Semantics (disambiguation): Difference between revisions

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The word '''semantics''' basically refers to the concept of meaning in relation to language. We can conceptualize 'meaning' in many ways, recognize language in many guises, and consider many aspects of relationship. Hence 'semantics' has many referents.


This article focuses on human natural language and meaning qualifying as 'linguistic meaning'. We therefore begin with an explication of 'natural language' and of 'linguistic meaning'.
In English, as a figure of speech, people may say, "That's just semantics", which is usually a shorthand way of saying “That's not so important. Now we're just arguing about the meaning of words.”


==Natural language==
{{rpl|Semantics (linguistics)}}
 
{{rpl|Semantic primes}}
==Linguistic meaning==
{{rpl|Semantic Web}}
 
{{rpl|Lexical  semantics}}
<!-- Preserving original lede: '''Semantics is the study of the way in which the use of and interrelationships between [[word (language)|words]], [[phrase]]s and [[sentence (linguistics)|sentences]] create [[meaning]], usually in language.
{{rpl|Musical semantics}}
 
There are a number of approaches to semantics, but one approach, pioneered by [[Richard Montague]] and known as [[model-theoretic semantics]] (or simply [[Montague semantics]]) is based on the idea of interpretation. An interpretation is a mapping from the domain of sentences to a formal structure known as a model. Models include relationships and attributes that may be defined in set-theoretic terms (e.g., '''older than''', '''inanimate''', '''owner of''', etc.) for a property to be semantically interesting, it must hold in all interpretations (or all interpretations satisfying a suitable sent of restrictions). This ensures that they do not reflect accidental or [[contingent]] information. -->
 
===Rule to Rule Hypothesis===
An important idea in the semantics of natural languages is the ''rule to rule hypothesis''. The idea is that any phrase structure rule or, more generally, syntactic construct, will have a corresponding semantic relationship. Thus, in the sentence
 
John sees Sally.
 
the relationship between John and Sally established by the verb see must correspond to a relationship on the level of models to which the verb ''see'' is mapped.

Latest revision as of 13:35, 18 February 2024

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same or a similar title.

In English, as a figure of speech, people may say, "That's just semantics", which is usually a shorthand way of saying “That's not so important. Now we're just arguing about the meaning of words.”

  • Developing Article Semantics (linguistics): The subfield of the study of language which focuses on meaning. [e]
  • Developing Article Semantic primes: Words universal to all Earth's natural languages, their meaning ordinarily learned during development solely through the way contemporaries use them, serving as a basic set of words by which lexicographers could, in principle, define without circularity all the other words in a given language's lexicon. [e]
  • Stub Semantic Web: Tim Berners-Lee's concept of a "web of knowledge", whereby web-based document contents would be annotated and classified so that computers can parse the classifications and provide search results based on the semantic information (what the content means), rather than simply on matching of text strings. [e]
  • Stub Lexical semantics: Subfield of linguistic semantics, which studies how and what the words of a language denote. [e]
  • Developing Article Musical semantics: The study of how music conveys meaning. [e]
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