Semantics

Word Meanings "Word meanings are like stretchy pullovers, whose outline contour is visible, but whose detailed shape varies with use: 'The proper meaning of a word . . . is never something upon which the word sits like a gull on a stone; it is something over which the word hovers like a gull over a ship's stern,' noted one literary critic [Robin George Collingwood]." (Jean Aitchison, The Language Web: The Power and Problem of Words. Cambridge University Press, 1997) Meaning in Sentences "It may justly be urged that, properly speaking, what alone has meaning is a sentence. Of course, we can speak quite properly of, for example, 'looking up the meaning of a word' in a (John L. Austin, "The Meaning of a Word." Philosophical Papers, 3rd ed., edited by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock. Oxford University Press, 1990) Different Kinds of Meaning for Different Kinds of Words "There can't be a single answer to the question 'Are meanings in the world or in the head?' because the division of labor between sense and reference is very different for different kinds of words. With a word like this or that, the sense by itself is useless in picking out the here, there, you, me, now, and then. "At the other extreme are words that refer to whatever we say they mean when we touchdown is, or a member of parliament, or a dollar, or an American citizen, or GO in Monopoly, because their meaning is laid down exactly by the rules and regulations of a game or system. These are sometimes called (Steven...

Recent Examples on the Web The online autonomous navigation and semantic mapping experiment presented [below] is conducted with the Cassie Blue bipedal robot at the University of Michigan. — IEEE Spectrum, 18 Jan. 2023 Cognitive performance was evaluated using an array of tests: immediate recall, late recall, recognition, semantic and phonemic verbal fluency and trail-making tests. — L'oreal Thompson Payton, Fortune, 6 Dec. 2022 As mentioned, finding semantic relations entails connecting data from various structured and unstructured data sources. — Daniel Fallmann, Forbes, 9 June 2022 Companies have tried to put semantic guardrails in place to limit what chatbots can say, but that doesn’t always work. — Rachel Lerman, Washington Post, 7 May 2023 The semantic decoder, as it's called, can convert to real speech the brain activity of a person who's listening to a story or imagining telling a story. — Gabriella Ybarra, San Antonio Express-News, 4 May 2023 If the semantic gymnastics of hypersensitivity seem elliptical, try adding the inertia of devising a culturally appropriate children’s play that honors America’s genocidal roots. — Naveen Kumar, Variety, 21 Apr. 2023 Embodiment is an important characteristic for all intelligent agents (creatures and robots), while existing scene description tasks mainly focus on analyzing images passively and the semantic understanding of the scenario is separated from the interaction between the agent and the environment. — IEEE Spectrum, 15...

Table of Contents • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • The subject matter of semantics is meaning. ‘Semantics is the technical used to refer to the study of meaning, and, since meaning is a part of language, semantics is part of linguistics.’ (FR Palmer: 1). Man has always been interested in language, and mainly in the relations of linguistic symbols, and over the centuries these relations have been viewed differently from various angles. The term semantics was first used in the seventeenth century in the phrase semantick philosophy. M. Breal is credited with coining the word semantics in his Essai de semantique (1897) ‘as a name for philosophical enquiries’. ‘Chwistek meant by it what Carnap called logical syntax, it is often used to refer to such inquiries into meaning as Peirce’s theory of signs, Frege’s distinction between Sense and Reference, and Wittgensteins picture theory. In ancient times, in the days of pre-platonic philosophizing association between sense and reference, name and concrete things was recognised. This stand has not substantially changed in that the basic premises and processes of meaning recognise it. In 1894 the English word semantics occurred in a paper presented to the American Philosophical Association : ‘Reflected meaning a point in semantics’. As a branch of language study considering language in terms of semantic units, structured in a certain way, being linked to phonetic units, semantics is recent development, yet to develop its tools, analytic...