Review

branches of semantics

Lexical or word meaning is the meaning of individual lexical items. These are of two types: the open class lexical items, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, and the close class items such as prepositions, conjunctions and deter-miners. The open class items have independent meanings, which are defined in the dictionary. The closed class items have meaning only in relation to other words in a sentence; this is called grammatical meaning, which can be understood from a consideration of the structure of the sentence and its relation with other sentences. For example, in the sentence The tiger killed the elephant’, there are three open class items: tiger, kill, elephant. Out of these, two are nouns and one is a verb. There is one closed class tern— ’the’—which occurs before each noun. It has no independent reference of its own and can have meaning only when placed before the nouns. This distinction may help in understanding ambiguity. Thus, if there is ambiguity in a sentence, this can be a lexical ambiguity or a grammatical ambiguity. For example, in the sentence:

I saw him near the bank. there is lexical ambiguity, since the item ‘bank’ can mean (a) the financial institution or  

(b) the bank of a river. However, in the case of: ‘The parents of the bride and the groom were waiting’ there is grammatical ambiguity as the sentence structure can be interpreted in two ways: (a) the two separate noun phrases being ‘the parents of the bride’, and ‘the groom’; or (b) the single noun phrase ‘the parents’ within which there is the prepositional phrase ‘of the bride and the groom’ containing two nouns. The first type of coordination gives us the meaning that the people who were waiting were the parents of the bride and the groom himself. The second type of coordination gives us the meaning that the people who were waiting were the parents of the bride and the parents of the groom. The meaning of a sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meanings. This becomes clear if we compare a pair of sentences such as the following: The dog bit the postman. The postman bit the dog. These two sentences differ in meaning. But the difference in meaning is not due to the difference in the meaning of the lexical items ‘postman’ and ‘dog’, but in the grammatical relationship between the two. In one case ‘dog’ is the subject and ‘postman’ is the object, in the other case the grammatical roles are reversed. There is also the relationship of these nouns with the verb ‘bit’. In the first sentence, the action is performed by the dog, which conforms to our knowledge about dogs, but in the second sentence, the action is performed by the postman which does not match with our knowledge about what postmen do, so there is a sense of incongruity about the second sentence. Only in some exceptional circumstance could we expect it to be comprehensible. 

an article review

Semantics

       Semantics is best described as the learning of the meanings accorded to morphine’s, phrases, words, and sentences. Not only that, semantics is also learning about sign, symbol and etc.

Semantis – word refers to many new ideas popular. This is often used in daily conversation to refer comprehension about diction or connotation. In other word the concept has for a long time been contentious to linguistics and philosophers and its intricacies to language i.e. the manner in which humans do construct meaning and how static those meaning really are.

With semantics, it shows that the actual name is not of importance really, it is what that thing or concept represents that does matter. For example, if a rose ceased to be referred to as a rose, its smell, the feel of its petals and the prick of its thorns will still remain with us. It means if ceased  to call a rose, still a rose, still smell its fragrance, the feel its velvety petals, and be prick by its thorns.

So semantics could be interpretation of  word, sign and sentence stucture. or  meaning of rose is concept of flower. It is called hyponym. A hyponym is a term used to mean more general word. hy Other word flower is hyponym by tumbuhan and tumbuhan is hyponym by makhluk hidup.