Review about semantics

semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It can be applied to entire texts or to single words. For example, "destination" and "last stop" technically mean the same thing, but students of semanticsanalyze their subtle shades of meaning.

1. Linguistics.

   • the study of meaning.
   • the study of linguistic development by classifying and examining changes in meaning and form.
2. Also called signifies.the branch of semiotics dealing with the relations between signs and what they denote.
   
   
3. the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc :
   Let's not argue about semantics.
4. General Semantics. 
   
   

   Semantic Theory

   Katz begins from a familiar place: Chomsky's characterization of the job of linguistics as construction of a system of rules which represent ``what a fluent speaker knows about the semantic structure of his language'' (519-20). Such a theory will take the form of recursive rules which allow a speaker to compose and understand sentences in his language.
   On this account, a semantic theory must contain rules which represent the speaker's knowledge of the semantic structure of the language and which allow the composition and decomposition of sentences in that language to understand the meaning of the sentences. Semantic theory consists of two parts: a lexicon or dictionary, and a `finite set of ``projection'' rules' (520).
   Katz assigns as input to the semantic theory, the output of the syntactic theory; thus all sentences which the semantic theory encounters are by hypothesis well-formed. The precise input is the sentence represented as a concatenation of morphemes which are ``terminal elements'' (521). Thus for the sentence
   The boys like candy,
   the input is `the + boy + s + like + candy.' It is the job of the semantic theory to assign a semantic interpretation/meaning, or in case of ambiguity, multiple interpretations, to this input in such a way that the meaning (or meanings) is revealed, along with other semantic properties, including analyticity, et alia.
   Thus, Katz needs to characterize: dictionary entry, semantic interpretation and projection rule, which he does as follows.
   
   • Dictionary entry: ``a finite number of sequences of symbols, each sequence consisting of an initial subsequence of syntactic markers, followed by a subsequence of 'semantic markers,' then, optimally one 'distinguisher,' and finally, a `selection restriction'''(522).
   • Semantic interpretation: A semantic interpretation is what Katz calls a path in the semantic tree. See example below.
   • Projection rule: There are two types of projection rules: type one and type two.
   Type one projection rules utilize the information about the meanings of the lexical items contained in the paths belonging to the sets of paths assigned ...in order to provide a characterization of the meaning of every constituent of the sentence, including the whole sentence (525)The idea is to amalgamate various paths from a single node to form one path. Katz includes what he calls an ``erasure clause'' to eliminate duplication of semantic markers. The sample rule on 526 explains how modifiers are added to nouns, see 527 for the example of `colorful ball.'