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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Semantics (disambiguation).

A central topic in semantics concerns the relation

between language, world, and mental concepts.

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their
meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this
process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and
concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression
points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to
create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use
language in communication. Semantics, together with syntactics and pragmatics, is a part
of semiotics.

Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines whether
words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another.
Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon
of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal
semantics relies on logic and mathematics to provide precise frameworks of the relation
between language and meaning. Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological
perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual
structures used to understand the world. Other branches of semantics include conceptual
semantics, computational semantics, and cultural semantics.

Theories of meaning are general explanations of the nature of meaning and how expressions
are endowed with it. According to referential theories, the meaning of an expression is the
part of reality to which it points. Ideational theories identify meaning with mental states like
the ideas that an expression evokes in the minds of language users. According to causal
theories, meaning is determined by causes and effects, which behaviorist semantics analyzes
in terms of stimulus and response. Further theories of meaning include truth-conditional
semantics, verificationist theories, the use theory, and inferentialist semantics.
The study of semantic phenomena began during antiquity but was not recognized as an
independent field of inquiry until the 19th century. Semantics is relevant to the fields of formal
logic, computer science, and psychology.

Definition and related fields

Semantics is the study of meaning in languages.[1] It is a systematic inquiry that examines what
linguistic meaning is and how it arises. [2] It investigates how expressions are built up from
different layers of constituents, like morphemes, words, clauses, sentences, and texts, and
how the meanings of the constituents affect one another.[3] Semantics can focus on a specific
language, like English, but in its widest sense, it investigates meaning structures relevant to all
languages.[4][a][b] As a descriptive discipline, it aims to determine how meaning works
without prescribing what meaning people should associate with particular expressions.[7] Some
of its key questions are "How do the meanings of words combine to create the meanings of
sentences?", "How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the things words
refer to?", and "What is the connection between what a word means, and the contexts in
which it is used?".[8] The main disciplines engaged in semantics are linguistics, semiotics,
and philosophy.[9] Besides its meaning as a field of inquiry, semantics can also refer to theories
within this field, like truth-conditional semantics,[10] and to the meaning of particular
expressions, like the semantics of the word fairy.[11]

As a field of inquiry, semantics has both an internal and an external side. The internal side is
interested in the connection between words and the mental phenomena they evoke, like ideas
and conceptual representations. The external side examines how words refer to objects in the
world and under what conditions a sentence is true.[12]

Many related disciplines investigate language and meaning. Semantics contrasts with other
subfields of linguistics focused on distinct aspects of language. Phonology studies the different
types of sounds used in languages and how sounds are connected to form words
while syntax examines the rules that dictate how to arrange words to create sentences. These
divisions are reflected in the fact that it is possible to master some aspects of a language while
lacking others, like when a person knows how to pronounce a word without knowing its
meaning.[13] As a subfield of semiotics, semantics has a more narrow focus on meaning in
language while semiotics studies both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Semiotics investigates
additional topics like the meaning of non-verbal communication, conventional symbols, and
natural signs independent of human interaction. Examples include nodding to signal
agreement, stripes on a uniform signifying rank, and the presence of vultures indicating a
nearby animal carcass.[14]

Semantics further contrasts with pragmatics, which is interested in how people use language in
communication.[15] An expression like "That's what I'm talking about" can mean many things
depending on who says it and in what situation. Semantics is interested in the possible
meanings of expressions: what they can and cannot mean in general. In this regard, it is
sometimes defined as the study of context-independent meaning. Pragmatics examines which
of these possible meanings is relevant in a particular case. In contrast to semantics, it is
interested in actual performance rather than in the general linguistic competence underlying
this performance.[16] This includes the topic of additional meaning that can be inferred even
though it is not literally expressed, like what it means if a speaker remains silent on a certain
topic.[17] A closely related distinction by the semiotician Charles W. Morris holds that semantics
studies the relation between words and the world, pragmatics examines the relation between
words and users, and syntax focuses on the relation between different words. [18]

Semantics is related to etymology, which studies how words and their meanings changed in
the course of history.[7] Another connected field is hermeneutics, which is the art or science of
interpretation and is concerned with the right methodology of interpreting text in general
and scripture in particular.[19] Metasemantics examines the metaphysical foundations of
meaning and aims to explain where it comes from or how it arises. [20]
The word semantics originated from the Ancient Greek adjective semantikos, meaning 'relating
to signs', which is a derivative of sēmeion, the noun for 'sign'. It was initially used for medical
symptoms and only later acquired its wider meaning regarding any type of sign, including
linguistic signs. The word semantics entered the English language from the French
term semantique, which the linguist Michel Bréal first introduced at the end of the 19th
century.[21]

