Department of English

MA English 1st (2020-2022)

Course: Introduction to General Linguistics

Semester: First Credit hours:3
Instructor: Muhammad Ishaq Malik
Lecture: #
What is Semantics?
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: sēmantikos, "significant") is the linguistic and philosophical
study of meaning, in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is
concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—
and what they stand for, their denotation.
In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The word semantics
was first used by Michel Bréal, a French philologist.
Definitions of Semantics
It could be simply described as:
The branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. The two main areas are logical
semantics, concerned with matters such as sense, reference, presupposition and implication, and
lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them.
But not most, at least, many introductions to semantics begin by asking the following question:
what is semantics? What does semantics actually study? This seems like a sensible way to start a
course on semantics, so we can begin by looking at some of the answers that different authors
provide.
Semantics is the study of meanings. Lyons (1977)

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. Hurford &

Heasley (1983)

Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language. Saeed (1997)

Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned with meaning. Löbner (2002)
Linguistic semantics is the study of literal, decontextualized, Frawley (1992)
grammatical meaning.
Linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and express Kreilder (1998)
meanings

Table 1. Some definitions of Semantics

Something that can be noticed is that there is no complete agreement. For some, semantics
concerns the study of meaning as communicated through language, while for some others,
semantics studies all aspects of meaning and they have to add the label “linguistic” to arrive at a
more precise definition. This distinction, however, is not generally given much importance and
leaving aside special formulations, probably all authors would agree with Kreidler’s definition
(to choose just one of them): linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and
express meanings.
This, however, leaves us with a second question: what do we understand by “meaning”? What is
that “meaning” that is organized and expressed by languages? In very general terms, speaking
consists of communicating information: somebody (the speaker) has something in his/her mind
(an idea, a feeling, an intention, whatnot), and decides to communicate it linguistically. Vocal
noises are then emitted that are heard by a second person (the hearer), who “translates” these
noises back into ideas, with the result being that this hearer somehow “knows” what the first
person had in mind. That “something” that was at first in the speaker’s mind and now is also in
the hearer’s mind is what we call meaning. What can it be? The problem is that it can be virtually
anything: objects (concrete, abstract or imaginary), events and states (past, present, future or
hypothetical), all sort of properties of objects, feelings, emotions, intentions, locations, etc. We
can talk about anything we can think of (or perhaps almost).
Grammar, Lexicon and Meaning
Grammar is (The study or use of) the rules about how words change their form and combine with
other words to make sensible grammatical structure. Lexicon is the set of all the morphemes of a
language; a dictionary. Mental Lexicon can be described as:
 A list of terms relating to a particular subject or list of words explaining a particular idea.
 The vocabulary of a language or of an individual.
 The set of lexemes referring to the abstract ideas which come in our mind or set of words
referring to abstract or conceptual ideas.
The lexicon is all about the words referring to the ideas in any language. And grammar is all
about the art of using lexemes in particular order to produce meaningful sentences as the prime
purpose of any language is to “communicate”.
In modern linguistics the problem of distinction between the grammar and lexicon is often in
term of the distinction between sentences that are unacceptable for grammatical reasons, and
those that are excluded on lexicon grounds. Like Chomsky invent the sentence colorless green
ideas sleep furiously. It seems impeccable grammatically but lexically it is completely
unacceptable. From the above example it is clear that grammar & lexicon are distinct.
Grammatical mistakes can be corrected easily by breaking a rule. e.g. “the boys is in the garden.”
“the dog scattered”. It is wrong because „scattered‟ use for things. Dog stand for whole family of
dog so it should be “the herd scattered”.
In semantics we convey the sense though the sentence is grammatically incorrect. If the sentence
is grammatically correct but it gives no sense it is of no use. In semantics sense should be clear
not grammatical structure. Rules are related to grammar and we do not have any exact rule in
English grammar which applies every time and everywhere in English.
Lexical and Compositional Semantics (Meanings)
Lexical semantics deals with the meanings of individual expressions (and the relations they bear
to one another) and Compositional semantics deals with how we combine these individual ideas
into larger ones.
In lexical semantics there are two aspects of linguistic meanings:
 sense is something like the mental image evoked by an item
 reference is the relationship of the lexical item to the world, or those things that it picks
out.
Some aspects of the meaning of a word include any mental images or prototypes that it may
invoke, knowledge about the appropriate circumstances in which to use it, and any objects in the
words that it picks out (referents).
The principle of compositionality states that we put together the meanings of phrases and
sentences by (somehow) combining the meanings of the parts.
Full sentences express propositions, which are essentially claims about the world. If you
understand the language being spoken, then you understand what the world would need to look
like for a given sentence to be true:
 John smokes.
For this proposition to be true, the individual referent of “John” has to be someone who
smokes (that is, who belongs to the set of individuals that are smokers). So, to put together a
simple sentence like this, we check if the referent of the (subject) NP is found in the set that
is the referent of the predicate VP.