An Introduction to Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning focusing on sentence meaning which involves psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. It focuses meaning in discourse, and meaning grammatically, phonologycally, and lexically. It is from word to sentence, sentence to paragraph, paragraph to discourse.

Grammatical Categories
This categories are related to the part of speech. The words in it are the ‘components’ of making sentences. The words are categoriesed into noun, verb, adjective, adverb, article, preposition, etc.

Tense and Aspect
The making sentence uses the formulation with the tense and aspect. Tense is marking of time that allows a speaker to potray the situation type.

Aspect is the internal temporal nature of situation/ duration of the situation happened.
For examples :

• Ralph was bulding a fire-escape last week.
• Ralph built a fire escape last week.

Grammatical Categories and Morphological Relations
Noun, verb, adjective, and adverb are a parts of speech. These word categories are the products of morphological process. The process of ‘making word’ can be through derivation and inflection.

Derivation
This process results words on the basis of an existing word. E.g. happiness and unhappy from happy, or determination from determine.

It often involves the addition of a morpheme in the form of an affix, such as -ness, un- and -ation in the preceding examples. It causes the different class of word and meaning.

Examples of Derivation in English:

• adjective-to-noun: -ness (slow → slowness)
• adjective-to-verb: -ise (modern → modernise)
• adjective-to-adjective: -ish (red → reddish)
• adjective-to-adverb: -ly (personal → personally)
• noun-to-adjective: -al (recreation → recreational)
• noun-to-verb: -fy (glory → glorify)
• verb-to-adjective: -able (drink → drinkable)
• verb-to-noun (abstract): -ance (deliver → deliverance)
• verb-to-noun (agent): -er (write → writer)

Semantics, grammatical categories and morphological relations
These three discussion aim to ensure that to find out the meaning in a sentence, it should understand the process of making word and how it arranges into sentences by involving the time indicators and temporal process of the event or action happened.

Meaning and Cognition
This is influenced by the mental spaces that speakers had to set up to manipulate reference to entities or to construal of a scene as the conceptual process such as viewpoint shifting, figure-ground shifting and profiling.
A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object. There is a tenor and vehicle on it.