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Linguistics & Grammar vocabulary · Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics

Meaning in linguistics & grammar, with examples

/sɪˈmæntɪks/nounCore term

In linguistics & grammar, semantics means: The study of meaning in language: what words, phrases and sentences mean, and how their meanings relate to each other and to the world.

In Turkish: anlambilim, semantik

How it is used

The name of the field and its branches (lexical semantics, formal semantics). In everyday English, 'it's just semantics' means an argument is only about words, not about real facts; avoid this sense in academic writing.

Example sentences

  1. Semantics looks at what a sentence means on its own; pragmatics looks at what the speaker means by it.

  2. In lexical semantics we compare words like big, large and huge.

Common collocations

  • lexical semantics
  • formal semantics
  • semantic field
  • semantic change
  • pragmaticsThe study of how context affects meaning: how speakers mean more than they actually say, and how listeners work out intended meanings, politeness and hints.
  • synonymA word or phrase that means the same or nearly the same as another one in at least some contexts, such as big and large, or start and begin.
  • ambiguityThe quality of having more than one possible meaning, caused either by a word with several senses or by a structure that can be analysed in more than one way.
  • polysemyThe situation in which one word has several related meanings, such as 'head' meaning a part of the body, the leader of a group or the top of a page.
  • connotationThe feelings, attitudes or associations a word carries beyond its basic meaning, such as the positive feel of 'slim' compared with 'skinny'.

More terms: Semantics and Pragmatics

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