Basic concepts

Meaning

Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic

expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An
example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous
expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male
sheep.[22] There are many forms of non-linguistic meaning that are not examined by semantics.
Actions and policies can have meaning in relation to the goal they serve. Fields
like religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life, which is about finding a
purpose in life or the significance of existence in general.[23]

Semantics is not focused on subjective speaker

meaning and is instead interested in public meaning, like the meaning found in general
dictionary definitions.
Linguistic meaning can be analyzed on different levels. Word meaning is studied by lexical
semantics and investigates the denotation of individual words. It is often related
to concepts of entities, like how the word dog is associated with the concept of the four-
legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning falls into the field of phrasal semantics and
concerns the denotation of full sentences. It usually expresses a concept applying to a type of
situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt". [24] The meaning of a sentence
is often referred to as a proposition.[25] Different sentences can express the same proposition,
like the English sentence "the tree is green" and the German sentence "der Baum ist
grün".[26] Utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and is about the meaning of an
expression on a particular occasion. Sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart in
cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony.[27]

Semantics is primarily interested in the public meaning that expressions have, like the meaning
found in general dictionary definitions. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is the private or
subjective meaning that individuals associate with expressions. It can diverge from the literal
meaning, like when a person associates the word needle with pain or drugs.[28]

Sense and reference

The distinction between sense and reference was first

introduced by the philosopher Gottlob Frege.[29]

Meaning is often analyzed in terms of sense and reference,[30] also referred to as intension and
extension or connotation and denotation.[31] The referent of an expression is the object to
which the expression points. The sense of an expression is the way in which it refers to that
object or how the object is interpreted. For example, the expressions morning
star and evening star refer to the same planet, just like the expressions 2 + 2 and 3 + 1 refer to
the same number. The meanings of these expressions differ not on the level of reference but
on the level of sense.[32] Sense is sometimes understood as a mental phenomenon that helps
people identify the objects to which an expression refers.[33] Some semanticists focus primarily
on sense or primarily on reference in their analysis of meaning.[34] To grasp the full meaning of
an expression, it is usually necessary to understand both to what entities in the world it refers
and how it describes them.[35]

The distinction between sense and reference can explain identity statements, which can be
used to show how two expressions with a different sense have the same referent. For
instance, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative and people can
learn something from it. The sentence "the morning star is the morning star", by contrast, is an
uninformative tautology since the expressions are identical not only on the level of reference
but also on the level of sense.[36]

Compositionality

Compositionality is a key aspect of how languages construct meaning. It is the idea that the
meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. It is possible to
understand the meaning of the sentence "Zuzana owns a dog" by understanding what the
words Zuzana, owns, a and dog mean and how they are combined.[37] In this regard, the
meaning of complex expressions like sentences is different from word meaning since it is
normally not possible to deduce what a word means by looking at its letters and one needs to
consult a dictionary instead.[38]
Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost
infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive resources is
finite. Many sentences that people read are sentences that they have never seen before and
they are nonetheless able to understand them.[37]

When interpreted in a strong sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning
of a complex expression is not just affected by its parts and how they are combined but fully
determined this way. It is controversial whether this claim is correct or whether additional
aspects influence meaning. For example, context may affect the meaning of
expressions; idioms like "kick the bucket" carry figurative or non-literal meanings that are not
directly reducible to the meanings of their parts.[37]

Truth and truth conditions

Truth is a property of statements that accurately present the world and true statements are in
accord with reality. Whether a statement is true usually depends on the relation between the
statement and the rest of the world. The truth conditions of a statement are the way the world
needs to be for the statement to be true. For example, it belongs to the truth conditions of the
sentence "it is raining outside" that raindrops are falling from the sky. The sentence is true if it
is used in a situation in which the truth conditions are fulfilled, i.e., if there is actually rain
outside.[39]
Truth conditions play a central role in semantics and some theories rely exclusively on truth
conditions to analyze meaning. To understand a statement usually implies that one has an idea
about the conditions under which it would be true. This can happen even if one does not know
whether the conditions are fulfilled.[39]

Semiotic triangle

The semiotic triangle aims to explain how the

relation between language (Symbol) and world (Referent) is mediated by the language users
(Thought or Reference).

The semiotic triangle, also called the triangle of meaning, is a model used to explain the
relation between language, language users, and the world, represented in the model
as Symbol, Thought or Reference, and Referent. The symbol is a linguistic signifier, either in its
spoken or written form. The central idea of the model is that there is no direct relation
between a linguistic expression and what it refers to, as was assumed by earlier dyadic models.
This is expressed in the diagram by the dotted line between symbol and referent. [40]

The model holds instead that the relation between the two is mediated through a third
component. For example, the term apple stands for a type of fruit but there is no direct
connection between this string of letters and the corresponding physical object. The relation is
only established indirectly through the mind of the language user. When they see the symbol,
it evokes a mental image or a concept, which establishes the connection to the physical object.
This process is only possible if the language user learned the meaning of the symbol before.
The meaning of a specific symbol is governed by the conventions of a particular language. The
same symbol may refer to one object in one language, to another object in a different
language, and to no object in another language.[40]

