Semantics Module for University Student

Introduction

Why study semantics? Semantics (as the study of meaning) is central to the study of communication and as communication becomes more and more a crucial factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing. Semantics is also at the center of the study of the human mind – thought processes, cognition, conceptualization – all these are intricately bound up with the way in which we classify and convey our experience of the world through language.

Because it is, in these two ways, a focal point in man's study of man, semantics has been the meeting place of various cross-currents of thinking and various disciplines of study. Philosophy, psychology, and linguistics all claim a deep interest in the subject. Semantics has often seemed baffling because there are many different approaches to it, and the ways in which they are related to one another are rarely clear, even to writers on the subject.

Semantics is a branch of linguistics, which is the study of language; it is an area of study interacting with those of syntax and phonology. A person's linguistic abilities are based on knowledge that they have. One of the insights of modern linguistics is that speakers of a language have different types of linguistic knowledge, including how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences, and about the meaning of individual words and sentences. To reflect this, linguistic description has different levels of analysis. So, phonology is the study of what sounds combine to form words; syntax is the study of how words can be combined into sentences; and semantics is the study of the meanings of words and sentences.