Semantics
Semantics has been defined as the study of
meanings or the science of meanings. According to Prof.Gray, it
deals with the evolution of
Meaning of
words with reasons for their survival, decay, disappearance and sometimes survival as well as with the care of creation of new words. Semantic is opposed to phonetics and phonology; it is that branch of philology that deals with the meanings of words both in themselves and in relation to the senses from which they derive or the senses to which they lead. It is comparatively a recent development of Linguistics and deals with erudition, a sympathetic knowledge of life and the world around and an alert
mind that quickly grasps parallels and analogies and is hence also known as ‘psychology’.
In studying the history of any
language of any language, we have to consider not only the development its grammatical structure and the additions of new words to it vocabulary but also the changes that have taken place in the meaning of many such words in the language. The words have no independent or intrinsic meaning but rather meaning given to them by the human mind and context; as their primary function is the expression of thought. Therefore meaning is never static.
To Shakespeare a ‘battle’ is used to signify not only a fight , but also a group of soldiers. Many years back , ‘wife’ meant a woman as mentioned in chaucer’s
wife of Bath. Also the pipe signifies one thing to the plumber, another to the smoker and still another to the musician. Ask someone the past –participle o fstrike and you put them in a dilemma. The word Caesarean was born with the birth of Julius Caesar. The words have multiplied by virtue of many methods.
More summaries about the semantics