The Scope of Semantics

1. Naming: Naming deals with the possibility of treating language as nomenclatures. As far back as we can trace the history of linguistics speculation, the basic semantic function of words has been seen as that of meaning. A language might be thought of as a communication system with on the hand of the signifier, on the other the signified. Names as they are employed in everyday language behaviour, have two characteristic functions. One is referential and other is vocative.

To mention referential function it is worth pointing out here, that names are frequently used simply to draw the hearer's attention to the presence of the person being named to remind them here to the existence relevance of the person being named.

By the vocative function of names is meant their being used to attract the attention of the person being called or summoned. The linguistic status of names has long been a subject of controversy, not only among philosophers but also among linguists.

2. Concepts: According to Ferdinand De Saussure, the linguistic sign consists of a signifier and a signified. Sounds, image, concept and thought are called signified. The symbol is the linguistic element referent is object and thought are concepts.

According to the theory, there is no direct link between symbol and referent - the link is via thought, the concept of our mind.

The main criticism of this approach is the difficulty of identifying “Concepts”. The “Concepts” underlying a word such as tradition is no easier to define than the “thing” referred to by tradition. Some words do have meaning that are relatively easy to conceptualize but we certainly do not have neat visual images corresponding to very word we say.

3. Sense and Reference: The term “reference” means the relationship between linguistic form and the outside world. “Sense” relates to the complex system of relationship that hold between the linguistic elements themselves. It is concerned only with intra linguistic relation.

The distinction between sense and Reference is a critical one because it allows us to study the many cases where we happily use words. Even though they do not naturally correspond to the way things are in the world.

In everyday life, we use such words like “hill” and “mountain” “cup” and “glass” or “stream” and “river” where the real world notions are quite indeterminate. When does a stream become a river, or river a hill or mountain?

For example, we use such words like beautiful and beauty. The sense of words is nice.

4. Word and Lexeme: The word is not a clearly defined linguistic unit. It's to degree purely conventional as Lyons says a word is any sequence of letters which, in formal typographical practice, is bounded on either side by a space. Of Course, this spacing is not wholly arbitrary, and there are several sound reasons why we make such divisions.

Stress may be one of the reasons where one word seems to allow only one main stress, and thus, treat “black bird” as a single word but “blackbird” as two. But there is no correlation between the spoken and written form.

Bloomfield offered a sound by suggesting that word is “minimum free form” the smallest form that may occur in isolation. We learn to utter in isolation only those items that we have learnt to recognize as words.

We can redefine the “word” in a different, though not unfamiliar way.  We have been using this term in the sense that “love” and “loved” are different words. But we could also say that they are forms of the same word the verb to love. A technical term for the word in this second sense is Lexeme.

5. Sentence: The traditional definition of a sentence is, “the expression of complex thought." As we communicate with sentences, not words, we can also call sentence as the basic unit of meaning. The sentence is essentially a grammatical unit. Syntax, the study of the sentence describes the structure of the sentence and thereby defines it.

For example, English sentences will consist of minimally of a subject noun phrase and a verb as its predicate or complement.

The meaning of a sentence can be predicted from the meaning of the words it contains, or, more strictly, from these words qua lexemes and the grammatical features with which they are associated.

So each sentence will have meaning (literal meaning), or if it is ambiguous, two or more meaning. Besides, there can be other types of sentence meanings that are not directly related to grammatical and lexical structure.

Also Read: Types of Semantics

6. Prosodies: Intonation, stress, rhythm and loudness etc. For example the difference between “I am a student and I am a student”. In first sentence, you speak smoothly and the second sentence you speak loudly. So two sentences are same but intonation is different.

7. Paralinguistic: Facial expression and gesture are called paralinguistics. Example- we can indicate that what we are saying is not really true, but is just meant to tease, by winking or even simply smiling.

8. Sarcasm: Saying something completely the opposite. For example, if we call someone as beautiful but the way we utter it indicate that we mean he is not beautiful.

9. Speech Acts: We warn, we threaten, we promised, though often without giving any overt indication that we are doing so. For example, there is a bull in the field may be wearing rather than a piece of information.

10. Social: Social relationship with the person spoken to is also an important factor. We may be polite or rude while we say -“would you please be quiet” or “shut up”.

Lyons has suggested that we should draw a distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. The sentence meaning being directly predicable from the grammatical and lexical fractures of the sentence, while utterance meaning includes all the various types of meaning discussed above.