Definition:
The field of linguistics concerned with the study of meaning in language. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "sign"Observations:
- "The technical term for the study of meaning in language is semantics. But as soon as this term is used, a word of warning is in order.
"Any scientific approach to semantics has to be clearly distinguished from a pejorative sense of the term that has developed in popular use, when people talk about the way that language can be manipulated in order to mislead the public. A newspaper headline might read. 'Tax increases reduced to semantics'--referring to the way a government was trying to hide a proposed increase behind some carefully chosen words. Or someone might say in an argument, 'That's just semantics,' implying that the point is purely a verbal quibble, bearing no relationship to anything in the real world. This kind of nuance is absent when we talk about semantics from the objective point of linguistic research. The linguistic approach studies the properties of meaning in a systematic and objective way, with reference to as wide a range of utterances and languages as possible."
(David Crystal, How Language Works. Overlook, 2006) - "A perennial problem in semantics is the delineation of its subject matter. The term meaning can be used in a variety of ways, and only some of these correspond to the usual understanding of the scope of linguistic or computational semantics. We shall take the scope of semantics to be restricted to the literal interpretations of sentences in a context, ignoring phenomena like irony, metaphor, or conversational implicature."
(Stephen G. Pulman, "Basic Notions of Semantics." SRI International, Cambridge, England)
Pronunciation: si-MAN-tiks
Also Known As: semasiology
