semantics (n.)

A major branch of LINGUISTICS devoted to the study of MEANING in LANGUAGE. The term is also used in philosophy and logic, but not with the same range of meaning or emphasis as in linguistics. Philosophical semantics examines the relations between linguistic expressions and the phenomena in the world to which they refer, and considers the conditions under which such expressions can be said to be true or false, and the factors which affect the interpretation of language as used. Its history of study, which reaches back to the writings of Plato and Aristotle, in the twentieth century includes the work of such philosophers and logicians as Charles Peirce (1839–1914), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and Alfred Tarski (1902–83), particularly under the heading of SEMIOTICS and the ‘philosophy of language’. ‘Logical’ or ‘pure’ semantics (formal semantics) is the study of the meaning of expressions in terms of logical systems of analysis, or calculi, and is thus more akin to formal logic or mathematics than to linguistics.

In linguistics, the emphasis is on the study of the semantic properties of natural languages (as opposed to logical ‘languages’), the term ‘linguistic semantics’ often being employed to make the distinction clear (though this is not a convention needed in this dictionary, where the term ‘semantics’ is used without qualification to refer to its linguistic sense). Different linguists’ approaches to meaning none the less illustrate the influence of general philosophical or psychological positions. The ‘behaviorist’ semantics of Leonard Bloomfield, for example, refers to the application of the techniques of the BEHAVIORIST movement in psychology, restricting the study of meaning to only observable and measurable behavior. Partly because of the pessimism of this approach, which concluded that semantics was not yet capable of elucidation in behavioral terms, semantics came to be much neglected in post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, and has received proper attention only since the 1960s.

Of particular importance here is the approach of structural semantics, which displays the application of the principles of STRUCTURAL linguistics to the study of meaning through the notion of semantic relations (SENSE or ‘meaning’ relations such as SYNONYMY and ANTONYMY). Semantic meaning may here be used, in contradistinction to ‘GRAMMATICAL meaning’. The linguistic structuring of semantic space is also a major concern of GENERATIVE linguistics, where the term ‘semantic’ is widely used in relation to the grammar’s organization (one section being referred to as the semantic component) and to the analysis of SENTENCES (in terms of a semantic representation) and of LEXICAL ITEMS (in terms of semantic features). However, the relation between SYNTAX and semantics in this approach is a matter of controversy. Other terms used to distinguish features of meaning in this and other theories include ‘semantic MARKERS/ DISTINGUISHERS/properties’ and (in an unrelated sense to the above) ‘semantic components’. Linguists have also built on results in logical and philosophical semantics to develop theories in which TRUTH CONDITIONS, REFERENCE and the logical properties of natural language EXPRESSIONS play a central role (TRUTH-CONDITIONAL SEMANTICS, MODEL-THEORETIC SEMANTICS). A very different direction has been taken in COGNITIVE SEMANTICS, drawing on psychology and focusing on the role of conceptualization in interpretation. The influence of mathematical and computational models is also evident: state-transition semantics, for example, is an analysis of natural language meanings in terms of a series of states and state transitions in a language user.