Ethnolinguistics (sometimes called cultural linguistics ) is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language or group of languages and the cultural behavior of the people who speak those languages.
85-577: It examines how different cultures conceptualize and categorize their experiences, such as spatial orientation and environmental phenomena. Ethnolinguistics incorporates methods like ethnosemantics, which analyzes how people classify and label their world, and componential analysis, which dissects semantic features of terms to understand cultural meanings. The field intersects with cultural linguistics to investigate how language encodes cultural schemas and metaphors, influencing areas such as intercultural communication and language learning. Ethnolinguists study
170-514: A "lettuce" or a "weed", and using this information can discover something about how that culture thinks about plants. In one section of Oscar Lewis' La Vida , he includes the transcript of an interview with a Puerto Rican woman in which she discusses a prostitute's social world. Using ethnosemantics, the speaker's statements about the people in that social circle and their behavior can be analyzed in order to understand how she perceives and conceptualizes her social world. The first step in this analysis
255-493: A different context. For example, the reference of the word here depends on the location in which it is used. A closely related approach is possible world semantics, which allows expressions to refer not only to entities in the actual world but also to entities in other possible worlds. According to this view, expressions like the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to different persons in different worlds. This view can also be used to analyze sentences that talk about what
340-440: A different sense have the same referent. For instance, the sentence "the morning star is the evening star" is informative and people can learn something from it. The sentence "the morning star is the morning star", by contrast, is an uninformative tautology since the expressions are identical not only on the level of reference but also on the level of sense. Compositionality is a key aspect of how languages construct meaning. It
425-413: A more complex meaning structure. In the expression "Beethoven likes Schubert", the verb like connects a liker to the object of their liking. Other sentence parts modify meaning rather than form new connections. For instance, the adjective red modifies the color of another entity in the expression red car . A further compositional device is variable binding, which is used to determine the reference of
510-414: A particular language. Some semanticists also include the study of lexical units other than words in the field of lexical semantics. Compound expressions like being under the weather have a non-literal meaning that acts as a unit and is not a direct function of its parts. Another topic concerns the meaning of morphemes that make up words, for instance, how negative prefixes like in- and dis- affect
595-413: A particular language. The same symbol may refer to one object in one language, to another object in a different language, and to no object in another language. Many other concepts are used to describe semantic phenomena. The semantic role of an expression is the function it fulfills in a sentence. In the sentence "the boy kicked the ball", the boy has the role of the agent who performs an action. The ball
680-445: A speaker remains silent on a certain topic. A closely related distinction by the semiotician Charles W. Morris holds that semantics studies the relation between words and the world, pragmatics examines the relation between words and users, and syntax focuses on the relation between different words. Semantics is related to etymology , which studies how words and their meanings changed in the course of history. Another connected field
765-438: A strict distinction between meaning and syntax and by relying on various formal devices to explore the relation between meaning and cognition. Computational semantics examines how the meaning of natural language expressions can be represented and processed on computers. It often relies on the insights of formal semantics and applies them to problems that can be computationally solved. Some of its key problems include computing
850-459: A strong sense, the principle of compositionality states that the meaning of a complex expression is not just affected by its parts and how they are combined but fully determined this way. It is controversial whether this claim is correct or whether additional aspects influence meaning. For example, context may affect the meaning of expressions; idioms like " kick the bucket " carry figurative or non-literal meanings that are not directly reducible to
935-508: A term. For example, the last part of the expression "the woman who likes Beethoven" specifies which woman is meant. Parse trees can be used to show the underlying hierarchy employed to combine the different parts. Various grammatical devices, like the gerund form, also contribute to meaning and are studied by grammatical semantics. Formal semantics uses formal tools from logic and mathematics to analyze meaning in natural languages. It aims to develop precise logical formalisms to clarify
