INTRODUCTION TO SEMANTICS

Semantics is branch of linguistics that referred to the study of meaning. Study semantics concerned to the level of word, phrases and sentence meaning. But do you know what the meaning is? Meaning is a complex phenomenon that expresses the relationship between a language and the minds of its speaker, between language and the world, and between language and practical uses which it is put. 
The first description of studying semantic is about meaning. What is meaning?
1. Dictionary definitions; although so many people think that the practical way to know the meaning of words is from dictionary but actually meaning is provided by a community of native speakers. Since the different dictionary would give different explanation of the same word.
2. Mental images; since not all languages have corresponding mental images, and mental images tend to only of typical of the thing they symbolize so the meaning of an expression is not just a mental images. In giving definition of a teacher is sometimes different of every native speaker.
3. Meaning and truth; explaining of the meaning of can be done in part by explaining its truth conditions.
4. Meaning and language use; one of the important aspect of meaning is condition on language use, knowing the meaning of an utterance is also knowing how to use it.
In semantics we will also learn about Meaning Relationship; in this case are:
1. Antonymy are the words in the some sense opposite in meaning. Lucky-unlucky, like-dislike, possible-impossible etc.
2. Synonymy are two different forms with the same meaning like sofa and couch or cease and stop.
3. Homonymy are two different meaning with the same form. Such as sea and see or night and knight.
4. Entailment is the relationship between the general meaning and specific meaning. When it is a cat it must be an animal but when it is an animal it must not be a cat.


Other descriptions of Meaning Relationship are:
1. Semantic Features
The example; the book read the boy. This sentence is syntactically right, but semantically odd. The subject book must denote entities that are capable of ‘reading’ but the noun book doesn’t have this property.
2. Lexical Relations
Lexical relations are the analysis of treating the procedure of semantic description. One of the types of lexical relations is synonym, example bad-good, beautiful-ugly, keep-damage etc.
3. Deictic Expressions 
Deictic expressions are the means of ‘pointing’ with language that can be interpreted in terms of location that the speaker intends to indicate such as here, there, this, that, tomorrow etc.
4. Presuppositions
A presupposition is the descriptions that what a speaker assumes is true or is known by the hearer. The example, if you asked why do you cry? There is a presupposition that you do cry.
In the next chapter about semantics explain about Semantic Composition, these are:
1. Structural ambiguity; this explanation has been described in previous chapter that is in syntax. It means that some sentences sometimes have different meaning.
2. Relative intersection; the combination of words is relative, depends on whether that combination is match or not. Example tall cat of course it is not matched.