SEMANTICS
• Semantics is the study of meaning and is one of the largest branches of linguistics.
• It is important for understanding language in social contexts, as these are likely to affect meaning, and for
understanding varieties of English and effects of style.
• It includes several areas, and today we will be exploring the following:
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symbols and referents
semantic fields
collocations, lexemes and fixed expressions.
denotation and connotation
synonyms, hyponyms and antonyms
Metaphor.
You will need to have your glossaries
ready and be jotting down notes about
new terminology.
WHY SEMANTICS IS IMPORTANT
• Write a definition for ‘dog’.
• Imagine you are Martian and you have never seen a dog before. You look in the dictionary to see what they
are, and come across the following definition:
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dog n. 1. a domesticated canine mammal, occurring in many breeds that show a great variety in size and form. 2.
any other carnivore of the family Canidae, such as the dingo and coyote.
• You now stumble across an unfamiliar animal. How do you decide whether it is a dog or not?
• How helpful do you think such a definition would be?
• Is your definition any more helpful?
• Semantics is the study of how meanings work, and exploring issues such as the above is important for our
understanding of language.
SIGNS
What does this sign mean?
How do you know?
• Signs are essentially things that can be interpreted as having a meaning, which is something other
than themselves. E.g. a road sign.
• ‘Don’t overtake’ is know as the referent, what the sign is referring to.
• The referent for ‘green’ is ‘go’, and ‘red’ is ‘stop’, or ‘no’.
• Signs like this are known as symbolic signs: we know what they mean because of cultural consensus.
Of course, in other cultures, symbolic signs might have different referents to the UK.
• Portraits and diagrams are known as iconic signs: they bear a closer resemblance to their referent.
REFERENTS IN LANGUAGE
• In a sentence, the referent is the thing to which the word is referring.
• The farmer stopped working, for he was hot. The sun was shining brightly and he felt exhausted after his long
labour. It had taken all day.
• Can you work out the referent for each of the pronouns in this sentence?
• Identifying what the referents are for a pronoun is part of the skill of reading: it’s an essential part of textual
cohesion and a way of linking different ideas in a sentence together.
SEMANTIC FIELDS
This should be familiar from GCSE!
• Semantic fields are groups of words to do with a particular subject, or which have similar meanings.
• For example:
• ball, player, team are all part of the semantic field of sport.
• Depending on the words in the field, they can become more or less specific:
• ball, player, team, striker, Arsenal, off-side are all part of the semantic field of football.
COLLOCATIONS AND LEXEMES
• As a lexical unit may contain more than one word, David Crystal has coined the term lexeme. This is
usually a single word, but may be a phrase in which the meaning belongs to the whole rather than its
parts, as in verb phrases tune in, turn on, drop out or noun phrase (a) fry up.
• Words which are often found in pairs are called collocations – cosmetic surgery, Christmas Eve,
director’s cut.
• Collocations which become so frequently used that they are accepted as one long structure, rather
than single words, are known as fixed expressions – see you later, at the end of the day.
DENOTATION AND CONNOTATION
• What a sign denotes is the precise match between a sign and its referent, more like a dictionary
definition.
• What a sign connotes is ideas and associations which are connected with the sign.
• For instance, a red rose.
• The denotation is a red-coloured, many-petalled flower, with thorns.
• The connotation of a red rose are manifold: passion, love, sacrifice, the England Rugby Team (where
the rose is used as a symbolic sign), the red rose of York…
SYNONYMS AND ANTONYMS
• Synonyms (as you know!) are words which have roughly the same meaning as each other.
• However, this is enormously simplified as often one word will have very different connotations or will
be used in a very different register: pal, friend, mate, companion, playmate, ally.
• Antonyms (as you should also know!) are words with opposite meanings as each other. Antonyms can
be:
• Complementary – e.g. alive v. dead – you can only be one or the other!
• Graded – e.g. long v. short – you have varying degrees of length or shortness.
DYSPHEMISMS AND EUPHEMISMS
• Sometimes, due to the needs of an audience, a writer may choose to use a euphemism rather than a
more blunt, taboo word, known as a dysphemism.
• Consider the word ‘toilet’. Can you think of other synonyms? Which are euphemisms and which are
dysphemisms? In what ways would your audience or form of writing (mode) dictate your semantic
choices here?
HYPONYMS AND HYPERNYMS
Thinking point:
When might you
choose to make
use of more or
less specific
terms?
• Hypernyms are more general ways of referring to things.
• Hyponyms are more specific ways of referring to things.
• In the diagram below, electronics is a hypernym of hardware, its hyponym; hardware is a
hypernym of computer, its hyponym, and so on.
Electronics
Hardware
Computer
Laptop
METAPHOR
• One final way we might think about semantics is metaphor. The linguistics definition of metaphor is ‘a
structure that presents one thing in terms of another’.
• We use many metaphors in everyday speech without really thinking about it:
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“I’m heading in the right direction.”
“I’m moving on after that breakup.”
part of a broad metaphor of ‘life as a journey’
“It’s like she’s going sideways.”
“He was on a high.”
“Mum was feeling so low.”
part of a broad metaphor of emotions on a vertical scale
• Metaphorical frameworks like this are helpful to give us a structure to understand key ideas. Consider the
metaphor of love as a container: I’m in love, I’m out of love…
SO WHAT?
• Semantics is an important field of language as it helps us negotiate the relationship between
text producer, text receiver and the text itself. It is also important to help us identify and analyse
the purpose and audience of the text.
HOMEWORK (DUE NEXT LESSON)
• Referring to as many different semantic concepts as you can, explore how this advertisement
works and how the reader relates to the ideas, and what associations the reader is expected to
make.
• You may annotate the advertisement as your response to this task, or write up your ideas in full.
• Please also read the chapter on phonetics and phonology that I have emailed to you in preparation
for our next lesson. Write down any questions or anything you don’t understand for us to go
through in the following lesson.