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#17327978729831020-407: A text that come before and after it. Context affects the meaning of various expressions, like the deictic expression here and the anaphoric expression she . A syntactic environment is extensional or transparent if it is always possible to exchange expressions with the same reference without affecting the truth value of the sentence. For example, the environment of the sentence "the number 8
1105-457: A uniform signifying rank , and the presence of vultures indicating a nearby animal carcass. Semantics further contrasts with pragmatics , which is interested in how people use language in communication. An expression like "That's what I'm talking about" can mean many things depending on who says it and in what situation. Semantics is interested in the possible meanings of expressions: what they can and cannot mean in general. In this regard, it
1190-427: A word means by looking at its letters and one needs to consult a dictionary instead. Compositionality is often used to explain how people can formulate and understand an almost infinite number of meanings even though the amount of words and cognitive resources is finite. Many sentences that people read are sentences that they have never seen before and they are nonetheless able to understand them. When interpreted in
1275-484: Is hermeneutics , which is the art or science of interpretation and is concerned with the right methodology of interpreting text in general and scripture in particular. Metasemantics examines the metaphysical foundations of meaning and aims to explain where it comes from or how it arises. The word semantics originated from the Ancient Greek adjective semantikos , meaning 'relating to signs', which
1360-400: Is 8. Semanticists commonly distinguish the language they study, called object language, from the language they use to express their findings, called metalanguage . When a professor uses Japanese to teach their student how to interpret the language of first-order logic then the language of first-order logic is the object language and Japanese is the metalanguage. The same language may occupy
1445-529: Is a derivative of sēmeion , the noun for ' sign '. It was initially used for medical symptoms and only later acquired its wider meaning regarding any type of sign, including linguistic signs. The word semantics entered the English language from the French term semantique , which the linguist Michel Bréal first introduced at the end of the 19th century. Semantics studies meaning in language, which
1530-410: Is an important factor by which plants may be distinguished from one another (Ottenheimer, 2006, p. 20). To summarize, one word can have basic underlying meanings that are well established depending on the cultural context. It is crucial to understand these underlying meanings in order to fully understand any language and culture. Structural semantics and the componential analysis were patterned on
1615-543: Is based on geographical landmarks such as the river system and one's position on the coast. Similarly, the Yurok lack the idea of cardinal directions; they orient themselves with respect to their principal geographic feature, the Klamath River . Cultural Linguistics is a related branch of linguistics that explores the relationship between language and cultural conceptualisations. Cultural Linguistics draws on and expands
1700-426: Is created through the combination of expressions belonging to different syntactic categories. Dynamic semantics is a subfield of formal semantics that focuses on how information grows over time. According to it, "meaning is context change potential": the meaning of a sentence is not given by the information it contains but by the information change it brings about relative to a context. Cognitive semantics studies
1785-445: Is described but an experience takes place, like when a girl sees a bird. In this case, the girl has the role of the experiencer. Other common semantic roles are location, source, goal, beneficiary, and stimulus. Lexical relations describe how words stand to one another. Two words are synonyms if they share the same or a very similar meaning, like car and automobile or buy and purchase . Antonyms have opposite meanings, such as
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#17327978729831870-408: Is even" is extensional because replacing the expression the number 8 with the number of planets in the solar system does not change its truth value. For intensional or opaque contexts , this type of substitution is not always possible. For instance, the embedded clause in "Paco believes that the number 8 is even" is intensional since Paco may not know that the number of planets in the solar system
1955-543: Is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax , which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics , which investigates how people use language in communication. Lexical semantics is the branch of semantics that studies word meaning . It examines whether words have one or several meanings and in what lexical relations they stand to one another. Phrasal semantics studies
2040-514: Is interested in how meanings evolve and change because of cultural phenomena associated with politics , religion, and customs . For example, address practices encode cultural values and social hierarchies, as in the difference of politeness of expressions like tu and usted in Spanish or du and Sie in German in contrast to English, which lacks these distinctions and uses
2125-454: Is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep . There are many forms of non-linguistic meaning that are not examined by semantics. Actions and policies can have meaning in relation to
