Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning in language — what words, phrases, and sentences mean independently of context. It asks: what does this expression mean by virtue of its linguistic form alone? Context-dependent meaning is the domain of Pragmatics.

Lexical Semantics

Lexical semantics concerns the meaning of individual words and the systematic relationships between them:

• Synonymy — words with similar meanings (big/large, start/begin). True synonyms are rare; most "synonyms" differ in register, collocation, or connotation.
• Antonymy — opposites. Gradable (hot/cold), complementary (alive/dead), relational (buy/sell, parent/child).
• Hyponymy — hierarchical inclusion. Rose is a hyponym of flower; flower is the superordinate. These taxonomic relations structure the mental lexicon and are the basis of Lexical Sets.
• Polysemy — one word, multiple related meanings (bank: riverbank, financial institution, to bank on). Distinct from homonymy (unrelated meanings that happen to share a form).
• Meronymy — part-whole relations (wheel is a meronym of car).

Compositional Semantics

The meaning of a sentence is built from the meanings of its parts plus the way they combine (the principle of compositionality, attributed to Frege). The dog chased the cat means something different from The cat chased the dog — same words, different meaning, because syntax determines who does what to whom.

This principle has limits. Idioms (kick the bucket), collocations (heavy rain), and formulaic sequences resist compositional analysis — their meaning is not simply the sum of their parts.

Teaching Implications

• Vocabulary instruction — teaching sense relations explicitly (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms) builds lexical networks rather than isolated word lists. Nation (2001) includes knowledge of word associations and semantic relations as a component of knowing a word.
• Error analysis — many vocabulary errors are semantic: using a word in the wrong semantic field, confusing near-synonyms (say/tell/speak/talk), or applying L1 semantic boundaries to L2 words.
• Cohesion — lexical cohesion relies heavily on semantic relations. Repetition, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy all create textual connections.
• Reading comprehension — inferring meaning from context requires semantic reasoning: understanding sense relations, compositional meaning, and the constraints words place on each other.