Others

Many other concepts are used to describe semantic phenomena. The semantic role of an
expression is the function it fulfills in a sentence. In the sentence "the boy kicked the ball", the
boy has the role of the agent who performs an action. The ball is the theme or patient of this
action as something that does not act itself but is involved in or affected by the action. The
same entity can be both agent and patient, like when someone cuts themselves. An entity has
the semantic role of an instrument if it is used to perform the action, for instance, when
cutting something with a knife then the knife is the instrument. For some sentences, no action
is described but an experience takes place, like when a girl sees a bird. In this case, the girl has
the role of the experiencer. Other common semantic roles are location, source, goal,
beneficiary, and stimulus.[41]

Lexical relations describe how words stand to one another. Two words are synonyms if they
share the same or a very similar meaning,
like car and automobile or buy and purchase. Antonyms have opposite meanings, such as the
contrast between alive and dead or fast and slow.[c] One term is a hyponym of another term if
the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For
example, ant is a hyponym of insect. A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features
of the type it belongs to. A robin is a prototype of a bird but a penguin is not. Two words with
the same pronunciation are homophones like flour and flower, while two words with the same
spelling are homonyms, like a bank of a river in contrast to a bank as a financial
institution.[d] Hyponymy is closely related to meronymy, which describes the relation between
part and whole. For instance, wheel is a meronym of car.[44] An expression is ambiguous if it
has more than one possible meaning. In some cases, it is possible to disambiguate them to
discern the intended meaning.[45] The term polysemy is used if the different meanings are
closely related to one another, like the meanings of the word head, which can refer to the
topmost part of the human body or the top-ranking person in an organization.[44]

The meaning of words can often be subdivided into meaning components called semantic
features. The word horse has the semantic feature animate but lacks the semantic
feature human. It may not always be possible to fully reconstruct the meaning of a word by
identifying all its semantic features.[46]

A semantic or lexical field is a group of words that are all related to the same activity or
subject. For instance, the semantic field of cooking includes words like bake, boil, spice,
and pan.[47]

The context of an expression refers to the situation or circumstances in which it is used and
includes time, location, speaker, and audience. It also encompasses other passages in a text
that come before and after it.[48] Context affects the meaning of various expressions, like
the deictic expression here and the anaphoric expression she.[49]
A syntactic environment is extensional or transparent if it is always possible to exchange
expressions with the same reference without affecting the truth value of the sentence. For
example, the environment of the sentence "the number 8 is even" is extensional because
replacing the expression "the number 8" with "the number of planets in the Solar System"
does not change its truth value. For intensional or opaque contexts, this type of substitution is
not always possible. For instance, the embedded clause in "Paco believes that the number 8 is
even" is intensional since Paco may not know that the number of planets in the solar system is
8.[50]

Semanticists commonly distinguish the language they study, called object language, from the
language they use to express their findings, called metalanguage. When a professor uses
Japanese to teach their student how to interpret the language of first-order logic then the
language of first-order logic is the object language and Japanese is the metalanguage. The
same language may occupy the role of object language and metalanguage at the same time.
This is the case in monolingual English dictionaries, in which both the entry term belonging to
the object language and the definition text belonging to the metalanguage are taken from the
English language.[51]

Branches

Lexical semantics

Main article: Lexical semantics

Lexical semantics is the sub-field of semantics that studies word meaning.[52] It examines
semantic aspects of individual words and the vocabulary as a whole. This includes the study of
lexical relations between words, such as whether two terms are synonyms or
antonyms.[53] Lexical semantics categorizes words based on semantic features they share and
groups them into semantic fields unified by a common subject.[54] This information is used to
create taxonomies to organize lexical knowledge, for example, by distinguishing between
physical and abstract entities and subdividing physical entities into stuff and individuated
entities.[55] Further topics of interest are polysemy, ambiguity, and vagueness.[56]

Lexical semantics is sometimes divided into two complementary

approaches: semasiology and onomasiology. Semasiology starts from words and examines
what their meaning is. It is interested in whether words have one or several meanings and how
those meanings are related to one another. Instead of going from word to meaning,
onomasiology goes from meaning to word. It starts with a concept and examines what names
this concept has or how it can be expressed in a particular language. [57]

Some semanticists also include the study of lexical units other than words in the field of lexical
semantics. Compound expressions like being under the weather have a non-literal meaning
that acts as a unit and is not a direct function of its parts. Another topic concerns the meaning
of morphemes that make up words, for instance, how negative prefixes like in- and dis- affect
the meaning of the words they are part of, as in inanimate and dishonest.[58]

Phrasal semantics

Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences. It relies on the principle of

compositionality to explore how the meaning of complex expressions arises from the
combination of their parts.[59][e] The different parts can be analyzed as subject, predicate,
or argument. The subject of a sentence usually refers to a specific entity while the predicate
describes a feature of the subject or an event in which the subject participates. Arguments
provide additional information to complete the predicate. [61] For example, in the sentence
"Mary hit the ball", Mary is the subject, hit is the predicate, and the ball is an argument.[61] A
more fine-grained categorization distinguishes between different semantic roles of words,
such as agent, patient, theme, location, source, and goal. [62]

Parse trees, like the constituency-based parse tree,

show how expressions are combined to form sentences.

