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Selasa, 03 Mei 2016

Semantics

Semantics is the branch of linguistics concerned with meaning. There are a number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including : Formal Semantics, which studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, Lexical Semantics, which studies word meanings and word relations, and Conceptual Semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning.

And simple definition of Semantics is the study of the meanings of words and phrases in language.


  1. Multiple Meanings

One part of studying a language is knowing the many meanings of individual words. Here are some examples of words with more than one meaning:

  • "A flowering plant" could be referred to as a weed or a garden flower.
  • "Paying a child for chores" may be considered a bribe or simply incentive.
  • "A human" can be referred to as a male, female, child, adult, baby, bachelor, father or mother.
  • "A female animal" can be a tigress, ewe, hen, doe, or mother, daughter, and sister.
  • The simple word "on" can have many meanings, such as: on call, on the roof, on cloud nine, on edge, on fire, on purpose, on demand, on top, or on the phone.
There are two types of semantics :
  1. Connotative Semantic
  2. Denotative Semantic
There are seven types of meaning 
  1.  Conceptual or Denotative Meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is the basic propositional meaning which corresponds to the primary dictionary definition. For example the word “woman” can be shown as: “Woman = + Human, -Male, + Adult”.
  2. Connotative Meaning is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual content.  It is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in the real world. It is something more than the dictionary meaning.
  3. Social Meaning is the meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is called the social meaning. The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and other variations of language.
  4.  Affective or Emotive Meaning for some linguists it refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked in the reader, listener. It is what is conveyed about the personal feelings or attitude towards the listener.
  5. Reflected Meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual meaning or multiple conceptual meaning
  6. Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. Words collocate or co-occur with certain words only.
  7. Thematic Meaning, It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis.





Sources : 
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semantics
http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-semantics.html
http://universeofenglish.blogspot.co.id/2009/02/seven-types-of-meaning-in-semantics.html