Notes
Traditional Semantics
Content of the notes (1)
Page 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