Semantics

Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication.

Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual structures used to understand the world.

Ideational theories identify meaning with mental states like the ideas that an expression evokes in the minds of language users.

According to causal theories, meaning is determined by causes and effects, which behaviorist semantics analyzes in terms of stimulus and response.

Semiotics investigates additional topics like the meaning of non-verbal communication, conventional symbols, and natural signs independent of human interaction.

Examples include nodding to signal agreement, stripes on a uniform signifying rank, and the presence of vultures indicating a nearby animal carcass.

The word semantics entered the English language from the French term semantique, which the linguist Michel Bréal first introduced at the end of the 19th century.

[38] Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive resources is finite.

[37] When interpreted in a strong sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex expression is not just affected by its parts and how they are combined but fully determined this way.

[61] A more fine-grained categorization distinguishes between different semantic roles of words, such as agent, patient, theme, location, source, and goal.

It relies on higher-order logic, lambda calculus, and type theory to show how meaning is created through the combination of expressions belonging to different syntactic categories.

[76] They study how the interaction between language and human cognition affects the conceptual organization in very general domains like space, time, causation, and action.

[82] Other investigated phenomena include categorization, which is understood as a cognitive heuristic to avoid information overload by regarding different entities in the same way,[83] and embodiment, which concerns how the language user's bodily experience affects the meaning of expressions.

It holds that meaning is not about the objects to which expressions refer but about the cognitive structure of human concepts that connect thought, perception, and action.

[89] Some of its key problems include computing the meaning of complex expressions by analyzing their parts, handling ambiguity, vagueness, and context-dependence, and using the extracted information in automatic reasoning.

It compares conceptual structures in different languages and is interested in how meanings evolve and change because of cultural phenomena associated with politics, religion, and customs.

[92] For example, address practices encode cultural values and social hierarchies, as in the difference of politeness of expressions like tu and usted in Spanish or du and Sie in German in contrast to English, which lacks these distinctions and uses the pronoun you in either case.

It is based on the idea that communicative meaning is usually context-sensitive and depends on who participates in the exchange, what information they share, and what their intentions and background assumptions are.

[113] According to behaviorist semantics, also referred to as stimulus-response theory, the meaning of an expression is given by the situation that prompts the speaker to use it and the response it provokes in the audience.

[116] One of its key motivations is to avoid private mental entities and define meaning instead in terms of publicly observable language behavior.

[123] Truth-conditional semantics is closely related to verificationist theories, which introduce the additional idea that there should be some kind of verification procedure to assess whether a sentence is true.

He developed an early form of the semantic triangle by holding that spoken and written words evoke mental concepts, which refer to external things by resembling them.

[138] Philosophers of the orthodox school of Mīmāṃsā discussed the relation between the meanings of individual words and full sentences while considering which one is more basic.

[140] In ancient China, the Mohists argued that names play a key role in making distinctions to guide moral behavior.

[143] Boethius (480–528) wrote a translation of and various comments on Aristotle's book On Interpretation, which popularized its main ideas and inspired reflections on semantic phenomena in the scholastic tradition.

He further explored the nature of universals, which he understood as mere semantic phenomena of common names caused by mental abstractions that do not refer to any entities.

[149] In the early modern period, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) distinguished between marks, which people use privately to recall their own thoughts, and signs, which are used publicly to communicate their ideas to others.

This attempt inspired theorists Christian Wolff (1679–1754), Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), and Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) to develop the idea of a general science of sign systems.

Christian Karl Reisig (1792–1829) is sometimes credited as the father of semantics since he clarified its concept and scope while also making various contributions to its key ideas.

[164] The theory of general semantics was developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) as an inquiry into how language represents reality and affects human thought.