Semantics

is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation betweensignifiers, like words, phrases, signs,
and symbols, and what they stand for; their denotation. Linguistic semantics is the study of
meaning that is used for understanding human expression through language. Other forms of
semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.
In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology.

itself denotes a range of ideas—from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary
language for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection
or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal enquiries, over
a long period of time, especially in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of
the interpretation of signs or symbols used in agents or communities within particular
circumstances and contexts.[4] Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language,
and proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each comprises several branches of study.
In written language, things like paragraph structure and punctuation bear semantic content; other
forms of language bear other semantic content.[4]

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the
levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termedtexts, or narratives). The
study of semantics is also closely linked to the subjects of representation, reference and denotation.
The basic study of semantics is oriented to the examination of the meaning of signs, and the study
of relations between different linguistic units
and compounds: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy, hyponymy,meronymy, metony
my, holonymy, paronyms. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text,
possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning.

Theories in semantics
Model theoretic semantics
A highly formalized theory of natural language semantics in which expressions are assigned
denotations (meanings) such as individuals, truth values, or functions from one of these to another.
The truth of a sentence, and more interestingly, its logical relation to other sentences, is then
evaluated relative to a model.
Formal (or truth-conditional) semantics
The challenge is to arrive at the truth conditions for any sentences from fixed meanings assigned
to the individual words and fixed rules for how to combine them. In practice, truth-conditional
semantics is similar to model-theoretic semantics; conceptually, however, they differ in that truth-
conditional semantics seeks to connect language with statements about the real world (in the form
of meta-language statements), rather than with abstract models.
Lexical and conceptual semantics
This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this
theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.

Lexical semantics
A linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a
word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual
relations.
Computational semantics
Computational semantics is focused on the processing of linguistic meaning. In order to do this
concrete algorithms and architectures are described. Within this framework the algorithms and
architectures are also analyzed in terms of decidability, time/space complexity, data structures they
require and communication protocols.

There are 3 kinds of sign : the ICON, the INDEX and the SYMBOL.

 from philosopher Charles S. Peirce in the late 19th century.

 a sign is a stimulus pattern that has a meaning.
 The difference is in how the meaning happens to be attached to (or associated with) the
pattern.

ICON

The icon is the simplest since it is a pattern that physically resembles what it `stands for'.

 A picture of your face is an icon of you.

 The little square with a picture of a printer on your computer screen is an icon for the print
function.
 The picture of a smoking cigarette with a diagonal bar across the picture is an icon that
directly represents `Smoking? Don't do it' (at least it does with appropriate cultural
experience).
 Your cat is preparing to jump up on your lap, so you put out the palm of your hand over
the cat.
  Words can be partly iconic too. Bow-wow, splash and hiccup. And the bird called
the whippoorwill. (These are also called onomotopoetic words.)
 Also words can be pronounced iconically:
o His nose grew wa-a-a-ay out to here.
o Julia Childes grabbed that carrot and went CHOP CHOP CHOP CHOP.
o Aw, poor widdow ba-by!

INDEX

Defined by some sensory feature, A, (directly visible, audible, smellable, etc) that correlates
with and thus implies or `points to' B, something of interest to an animal.

 All animals exploit various kinds of indexical signs

 Less sophisticated animals acquire them by natural selection.
 More intelligent animals learn them.

Thus,

 dark clouds in the west are an index of impending rain,

 for a fish in the sea, the direction of greater light is the direction of warmer water,
 a limping gait is a sign that an animal is physically impaired,
 a scowling facial expression is an index of displeasure or concern (to a human),
 sensing a pheremone in the air is an indexical sign (for some insects) that a sexually
receptive member of its own species is located upwind,
 a particular alarm call in certain monkeys is a sign that
o the animal directly sensed a particular type of predator
o OR has heard another monkey give this predator alarm call.
 a particular pronunciation of a word can index a particular geographic place or social
group.

Indices depend on a statistical regularity of:

 part A (the signal pattern) with

 part B (the behaviorally relevant situation).

This requires first,

 detecting property A (which is not necessarily simple) and either

 learning (or innately knowing) its correlation with the B.
For humans, many indices are artificial (not `natural'):

 a beep from your oven can signal that the cookies are ready to be removed,
 a red stoplight is a sign that you should stop your car or risk an accident,
 in an animal behavior experiment, a flashing light could be a sign that food will be
available or that a shock will soon follow.
 a person can wave their hand as a sign of recognition and greeting (though this may be
partly iconic too).

Notice that the correlation need not be perfect.

Words are said to be indexical when they directly point to their meaning. Eg,

here, there, I, me, you, this, etc.

SYMBOL

Words as Symbols.

Now, what about a noun in a human language? Is English `KITTY' an index? Evidence in support
of this:

 A small child and its mother would be likely to say KITTY in the presence of a cat.
 So [kIDi] does partially predict the presence of an actual cat.

But no. Even if its true that the earliest words are learned indexically (that is, by pointing).

It is very rare for the utterance of a word to correlate with the thing it refers to.
A word in any language is vastly more complex and sophisticated.

Conclusion.

Signs have :

a signal aspect, some physical pattern (eg, a sound or visible shape) and
a meaning - some semantic content that is implied or `brought to mind'

Where:
  Icons have a physical resemblance between the signal and the meaning
 Indices have a correlation in space and time with its meaning.
 Symbols (content words like nouns, verbs and adjectives) are (sound) patterns) that get
meaning:
o primarily from its mental association with other symbols and
o secondarily from its correlation with environmental patterns.

What is Symbolset?

Symbolset aims to provide well-crafted symbols using the most suitable methods. This has led us
to develop our own semantic symbol webfont. Let’s discuss how we arrived at webfonts and why
semantics are important.
There are other techniques for displaying symbols that are suitable under certain conditions. We’ll
talk about those another time.

Figure 12.1: The role of semantics. The meaning of the symbols are in the user's head. The
computer takes in symbols and outputs symbols. The output can be interpreted by the user
according to the meaning the user places on the symbols.