Semantics
What is Semantics?
Semantics is the study of meaning in language, focusing on how words, phrases, sentences, and texts convey meaning. It explores how the meanings of words change depending on context, usage, and social influences, and how these meanings are understood by speakers and listeners. Semantics is crucial for understanding communication, interpretation, and reasoning, and plays a central role in fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and artificial intelligence.
The Basic Idea
While sometimes a word just has one meaning, there are many words in the English language that can be used in a variety of different circumstances. Consider all the ways that we can use the word “pitch”:
- He threw a curveball pitch.
- Tell me your elevator pitch.
- The soccer pitch is being used.
- Your voice needs to hit a higher pitch on the first note.
- The roof of that building has a steep pitch.
In each of these sentences, the word pitch means something different: a baseball throw, a persuasive speech, a sports field, a sound frequency, and finally, an angle. Even though the five-letter word is identical across each of the sentences, it signifies something different, and thanks to the context provided by the other words in the sentence, we intuitively understand the meaning of the word pitch in each.
Semantics is a branch of linguistics that focuses on how our interpretation of words and phrases changes depending on context. Semantics focuses on both the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and the meaning of sentences and phrases (sentential semantics) to understand how words paired together express larger ideas. Semantics is particularly concerned with semantic properties, the inherent features of a word, to understand how we group words together. For example, the words “child,” “puppy,” and “kitten” all describe a younger version of a mammal, so we may group them together.1
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
— Felix Frankfurter, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States2
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
