About semantics: what is semantics?


         Traditionally, meaning was analysed mainly by logicians within the discipline of philosophy. For example, words were considered as signs with form and meaning and does not consider words, sentence or fragment of sentence as the basic units of any analysis of meaning. Also, philosophers viewed naming as a natural relation between the signs and what they signified. This led to rise two important schools in traditional analyses of meaning: the school of naturalists and school of conventionalists. 

        Semantic theory has certain goals including composionality principle. It basically links the word and sentence meanings by highlighting the important role of word order in delimiting the literal meaning of sentence in language. Also, composionality principle shows that there is a close connection between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentence, that is between word meaning and sentence meaning. Moreover, it shows that semantic theory should ultimate aim at finding a compromise which would account for both word meaning and sentence meaning. Next, another goal of semantic theory is to differentiate between denotative or literal meaning or the meaning that each word have in the dictionary. It is partly linked to reference another nation used in study of meaning and connotative or figurative meaning which depend on social or emotive attitude of the speaker. Furthermore, semantic field is another goal of semantic theory which can be defined as categories or classes of words which share a particular semantic property. Finally, the most important goal of semantic theory of meaning is should seek and explain the syntagmatic and paradigmatic sense relation which exist between words in language like synonymy, homonymy, polysemy, homonymy, antonymy....


                                               A.Manzar