What are Common Concepts of Semantics?
The most common concepts of semantics refer to human communication and computational information retrieval. The overview provides more information.
Semantics as part of Linguistics
Semantics is a subfield that studies meaning at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse. Two fundamental issues are compositional semantics, which pertains to how smaller parts like words interact to form the meaning of larger expressions, and lexical semantics, which refers to the nature of the meaning of words.
Formal semantics
This field seeks to identify domain-specific mental operations that speakers perform when they compute a sentence’s meaning based on its syntactic structure. This subfield emerged in the 1970s after the pioneering work of Richard Montague and Barbara Partee and continues to be an active area of research.
Conceptual semantics
This theory attempts to explain properties of argument structure, assuming that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them. This approach looks at the internal structure of words, with the smallest parts that make up this structure referred to as semantic primitives1.
Cognitive semantics
This approach views meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, explaining language via general human cognitive abilities rather than a domain-specific language module. This approach is typically used in lexical studies1.
Lexical semantics
This theory investigates word meaning, asserting that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. The meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations, distinguishing between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation1.
Cross-cultural semantics
This field involves various disciplines and focuses on comparing, contrasting, and translating words, terms, and meanings from one language to another. It deals with questions such as whether words like love, truth, and hate are universals, and whether even the word “sense” – so central to semantics – is a universal concept or one entrenched in a long-standing but culture-specific tradition1.
Computational semantics
This field is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning, describing concrete algorithms and architectures for this purpose. It also involves the analysis of these algorithms and architectures in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, required data structures, and communication protocols