Semantics is the study of meaning in language. It examines how meaning is constructed and understood based on linguistic forms like words, phrases, and sentences. There are different types of meaning including lexical, grammatical, denotative, and connotative. Meaning can shift over time through processes like generalization, specialization, amelioration, and pejoration. Semantics also studies meaning relations between linguistic elements like synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, and homonyms. It plays an important role in language processing by enforcing semantic rules during analysis to construct a syntax tree for code generation.