Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It examines how words, phrases, and sentences convey meaning, and how meaning is constructed and interpreted. Semantics problems in NACLO often involve understanding how words relate to concepts and how meanings combine.
What is Semantics?
Semantics explores:
- The relationship between linguistic expressions and what they refer to
- How meaning is constructed from smaller parts
- How words relate to concepts, objects, and situations
- The ways meaning can vary across languages
In NACLO, semantic problems might ask you to figure out word meanings from context or understand how different languages express similar concepts.
Lexical Semantics
Lexical semantics focuses on the meaning of individual words. Key concepts include:
- Synonymy: Words with similar meanings (e.g., "big" and "large")
- Antonymy: Words with opposite meanings (e.g., "hot" and "cold")
- Hyponymy: Specific-general relationships (e.g., "dog" is a hyponym of "animal")
- Polysemy: Words with multiple related meanings (e.g., "bank" can mean a financial institution or the side of a river)
Understanding these relationships helps you analyze how words are organized in different languages and how meanings can be mapped between languages.
Compositional Semantics
Compositional semantics examines how the meanings of words combine to form the meanings of phrases and sentences. The principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex expression depends on:
- The meanings of its parts
- The way those parts are combined
For example, "red car" means something different from "car red" because the order matters. In NACLO, you might need to understand how meanings combine in an unfamiliar language.
Semantic Patterns in NACLO
NACLO problems involving semantics often require you to:
- Determine word meanings from context and examples
- Understand how different languages categorize concepts
- Recognize semantic relationships between words
- Translate based on meaning rather than word-for-word correspondence
- Understand how meaning is expressed through different grammatical structures
These problems test your ability to think about meaning systematically and recognize patterns in how languages express concepts.