Verbs usually function as predicates and often help to establish connections between different
expressions to form a more complex meaning structure. In the expression "Beethoven likes
Schubert", the verb like connects a liker to the object of their liking.[63] Other sentence parts
modify meaning rather than form new connections. For instance, the adjective red modifies
the color of another entity in the expression red car.[64] A further compositional device is
variable binding, which is used to determine the reference of a term. For example, the last part
of the expression "the woman who likes Beethoven" specifies which woman is meant.[65] Parse
trees can be used to show the underlying hierarchy employed to combine the different
parts.[66] Various grammatical devices, like the gerund form, also contribute to meaning and
are studied by grammatical semantics.[67]

Formal semantics

Main article: Formal semantics (natural language)

Formal semantics uses formal tools from logic and mathematics to analyze meaning in natural
languages.[f] It aims to develop precise logical formalisms to clarify the relation between
expressions and their denotation.[69] One of its key tasks is to provide frameworks of how
language represents the world, for example, using ontological models to show how linguistic
expressions map to the entities of that model.[69] A common idea is that words refer to
individual objects or groups of objects while sentences relate to events and states. Sentences
are mapped to a truth value based on whether their description of the world is in
correspondence with its ontological model.[70]
Formal semantics further examines how to use formal mechanisms to represent linguistic
phenomena such as quantification, intensionality, noun phrases, plurals, mass terms, tense,
and modality.[71] Montague semantics is an early and influential theory in formal semantics
that provides a detailed analysis of how the English language can be represented using
mathematical logic. It relies on higher-order logic, lambda calculus, and type theory to show
how meaning is created through the combination of expressions belonging to different
syntactic categories.[72]
Dynamic semantics is a subfield of formal semantics that focuses on how information grows
over time. According to it, "meaning is context change potential": the meaning of a sentence is
not given by the information it contains but by the information change it brings about relative
to a context.[73]

Cognitive semantics

Main article: Cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics is interested in the conceptual

structures underlying language, which can be articulated through the contrast between profile
and base. For instance, the term hypotenuse profiles a straight line against the background of
a right-angled triangle.

Cognitive semantics studies the problem of meaning from a psychological perspective or how
the mind of the language user affects meaning. As a subdiscipline of cognitive linguistics, it
sees language as a wide cognitive ability that is closely related to the conceptual structures
used to understand and represent the world.[74][g] Cognitive semanticists do not draw a sharp
distinction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the world and see them instead as
interrelated phenomena.[76] They study how the interaction between language and human
cognition affects the conceptual organization in very general domains like space, time,
causation, and action.[77] The contrast between profile and base is sometimes used to
articulate the underlying knowledge structure. The profile of a linguistic expression is the
aspect of the knowledge structure that it brings to the foreground while the base is the
background that provides the context of this aspect without being at the center of
attention.[78] For example, the profile of the word hypotenuse is a straight line while the base is
a right-angled triangle of which the hypotenuse forms a part.[79][h]
Cognitive semantics further compares the conceptual patterns and linguistic typologies across
languages and considers to what extent the cognitive conceptual structures of humans are
universal or relative to their linguistic background.[81] Another research topic concerns the
psychological processes involved in the application of grammar.[82] Other investigated
phenomena include categorization, which is understood as a cognitive heuristic to avoid
information overload by regarding different entities in the same way,[83] and embodiment,
which concerns how the language user's bodily experience affects the meaning of
expressions.[84]

Frame semantics is an important subfield of cognitive semantics.[85] Its central idea is that the
meaning of terms cannot be understood in isolation from each other but needs to be analyzed
on the background of the conceptual structures they depend on. These structures are made
explicit in terms of semantic frames. For example, words like bride, groom, and honeymoon
evoke in the mind the frame of marriage.[86]

Others

Conceptual semantics shares with cognitive semantics the idea of studying linguistic meaning
from a psychological perspective by examining how humans conceptualize and experience the
world. It holds that meaning is not about the objects to which expressions refer but about the
cognitive structure of human concepts that connect thought, perception, and action.
Conceptual semantics differs from cognitive semantics by introducing a strict distinction
between meaning and syntax and by relying on various formal devices to explore the relation
between meaning and cognition.[87]

