Essay of semantics
BY: Marco Antonio Eguan Zacarias
Focusing on the semantic course I saw several topics. Personally I learned
different things about semantics. For example in the semantics study I read
about meaning, and that there are three disciplines concerned with the
semantics study of meaning in itself. They are psychology, philosophy and
linguistics. Their particular interests and approaches are different, yet each
borrows from and contributes to the others. For language and human a red and
I understood that the child acquires the ability to make use, as speaker and
hearer, of the most important communication system of the community.
Through this possession the individual enjoys a life of being able to inform, to
express feelings and thoughts, perhaps to influence others in smaller or lager
ways, and to learn.
In concepts and words it was about words that are related with meaning as in
the synonymy is because they have identical meaning and that little
complication aside. Even when two words can be applied to exactly the same
range of objects or events, they often have different association. However, it
depends on what you are trying to do. If you are only interested in deciding
which objects or phenomena a word can possibly refer to. For example in the
case of the words married and single is particularly interesting. Some people
insist that any adult is necessarily either married or single, and will not listen to
any arguments for others point of view. Others are equally sure that married
and single are just two of a number of possibilities, including engaged, attached,
living with someone, separated, divorced, widowed, and possibly other. Indeed,
on discussion on this point can become quite heated.
And thus I saw others interesting topics and I read about them sincerely, they
are good topics. On the first section I did practice about the semantics study,
the naturalness of language, words and concepts, semantics fields and
semantics change. On the second section there were others interesting topics
like, pragmatics, conventional and natural sings, the linguistics sing, speech and
utterance, the prosody the non-verbal communication and speech acts. On the
third section was about context, style and culture, semantics and culture and
finally, the grammar and semantics.
First of all semantics is the study of meaning. This is related between signifier,
such as words, phrases, signs and symbols. Sometimes we do not know what
is “meaning”. It is communicated through the use of language. What is
expressed by writers or speakers. Semantics also includes different field such
as lexicology, syntax, pragmatics etymology and others. In addition, semantics
is a wide subject the general study of language. It is essential to the study of
language acquisition, I mean how language users acquire a sense of meaning,
as speakers and writers, listener and readers.
The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed
interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated etc. some important areas of
semantics theory or related subjects include these; words and lexeme,
denotation, connotation, implication, pragmatics, ambiguity, synonym, antonym,
hyponym and more important areas that are very good to learn.
Continuing with the importance of semantics and those topics semantics have.
We know that one of meaning of language is a social activity, and choice of
language varies according to social function or personal intention. Language
also is a systematic means of communicating by the use of sounds of
conventional symbols. In my opinion, the language, we speak determines the
way we think because we show our feelings by saying words and people
normally identify how you think and what is your behavior in different situation in
the life. In the same way we acquire our language as we are growing, if we live
with people who think and speak very bad, then we will have the same behavior
because we are learning and we are adopted that kind of language.
However, it is important to know that language will occur almost wherever we
come into contact with other people and it will be different according to the
nature of the contact. As I said before, all the time the human learns the
language of the society in which she/he grows up, the child acquires the
fundamental of that language from their parents, for example, the behavior, the
manner at the moment to speak, the education. The child also acquires the
fundamental of that language in the first five or six years of life. As we know the
child follows a general timetable in the process of acquisition. Just as the baby
sits up, then crawls, stands and walks according to an innate timetable.
the child acquires the ability to make use, as speakers and hearers and with this
human child starts to communicate, to enjoy a life, of being able to inform and to
express feelings. We produce different sounds to communicate something with
other person and here is when phonology has participation because phonology
is the knowledge, or the description, of how we speech sounds are organized in
a particular language.
In connection with semantics, sentence and utterance are two different things
because; they can have different meaning in different situations. Furthermore,
different pieces of language can have different meanings in different contexts.
An utterance is an act of speech or writing. For example, when a person is
given a conference or when a person is writing a book, it is specific an event, at
particular time and place involving at least one person, the one who produces
the utterance.
An utterance happens just once; a spoken utterance happens and then unless it
is recorder electronically. A written utterance is intended to last for a short time
for example: a shopping list or much longer as in the case of a book. A
sentence is not an event; it is a construction of words and it can be in English or
other language. However the meaning of a sentence is determined by the
language, something knows to all people who have learned to use that
language.
The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the circumstances: the time and
place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another
and all of them we can call physical- social context of an utterance.
In context, style and culture translate text is not easy. One reason it is not easy
is that words in different languages do not match up one to one. English, for
example makes a clear different in meaning between ape and monkey. And this
is a simple case. Much more typically, a stretch of meaning is just divided up by
different languages into completely different and overlapping pieces. This is a
view, a minority but a prominent one none the less, that such translation can be
almost impossible, and for a very interesting reason.
Most definition of pragmatics pay lip service to Charles Morris’s famous
definition of pragmatics as “the study of the relation of sings to interpreters”
(1983:6).If pragmatics, as suggest in the previous comments, indeed is a new
paradigm of research, it is obliged to come up with a new definition of the object
of that research. The proper domain of pragmatics would then be what
Chomsky has called performance, that is to say, the way the individual goes
about using language. This concrete linguistic practice would be distinguished
from an abstract competence, understood as the user`s knowledge of the
language and it`s rules. This point of view is neatly captured by Katz. Who, who
says: “grammar are the theories about the structure of sentences types…
pragmatics theories, in contrast, explicate the reasoning of speakers and
hearers” (1977:19).
Conclusively, in my opinion semantics or the semantics course is very important
in order to catch all the information we can obtain in this course. However, we
as students had to have a completed knowledge about semantics, pragmatics,
symbol, meaning, phonology, lexis, language, implication, etc. all those topics
are used in our life. As you are reading about language, phonology and other
researches your can keep all that information and then use it in your daily life or
wherever you want to. Semantics has different concepts which are for uses of
language and different situation in your own life, also you can know about
grammatical rules, speech, utterances, sentences and several topics that can
be helpful for you.
Bibliography
Kreidler, Ch. (1998). Introducing English semantics. London: routledge.
Mey, J. L. (2001) pragmatics: An introduction. Second Edition. Padstow,
Cornwall: Blackwell publishing
Trask, R. L. (1995). Language: The Basics. New York: Routledge.
Uniersalteacher. Org. uk (2008) semantic change and etymology. Retrieved july
14, 2008 from http:/ftp4.dns-systems.net/eryc/amoore/lang/semantics.htm#10
Yule, G.(1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: oxford university press.