ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY

6.1 Types of Semantics

 

Stephen Ullman classifies semantics into lexical semantics, which concentrates on word-meanings (p.33), and syntactic semantics, which deals with “the meaning of parts of speech, parts of the sentence, and other grammatical categories” (p.34). He also identifies descriptive and historical semantics. Descriptive semantics is the science of meaning, and diachronic semantics is the science of changes of meaning (p.171).

Howard Jackson gives several types of semantics: pragmatic, sentence, lexical, philosophical, and linguistic. He states that pragmatic semantics studies the meaning of the utterances in the context; sentence semantics studies the meanings of the sentences and meaning relations between the sentences; lexical semantics is the study of meaning in relation to words, including both the meaning relations that words contract with each other and the meaning relations that words have with extra-linguistic reality; philosophical semantics is concerned with logical properties of language; and linguistic semantics deals with all aspects of meaning in natural languages, from meaning of utterances in context to the meanings of sounds in syllables (pp.246-247). Georgios Tserdanelis and Wai Yi Peggy Wong add compositional semantics as well, by which they understand “the way the meanings of the whole sentences are determined from the meanings of the words in them by the syntactic structure of the sentence” (2004, p.216). Lexical semantics deals with a lexicon or a group of words in a language. While lexical semantics deals with individual words, compositional semantics deals with the meanings of phrases and sentences.