Thursday, March 19, 2009

Sematics:

The purpose of reading semantics is to understand the meaning of different sentences such as contradictory, anomalous, ambiguous, or vague. Actually the meaning of the words in the sentences have multifaceted notion thus most of the time it is really difficult to have semantics features from just the word or sentence. Exact meaning is only possible along with the proper context otherwise even the meaningful sentence can’t give proper meaning.
I remember when I was studying linguistic, suddenly my teacher gave us a sentence and asked us the meaning of the sentence, and different students came up with different meanings. For example, the teacher asked the meaning of the sentence, “Fish is ready to eat”.
Then all of us were asked to interpret the meaning. Some of us said it means, there is a fish, who is ready to eat its food but other said might be in the kitchen mother cooks the fish and she said her children that now the dish of fish is ready to eat.
Thus, unless we do not know the exact context, whether the sentence is said in the kitchen by a mom or a boy who is looking at the fish in the pond narrate the sentence, we cannot say the exact meaning of the sentence.
Except that also there are varieties of other factors which differ the characteristic of the semantics feature, such as anomalous sentence in which the sentence structure is made in such a way which does not give any sense for example “my table is dead”.

2 comments:

  1. Excellent example! I think You've made a very good point. The exact meaning of a sentence can not be dertermined without the discourse.

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