In distinguishing polysemy from homonmy , understanding the concept is easier than putting it into practice. Word semantics is given some attention by Crystal, but he has little to say about the semantics of sentences, which is in fact the area in which most semanticists concentrate their energies. This usually called propositional semantics , and it is, as Crystal notes, related to philosophy and logic. We cannot elaborate on this rich topic here, but it is clear that Penn has many resources in this area should you care to follow it up. Interested parties should probably have a look at the home page for the Institute for Reseach in Cognitive Science.
Crystal considers it to be part of the wider field of discourse analysis.
Speech acts include asking for a glass of water, in addition to making promises, issuing warnings or threats, giving orders, making requests for information, and many others. There are three basic types of direct speech acts , and they correspond to three special syntactic types that seem to occur in most of the world's languages. Speech Act Sentence Type Function Examples Assertion Declarative. Biak eko nos. Although assertions, questions and orders are fairly universal, and most of the world's languages have separate syntactic constructions that distinguish them, other speech acts do not have a syntactic construction that is specific to them.