ENGL205 6

The Systematic Study of Meaning

• Semantics is the systematic study of meaning, especially in language.

• It plays a role in daily communication, advertising, legal and literary interpretation.

• Three disciplines contribute to the study of meaning:

  • Linguistics: Focuses on how language organizes and communicates meaning.

  • Psychology: Studies how the mind processes, retains, and recalls meaning.

  • Philosophy: Analyzes the nature of knowledge, truth, and logical relationships.

The Nature of Language

• Human language is unique for its stimulus-freedom (not tied to immediate context) and creativity (ability to generate new utterances).

• The relationship between words and meanings is arbitrary, yet language acquisition is natural to humans.

• All human languages are complex and adaptable, with no one language being more “natural” than another.

Language & the Individual

• Children naturally acquire their community’s language by age six, developing both productive (speaking) and receptive (understanding) vocabularies.

• Much language knowledge is implicit (unconscious).

• Linguists study and describe this implicit knowledge through grammar, which includes:

  • Phonology – sound patterns

  • Morphology – word formation

  • Syntax – sentence structure

  • Semantics – meaning

Demonstrating Semantic Knowledge

Speakers show understanding of semantics through:

• Anomaly – recognizing nonsensical but grammatically correct sentences.

• Paraphrase – identifying equivalent meanings in different sentences.

• Synonymy – recognizing words with similar meanings.

• Contradiction – detecting logically opposing statements.

• Antonymy – identifying words with opposite meanings.

• Semantic features – common meaning components in related words.

• Ambiguity – recognizing double meanings.

• Conversational interaction – using appropriate responses (e.g., adjacency pairs).

• Entailment – knowing that one truth implies another.

• Presupposition – understanding background assumptions within a statement.