semantics and meaning

Richard Chasi

Semantics and meaning

SEMANTICS AND MEANING

Introducción

• Semantics is the technical term used to refer to study of meaning • Meaning covers a variety of aspects of language, there is not

very general agreement about what meaning is or about the way in which it should be described.

SEMANTICS AND MEANINGHistorical background

• The term SEMANTICS is a recent addition to the English language.• Semantics appears with American Philosophy association in

1894 entitled “Reflected meaning a point of semantics”• In 1990, studies of science of meaning through Breal´s book

semantics.

• 1923, the most famous book the meaning of meaning by C.K Ogden and Richards

Historical background

• Semantics by H.G Wells “The shape of things to come speaks of the science of significs, but it was lost sight in twenty century first.

• Scholar terms that were used to their own interest and orientation: semasiology, semology, semiotics, sememics and semics.

• Unfortunately, appears use of terms semantic and semantics in popular language, specially in newspaper to manipulate the language as a headline to mislead, example: mobile manoevre = retreat

• The term meaning is more familiar but dictionaries can give us a number of different meanings of meaning or more correctly of the verb mean.

• Meaning can be understand in context, for example: I mean to be there tomorrow (my meaning - what I mean to do)

• Mean uses signs to express something happened or will happened, example: A red light means stop. It provides information or instructions.

• The majority meaning is given by dictionary with similar meaning

• A diferente use of meaning is found in sentences as It wasnt what he said, but what he meant. Lewis Carroll made the difference between saying and meaning.• Literal meaning, our words have a meaning, how can we fail to

say what they mean? To achieve it we can use features as intonation or perhaps no linguistics signs such as wink to indicate that the words must not be taken literally.• All in all, we can say that semantics is a part of linguistics, the

scientific study of language.

SEMANTICS AND LINGUISTICS

• Semantics is a component or level of linguistics of the same kind as phonetic or grammar• Language can be viewed as a communication system that relates

something to be communicated with something that communicates, a message on the one hand with a set of signs or symbols on the other.

SEMANTICS AND LINGUISTICS

• Ferdinand de Saussure use the term sign to associate signifier and signified, but new researchers use alone. Example: trafic light uses a system of colours and colours combinations to instruct drivers to go or to stop.

• Language doesn’t always have a message in any real sense, it can have social relationships to express something. Example animal communication

SEMANTICS AND LINGUISTICS

Human Language uses signs and messages ( signifiers and signified) for that reason it is more complex than other language.

• Linguistics must be concerned no with specific instances, but with generalization. • This point of view were made by Saussure ( langue- parole) and

Chomsky ( competence – performance), but linguistic system is the same.• Phoneticians don’t pay attention on particular sounds or time by

a particular person, on the contrary it focus on pronunciation.

SEMANTICS AND LINGUISTICS

• Linguistics must be concerned no with specific instances, but with generalization. • This point of view were made by Saussure ( langue- parole)

and Chomsky ( competence – performance), but linguistic system is the same.• Phoneticians don’t pay attention on particular sounds or time

by a particular person, on the contrary it focus on pronunciation.

SEMANTICS AND LINGUISTICS

• Study of language is not concerned with the writing language• Spoken language is prior to:- The human rice had speech long before it had writing and

there are still many language that have not written form. - The child learns to speak long before he learns to write.- Speech plays a far greater role in our lives than writing.- We speed far more time speaking than writing or reading.

THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE

• Features of writing that we can find: Prosodic and paralinguistic• Prosodic features include intonation and stress • The semantics of intonation and stress is the major subject in its

own right. But meaning is also carried by paralinguistic features such as: Tempe, rhythm, loudness, (shouting and whispering are very meaningful)

• Semantics is the study of meaning and it includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified, negotiated, contradicted and paraphrased. • The notions of word and word meaning are problematic to pin

down, and this is reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical semantics. In part, this depends on the fact that the words ‘word’ and ‘meaning’ themselves have multiple meanings, depending on the context and the purpose they are used for (Matthews 1991). • Both semantics and meaning are fundamental to acquisition a

second language to communicated and understanding each others.

Conclusion