SEMANTICS SUMMARY

semantics of course is the study of the meaning. that is a simple definition about semantics.

The word semantic (from French sémantique) was invented byMichel Bréal during the 19th century.

- According to Richmond H. Thomason " semantics is the study of the meaning of linguistics expression. The language can be natural language, such as English or Navajo, or a artificial language like a computer programming language ".

- According to The Evolution of language (2010) by W. Tecumseh Fitch " semantics is the branch of language study that consistently rubs shoulder with philosophy. this is because the study of meaning rises a host of deep problems that are the traditional stomping grounds for philosophers ".

- According to Hockett (1945) " language is a complex system from habits and the system has 5 subsystem namely Grammatical, Phonology, Morph-phonemic (morfo-fonemik), Phonetic and Semantic.

- According to Ferdinand de Saussure "  linguistics without semantics is nothing ".

this pictures will give a simple explanation about semantics.

semantics of course has roles. this is the roles of semantics

Seven Types of Meaning

Geoffrey Leech in his ‘Semantic- A Study of meaning’ (1974) breaks down meaning into seven types or ingredients giving primacy to conceptual meaning. The Seven types of meaning according to Leech are as follows.

1) Conceptual or Denotative Meaning:

Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the basic propositional meaning which corresponds to the primary dictionary definition. Such a meaning is stylistically neutral and objective as opposed to other kinds of associative meanings. The aim of conceptual meaning is to provide an appropriate semantic representation to a sentence or statement. A sentence is made of abstract symbols. Conceptual meaning helps us to distinguish one meaning from the meaning of other sentences. Thus, conceptual meaning is an essential part of language. A language essentially depends on conceptual meaning for communication. The conceptual meaning is the base for all the other types of meaning.

2) Connotative Meaning:

Connotative meaning is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual content. It is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in the real world. The boundary between conceptual and connotative seems to be analogous. Connotative meaning is regarded as incidental, comparatively unstable, in determinant, open ended, variable according to age, culture and individual, whereas conceptual meaning is not like that . It can be codified in terms of limited symbols.

3) Social Meaning:

The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is called the social meaning. The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other variations of language. We recognize some words or pronunciation as being dialectical i.e. as telling us something about the regional or social origin of the speaker. Social meaning is related to the situation in which an utterance is used.

4) Affective or Emotive Meaning:

For some linguists it refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader, listener. It is what is conveyed about the personal feelings or attitude towards the listener. E.g. ‘home’ for a sailor/soldier or expatriate and ‘mother’ for a motherless child, a married woman (esp. in Indian context) will have special effective, emotive quality. In affective meaning, language is used to express personal feelings or attitude to the listener or to the subject matter of his discourse.

5) Reflected Meaning:

Reflected meaning and collocative meaning involve interconnection

At the lexical level of language, Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual meaning or multiple conceptual meaning. reflected meaning has great importance in the study of semantics.

6) Collocative Meaning:

Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. Words collocate or co-occur with certain words only e.g. Big business not large or great.Collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words. ‘Pretty’ and‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’. However, they slightly differ from each other because of collocation or co-occurrence. The word ‘pretty’ collocates with –girls, woman, village, gardens, flowers, etc. Collocative meanings need to be invoked only when other categories of meaning don’t apply. Generalizations can be made in case of other meanings while collocative meaning is simply on idiosyncratic property of individual words. Collocative meaning has its importance and it is a marginal kind of category.

7) Thematic Meaning:

It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis .Thus active is different from passive though its conceptual meaning is the same. Various parts of the sentence also can be used as subject, object or complement to show prominence. It is done through focus, theme (topic) or emotive emphasis. Thematic meaning helps us to understand the message and its implications properly.

in simple definition of the 7 types :

1. Conceptual Meaning = Logical, cognitive or connotative content.

2. Connotative Meaning = What is communicated by virtue of what language refers

3. Social Meaning = What is communicated of the social circumstances of Language

4. Affective Meaning = What is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the Speaker through language.

5. Reflected Meaning = What is communicated through associations with another Sense of the same world.

6. Collocative Meaning = What is communicated through associations with words which co-occur with another word.

7. Thematic Meaning = What is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.

this pictures will give u more explanation about semantics.