Semantics

Traditional lexical semantics

(structuralist and earlier, including anthropological linguistics) and early semantics within generative grammar (Fodor/Katz, Jackendoff) took lexical meanings as a starting point for a theory of semantics: the most common paradigms involved "decomposing" lexical meaning in terms of (what were hypothesized) "semantic primitives", allegedly atomic units of meaning. This technique actually turned out to be only applicable at all to a small part of the lexicon, and it never helped with any adequate theory of compositional semantics. Starting in the 1970's and 1980's, linguistic semantics came under the influence of Richard Montague's work, which took an account of truth conditions (which hypothetical states of affairs the sentence would correctly describe) and denotation (what objects words could refer to) as the basic goal of semantics---this is the conception of semantics that logicians had employed for their formal logical languages for decades, but it had never been seriously applied to natural languages before Montague.

MORPHOLOGY is the part of linguistics that deals with the study of words, their internal structure and partially their meanings. It is also interested in how the users of a given language understand complex words and invent new lexical items. As morphology is concerned with word forms it is akin to phonology (which describes how words are pronounced), it is also related to lexical studies as the patterns examined by morphology are used to create new words. Furthermore, it is also linked with semantics as it deals with the meanings of words.

GRAMMATICAL MEANING

The meaning that is conveyed by word order and other grammatical signals.Linguists distinguish grammatical meaning from lexical meaning (ordenotation)--the dictionary meaning of an individual word.

Different forms of the same lexeme will generally, though not necessarily, differ in meaning: they will share the same lexical meaning (or meanings) but differ in respect of their grammatical meaning, in that one is the singular form (of a noun of a particular subclass) and the other is the plural form (of a noun of a particular subclass); and the difference between singular and plural forms, or--to take another example--the difference between the past, present and future forms of verbs, is semantically relevant: it affects sentence-meaning. The meaning of a sentence . . . is determined partly by the meaning of the words (i.e., lexemes) of which it is composed and partly by its grammatical meaning."

DENOTATION

The denotation of a term is its exact and literal meaning. Consider the word home. Its denotation, or precise meaning, is 'residence or fixed dwelling place.' The denotation of the word city is 'center of population and commerce.'

"A word's connotation, on the other hand, consists of its emotive value. For example, connotations of the word home might be refuge, resting place, even boring or predictable habitation. The word city might connote place of excitement, energy, danger, or even sin.

SYNONYMS AND CONNOTATIONS

"A group of synonyms cannot by definition be distinguished in terms of their denotation, but they usually display noticeable differences of connotation, as in the case of car, automobile, runabout, buggy, banger, bus, hot rod, jalopy, old crock, racer, and so on."

MEANING WORDS IN RELATIONS

Antonyms are words which have almost opposite meanings. Most words can have one or more antonyms.

SYNONYMS meaning, acceptation, import, sense, significance, signification. These nouns refer to the idea conveyed by something, such as a word, action, gesture, or situation: Synonyms are words with the same or nearly the same meaning. In one of its acceptations value is a technical term in music. The import of his statement is ambiguous. The term anthropometry has only one sense. The significance of a green traffic light is widely understood. Linguists have determined the hieroglyphics' signification.

POLYSEME is a word or phrase with different, but related senses. Since the test for polysemy is the vague concept of relatedness, judgments of polysemy can be difficult to make. Because applying pre-existing words to new situations is a natural process of language change, looking at words' etymology is helpful in determining polysemy but not the only solution; as words become lost in etymology, what once was a useful distinction of meaning may no longer be so.

HYPONYM is a word or phrase whose semantic range is included within that of another word. For example, scarlet, vermilion,carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym), which is, in turn, a hyponym of colour.

HYPERNYMY is the semantic relation in which one word is the hypernym of another. Hypernymy, the relation words stand in when their extensions stand in the relation of class to subclass, should not be confused with holonymy which is the relation words stand in when the things that they denote stand in the relation of whole to part. A similar warning applies to hyponymy and meronymy.

HOMONYMS generally include two categories of word types: homophones and homographs.

Homographs are words that are spelled the same but have different meanings.Homophones are words that sound the same when you pronounce them, but have different meanings.