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(Chapter: four Semantics: Concepts and Roles)

Semantics: (it deal with aspects of meaning that is encoded by words and grammar)

Semantics is the study of meaning, reference, trust and related notions in

language meaning.
Semantics contains work that with the description of word-and-sentence-meaning.
How words and sentences are related to the real/ imaginary objects they refer to and
the situations they describe.

Meaning, Reference and Truth:

Meaning is a complex phenomenon involves relations and concepts among which
words and sentences are involved.

Meaning is provided by a community of native speakers not by dictionaries or

grammar books.
So, meaning is not a mental image that may vary from one person to another.
Truth conditions help knowing the meaning of a sentence. It involves knowing the
conditions under which it would be true, so explaining its truth conditions.

Homophony:
Homophony is when two or more differently written forms have the same
pronunciation . for example: meat and meet; week and weak etc.

homonymy and polysemy:

Homonymy:
Homonymy is when the same morphological word have a range of many unrelated
meanings. e.g., bank , pupil , eye , mole , etc.

Polysemy:
Polysemy is when the same morphological word may have a range of many related
meanings. e.g., head , foot , run , cup , etc.

Synonymy and Antonymy:

Synonymy:
Synonymy is two or more forms with very closely related meanings.
e.g., broad & wide ; hide & conceal ; almost & nearly , etc.

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Antonymy:
Antonymy is when two lexical forms have opposite meanings.
e.g., quick and slow, hot and cold, short and tall, etc.

Hyponymy:
Hyponymy: is when the meaning of one form is included in the meaning of
another.
The bigger concept is called super ordinate, e.g., flower (super ordinate) & daffodil (hyponym), animal
(super ordinate) & dog (hyponym), etc.
The two diagrams below provide visual presentation for the above:

-Diagram (1) : Plants relations

-Diagram (2) : Vegetables relations

Idioms:
Idioms: are a group of words whose meaning cannot be explained in terms of
habitual meanings of words that make up the piece of language.

For example, fly off the handle' (means: loose one's temper), a red letter day'
(means: a day that will never be forgotten), kick the bucket, (to die), etc.
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Sociolinguistics and Language Variation:

Sociolinguistics studies Language in the society.

It examines how and why people use language as they interact with the other
members of their society.
Sociolinguistics examines the variety in language, its development and change.
Accent , dialect and idiolect are basic concepts for this branch.

Other areas of interest for sociolinguists are: bilingualism , dialectology , codeswitching and code-mixing.
Moreover, standards and vernaculars are studied as variations of language in
formal and informal situations by Sociolinguistics.
Diglossia , is a kind of bilingualism, receives intensive attention by sociolinguists.
It occurs when the difference between the standard and the dialect is sharp.

Syntax: (Syntax is order of words to make a sentence to give us the complete thought .)

This theoretical subfield of Linguistics focuses on words in combination, where

grammar ' and structure ' are two terms used alternatively to refer to syntax '.

Syntax investigates in the sentence structure, the one level higher than the word
level.

It studies the internal structure of sentences and phrases, and looks into the
relationship among their component parts.

Syntax, also, studies the various phenomena pertaining to the form and
organization of sentences, sentence formation and types.

Basic Syntactic concepts and processes:

A fundamental fact about words in all languages is that they is that they can be
grouped together in a rather relatively small number of classes called syntactic
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categories of the phrase structures. These are discussed in the pages that follow.
The phrase:

A phrase is a string of words with hierarchical structure consisting of a group of

words that may themselves consist of smaller groups of words, and so on.
The phrase has a head that is built around its constituents, and is named after this
head.

There are at least five phrases in English; namely: Noun Phrase (NP), Verb Phrase

(VP), Adjective Phrase (AP), Adverb Phrase (AdvP) and Prepositional Phrase (PP).
The clause:

A clause is a group of words which contains a finite verb, but cannot occur in
isolation in the sense that it is part of the sentence.
However, in each complex sentence , there are at least two clauses; a main clause
and a subordinate clause.
It is also considered in syntax that a simple sentence can be called a clause'.

The sentence and its types:

The sentence and its types are three; (simple, complex and compound). Below are
examples of the sentence types:
Type

Example

Explanation

Simple

The young
The simple sentence consists of only one
man defended finite verb (defended).
his mother.

Compound

He arrived
and she left .

Complex

He believed
The complex sentence consists of one
that the earth simple and main sentence with the main
is round.
verb (believed), and another
subordinate (or embedded) sentence
with the secondary verb (is).

The compound sentence consists of two

simple sentences linked by the
coordinating conjunction and.

There are over two hundred definitions of sentence'. It has been agreed that each
sentence is as independent linguistic form, not included in any larger linguistic
form by virtue of any grammatical construction.

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Structural Analysis of Sentences:

Read the following sentence and its structural analysis which follows:
The dog followed the cat.
The structure of the above sentence can be analysed by using various syntactic
techniques.
Two basic and commonly used ones are introduced here; namely: the labeled-bracketing
and the tree-diagram ones.

Labeled-bracketing:

[ S [ NP [ art the ][ N dog ]] [ VP [ V followed ] [ NP [ art the ] [ art cat ]]]

Tree-Diagram:

The above diagrams help to describe clearly and visually how an English sentence
segments are put together as combinations of phrases which, in turn, are combinations
of words.

End of chapter four

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