2210-446: Is possible or what is necessary: possibility is what is true in some possible worlds while necessity is what is true in all possible worlds. Ideational theories, also called mentalist theories, are not primarily interested in the reference of expressions and instead explain meaning in terms of the mental states of language users. One historically influential approach articulated by John Locke holds that expressions stand for ideas in
2295-430: Is sometimes defined as the study of context-independent meaning. Pragmatics examines which of these possible meanings is relevant in a particular case. In contrast to semantics, it is interested in actual performance rather than in the general linguistic competence underlying this performance. This includes the topic of additional meaning that can be inferred even though it is not literally expressed, like what it means if
2380-444: Is sometimes divided into two complementary approaches: semasiology and onomasiology . Semasiology starts from words and examines what their meaning is. It is interested in whether words have one or several meanings and how those meanings are related to one another. Instead of going from word to meaning, onomasiology goes from meaning to word. It starts with a concept and examines what names this concept has or how it can be expressed in
2465-504: Is sometimes understood as a mental phenomenon that helps people identify the objects to which an expression refers. Some semanticists focus primarily on sense or primarily on reference in their analysis of meaning. To grasp the full meaning of an expression, it is usually necessary to understand both to what entities in the world it refers and how it describes them. The distinction between sense and reference can explain identity statements , which can be used to show how two expressions with
2550-412: Is the analysis of words through structured sets of semantic features , which are given as "present", "absent" or "indifferent with reference to feature". The method thus departs from the principle of compositionality . Componential analysis is a method typical of structural semantics which analyzes the components of a word's meaning. Thus, it reveals the culturally important features by which speakers of
2635-416: Is the idea that the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its parts. It is possible to understand the meaning of the sentence "Zuzana owns a dog" by understanding what the words Zuzana , owns , a and dog mean and how they are combined. In this regard, the meaning of complex expressions like sentences is different from word meaning since it is normally not possible to deduce what
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2720-419: Is the object to which the expression points. The sense of an expression is the way in which it refers to that object or how the object is interpreted. For example, the expressions morning star and evening star refer to the same planet, just like the expressions 2 + 2 and 3 + 1 refer to the same number. The meanings of these expressions differ not on the level of reference but on the level of sense. Sense
2805-404: Is the theme or patient of this action as something that does not act itself but is involved in or affected by the action. The same entity can be both agent and patient, like when someone cuts themselves. An entity has the semantic role of an instrument if it is used to perform the action, for instance, when cutting something with a knife then the knife is the instrument. For some sentences, no action
2890-479: Is to identify and map out all of the social categories or social identities the speaker identified. Once the social categories have been mapped, the next steps are to attempt to define the precise meaning of each category, examine how the speaker describes the relationship of categories, and analyze how she evaluates the characteristics of the people who are grouped in those social categories. The speaker in this example identified three basic social categories (the rich,
2975-404: Is true. Many related disciplines investigate language and meaning. Semantics contrasts with other subfields of linguistics focused on distinct aspects of language. Phonology studies the different types of sounds used in languages and how sounds are connected to form words while syntax examines the rules that dictate how to arrange words to create sentences. These divisions are reflected in
3060-450: Is used if the different meanings are closely related to one another, like the meanings of the word head , which can refer to the topmost part of the human body or the top-ranking person in an organization. The meaning of words can often be subdivided into meaning components called semantic features . The word horse has the semantic feature animate but lacks the semantic feature human . It may not always be possible to fully reconstruct
3145-598: The vocabulary as a whole. This includes the study of lexical relations between words, such as whether two terms are synonyms or antonyms. Lexical semantics categorizes words based on semantic features they share and groups them into semantic fields unified by a common subject. This information is used to create taxonomies to organize lexical knowledge, for example, by distinguishing between physical and abstract entities and subdividing physical entities into stuff and individuated entities . Further topics of interest are polysemy, ambiguity, and vagueness . Lexical semantics
