Lakhasly

Introduction
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. Although it can be conceived as concerned with meaning in general, it is often confined to those aspects which are relatively stable and context-free, in contrast to pragmatics, which is concerned with meaning variation with context. Semantics is sometimes described as concerned with the relation of linguistic forms to states of the world; more sensibly, it may be seen as concerned with the relation of linguistic forms to non-linguistic concepts and mental representations, as well as with relationship, of meaning between linguistic forms, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy. Semantic theories have influenced approaches to describing word meaning, and are thus particularly relevant to Lexicography and vocabulary teaching.
Semantics is the study of meaning. Seen by Breal, in the late 19th century, as an emerging science (French, „semantique‟) opposed to phonetics („phonetique‟) as a science of sounds: similarly for Bloomfield in 1930, it was a field covering, as one account of meaningful forms, and the lexicon. Also seen more narrowly, in a traditional lasting into the 1960s, as the study of meaning in the lexicon alone, including changes in word meaning. Later, in accounts in which the study of distribution was divorced from that of meanings, opposed either to grammar in general; or, within grammar and especially within a generative grammar from the 1960s onwards, to syntax specifically. Of the uses current at the beginning of the 21st century, many restrict semantics to the study of meaning is abstraction from the contexts in which words and sentences are uttered: in opposition, therefore, to pragmatics. Others include pragmatics as one of its branches. In others its scope is in practice very narrow: thus, one handbook of „contemporary semantic theory‟, in the mid-1990s deals almost solely with problems in formal semantics, even the meanings of lexical units being neglected [1].
Semantics, as the study of linguistic meaning, deals with issues of what sentences and other linguistic objects express, but not with 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. “Semantics, the study of word meaning and sentence meaning, abstracted away from contexts of use, is a descriptive subject. It is an attempt to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their language that people have from knowing the language” [2]. However, cognitive linguistics tends to disclaim this difference between pragmatics and semantics. The history of semantics is a peculiarly complex one because so many fields of study are involved, among them the study of the meaning relationships between words in a particular language. Yet, semantics is not only a matter of assigning meaning to individual units, whether these be morphemes or words, but is also concerned with the relationships between them, how they act upon each other, how they fuse and combine in different ways. “Semantics is the complex interplay of morphology, lexis, and syntax. Complex though it is, however, it does not account for all aspects of meaning. We still have pragmatics to consider” [3].
 
Chapter Two
History of semantics
The history of semantics and its relationship with the development of other areas of knowledge can be traced back quite far. Aristotle is usually regarded as the forerunner of modern semantics. He was concerned with the same general areas that concern modern semanticists. Still, we must mention that there are areas of meaning studied by modern semanticists, which were not known to Aristotle and his fellow philosophers. We must assume that our modern theories of meaning (to the extent that they agree with one another) are in some sense superior to Aristotle’s, i.e. that in some ways Aristotle ‘got it wrong’, and we, with the benefit of more than 2,000 years’ further thought, are more likely to have ‘got it right’. Semantic theories are justified by reference to the actual semantic facts that 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 certain modern techniques (e.g. symbolic logic, new theories of grammar such as cognitive and generative grammar, and research in psychology and cognitive science, to name just a few) not available to the ancients. As far as we can tell, although individual languages have changed (Modern Greek is very different from Ancient Greek), the basic ways in which language is used to convey meaning have not changed at all [4].
definition
Semantics is the study of meaning. The term semantics originates from the Greek word sēmantiká, neuter plural of sēmantikós, derived from the Greek word sēma meaning sign, or, as Nick Riemer puts it, “semantics comes from the ancient Greek word semantikos, an adjective meaning ‘relating to signs’, based on the noun sēmeion ‘sign’” (Riemer). Although the study of meaning is extremely old, the name semantics was only coined in the late nineteenth century by French linguist Michel Bréal. “Like many other names of branches of linguistics, the word semantics reflects the origins of the Western tradition of linguistic analysis in the writings of Greek thinkers from the fifth century BC onwards”, adds Riemer [5].
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. We know that language is used to express meanings which can be understood by others. But meanings exist in our minds and we can express what is in our minds through the spoken and written forms of language (as well as through gestures, action etc.). The sound patterns of language are studied at the level of phonology and the organization of words and sentences is studied at the level of morphology and syntax. These are in turn organized in such a way that we can convey meaningful messages or receive and understand messages. „How is language organized in order to be meaningful? ‟ This is the question we ask and attempt to answer at the level of semantics. Semantics is that level of linguistic analysis where meaning is analyzed. It is the most abstract level of linguistic analysis, since 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. So, when we try to analyze meaning, we are trying to analyze our own capacity to think and understand our own ability to create meaning. Semantics concerns itself with „giving a systematic account of the nature of meaning‟ [6].
Problem
Semantics focuses on the relationship that exists between signifiers (such as words, phrases, signs, and symbols) and what they stand for (their denotata, or the signified). Another concern of semantic studies is the problem of semantic change, i.e. change of meaning.
There are basically three main semantic problems in the center of semantic:
– a psychological problem: why and how people communicate, what a sign is.
– a logical problem: the relationships between signs and reality.
– a linguistic problem: what a word is, the relations between the form and the sense or meaning of a word, the relationships between words.

