Semantics and Pragmatics

Historical of Semantic

Semantic comes from the Greek word; meaning or meaning. Semantics is a study of the meaning of the word.  Slametmuljana (1964: 1) states that semantics is the study of the meaning of words in certain languages are grouped according to the system. Semantics can do the abstract, and what to do with semantics only describes the mental life of language users.

Semantics is part of the linguistic study of meaning. Semantics not occur in the main body of the body itself, but appears in the appendix. Linguistic semantics is one of the components that are considered equal to the phonetics and grammar, the semantic meaning does not seem to be stable, but depending on the speaker, listener, and context.

Historical Preamble of Semantics And Pragmatics

According to Bloomfield linguistics consist of three branches: they are phonetics, phonemics, and morphonemics, while Chomsky (1950) emphasize that syntax include in linguistics branch but like the structuralist. Lakoff is more emphasize that syntax could not be separated from the study of language use. The widening scope of linguistics involved a change in the view of what language is, and how linguistics should define its subject. Found the ambiguity and synonym as the basic data of linguistics, therefore Chomsky presented for semantics as the branch of linguistics. The linguists try to analyze meaning from context to context, but it is difficult to exclude it semantically, so semantic spills over into pragmatics.

The most important things about semantics and pragmatics:

a.       The semantics representation →logical form

Pragmatics representation       →interpretation

b.      Semantic is grammatical and pragmatics is rhetorical

There are some elements of speech situations

a.       Addressers and addresses

b.      Context

c.       Goals

d.      Illocutionary act (speech act)

e.       Utterance

Rhetoric was decided as the present approach of pragmatics because of its traditional which referred to the study of effective use of language in communication. The point about the term rhetoric in this context is the focus it places on a goal oriented speech situations in which speaker uses language in order to produce a particular effect in the mind of hearer.

Scope of Semantic

a.       Naming

The process of naming is a gift for something that is not yet known, and then concepted in mind and become one of the existing reference in our minds. Word Desk example, the previous is that we do not know what kind of table in our minds is that the table is rectangular has a leg / foot four and reference the object, called the desk Office.

b.      Concept

This part of the new mentalist where the key claim is that intuition and introspection should play a big part in our investigation of language. This is a short and perhaps inevitable step to see meaning in terms of mental entity called a concept suggested, moreover, that if we are unhappy about the theoretical entities postulated the existence of such fully, we must find a parallel in physics theory, which suggests that there entities such as neutron unobserved, and said that there is no reason to deny the existence of concepts rather than deny the existence of neutrons.

Tin practice we all know what it was for a word to have meaning. Knowing the meaning of a word means that we can do some things - we can use it properly, we can explain it to others in terms of paraphrases or synonyms. But that does not follow from that that there is an entity or group of entities meaning that the meaning of words. For the word to mean something similar in some ways similar to the notion that the dot in one place, we can understand the meaning of a word just as we can read the guide. But that does not make sense to ask what the words mean more than to ask what a sign. It is not reasonable, that is, to ask in general what words mean.

c.       Sense & Reference

Terms of reference have been used to contrast with the denotation. It is also used in a useful, but a broader sense, to contrast with the SENSE, to distinguish between two very different, though related, aspects of meaning.

References relating to the relationship between linguistic elements, words, sentences, etc. and non-linguistic world of experience. Understanding related to a complex system of relationships that hold between the linguistic elements themselves (most of the words); was only related to the intra-linguistic relations. Maybe it seems reasonable to argue that semantically related only to the way we relate our language on our experience so to say that references are important elements of semantics. But relations have shaped the meaning of an important part of language study. To consider the words of lamb and ewe. This on the one hand refers to a particular animal species and have significance in this way. But they also belong to a pattern in English which includes herd / bull, pig / wild boar, the mare / male, older, etc. English grammar is treated as part of the grammar, because it is clearly related to sex, and sex should be a matter of gender (since sex and gender-related at a certain level in Latin). But there are other kinds of words are related, such as duck / duck, pig / piglet (including adults and young, or father / son, uncle / nephew (which involves family relationships), these ads are usually not considered as the grammar. They are rather part of the 'semantic structure' of the English language. We have, then, two kinds of semantics, which is associated with semantic structures and others associated with the meaning in terms of our experience outside of language. We do not care, but, only with words but also with the sentences. Indeed, scholars have had to deal with the feeling of having mainly to do with the meaning of the sentence and its relationship with the word meaning.

Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Worf Hypothesis) is a theory that emerged the concept of culture and language concepts are not separated from each other. That means, learn about the world and learning about language is an activity that cannot be separated. Because the language is fully as part of the culture. As Sapir showed that "the world we live too aware of most of the built on the language habits of the group". In addition, Worf pointed that "language is not just about ideas or voice messages, but a lot of influence and shape the idea of language speakers". Thus, it can be concluded that the language and speakers' cognition affect each other. In conducting experiments to determine the correlation between cultures and languages, comparing the structure of the Hopi Whorf (American Indian language) with European standard language, and he found that differences in the structure of the two languages are exposed and become influenced by the way they thought or taught. In addition, Noam Chomsky argues that "language is a mirror of the mind". Thus, it is clear to us that the speaker's language affects the 'way of thinking about the world. As an example here that the existence of the Subtle language in Java language. According to them we need to respect to parents when we speak or behave. Another example is the use of the pronoun you in English and Javanese. If in the English language you only know the word to refer to someone else, known in Javanese three words. They kowe, sampeyan, and penjenengan.

Furthermore, linguistic structure affects cognition and behavior of language users. It is clear that, thought to their grammatical structure of language we will learn about the speakers' way of thinking about the world. In addition, Pateda (1987). Ensure that the language can be a way we understand the language of one of the speakers, although we still need other factors. As proof that the concept of time. England has two main tenses, present and past. They are determined by changes in the verb. For example, I eat food every day, and I eat yesterday. It is clear that English is determined by the tense verbs. On the other hand, the concept of time Indonesia was marked by the adverb. For example, I eat rice today and I ate rice yesterday. So, the British people think that they did in the last time must be different at this time. Language is relative, as Whorf argued that we do not know the background of our language characters. Because language is the symbol of everything in the world. Thus, the existence of the language by which the relative appears related to the culture in which language appears. In short, linguistic relativity involved for the culture and language itself. A language affects cognition or taught language users.

Context Situation

This course is part of the semantic field related to the meaning of a word or phrase. In linguistics we already know about the 'ambiguity' and 'anomalies'. Recognize anomalies and ambiguities in every sentence we need to have relevant information about a very narrow semantic theory correctly associated with meaning. And this is what we emphasized in the context of the exception. Here is an example sentence including the anomalies and ambiguities.

a.       typewriter I have bad intentions (anomaly)

b.      John're looking glass (ambiguous)

c.       a large bill (ambiguous)

These sentences will produce two or more perceptions of their meaning. In the sentence John was looking for his glasses, is ambiguous because it refers to the spectacle of a drinking glass. According to Katz and Fodor sentence may be disambiguated if we add several extensions, eg a large bill while we expand with ... but needs to be paid, of course, can deal with only one meaning of the bill. In the context of the situation, is to teach us that language has a wider paradigm, so that what we are used to books not in the norm; it is far-fetched derivative function of language, to the original language is not a 'mirror of the mind reflected' ( Malinowski: 1923).
Language is not a simple matter stated information. According to Firth that context the situation is part of the apparatus linguists in the same way as the grammar category and best used as 'building a suitable scheme' to apply to language events and therefore, he suggested the following categories below :

a.       The relevance of the features of participants: persons, personalities.

1)      Verbal action of participants

2)      non-verbal actions of the participants

b.      Relevant objects.

c.       Effects of verbal action.

Thus, we can conclude that the context of the situation means that we will deal with the ordinary meaning of the terms with the fact that the meaning of words and phrases that relate to the world of experience and knowledge and has been proven by linguists on their way to deal with issues of language to infer meaning.

Lexical Semantics : Fields and Collocation

Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistic semantics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Words may either be taken to denote things in the world, or concepts, depending on the particular approach to lexical semantics.

