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Semanticsis the study of meaning, usually inlanguage.  The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical.  It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal inquiries, over a long period of time.  The word is derived from theGreekwordσημαντικός(semantikos), "significant",fromσημαίνω(semaino), "to signify, to indicate" and that fromσήμα(sema), "sign, mark, token".Inlinguistics, it is the study of interpretation of signs or symbols as used byagentsorcommunitieswithin particular circumstances and contexts.Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language,proxemicshave semantic (meaningful) content, and each has several branches of study.  In written language, such things as paragraph structure and punctuation have semantic content; in other forms of language, there is other semantic content.
The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, includingproxemics,lexicology,syntax,pragmatics,etymologyand others, although semantics is a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties.Inphilosophy of language, semantics andreferenceare related fields. Further related fields includephilology,communication, andsemiotics. The formal study of semantics is therefore complex.
The wordsemanticin its modern sense is considered to have first appeared inFrenchassémantiqueinMichel Bréal's 1897 book,Essai de sémantique'.Ininternational scientific vocabularysemantics is also calledsemasiology.
The discipline of Semantics is distinct fromAlfred Korzybski's General Semantics, which is a system for looking at the semantic reactions of the whole human organism in its environment to some event, symbolic or otherwise.
साचा:CleanupInlinguistics,semanticsis the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units ofdiscourse(referred to astexts).
The basic area of study is the meaning ofsigns, and the study of relations between different linguistic units:homonymy,synonymy,antonymy,polysemy,paronyms,hypernymy,hyponymy,meronymy,metonymy,holonymy,exocentricity /endocentricity, linguisticcompounds. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning.
Traditionally, semantics has included the study ofsenseand denotativereference,truth conditions, argument structure,thematic roles,discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.
Formal semanticistsare concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of logic. Thus the sentenceJohn loves a bagelcan be broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unitlovesmay serve as both syntactic and semantichead.
In the late 1960s,Richard Montagueproposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms oflambda calculus. In these terms, the syntacticparseof the sentence above
would now indicatelovesas the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent,John, and the object,bagel, with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicateloves (John, bagel), thus
linking semantics tocategorial grammarmodels ofsyntax.
The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set ofTarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to thelanguage of thoughthypothesis from the 70s.
Despite its elegance,Montague grammarwas limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:
In theChomskiantradition in linguistics there was no mechanism for the learning of semantic relations, and thenativistview considered all semantic notions as inborn. Thus, even novel concepts were proposed to have been dormant in some sense. This traditional view was also unable to address many issues such asmetaphoror associative meanings, andsemantic change, where meanings within a linguistic community change over time, andqualiaor subjective experience. Another issue not addressed by the nativist model was how perceptual cues are combined in thought, e.g. inmental rotation.
This traditional view of semantics, as an innate finite meaning inherent in alexical unitthat can be composed to generate meanings for larger chunks of discourse, is now being fiercely debated in the emerging domain ofcognitive linguisticsand also in the non-Fodoriancamp inPhilosophy of Language.The challenge is motivated by:
A concrete example of the latter phenomenon is semanticunderspecification— meanings are not complete without some elements of context. To take an example of a single word, "red", its meaning in a phrase such asred bookis similar to many other usages, and can be viewed as compositional.However, the colours implied in phrases such as "red wine" (very dark), and "red hair" (coppery), or "red soil", or "red skin" are very different. Indeed, these colours by themselves would not be called "red" by native speakers. These instances are contrastive, so "red wine" is so called only in comparison with the other kind of wine (which also is not "white" for the same reasons). This view goes back tode Saussure:
and may go back to earlierIndianviews on language, especially theNyayaview of words asindicatorsand not carriers of meaning.
An attempt to defend a system based on propositional meaning for semantic underspecification can be found in theGenerative Lexiconmodel ofJames Pustejovsky, who extends contextual operations (based on type shifting) into the lexicon. Thus meanings are generated on the fly based on finite context.
Another set of concepts related to fuzziness in semantics is based onprototypes. The work ofEleanor RoschandGeorge Lakoffin the 1970s led to a view that
natural categories are not characterizable in terms of
necessary and sufficient
conditions, but are graded (fuzzy at their boundaries) and inconsistent as to
the status of their constituent members.
Systems of categories are not objectively "out there" in the world but are
rooted in people's experience. These categories evolve aslearnedconcepts
of the world — meaning is not an objective truth, but a
subjective construct, learned from experience, and language arises
out of the "grounding of our
conceptual systems in sharedembodimentand bodily experience".A corollary of this is that the conceptual categories
(i.e. the lexicon) will not be identical for
different cultures, or indeed, for every individual in the same culture. This
leads to another debate (see theWhorf-Sapir hypothesisorEskimo words for snow).
English nouns are found by language analysis to have 25 different semantic features, each associated with its own pattern of fMRI brain activity. The individual contribution of each parameter predicts the fMRI pattern when nouns are considered thus supporting the view that nouns derive their meaning from prior experience linked to a common symbol.
Inसंगणक विज्ञान, where it is considered as an application ofmathematical logic, semantics reflects the meaning of programs or functions.
In this regard, semantics permits programs to be separated into their syntactical part (grammatical structure) and their semantic part (meaning). For instance, the following statements use different syntaxes, but issue the same instructions:
Generally these operations would all perform an arithmetical addition of 'y' to 'x' and store the result in a variable called 'x'.
Semantics for computer applications falls into three categories:
TheSemantic Webrefers to the extension of theWorld Wide Webthrough the embedding of additional semanticmetadata; s.a.Web Ontology Language(OWL).
Inpsychology,semantic memoryis memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only thegist, the general significance, of remembered experience, whileepisodic memoryis memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep; the relationships among words themselves in asemantic network. In a network created by people analyzing their understanding of the word (such asWordnet) the links and decomposition structures of the network are few in number and kind; and include "part of", "kind of", and similar links. In automatedontologiesthe links are computed vectors without explicit meaning. Various automated technologies are being developed to compute the meaning of words:latent semantic indexingandsupport vector machinesas well asnatural language processing,neural networksandpredicate calculustechniques.
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साचा:Philosophy of language