3230-487: The approach of Cultural Linguistics has been adopted in several areas of applied linguistic research, including intercultural communication , second language learning , Teaching English as an International Language, and World Englishes . Ethnosemantics , also called ethnoscience and cognitive anthropology , is a method of ethnographic research and ethnolinguistics that focuses on semantics by examining how people categorize words in their language. Ethnosemantics studies
3315-420: The cognitive conceptual structures of humans are universal or relative to their linguistic background. Another research topic concerns the psychological processes involved in the application of grammar. Other investigated phenomena include categorization, which is understood as a cognitive heuristic to avoid information overload by regarding different entities in the same way, and embodiment , which concerns how
3400-403: The concept of plants and how dandelions are categorized to explain how ethnosemantics can be used to examine the differences in how cultures think about certain topics. In her example, Ottenheimer describes how the topic "plants" can be divided into the two categories "lettuce" and "weeds". Ethnosemantics can help anthropologists to discover whether a particular culture categorizes "dandelions" as
3485-454: The conditions under which it would be true. This can happen even if one does not know whether the conditions are fulfilled. The semiotic triangle , also called the triangle of meaning, is a model used to explain the relation between language, language users, and the world, represented in the model as Symbol , Thought or Reference , and Referent . The symbol is a linguistic signifier , either in its spoken or written form. The central idea of
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3570-408: The context, like the deictic terms here and I . To avoid these problems, referential theories often introduce additional devices. Some identify meaning not directly with objects but with functions that point to objects. This additional level has the advantage of taking the context of an expression into account since the same expression may point to one object in one context and to another object in
3655-478: The contrast between alive and dead or fast and slow . One term is a hyponym of another term if the meaning of the first term is included in the meaning of the second term. For example, ant is a hyponym of insect . A prototype is a hyponym that has characteristic features of the type it belongs to. A robin is a prototype of a bird but a penguin is not. Two words with the same pronunciation are homophones like flour and flower , while two words with
3740-399: The corresponding physical object. The relation is only established indirectly through the mind of the language user. When they see the symbol, it evokes a mental image or a concept, which establishes the connection to the physical object. This process is only possible if the language user learned the meaning of the symbol before. The meaning of a specific symbol is governed by the conventions of
3825-541: The fact that it is possible to master some aspects of a language while lacking others, like when a person knows how to pronounce a word without knowing its meaning. As a subfield of semiotics, semantics has a more narrow focus on meaning in language while semiotics studies both linguistic and non-linguistic signs. Semiotics investigates additional topics like the meaning of non-verbal communication , conventional symbols , and natural signs independent of human interaction. Examples include nodding to signal agreement, stripes on
3910-434: The features of words in a category can be examined to form hypotheses about the significant meaning and identifying features of words in that category. Semantics Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning . It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference . Sense
3995-423: The foreground while the base is the background that provides the context of this aspect without being at the center of attention. For example, the profile of the word hypotenuse is a straight line while the base is a right-angled triangle of which the hypotenuse forms a part. Cognitive semantics further compares the conceptual patterns and linguistic typologies across languages and considers to what extent
4080-408: The goal they serve. Fields like religion and spirituality are interested in the meaning of life , which is about finding a purpose in life or the significance of existence in general. Linguistic meaning can be analyzed on different levels. Word meaning is studied by lexical semantics and investigates the denotation of individual words. It is often related to concepts of entities, like how
4165-422: The ideas that an expression evokes in the minds of language users. According to causal theories, meaning is determined by causes and effects, which behaviorist semantics analyzes in terms of stimulus and response. Further theories of meaning include truth-conditional semantics , verificationist theories, the use theory , and inferentialist semantics . The study of semantic phenomena began during antiquity but
4250-423: The language distinguish different words in a semantic field or domain (Ottenheimer, 2006, p. 20). man = [+ MALE], [+ MATURE] or woman = [– MALE], [+ MATURE] or boy = [+ MALE], [– MATURE] or girl = [– MALE] [– MATURE] or child = [+/– MALE] [– MATURE]. In other words, the word girl can have three basic factors (or semantic properties ): human , young , and female . Another example, being edible
