Traditional Semantics

Seite 1

TRADITIONAL SEMANTICS

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning.

Lexical Semantics ( focus of the chapter)

Sentence Semantics (chapter 10)

Discourse Semantics (chapter 11)

Word meanings are a matter of both social agreement and use.

The assumption that there is one "true" meaning for a word is mistaken.

Ignores of meaningful phonological features (i.e. strees and intonation), grammatical structure of the utterance, significance of the communicative context (pragmatics)

The correspondence between a word and a thing is NOT simple and direct