Computational semantics examines how the meaning of natural language expressions can be
represented and processed on computers.[88] It often relies on the insights of formal semantics
and applies them to problems that can be computationally solved. [89] Some of its key problems
include computing the meaning of complex expressions by analyzing their parts, handling
ambiguity, vagueness, and context-dependence, and using the extracted information
in automatic reasoning.[90] It forms part of computational linguistics, artificial intelligence,
and cognitive science.[88] Its applications include machine learning and machine translation.[91]
Cultural semantics studies the relation between linguistic meaning and culture. It compares
conceptual structures in different languages and is interested in how meanings evolve and
change because of cultural phenomena associated with politics, religion, and customs.[92] For
example, address practices encode cultural values and social hierarchies, as in the difference of
politeness of expressions like tu and usted in Spanish or du and Sie in German in contrast to
English, which lacks these distinctions and uses the pronoun you in either case.[93] Closely
related fields are intercultural semantics, cross-cultural semantics, and comparative
semantics.[94]

Pragmatic semantics studies how the meaning of an expression is shaped by the situation in
which it is used. It is based on the idea that communicative meaning is usually context-
sensitive and depends on who participates in the exchange, what information they share, and
what their intentions and background assumptions are. It focuses on communicative actions,
of which linguistic expressions only form one part. Some theorists include these topics within
the scope of semantics while others consider them part of the distinct discipline of
pragmatics.[95]

Theories of meaning

Theories of meaning explain what meaning is, what meaning an expression has, and how the
relation between expression and meaning is established.[96]

Referential

Referential theories identify meaning with the

entities to which expressions point.
Referential theories state that the meaning of an expression is the entity to which it
points.[97] The meaning of singular terms like names is the individual to which they refer. For
example, the meaning of the name George Washington is the person with this
name.[98] General terms refer not to a single entity but to the set of objects to which this term
applies. In this regard, the meaning of the term cat is the set of all cats.[99] Similarly, verbs
usually refer to classes of actions or events and adjectives refer to properties of individuals and
events.[100]

Simple referential theories face problems for meaningful expressions that have no clear
referent. Names like Pegasus and Santa Claus have meaning even though they do not point to
existing entities.[101] Other difficulties concern cases in which different expressions are about
the same entity. For instance, the expressions Roger Bannister and the first man to run a four-
minute mile refer to the same person but do not mean exactly the same thing. [102] This is
particularly relevant when talking about beliefs since a person may understand both
expressions without knowing that they point to the same entity. [103] A further problem is given
by expressions whose meaning depends on the context, like the deictic terms here and I.[104]

To avoid these problems, referential theories often introduce additional devices. Some identify
meaning not directly with objects but with functions that point to objects. This additional level
has the advantage of taking the context of an expression into account since the same
expression may point to one object in one context and to another object in a different context.
For example, the reference of the word here depends on the location in which it is used.[105] A
closely related approach is possible world semantics, which allows expressions to refer not
only to entities in the actual world but also to entities in other possible worlds. [i] According to
this view, expressions like the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to different persons in
different worlds. This view can also be used to analyze sentences that talk about what is
possible or what is necessary: possibility is what is true in some possible worlds while necessity
is what is true in all possible worlds.[107]

Ideational

Ideational theories identify meaning with the mental

states of language users.
Ideational theories, also called mentalist theories, are not primarily interested in the reference
of expressions and instead explain meaning in terms of the mental states of language
users.[108] One historically influential approach articulated by John Locke holds that expressions
stand for ideas in the speaker's mind. According to this view, the meaning of the word dog is
the idea that people have of dogs. Language is seen as a medium used to transfer ideas from
the speaker to the audience. After having learned the same meaning of signs, the speaker can
produce a sign that corresponds to the idea in their mind and the perception of this sign
evokes the same idea in the mind of the audience.[109]

A closely related theory focuses not directly on ideas but on intentions.[110] This view is
particularly associated with Paul Grice, who observed that people usually communicate to
cause some reaction in their audience. He held that the meaning of an expression is given by
the intended reaction. This means that communication is not just about decoding what the
speaker literally said but requires an understanding of their intention or why they said
it.[111] For example, telling someone looking for petrol that "there is a garage around the
corner" has the meaning that petrol can be obtained there because of the speaker's intention
to help. This goes beyond the literal meaning, which has no explicit connection to petrol. [112]

Causal

Causal theories hold that the meaning of an expression depends on the causes and effects it
has.[113] According to behaviorist semantics, also referred to as stimulus-response theory, the
meaning of an expression is given by the situation that prompts the speaker to use it and the
response it provokes in the audience.[114] For instance, the meaning of yelling "Fire!" is given by
the presence of an uncontrolled fire and attempts to control it or seek safety. [115] Behaviorist
semantics relies on the idea that learning a language consists in adopting behavioral patterns
in the form of stimulus-response pairs.[116] One of its key motivations is to avoid private mental
entities and define meaning instead in terms of publicly observable language behavior. [117]