4335-453: The language user's bodily experience affects the meaning of expressions. Frame semantics is an important subfield of cognitive semantics. Its central idea is that the meaning of terms cannot be understood in isolation from each other but needs to be analyzed on the background of the conceptual structures they depend on. These structures are made explicit in terms of semantic frames. For example, words like bride, groom, and honeymoon evoke in
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#17327978729834420-470: The law, and the poor) and characterized those people in the higher categories of "rich" and "law" as bad people. The poor are further divided into those with disreputable positions and those with reputable positions. The speaker characterizes the disreputable poor generally as dishonest and corrupt, but presents herself as one of the few exceptions. This analysis of the speaker's description of her social circle thus allows for an understanding of how she perceives
4505-457: The meaning of a word by identifying all its semantic features. A semantic or lexical field is a group of words that are all related to the same activity or subject. For instance, the semantic field of cooking includes words like bake , boil , spice , and pan . The context of an expression refers to the situation or circumstances in which it is used and includes time, location, speaker, and audience. It also encompasses other passages in
4590-492: The meaning of complex expressions by analyzing their parts, handling ambiguity, vagueness, and context-dependence, and using the extracted information in automatic reasoning . It forms part of computational linguistics , artificial intelligence , and cognitive science . Its applications include machine learning and machine translation . Cultural semantics studies the relation between linguistic meaning and culture. It compares conceptual structures in different languages and
4675-407: The meaning of particular expressions, like the semantics of the word fairy . As a field of inquiry, semantics has both an internal and an external side. The internal side is interested in the connection between words and the mental phenomena they evoke, like ideas and conceptual representations. The external side examines how words refer to objects in the world and under what conditions a sentence
4760-435: The meaning of sentences by exploring the phenomenon of compositionality or how new meanings can be created by arranging words. Formal semantics relies on logic and mathematics to provide precise frameworks of the relation between language and meaning. Cognitive semantics examines meaning from a psychological perspective and assumes a close relation between language ability and the conceptual structures used to understand
4845-655: The meaning of the name George Washington is the person with this name. General terms refer not to a single entity but to the set of objects to which this term applies. In this regard, the meaning of the term cat is the set of all cats. Similarly, verbs usually refer to classes of actions or events and adjectives refer to properties of individuals and events. Simple referential theories face problems for meaningful expressions that have no clear referent. Names like Pegasus and Santa Claus have meaning even though they do not point to existing entities. Other difficulties concern cases in which different expressions are about
4930-421: The meaning of the words they are part of, as in inanimate and dishonest . Phrasal semantics studies the meaning of sentences. It relies on the principle of compositionality to explore how the meaning of complex expressions arises from the combination of their parts. The different parts can be analyzed as subject , predicate , or argument . The subject of a sentence usually refers to a specific entity while
5015-452: The meanings of sentences?", "How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the things words refer to?", and "What is the connection between what a word means, and the contexts in which it is used?". The main disciplines engaged in semantics are linguistics , semiotics , and philosophy . Besides its meaning as a field of inquiry, semantics can also refer to theories within this field, like truth-conditional semantics , and to
5100-436: The meanings of the constituents affect one another. Semantics can focus on a specific language, like English, but in its widest sense, it investigates meaning structures relevant to all languages. As a descriptive discipline, it aims to determine how meaning works without prescribing what meaning people should associate with particular expressions. Some of its key questions are "How do the meanings of words combine to create
5185-413: The meanings of their parts. Truth is a property of statements that accurately present the world and true statements are in accord with reality . Whether a statement is true usually depends on the relation between the statement and the rest of the world. The truth conditions of a statement are the way the world needs to be for the statement to be true. For example, it belongs to the truth conditions of
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#17327978729835270-467: The mind the frame of marriage. Conceptual semantics shares with cognitive semantics the idea of studying linguistic meaning from a psychological perspective by examining how humans conceptualize and experience the world. It holds that meaning is not about the objects to which expressions refer but about the cognitive structure of human concepts that connect thought, perception, and action. Conceptual semantics differs from cognitive semantics by introducing
