لخّصلي

is the study of meaning in language, often confined to stable and context-free aspects, unlike pragmatics which deals with meaning variation with context. Semantic theories have influenced approaches to describing word meaning and are particularly relevant to Lexicography and vocabulary teaching. Semantics was initially seen as an emerging science, opposed to phonetics, which focused on sounds. It has since evolved to include the study of meaning in the lexicon alone, including changes in word meaning.
Semantics focuses on the meanings of sentences and other linguistic objects, but not their syntactic arrangements or pronunciation. The basic question of semantics is what meaning is, and its objective is to define, explain, and describe the process of signification. Cognitive linguistics tends to disclaim the difference between pragmatics and semantics. The history of semantics is complex due to the involvement of many fields, including the study of meaning relationships between words in a particular language. Semantics is not only concerned with assigning meaning to individual units, such as morphemes or words, but also with the relationships between them, how they act upon each other, and how they fuse and combine in different ways. Semantics is the complex interplay of morphology, lexis, and syntax, but it does not account for all aspects of meaning. Therefore, pragmatics must still be considered when studying semantics.
can be traced back to Aristotle, who was the forerunner of modern semantics. Modern semanticists have studied areas of meaning that were not known to Aristotle and his fellow philosophers. Modern theories of meaning are justified by reference to the actual semantic facts they are meant to account for. As the subject has developed, new dimensions in the nature of meaning have begun to be described, and today's semanticists have at their disposal modern techniques such as symbolic logic, new theories of grammar such as cognitive and generative grammar, and research in psychology and cognitive science. Semantics is the study of meaning in language, which exists in our minds and can be expressed through spoken and written forms of language, gestures, and action. The sound patterns of language are studied at the level of phonology, while the organization of words and sentences is studied at the level of morphology and syntax. These are organized in such a way that we can convey meaningful messages or receive and understand messages. The question we ask and attempt to answer at the level of semantics is "how is language organized in order to be meaningful?" Semantics is the most abstract level of linguistic analysis, as we cannot see or observe meaning as we can observe and record sounds. Meaning is related very closely to the human capacity to think logically and to understand. When we try to analyze meaning, we are trying to analyze our own capacity to think and understand our ability to create meaning. Semantics concerns itself with giving a systematic account of the nature of meaning.
Semantics is a field that studies the relationship between signifiers like words, phrases, signs, and symbols and their meaning. It also addresses the issue of semantic change, or the change of meaning. Semantics focuses on three main problems: psychological, logical, and linguistic. Psychological problems involve understanding why people communicate and what a sign is, while logical problems examine the relationships between signs and reality. Linguistic approaches, as highlighted by David Crystal, aim to study the properties of meaning in a systematic and objective manner, considering a wide range of utterances and languages.
is a special semantic relation where a word is a near-synonym, but substitution does not leave the same truth-conditions. It is often used to indicate that the speaker is grappling for precision but may not possess the precise vocabulary or technical term for the object in mind. Examples of plesionyms include "It wasn't misty, just foggy" and "He was murdered, or rather executed." is an attribute of closely located words in coherent discourse, where two words collocate in an acceptable and expected way. Antonyms can also be philonymous if used in a coherent sentence.
is the creation of semantic dissonance by words not used philonymously, such as "fat water" or "the inexorable sadness of pencils." Such xenonyms are often the ground of creative or literary language. are two words that repeat without adding new value, creating a tautology. These phrases demonstrate that connotations and associations are imported along with denotations whenever words are brought together. Tautologies are conceptually uninformative but carry additional meaning on the pragmatic level. They are frequent in idiomatic and colloquial speech. is a part-whole relation, distinguished from a taxonomical, hyponymous relation. It holds between pairs like arm and elbow, with arm being the holonym and elbow being the meronym. Meronymy can be identified in terms of predicates 'has' and 'is a part of', rather than the 'is a'-relationship that obtains in the case of hyponymy. The part-whole relation comprises subtypes, such as the relation between component parts and the material entity, the relation between a member and the collection, the relation between a material and the object of which it forms an ingredient or constituent element, or the relation between a component action and the overall activity of which it forms part.
Every simple sentence – every proposition – has one predicate and a varying number of referring expressions, or arguments. In semantic analysis, every proposition contains one predicate and a varying number of referring expressions (noun phrases) called arguments. The meaning of a predicate is determined in part by how many arguments it may have and what role those arguments have. A sentence is defined as a composite of inflection and proposition, and a proposition consists of a subject and a predicate. Inflection includes agreement and tense; agreement is the formal bond between subject and predicate, a bond that varies considerably from one language to another. Tense is a system of contrasts that locates the general meaning of the proposition in the past, present or future, from the time-perspective of the speaker; and different languages have quite different tense systems. A proposition consists of a predicate and varying numbers of arguments, or referring expressions. The number of arguments that accompany a particular predicate is called its valency[11].
Semantic roles describe the roles or functions involved in propositions or sentences. Semantic roles have also been called semantic cases, thematic roles, participant roles, or thematic functions by other linguists. Instead of thinking of words as containers of meaning, we can look at the roles they fulfil within the situation described by a sentence. “If the situation is a simple event, as in the boy kicked the ball, then the verb describes an action (kick). The noun phrases in the sentence describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action. We can identify a small number of semantic roles (also called “thematic roles”) for these noun phrases” [12].
Among the most important semantic roles we include:
the entity that performs the action; the entity that undergoes the action; the one who perceives something; an entity used to perform an action; the place where the action happens; the place from which an action originates; the place where the action is directed.