Another causal theory focuses on the meaning of names and holds that a naming event is
required to establish the link between name and named entity. This naming event acts as a
form of baptism that establishes the first link of a causal chain in which all subsequent uses of
the name participate.[118] According to this view, the name Plato refers to an ancient Greek
philosopher because, at some point, he was originally named this way and people kept using
this name to refer to him.[119] This view was originally formulated by Saul Kripke to apply to
names only but has been extended to cover other types of speech as well. [120]

Others

Truth-conditional semantics analyzes the meaning of sentences in terms of their truth

conditions. According to this view, to understand a sentence means to know what the world
needs to be like for the sentence to be true.[121] Truth conditions can themselves be expressed
through possible worlds. For example, the sentence "Hillary Clinton won the 2016 American
presidential election" is false in the actual world but there are some possible worlds in which it
is true.[122] The extension of a sentence can be interpreted as its truth value while its intension
is the set of all possible worlds in which it is true. [123] Truth-conditional semantics is closely
related to verificationist theories, which introduce the additional idea that there should be
some kind of verification procedure to assess whether a sentence is true. They state that the
meaning of a sentence consists in the method to verify it or in the circumstances that justify
it.[124] For instance, scientific claims often make predictions, which can be used to confirm or
disconfirm them using observation.[125] According to verificationism, sentences that can neither
be verified nor falsified are meaningless.[126]

The use theory states that the meaning of an expression is given by the way it is utilized. This
view was first introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who understood language as a collection
of language games. The meaning of expressions depends on how they are used inside a game
and the same expression may have different meanings in different games.[127] Some versions of
this theory identify meaning directly with patterns of regular use. [128] Others focus on social
norms and conventions by additionally taking into account whether a certain use is considered
appropriate in a given society.[129]
Inferentialist semantics, also called conceptual role semantics, holds that the meaning of an
expression is given by the role it plays in the premises and conclusions of
good inferences.[130] For example, one can infer from "x is a male sibling" that "x is a brother"
and one can infer from "x is a brother" that "x has parents". According to inferentialist
semantics, the meaning of the word brother is determined by these and all similar inferences
that can be drawn.[131]

History

Semantics was established as an independent field of inquiry in the 19th century but the study
of semantic phenomena began as early as the ancient period as part of philosophy and
logic.[132][j] In ancient Greece, Plato (427–347 BCE) explored the relation between names and
things in his dialogue Cratylus. It considers the positions of naturalism, which holds that things
have their name by nature, and conventionalism, which states that names are related to their
referents by customs and conventions among language users.[134] The book On
Interpretation by Aristotle (384–322 BCE) introduced various conceptual distinctions that
greatly influenced subsequent works in semantics. He developed an early form of the semantic
triangle by holding that spoken and written words evoke mental concepts, which refer to
external things by resembling them. For him, mental concepts are the same for all humans,
unlike the conventional words they associate with those concepts.[135] The Stoics incorporated
many of the insights of their predecessors to develop a complex theory of language through
the perspective of logic. They discerned different kinds of words by their semantic and
syntactic roles, such as the contrast between names, common nouns, and verbs. They also
discussed the difference between statements, commands, and prohibitions. [136]

Bhartṛhari developed and compared various

semantic theories of the meaning of words.[137]

In ancient India, the orthodox school of Nyaya held that all names refer to real objects. It
explored how words lead to an understanding of the thing meant and what consequence this
relation has to the creation of knowledge.[138] Philosophers of the orthodox school
of Mīmāṃsā discussed the relation between the meanings of individual words and full
sentences while considering which one is more basic.[139] The
book Vākyapadīya by Bhartṛhari (4th–5th century CE) distinguished between different types of
words and considered how they can carry different meanings depending on how they are
used.[140] In ancient China, the Mohists argued that names play a key role in making distinctions
to guide moral behavior.[141] They inspired the School of Names, which explored the relation
between names and entities while examining how names are required to identify and judge
entities.[142]

One of Peter Abelard's innovations was his focus on

the meaning of full sentences rather than the meaning of individual words.