5355-448: The model is that there is no direct relation between a linguistic expression and what it refers to, as was assumed by earlier dyadic models. This is expressed in the diagram by the dotted line between symbol and referent. The model holds instead that the relation between the two is mediated through a third component. For example, the term apple stands for a type of fruit but there is no direct connection between this string of letters and
5440-564: The predicate describes a feature of the subject or an event in which the subject participates. Arguments provide additional information to complete the predicate. For example, in the sentence "Mary hit the ball", Mary is the subject, hit is the predicate, and the ball is an argument. A more fine-grained categorization distinguishes between different semantic roles of words, such as agent, patient, theme, location, source, and goal. Verbs usually function as predicates and often help to establish connections between different expressions to form
5525-401: The problem of meaning from a psychological perspective or how the mind of the language user affects meaning. As a subdiscipline of cognitive linguistics , it sees language as a wide cognitive ability that is closely related to the conceptual structures used to understand and represent the world. Cognitive semanticists do not draw a sharp distinction between linguistic knowledge and knowledge of
5610-601: The pronoun you in either case. Closely related fields are intercultural semantics, cross-cultural semantics, and comparative semantics. Pragmatic semantics studies how the meaning of an expression is shaped by the situation in which it is used. It is based on the idea that communicative meaning is usually context-sensitive and depends on who participates in the exchange, what information they share, and what their intentions and background assumptions are. It focuses on communicative actions, of which linguistic expressions only form one part. Some theorists include these topics within
5695-497: The public meaning that expressions have, like the meaning found in general dictionary definitions. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is the private or subjective meaning that individuals associate with expressions. It can diverge from the literal meaning, like when a person associates the word needle with pain or drugs. Meaning is often analyzed in terms of sense and reference , also referred to as intension and extension or connotation and denotation . The referent of an expression
5780-450: The relation between expressions and their denotation. One of its key tasks is to provide frameworks of how language represents the world, for example, using ontological models to show how linguistic expressions map to the entities of that model. A common idea is that words refer to individual objects or groups of objects while sentences relate to events and states. Sentences are mapped to a truth value based on whether their description of
5865-403: The role of object language and metalanguage at the same time. This is the case in monolingual English dictionaries , in which both the entry term belonging to the object language and the definition text belonging to the metalanguage are taken from the English language. Lexical semantics is the sub-field of semantics that studies word meaning. It examines semantic aspects of individual words and
5950-402: The same entity. For instance, the expressions Roger Bannister and the first man to run a four-minute mile refer to the same person but do not mean exactly the same thing. This is particularly relevant when talking about beliefs since a person may understand both expressions without knowing that they point to the same entity. A further problem is given by expressions whose meaning depends on
6035-412: The same proposition, like the English sentence "the tree is green" and the German sentence "der Baum ist grün" . Utterance meaning is studied by pragmatics and is about the meaning of an expression on a particular occasion. Sentence meaning and utterance meaning come apart in cases where expressions are used in a non-literal way, as is often the case with irony . Semantics is primarily interested in
6120-427: The same spelling are homonyms , like a bank of a river in contrast to a bank as a financial institution. Hyponymy is closely related to meronymy , which describes the relation between part and whole. For instance, wheel is a meronym of car . An expression is ambiguous if it has more than one possible meaning. In some cases, it is possible to disambiguate them to discern the intended meaning. The term polysemy
6205-440: The scope of semantics while others consider them part of the distinct discipline of pragmatics. Theories of meaning explain what meaning is, what meaning an expression has, and how the relation between expression and meaning is established. Referential theories state that the meaning of an expression is the entity to which it points. The meaning of singular terms like names is the individual to which they refer. For example,
6290-410: The sentence "it is raining outside" that raindrops are falling from the sky. The sentence is true if it is used in a situation in which the truth conditions are fulfilled, i.e., if there is actually rain outside. Truth conditions play a central role in semantics and some theories rely exclusively on truth conditions to analyze meaning. To understand a statement usually implies that one has an idea about
