Area that studies the meaning of linguistic signs, their origin, combination and context
Semantics refers to everything that is linked or belongs to the meaning of words. The same is associated with the meaning, interpretation and meaning of words, symbols and expressions.
For this reason, Semantics is also called the part of Linguistics that deals precisely with studying the meaning of linguistic signs and their combinations.
In other words, it is about discipline, a science that studies the meaning of words.
In relation to signs, semantics will study the origin and meaning of words and of many other symbols in relation to the objects they represent.
At the request of a text, semantics will take care of studying the relationship that is established between the various words of the discourse in order to unravel what it wants to communicate to us, not only focusing on the literality that each linguistic element shows but also considering and taking into account It takes into account the context in which it is found and the literary resources used in it. That is, here it will make a more general approach, not that this or that word means in isolation, but that all will be analyzed in relation to the factors mentioned to achieve a satisfactory understanding of the text.
Connotation and denotation
Semantics is usually divided into two parts: the connotation and the denotation. The latter consists of the most common and accepted expression of a word and that is the one we normally find in dictionaries or encyclopedias. On the other hand, the connotation will be the secondary way of using a word and that is mainly influenced by the localisms and the colloquialism of the language. This connotative meaning usually appears in dictionaries, although not always.
With an example we will clearly see the question, the word rat refers to that rodent mammal, that is, this would be its denotative meaning. Meanwhile, in the connotative form, when talking about the rat, it can refer to a person who is stingy, or to someone despicable.
Branches of semantics
All communication media assume a correspondence between expressions and certain situations or things, whether they correspond to the material or abstract world.
Meanwhile, semantics can be studied through different points of view, a fact by which it is decomposed into the following branches: linguistic semantics, which will study the coding of meaning in the context of linguistic expressions. In turn, it is divided into structural semantics and lexical semantics. The denotation that is the relationship between a word and what it refers to.
And on the other hand, the connotation, which will be the relationship between a word and what it means according to experiences and context. Likewise, the study that is carried out about the referent (what a word in question denotes, such as being a proper name or a common noun) and the meaning (the mental image that the referent forms) are integral parts, too, of the linguistic semantics; logical semantics it deals with the analysis of the logical problems of significance, then, for this it is necessary to study the signs, such as the parentheses and the quantified ones, among others, the variables, the constants, the rules, the predicates; and the semantics of cognitive science , deals especially with the psychic mechanism between the interlocutors in the communicative process, because the mind makes permanent relationships between the combinations of signs and other external issues that introduce meaning.
The generative semantics It is the linguistic theory that departs from generative grammar by providing that every sentence made comes from a semantic and not a syntactic structure.
The branch of semantics known as logical semantics has a special presence at the behest of mathematics, taking care of the study of logical problems of meaning and focusing on the interpretation of predicates, rules, signs and variables. Its specific functionality in mathematics, in terms of sets, is the establishment of structural relationships that occur between the different elements linked to each other.