In the Middle Ages, Augustine of Hippo (354–430) developed a general conception of signs as
entities that stand for other entities and convey them to the intellect. He was the first to
introduce the distinction between natural and linguistic signs as different types belonging to a
common genus.[143] Boethius (480–528) wrote a translation of and various comments on
Aristotle's book On Interpretation, which popularized its main ideas and inspired reflections on
semantic phenomena in the scholastic tradition.[144] An innovation in the semantics of Peter
Abelard (1079–1142) was his interest in propositions or the meaning of sentences in contrast
to the focus on the meaning of individual words by many of his predecessors. He further
explored the nature of universals, which he understood as mere semantic phenomena
of common names caused by mental abstractions that do not refer to any entities.[145] In the
Arabic tradition, Ibn Faris (920–1004) identified meaning with the intention of the speaker
while Abu Mansur al-Azhari (895–980) held that meaning resides directly in speech and needs
to be extracted through interpretation.[146]

An important topic towards the end of the Middle Ages was the distinction between
categorematic and syncategorematic terms. Categorematic terms have an independent
meaning and refer to some part of reality, like horse and Socrates. Syncategorematic terms
lack independent meaning and fulfill other semantic functions, such as modifying or
quantifying the meaning of other expressions, like the words some, not, and necessarily.[147] An
early version of the causal theory of meaning was proposed by Roger Bacon (c. 1219/20 – c.
1292), who held that things get names similar to how people get names through some kind of
initial baptism.[148] His ideas inspired the tradition of the speculative grammarians, who
proposed that there are certain universal structures found in all languages. They arrived at this
conclusion by drawing an analogy between the modes of signification on the level of language,
the modes of understanding on the level of mind, and the modes of being on the level of
reality.[149]
In the early modern period, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) distinguished between marks, which
people use privately to recall their own thoughts, and signs, which are used publicly to
communicate their ideas to others.[150] In their Port-Royal Logic, Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694)
and Pierre Nicole (1625–1695) developed an early precursor of the distinction between
intension and extension.[151] The Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
(1632–1704) presented an influential version of the ideational theory of meaning, according to
which words stand for ideas and help people communicate by transferring ideas from one
mind to another.[152] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) understood language as the mirror
of thought and tried to conceive the outlines of a universal formal language to express
scientific and philosophical truths. This attempt inspired theorists Christian Wolff (1679–
1754), Georg Bernhard Bilfinger (1693–1750), and Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) to
develop the idea of a general science of sign systems.[153] Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–
1780) accepted and further developed Leibniz's idea of the linguistic nature of thought.
Against Locke, he held that language is involved in the creation of ideas and is not merely a
medium to communicate them.[154]

Michel Bréal coined the French term sémantique and

conceptualized the scope of this field of inquiry.
In the 19th century, semantics emerged and solidified as an independent field of
inquiry. Christian Karl Reisig (1792–1829) is sometimes credited as the father of semantics
since he clarified its concept and scope while also making various contributions to its key
ideas.[155] Michel Bréal (1832–1915) followed him in providing a broad conception of the field,
for which he coined the French term sémantique.[156] John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) gave great
importance to the role of names to refer to things. He distinguished between the connotation
and denotation of names and held that propositions are formed by combining
names.[157] Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) conceived semiotics as a general theory of
signs with several subdisciplines, which were later identified by Charles W. Morris (1901–1979)
as syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. In his pragmatist approach to semantics, Peirce held
that the meaning of conceptions consists in the entirety of their practical
consequences.[158] The philosophy of Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) contributed to semantics on
many different levels. Frege first introduced the distinction between sense and reference, and
his development of predicate logic and the principle of compositionality formed the
foundation of many subsequent developments in formal semantics. [159] Edmund
Husserl (1859–1938) explored meaning from a phenomenological perspective by considering
the mental acts that endow expressions with meaning. He held that meaning always implies
reference to an object and expressions that lack a referent, like green is or, are
meaningless.[160]

In the 20th century, Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) defined truth in formal languages through
his semantic theory of truth, which was influential in the development of truth-conditional
semantics by Donald Davidson (1917–2003).[161] Tarski's student Richard Montague (1930–
1971) formulated a complex formal framework of the semantics of the English language, which
was responsible for establishing formal semantics as a major area of research. [162] According
to structural semantics,[k] which was inspired by the structuralist philosophy of Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1913), language is a complex network of structural relations and the meanings
of words are not fixed individually but depend on their position within this network. [164] The
theory of general semantics was developed by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) as an inquiry into
how language represents reality and affects human thought.[165] The contributions of George
Lakoff (1941–present) and Ronald Langacker (1942–present) provided the foundation of
cognitive semantics.[166] Charles J. Fillmore (1929–2014) developed frame semantics as a major
approach in this area.[167] The closely related field of conceptual semantics was inaugurated
by Ray Jackendoff (1945–present).[168]

In various disciplines

Logic

Main article: Semantics of logic

Logicians study correct reasoning and often develop formal languages to express arguments
and assess their correctness.[169] One part of this process is to provide a semantics for a formal
language to precisely define what its terms mean. A semantics of a formal language is a set of
rules, usually expressed as a mathematical function, that assigns meanings to formal language
expressions.[170] For example, the language of first-order logic uses lowercase letters
for individual constants and uppercase letters for predicates. To express the sentence "Bertie

is a dog", the formula can be used where is an individual constant for Bertie

and is a predicate for dog. Classical model-theoretic semantics assigns meaning to these
terms by defining an interpretation function that maps individual constants to specific objects

and predicates to sets of objects or tuples. The function maps to Bertie and to the
set of all dogs. This way, it is possible to calculate the truth value of the sentence: it is true if
Bertie is a member of the set of dogs and false otherwise.[171]

