Semantics: Concepts and Roles:

Semantics:

 Semantics is the study of meaning, reference, trust and related

notions in language meaning.

Semantics deal with aspects of meaning that is encoded by words and grammar.

 Semantics contains work that with the description of word-and-

sentence-meaning. How words and sentences are related to the
real/ imaginary objects they refer to and the situations they
describe.

Meaning, Reference and Truth:

Meaning is a complex phenomenon involves relations and concepts

among which words and sentences are involved.

 Meaning is provided by a community of native speakers not by

dictionaries or grammar books.
 So, meaning is not a mental image that may vary from one person
to another.
 Truth conditions help knowing the meaning of a sentence. It
involves knowing the conditions under which it would be true, so
explaining its truth conditions.

Homophony:

Homophony is when two or more differently written forms have the

same pronunciation, for example: meat and meet; week and weak etc.

homonymy and polysemy:

Homonymy:

Homonymy is when the same morphological word have a range of many

unrelated meanings, e.g., bank ,pupil , eye , mole , etc.

Polysemy:

Polysemy is when the same morphological word may have a range of

many related meanings, e.g., head ,foot , run , cup , etc.

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Synonymy and Antonymy:

Synonymy:

Synonymy is two or more forms with very closely related meanings, e.g.,
broad &wide ;hide &conceal ; almost &nearly , etc.

Antonymy:

Antonymy is when two lexical forms have opposite meanings, e.g., quick
and slow, hot and cold, short and tall, etc.

Hyponymy:

Hyponymy: is when the meaning of one form is included in the meaning

of another. The bigger concept is called super ordinate, e.g., flower
(super ordinate) & daffodil (hyponym), animal (super ordinate) & dog
(hyponym), etc.

The two diagrams below provide visual presentation for the above:

- Diagram (1) : Plants relations

- Diagram (2) : Vegetables relations

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Idioms:

Idioms: are a group of words whose meaning cannot be explained in

terms of habitual meanings of words that make up the piece of language.

 For example, ‘ fly off the handle' (means: loose one's temper), ‘ a
red letter day' (means: a day that will never be forgotten), ‘kick the
bucket, (to die), etc.

Sociolinguistics and Language Variation:

What is the sociolinguistics?

 Sociolinguistics studies Language in the society.

 It examines how and why people use language as they interact with
the other members of their society.
 Sociolinguistics examines the variety in language, its development
and change.
 Accent ,dialect and idiolect are basic concepts for this branch.

 Other areas of interest for sociolinguists are: bilingualism

,dialectology , code-switching and code-mixing.
 Moreover, standards and vernaculars are studied as variations of
language in formal and informal situations by Sociolinguistics.
 Diglossia , is a kind of bilingualism, receives intensive attention by
sociolinguists. It occurs when the difference between the standard
and the dialect is sharp.

Syntax:Syntax is order of words to make a sentence

 This theoretical subfield of Linguistics focuses on words in
combination, where ‘ grammar ' and ‘ structure ' are two terms
used alternatively to refer to ‘ syntax '.

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  Syntax investigates in the sentence structure, the one level higher
than the word level.

 It studies the internal structure of sentences and phrases, and

looks into the relationship among their component parts.

 Syntax, also, studies the various phenomena pertaining to the form

and organization of sentences, sentence formation and types.

 Basic Syntactic concepts and processes:
 A fundamental fact about words in all languages is that they is that
they can be grouped together in a rather relatively small number of
classes called syntactic categories of the phrase structures. These
are discussed in the pages that follow.

The phrase:

 A phrase is a string of words with hierarchical structure consisting

of a group of words that may themselves consist of smaller groups
of words, and so on.

 The phrase has a head that is built around its constituents, and is
named after this head.

 There are at least five phrases in English; namely: Noun Phrase

(NP), Verb Phrase (VP), Adjective Phrase (AP), Adverb Phrase
(AdvP) and Prepositional Phrase (PP).

The clause:

 A clause is a group of words which contains a finite verb, but

cannot occur in isolation in the sense that it is part of the sentence.
 However, in each complex sentence , there are at least two
clauses; a main clause and a subordinate clause.
 It is also considered in syntax that a simple sentence can be called
‘a clause'.

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  The sentence and its types:
 The sentence and its types are three; (simple, complex and
compound). Below are examples of the sentence types:

Type Example Explanation

Simple The young The simple sentence consists of
man only one finite verb (defended).
defended
his mother.
Compound He arrived The compound sentence consists
and she left of two simple sentences linked by
. the coordinating conjunction
“and”.
Complex He believed The complex sentence consists of
that the one simple and main sentence
earth is with the main verb (believed),
round. and another subordinate (or
embedded) sentence with the
secondary verb (is).

 There are over two hundred definitions of ‘sentence'. It has been

agreed that each sentence is as independent linguistic form, not
included in any larger linguistic form by virtue of any grammatical
construction.

Structural Analysis of Sentences:

Read the following sentence and its structural analysis which follows:

The dog followed the cat.

The structure of the above sentence can be analysed by using various

syntactic techniques. Two basic and commonly used ones are introduced
here; namely: the labeled-bracketing and the tree-diagram ones.

 Labeled-bracketing:

[ S [ NP [ art the ][ N dog ]] [ VP [ V followed ] [ NP [ art the ] [ art cat

]]]

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  Tree-Diagram:

The above diagrams help to describe clearly and visually how an English
sentence segments are put together as combinations of phrases which, in
turn, are combinations of words.

‫دالور امير‬: , symbols of sounds, voice or voiceless, place of articulation, and the manner of articulation