The units of meaning in lexical semantics are lexical units, which a speaker can continually add to throughout their life, learning new words and their meanings. By contrast, one can only easily learn the grammatical rules of one's native language during a critical period when one is young. Lexical semantics covers theories of the classification and decomposition of word meaning, the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax .

One question that lexical semantics explores is whether the meaning of a lexical unit is established by looking at its neighborhood in the semantic net (by looking at the other words it occurs within natural sentences), or if the meaning is already locally contained in the lexical unit. Another topic that is explored is the mapping of words to concepts. As tools, lexical relations (defined as patterns of association that exist between lexical items in a language^[1]) like synonymy, antonymy (opposites), hyponymy and hyponymy - and to a certain degree homonymy as well - are used in this field. In studying the lexicon of English (or any language) we may group together lexemes which inter-relate, in the sense that we need them to define or describe each other. For example we can see how such lexemes as cat, feline, moggy, puss, kitten, tom, queen and miaow occupy the same semantic field. We can also see that some lexemes will occupy many fields: noise will appear in semantic fields for acoustics, pain or discomfort and electronics (noise = “interference”). Although such fields are not clear-cut and coherent, they are akin to the kind of groupings children make for themselves in learning a language. An entertaining way to see how we organize the lexicon for ourselves is to play word-association games.

Lexicology is the systematic historical (diachronic) and contemporary (synchronic) study of the lexicon or vocabulary of a language. Lexicologists study semantics on a mass scale. Lexicography is the art and science of dictionary making. Lexicography also has a history.

Some words are most commonly found paired with other words, to create a semantic unit or lexeme. Thus false is often found together with passport, teeth or promise. These pairs are known as collocations. They are very helpful in establishing the meanings of the words in the pair. Porn is likely to be followed by film, mag, star or video. It may be collocated with actor, director or merchant but is less likely to be followed by customer, operative or minister. After estate you expect agent. How often have you seen whole new (whole new ball-game) as a collocation (here whole is redundant)? Think of collocations including these words: American, British, coffee, dirty, first, mad, millennium, native, Ninja, prime, police, rotten, speed, surf.

When words become grouped in almost predictable ways these are fixed expressions. Examples include jewel in the crown, desirable residence, criminal mastermind, world of work, address the issues, I put it to you.

Sometimes the group is so well rooted in the language that the meanings of the component words are ignored, or metaphorical meanings (in dead metaphors) are never visualized. Such a group has a meaning that is not to be found in analysis of its parts, and is an idiom. Examples include: keep your nose clean, stick your nose/oar in, beneath your station, bed of roses, load of crap, not my cup of tea, a piece of cake, get on your high horse, off your own bat (frequent substitution of back shows the speaker is unaware of the original meaning) or skin of your teeth, get stuffed (what did this originally mean?).

Relation between semantic representation and Pragmatic interpretation

Generally semantic is study of the meanings of the words, and pragmatic is concerned with practical results, sensible and realistic.

According to the per-formative hypothesis put forward by the generative semantics school in the early 1970s, every sentences S in a language is in its deep semantic structure a performative sentence roughly of the form I state/declare/ask/etc. by this means the illocutionary force of an utterance was given a place in its semantic representation, which, since this school did not distinguish semantic representations from syntactic ones, was also its deep syntactic representation. The rules of grammar with Searle’s concept of constitutive rules and the principles of pragmatics with his concept of regulative rules. In English transformational syntax, for example, the rule of do support may be stated as follows: “ If the Tense-marker is not attached to verb, replace the Tense-marker by do + tense marker.

The division of labor between rules and principles can be illustrated by the passive in English. The rule of changing an active structure into a passive one is constitutive: it defines a set of changes to a transitive clause, such that if those changes are made, the result is another clause, which is grammatically well formed and has the same sense as the structure with which one started.

Convention and motivation

To clarify matters, let me distinguish between two kinds of the rule, for example, that in English the word designating the male of human species is pronounced /maen/. This one has to learn as a bare fact when learning English. Historical explanations can, of course, be given as to why the word has come to have its present pronunciation, but these will also be ultimately arbitrary, in so far as they derive the word from an earlier arbitrary form