6375-503: The speaker's mind. According to this view, the meaning of the word dog is the idea that people have of dogs. Language is seen as a medium used to transfer ideas from the speaker to the audience. After having learned the same meaning of signs, the speaker can produce a sign that corresponds to the idea in their mind and the perception of this sign evokes the same idea in the mind of the audience. Componential analysis Componential analysis ( feature analysis or contrast analysis )
6460-464: The theoretical and analytical advancements in cognitive science (including complexity science and distributed cognition ) and anthropology. Cultural linguistics examines how various features of human languages encode cultural conceptualisations, including cultural schemas, cultural categories, and cultural metaphors. In Cultural Linguistics, language is viewed as deeply entrenched in the group-level, cultural cognition of communities of speakers. Thus far,
6545-418: The way perception and conceptualization influences language and show how that is linked to different cultures and societies. An example is how spatial orientation is expressed in various cultures. For example, in many societies, words for the cardinal directions east and west are derived from terms for sunrise/sunset. The nomenclature for cardinal directions of Inuit speakers of Greenland , however,
6630-695: The way people label and classify the cultural, social, and environmental phenomena in their world and analyze the semantic categories these classifications create in order to understand the cultural meanings behind the way people describe things in their world. Ethnosemantics as a method relies on Franz Boas ' theory of cultural relativity , as well as the theory of linguistic relativity . The use of cultural relativity in ethnosemantic analysis serves to focus analyses on individual cultures and their own language terms, rather than using ethnosemantics to create overarching theories of culture and how language affects culture. In order to perform ethnosemantic analysis, all of
6715-407: The word dog is associated with the concept of the four-legged domestic animal. Sentence meaning falls into the field of phrasal semantics and concerns the denotation of full sentences. It usually expresses a concept applying to a type of situation, as in the sentence "the dog has ruined my blue skirt". The meaning of a sentence is often referred to as a proposition . Different sentences can express
6800-479: The words in a language that are used for a particular subject are gathered by the researcher and are used to create a model of how those words relate to one another. Anthropologists who utilize ethnosemantics to create these models believe that they are a representation of how speakers of a particular language think about the topic being described. For example, in her book The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology , Harriet Ottenheimer uses
6885-432: The world and see them instead as interrelated phenomena. They study how the interaction between language and human cognition affects the conceptual organization in very general domains like space, time, causation, and action. The contrast between profile and base is sometimes used to articulate the underlying knowledge structure. The profile of a linguistic expression is the aspect of the knowledge structure that it brings to
6970-524: The world around her and the people in it. The method of componential analysis in ethnosemantic analysis is used to describe the criteria people use to classify concepts by analyzing their semantic features. For example, the word "man" can be analyzed into the semantic features "male," "mature," and "human"; "woman" can be analyzed into "female," "mature," and "human"; "girl" can be analyzed into "female," "immature," and "human"; and "bull" can be analyzed into "male," "mature," and "bovine." By using this method,
7055-542: The world is in correspondence with its ontological model. Formal semantics further examines how to use formal mechanisms to represent linguistic phenomena such as quantification , intensionality , noun phrases , plurals , mass terms, tense , and modality . Montague semantics is an early and influential theory in formal semantics that provides a detailed analysis of how the English language can be represented using mathematical logic. It relies on higher-order logic , lambda calculus , and type theory to show how meaning
7140-406: The world. Other branches of semantics include conceptual semantics , computational semantics , and cultural semantics. Theories of meaning are general explanations of the nature of meaning and how expressions are endowed with it. According to referential theories , the meaning of an expression is the part of reality to which it points. Ideational theories identify meaning with mental states like
7225-469: Was not recognized as an independent field of inquiry until the 19th century. Semantics is relevant to the fields of formal logic, computer science , and psychology . Semantics is the study of meaning in languages . It is a systematic inquiry that examines what linguistic meaning is and how it arises. It investigates how expressions are built up from different layers of constituents, like morphemes , words , clauses , sentences , and texts , and how
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