REVIEW ARTICLE ABOUT SEMANTICS

A REVIEW BY RATNA SARI

TITLE             : SEMANTICS

POST BY        : Abdullah Cglyn at Academia edu

PAGES            : 14

This article give us the material about semantics. Such as:

1. The meaning of semantics.

Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases and sentences.

It divided into three:

1. Lexical Semantics is concerned with the meaning of words, and the meaning relationships among words.
2. Phrasal or Sentential Semantics is concerned with the meaning of syntactic units larger than the word.
3.  Pragmatics is the study of how context and situation affect meaning.

2. Semantics is meaning. And meaning has two kinds. Such as: 

1.   Conceptual Meaning:  It is the type of meaning that dictionaries are designed to  describe. Such as “thin, sharp, steel instrument.”
2.   Associative Meaning  is the type of meaning that people might connect with the use of  words. They might associate it with “pain,” or “illness,” or “blood,” or “drugs”. And these  associations may different from one person to others.

3. The study of truth or truth conditions in semantics falls into two basic categories:

1.  The study of different types of truth embodied in individual sentences. Such as: taulogies, contradiction and synthetix sentences.
2.  The study of different types of truth relations that hold between sentences. Such as: entailment, contradictory and ambugity sentences

4. The Principle of Semantic Compositionality

When we become difficult or impossible to understand the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence by the meaning of its parts compositionality breaks down.  There are three that we have to know, such as:

• Anomaly : is a violation of semantic rules resulting in expressions that seem nonsense. example: “green in color.” How can sentences “green in color”?
•  Metaphors :We need to understand the individual words, the literal meaning of the whole expression, and facts about the world.  such as “the fall of the dollar,” meaning its decline in value on the world market.
• Idioms :An idiom is languages contain many idioms whose meanings are not predictable.  It have fixed meanings that must be learned.  Example: She put her foot in her mouth. We can’t change this expression as “Her foot was put in her mouth

5. Lexical Relations.

It is the relationships of meaning between words. Words are semantically related to one another in a variety of ways. Such as:

1. SYNONYMY
2. ANTONYMY
3. HYPONYMY
4. PROTOTYPES
5. MERONYMY (PARTONYMY)
6.  COLLOCATION
7. HOMOPHONES AND HOMONYMS
8. POLYSEMY

6. The study about Semantic features.

It is conceptual elements by which a person understands the meanings of words. This method represents the meaning of a word in terms of semantic features that make up the word. For example:

	Table	Horse	Boy	Man	Girl	Woman
Animate	-	+	+	+	+	+
Human	-	-	+	+	+	+
Female	-	-	-	-	+	+
Adult	-	+	-	+	-	+

7. Thematic Role.

            First,  semantic role : it is the semantic relationship between the verb and the noun phrases of a sentence, such as agent, theme, experiencer, location, instrument, goal and source. 

Second, Thematic Assignment (thematic role assignment is the syntactic elements in a sentence.

1.  Agent: the entity that performs the action.
2.  Theme is the entity that is involved in or affected by the action.
3. Experiencer is the entity that undergoes a sensory, cognitive, or emotional experience.
4. Instrument is the entity used to carry out the action.
5. Location is where the action occurs, where an entity is.
6. Source is the place/individual from which the movement of the action occurs.
7.  Goal is where the action is directed towards, the location or individual to which movement occurs.

Example:

The trainer gave the dog a treat.     The trainer gave a treat to the dog.

 Agent                      goal       theme  agent                  theme      goal

EVALUATION:

         

   This article it is good for student who wants to learn about semantics. Especially, for beginner. Because the grammar is not too difficult to understand. It is clearly with the example after the explanation. The writer also make our eyes comfortable while we are reading. He used the capital letter, space, paraghraph so good. Last, this article is simple but elegent. The contain is interesting us to dig what is semantics in generally. 

           

  But, this article so long. There are several sentence that not too important to written. Maybe it more better to the reader summarize this article to be short. And the writer not explain the function about some sub tittle. There is no preface about what he would explain to us. So, in the begin we liltle confused but after all it will be easy and interest.



THIS IS LINK AT ACADEMIA EDU : 
https://www.academia.edu/4841040/SEMANTICS_Semantics_is_the_study_of_linguistic_meaning_of_morphemes