Semantics

Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.

History

In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word (''sema'', "sign, mark, token").

In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term ''semiotics'', the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'':

The third Branch may be called [''simeiotikí'', "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also , Logick.

In 1831, the term is suggested for the third branch of division of knowledge akin to Locke; the "signs of our knowledge".

In 1857, the term '' semasiology'' (borrowed from German ''Semasiologie'') is attested in Josiah W. Gibbs' ''Philological studies with English illustrations'':

The development of intellectual and moral ideas from physical, constitutes an important part of ''semasiology'', or that branch of grammar which treats of the development of the meaning of words. It is built on the analogy and correlation of the physical and intellectual worlds.

In 1893, the term ''semantics'' is used to translate French ''sémantique'' as used by Michel Bréal. Some years later, in ''Essai de Sémantique'', Bréal writes:

What I have tried to do is to draw some broad lines, to mark some divisions and as a provisional plan on a field not yet exploited, and which requires the combined work of several generations of linguists. I therefore ask the reader to consider this book as a simple Introduction to the science I have proposed to call ''Semantics''. n footnote: , the science of .e., what it means from the verb "to signify", as opposed to ''Phonetics'', the science of sounds .e., what it sounds like

In 1922, the concept of semantics is attested in mathematical logic amidst a group of scholars in Poland including Leon Chwistek, Leśniewski, Łukasiewicz, Kotarbinski, Adjukiewicz, and Tarski. According to Allen Walker Read, they had been influenced by French culture; moreover, later, their work influenced Alfred Korzybski's usage of the term.

In the 1960s, semantics for programming languages is attested in publications by Robert W. Floyd and Tony Hoare, later termed '' axiomatic semantics''; its chief application is formal verification of computer programs. Some years later, the terms '' operational semantics'' and '' denotational semantics'' emerged. Floyd, in the lead to his 1967 paper ''Assigning meanings to programs'', writes:

A semantic definition of a programming language, in our approach, is founded on a syntactic definition. It must specify which of the phrases in a syntactically correct program represent commands, and what conditions must be imposed on an interpretation in the neighborhood of each command.

Linguistics

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that studies meaning. Partee, B. (1999)
Semantics
' in R. A. Wilson and F. C. Keil (eds.)
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
', Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 739–742. Semantics can address meaning at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse. Two of the fundamental issues in the field of semantics are that of compositional semantics (which pertains on how smaller parts, like words, combine and interact to form the meaning of larger expressions, such as sentences) and lexical semantics (the nature of the meaning of words). Other prominent issues are those of context and its role on interpretation, opaque contexts, ambiguity, vagueness, entailment and presuppositions.

Several disciplines and approaches have contributed to the often-contentious field of semantics. One of the crucial questions which unites different approaches to linguistic semantics is that of the relationship between form and meaning. Some major contributions to the study of semantics have derived from studies in the 1980–1990s in related subjects of the syntax–semantics interface and pragmatics.

The semantic level of language interacts with other modules or levels (like syntax) in which language is traditionally divided. In linguistics, it is typical to talk in terms of "interfaces" regarding such interactions between modules or levels. For semantics, the most crucial interfaces are considered those with syntax (the syntax–semantics interface), pragmatics and phonology (regarding prosody and intonation).

Disciplines and paradigms in linguistic semantics

Formal semantics

Formal semantics seeks to identify domain-specific mental operations which speakers perform when they compute a sentence's meaning on the basis of its syntactic structure. Theories of formal semantics are typically floated on top of theories of syntax, such as generative syntax or combinatory categorial grammar, and provided a model theory based on mathematical tools, such as typed lambda calculi. The field's central ideas are rooted in early twentieth century philosophical logic, as well as later ideas about linguistic syntax. It emerged as its own subfield in the 1970s after the pioneering work of Richard Montague and Barbara Partee and continues to be an active area of research.

Conceptual semantics

This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.Levin, Beth; Pinker, Steven; ''Lexical & Conceptual Semantics'', Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991. With this theory, linguists can better deal with the fact that subtle differences in word meaning correlate with other differences in the syntactic structure that the word appears in. The way this is gone about is by looking at the internal structure of words.Jackendoff, Ray;
Semantic Structures
', MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990. These small parts that make up the internal structure of words are termed ''semantic primitives''.

Cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics approaches meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics