This document discusses the meaning and study of semantics. It provides definitions and explanations of key concepts in semantics, including symbol and referent, denotation and connotation, pragmatics, ambiguity, and semantic change. It also discusses subfields like lexical semantics and sentential semantics. As an example, it analyzes the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which was originally presented as meaningless but is argued to poetically describe new, dull ideas circulating unconsciously.

1. Presented By : St. Choiron Nisak ASHARI

5. • It is important for understanding
language in social contexts, as these are
likely to affect meaning, and for
understanding varieties of English and
effects of style.
• It is thus one of the most fundamental
concepts in linguistics.
• The study of semantics includes the
study of how meaning is constructed,
interpreted, clarified, obscured,
illustrated, simplified, negotiated,
contradicted, and paraphrased.

6. Some important areas of semantic theory or
related subjects include these:
• Symbol and referent
• Conceptions of meaning
• Words and lexemes
• Denotation, connotation, implication
• Pragmatics
• Ambiguity
• Metaphor, simile and symbol
• Semantic fields

7. • Synonym, antonym and hyponym
• Collocation, fixed expression and idiom
• Semantic change and etymology
• Polysemy
• Homonymy, homophones and
homographs
• Lexicology and lexicography
• Thesauruses, libraries and Web portals
• Epistemology
• Colour

8. • The noun semantics and the adjective
semantic are derived from the Greek
word semantikos (“significant”).
• In linguistics, semantics is the
subfield that is devoted to the study of
meaning, as borne on the syntactic
levels of words, phrases, sentences,
and sometimes larger units of
discourse, generically referred to as
texts.

9. For thousands of years, philosophers
have pondered the meaning of
meaning, yet speakers of a language
can understand what is said to them
and can produce strings of words that
are meaningful to other speakers.

10. • To understand language we need to
know the meaning of words and the
morphemes that compose them. We
also must know how the meanings of
words combine into phrases and
sentence meanings. Finally, we must
consider context when determining
meaning.
• The study of the linguistic meaning of
morphemes, words, phrases, and
sentences is called Semantics.

11. Subfields of semantics are lexical (of or
relating to the vocabulary, words, or
morphemes of a language) semantics,
which is concerned with the meanings
of words, and the meaning
relationships among words; and phrasal
or sentential semantics, which is
concerned with the meaning of
syntactic units larger than the word.

12. • The study of how context affects
meaning is called Pragmatics.
• For example, the sentence "It's cold
in here" can be interpreted in certain
situations as "close the windows".

13. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
The sentence "Colorless green ideas
sleep furiously" was presented by
Chomsky as a great example of a series
of words strung together randomly. It
grammatical according to the lexical
classification, however, it is non-sense
on a semantic level. Or so goes the
claim. But is the claim correct?

14. According to a well-established usage
of the word "green", a green idea is one
that is new and untried. Again, a
colorless idea is one without vividness,
dull, and unexciting. So it follows that
a colorless green idea is a new, untried
idea that is without vividness, dull, and
unexciting.

15. To sleep is, among other things, to be
in a state of dormancy or inactivity, or
in a state of unconsciousness. To sleep
furiously may seem a puzzling turn of
phrase but one reflects that the mind in
sleep often indeed moves furiously with
ideas and images flickering in and out.

16. So, what is the poet telling us? (One
assumes that the quoted line is from the
work of a poet working in a medium of
studied precision and ambiguity. Or
rather, as we shall see...) Very simply
the poet seems to be saying that new
ideas, not yet sharply defined, circulate
in the unconscious, rapidly altering at a
furious rate.

17. One is left then with a question. Why is
this nice bit of poetic imagery cited by its
author as a quintessentially meaningless
sentence? Here we have an exquisite bit
of irony. The author evidently has a turn
for poetry, a turn which he turns his face
against. And the hidden face, the denied
self, has taken its revenge. The scientist
has called on his creative self to exhibit a
bit of nonsense.

18. The poet denied has replied with a
sentence, apparently meaningless, which
is no such thing when listened to with an
attentive ear. And yet consider; this
sentence is a very intellectualized
production - it is indeed "colorless". It
was, we suspect, a new idea, a variant of a
possibility, still new at the very moment
of production, one occurring by chance in
the froth of the unconscious.

19. In short, the cited sentence was a
colorless green idea that had slept
furiously.