Introducing English Semantics
Language and the individual
Learns the language of the
society in which it grows up.
A child acquires a language in
the first five or six years of life.
Approximately at twelve months,
begins to imitate their first words.
Mama.
Bed.
Doll.
Baby.
By the age of eighteen months
the child producing two-word utterances.
Daddy byebye.
Mama shoes.
Dolly sit.
Utterances become more
and more complex.
Questions.
Negative statements.
Interact with others.
Ability to use language,
think and conceptualize.
Develop at the same time and these
abilities depend on each other.
knowledge is partly conscious and explicit
but to a large extent unconscious and implicit.
language is creative, our communication
is not restricted to a fixed set of topics.
Subtopic
Contains numerousnames of people and places,
Grows rapidly in early childhood.
Know how to combine the vocabulary items into utterances.
Mean two things
The implicit knowledge that a speaker has.
The explicit description and explanation of it by the linguist.
Parts of grammar
Semantics.
Study of the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences in language.
Phonology.
knowledge of how speech sounds are
organized in a particular language.
There are units called phonemes which
combine in various possible ways.
Homonyms
Two words sound the same
but have different meanings.
Ambiguity
Sequences of words with the same
pronunciation have different interpretations.
Syntax.
knowledge, or the description, of the classes of
words.
Deals with grammatical categories like tense, number, aspect categories that differ from language to language
It is impossible to explore semantics without also dealing with syntax because the two are closely interrelated.
The description or the knowledge of word formation.
The derivation of different words
which share a basic meaning.
EXAMPLE:
Connect.
Disconnect.
Connection.
The systematic study of meaning
Legal scholars argue about the interpretation-that is,
the meaning-of a law or a judicial decision. Literary
scholars quarrel similary over the meaning of some poem or story.
Three disciplines are concerned with the
systematic study of "meaning" in itself:
Psychology
Philosophy
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Linguistics
Semantics is the systematic study of meaning and linguistic semantics is the study of how languages organize and express meanings.
The nature of language
All animals have some system for communicating with other members of their species, but only humans have a language which allows them to produce and understand ever-new messages and to do so without any outside stimulus.
The productivity of language is due to another feature which distinguishes our communication from that of other animals.
First, animals can communicate only in response to some particular stimulus.
Humans alone are able to talk about vast numbers of things which come from accumulated knowledge, memory and imagination.
The simple fact is that the human mind deals easily and frequently with what does not exist, or what does not yet exist. Nobody can explain just how people are able to abstract elements from their sensory world and put these elements together in ways that are partly familiar, partly new.