Formal logic aims to determine whether arguments are deductively valid, that is, whether the
premises entail the conclusion.[172] Entailment can be defined in terms of syntax or in terms of

semantics. Syntactic entailment, expressed with the symbol , relies on rules of inference,
which can be understood as procedures to transform premises and arrive at a conclusion.
These procedures only take the logical form of the premises on the level of syntax into account

and ignore what meaning they express. Semantic entailment, expressed with the symbol
, looks at the meaning of the premises, in particular, at their truth value. A conclusion follows
semantically from a set of premises if the truth of the premises ensures the truth of the
conclusion, that is, if any semantic interpretation function that assigns the premises the
value true also assigns the conclusion the value true.[173]

Computer science

Main article: Semantics (computer science)

In computer science, the semantics of a program is how it behaves when a computer runs it.
Semantics contrasts with syntax, which is the particular form in which instructions are
expressed. The same behavior can usually be described with different forms of syntax.
In JavaScript, this is the case for the commands i += 1 and i = i + 1, which are syntactically
different expressions to increase the value of the variable i by one. This difference is also
reflected in different programming languages since they rely on different syntax but can
usually be employed to create programs with the same behavior on the semantic level. [174]

Static semantics focuses on semantic aspects that affect the compilation of a program. In
particular, it is concerned with detecting errors of syntactically correct programs, such as type
errors, which arise when an operation receives an incompatible data type. This is the case, for
instance, if a function performing a numerical calculation is given a string instead of a number
as an argument.[175] Dynamic semantics focuses on the run time behavior of programs, that is,
what happens during the execution of instructions.[176] The main approaches to dynamic
semantics are denotational, axiomatic, and operational semantics. Denotational semantics
relies on mathematical formalisms to describe the effects of each element of the code.
Axiomatic semantics uses deductive logic to analyze which conditions must be in place before
and after the execution of a program. Operational semantics interprets the execution of a
program as a series of steps, each involving the transition from one state to another state.[177]

Psychology

Main article: Semantics (psychology)

Psychological semantics examines psychological aspects of meaning. It is concerned with how

meaning is represented on a cognitive level and what mental processes are involved in
understanding and producing language. It further investigates how meaning interacts with
other mental processes, such as the relation between language and perceptual
experience.[178][l] Other issues concern how people learn new words and relate them to familiar
things and concepts, how they infer the meaning of compound expressions they have never
heard before, how they resolve ambiguous expressions, and how semantic illusions lead them
to misinterpret sentences.[180]

One key topic is semantic memory, which is a form of general knowledge of meaning that
includes the knowledge of language, concepts, and facts. It contrasts with episodic memory,
which records events that a person experienced in their life. The comprehension of language
relies on semantic memory and the information it carries about word meanings. [181] According
to a common view, word meanings are stored and processed in relation to their semantic
features. The feature comparison model states that sentences like "a robin is a bird" are
assessed on a psychological level by comparing the semantic features of the word robin with
the semantic features of the word bird. The assessment process is fast if their semantic
features are similar, which is the case if the example is a prototype of the general category. For
atypical examples, as in the sentence "a penguin is a bird", there is less overlap in the semantic
features and the psychological process is significantly slower. [182]
See also

 Contronym

 Semantic technology – Technology to help machines understand data

References

Notes

a. The study of meaning structures found in all languages is sometimes referred to

as universal semantics.[5]

b. Semantics usually focuses on natural languages but it can also include the study of
meaning in formal languages, like the language of first-order logic and programming
languages.[6]

c. Antonym is an antonym of synonym.[42]

d. Some linguists use the term homonym for both phenomena.[43]

e. Some authors use the term compositional semantics for this type of inquiry.[60]
f. The term formal semantics is sometimes used in a different sense to refer to
compositional semantics or to the study of meaning in the formal languages of
systems of logic.[68]

g. Cognitive semantics does not accept the idea of linguistic relativity associated with the
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and holds instead that the underlying cognitive processes
responsible for conceptual structures are independent of the language one speaks. [75]
h. Other examples are the word island, which profiles a landmass against the
background of the surrounding water, and the word uncle, which profiles a human
adult male against the background of kinship relations.[80]

i. A possible world is a complete way of how things could have been. [106]

j. The history of semantics is different from historical semantics, which studies how the
meanings of words change through time.[133]

k. Some theorists use the term structural semantics in a different sense to refer to
phrasal semantics.[163]

l. Some theorists use the term psychosemantics to refer to this discipline while others
understand the term in a different sense.[179]

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External links

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