Once you have a handle on the words themselves, context comes into play. One part of studying language is understanding the many meanings of individual words. For a deeper dive, read these examples and exercises on connotative words. As such, semantics and connotation are deeply entwined. Connotation will be derived from the manner in which you interpret a word or sentence’s meaning. Meanwhile, connotation deals with the emotion evoked from a word. Denotation is the standard definition of a word. This is where context is important.Ĭonceptual semantics opens the door to a conversation on connotation and denotation. But, the word cougar has also come to indicate an older woman who’s dating a younger man. Conceptual Semantics - Conceptual semantics deals with the most basic concept and form of a word before our thoughts and feelings added context to it.įor example, at its most basic we know a cougar to be a large wild cat.This can include a study of individual nouns, verbs, adjectives, prefixes, root words, suffixes, or longer phrases or idioms. Lexical Semantics - Lexical semantics deconstruct words and phrases within a line of text to understand the meaning in terms of context.Has your teacher ever asked you to use an “if… then” question? It breaks apart lines of information to detect the underlying meaning or consequence of events. Formal Semantics - Formal semantics uses techniques from math, philosophy, and logic to analyze the broader relationship between language and reality, truth and possibility.Since meaning in language is so complex, there are actually different theories used within semantics, such as formal semantics, lexical semantics, and conceptual semantics. Semantics play a large part in our daily communication, understanding, and language learning without us even realizing it.įor example, in everyday use, a child might make use of semantics to understand a mom’s directive to “do your chores” as, “do your chores whenever you feel like it.” However, the mother was probably saying, “do your chores right now.” It influences our reading comprehension as well as our comprehension of other people’s words in everyday conversation. Semantics involves the deconstruction of words, signals, and sentence structure.

Semantic error