As David Crystal puts it, out of these, the most important one is the linguistic approach, which “aims to study the properties of meaning in a systematic and objective way, with reference to as wide a range of utterances and languages as possible” [7].
Special semantic relations
 Plesionymy
A word is a plesionym if it is a near-synonym, but substitution of the word does not leave the same truth-conditions. For example, in It wasn’t misty, just foggy, the words misty and foggy are plesionyms of each other. Other examples would be: “he was murdered, or rather executed”; “he’s a farmer, or strictly a stockman”; or “it’s a pie, or actually a savoury tart”. Plesionyms are often used to indicate that the speaker is grappling for precision, but perhaps does not possess the precise vocabulary or technical term for the object in mind. Though subtle, the reality of plesionymy can be illustrated by considering some odd examples that are cast in the right form but are not lexical plesionyms: “‘? My brother’s a shopkeeper, or more exactly a policeman’; ‘? She bought a dog, or more exactly, a cat’; ‘? It wasn’t misty, just sunny’” [8].
 Philonymy
All closely located words in coherent discourse usually exhibit philonymy. Two words are philonyms if they collocate in an acceptable and expected way: “the speaker can speak French”; “the pregnant woman”; “fine and dandy”. Antonyms, if used in a coherent sentence, can be philonymous.
 Xenonymy
Words which are not used philonymously are xenonyms if they create semantic dissonance: “fat water”; “the inexorable sadness of pencils”; “whispering lunar incantations dissolve the floors of memory”. Such xenonyms are often the ground of creative or literary language.
 Tautonyms
Two words are tautonyms if they merely repeat without adding new value, creating a tautology: “the speaker is speaking”; “boys will be boys”; “war is war”. “Of course, it is easy to imagine contexts in which these tautonymous phrases could be communicatively valid, demonstrating again that connotations and associations are imported along with denotations whenever words are brought together”.
A tautology is conceptually uninformative by the juxtaposition of two synonyms within the same sentence: e.g. “He is his father’s son”. However, on the pragmatic level, the very repetition of an item carries additional meaning: e.g. “He is his father’s son” suggests that he is, in certain respects, very much like his father…. Tautologies are frequent in idiomatic and colloquial speech: e.g. “Boys will be boys”; “What’s yours is yours”; “If you must, you must” [9].
 Meronymy
As we have seen earlier, meronymy is a part–whole relation, to be distinguished from a taxonomical, hyponymous relation. Meronymy holds between pairs such as arm and elbow: arm is the holonym and elbow is the meronym. Meronymy can be identified in terms of the predicates ‘has’ and ‘is a part of’ (an arm has an elbow, and an elbow is part of the arm), rather than in terms of the ‘is a’-relationship that obtains in the case of hyponymy (a finch is a bird). … The part–whole relation is not a unitary one, but rather comprises a number of subtypes, like the relation between component parts and the material entity to which they belong (keyboard/computer), the relation between a member and the collection to which it belongs (soldier/army), the relation between a material and the object of which it forms an ingredient or a constituent element (wood/ door), or the relation between a component action and the overall activity of which it forms part (paying/shopping) [10].