Dr. Francisco Perlas Dumanig Semantics Dr. Francisco Perlas Dumanig

What is semantics? Semantics - the study of meaning in human language. Four major topics in semantics: 1. The nature of meaning. 2. Some properties of the conceptual system underlying meaning. 3. The contribution of syntactic structure to the interpretation of sentences. 4.The role of non-grammatical factors in the understanding of utterances.

What is semantics? Semantics – the study of meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences. Morphemes - a meaningful morphological unit of a language that cannot be further divided Example: in, come, -ing, forming incoming Word - is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning) Examples: walk, book, write Phrase - is two or more words that do not contain the subject-verb pair necessary to form a clause. Phrases can be very short or quite long. Examples: in the garden, at the office Sentence – is a word or group of words that has a complete thought. Example: He comes to class on time.

Semantics Lexical semantics - deals with the meaning of words, and the relationship among words. Sentential/phrasal semantics - deals with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.

Semantics is the study of word meaning and sentence meaning abstracted away from the context of use. it is an attempt to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their language that people have from knowing the language. Example: Hold out your arm. That’s it. Note: You need to know the meaning of the expressions arm, your arm, hold out, that’s, it. hold out – denotes an action arm – denotes a part of a person your arm – denotes “arm of the person being spoken to” that – denotes something which is obvious to whomever is addressed it - denotes that has been recently spoken about

Expression is any meaningful language unit or sequence of meaningful units, from a sentence down: a clause, a phrase, a word, or meaningful part of a word.

What is Pragmatics? Pragmatics - is the study of how context affects meaning. - is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account the contexts of use. Example: Hold out your arm. That’s it. Refer to the detailed explanation on page 2, paragraph 3.

Semantics versus Pragmatics See Table 1.1 on page 3

Differences between Semantics and Pragmatics Utterances and sentences Stages of interpretation Utterances – are the raw data of linguistics. Each utterance is unique, having been produced by a particular sender in a specific situation. Sentence – is the abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based.