Area that studies the meaning of linguistic signs, their origin, combination and context
Semantics refers to everything that is linked or belongs to the meaning of words. the same is associated with the meaning, interpretation and meaning of words, symbols and expressions.
For this reason, it is that Semantics is also called the part of Linguistics that deals precisely with studying the meaning of linguistic signs and their combinations.
In other words, it is about the discipline, a science that studies the meaning of words.
In relation to signs, semantics will study the origin and meaning of words and many other symbols in relation to the objects they represent.
At the request of a text, semantics will deal with studying the relationship that is established between the various words of the discourse in order to unravel what it wants to communicate to us, not only focusing on the literalness that each linguistic element holds but also considering and taking into account account the context in which it is found and the literary resources used in it. That is to say, here he will make a more general approach, not what this or that word means in isolation, but rather that all of them will be analyzed in relation to the factors mentioned in order to achieve a satisfactory understanding of the text.
connotation and denotation
Semantics is usually divided into two parts: connotation and denotation. The latter consists of the most common and accepted expression of a word and which is what we normally find in dictionaries or encyclopedias. For its part, the connotation will be the secondary way of using a word and that is mostly influenced by localisms and colloquialism of the language. This connotative meaning usually appears in dictionaries, although not always.
With an example we will clearly see the question, the word rat refers to that rodent mammal, that is, this would be its denotative meaning. Meanwhile, in the connotative form, when speaking of a rat, it can refer to a person who is stingy, or to someone despicable.
branches of semantics
All media assume a correspondence between expressions and certain situations or things, whether they correspond to the material or abstract world.
Meanwhile, semantics can be studied through different points of view, which is why it breaks down into the following branches: linguistic semantics, which will study the encoding of meaning in the context of linguistic expressions. In turn, it is divided into structural semantics and lexical semantics. The denotation that is the relationship between a word and what it refers to.
And for its part, the connotation, which will be the relationship between a word and what it means according to the experiences and the context. Likewise, the study that is carried out on the referent (what a word in question denotes, such as a proper name or a common noun) and the meaning (the mental image that the referent forms) are also integral parts of the linguistic semantics; logical semantics deals with the analysis of logical problems of significance, then, for this, it must study the signs, such as parentheses and quantified, among others, variables, constants, rules, predicates; and the semantics of cognitive science especially addresses the psychic mechanism between the interlocutors in the communicative process, because the mind makes permanent relationships between the combinations of signs and other external issues that introduce meaning.
The generative semantics It is the linguistic theory that departs from generative grammar by providing that every sentence made comes from a semantic and not a syntactic structure.
The branch of semantics known as logical semantics has a special presence at the request of mathematics, taking charge of the study of logical problems of significance and focusing on the interpretation of predicates, rules, signs and variables. Its specific functionality in mathematics, in terms of sets, is the establishment of structural relationships that occur between the different elements linked to each other.
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