Text
An Overview of Semantics
This book is tailored to meet needs of preliminary materials or an overview of what Semantics is. Semantics has a wide range of issues and is composed of two subfields; lexical semantics dealing with meaning of lexical items and the relationships between them and grammatical and meaning roles in sentence as well as sentence semantics dealing with proposition and its relation with entailments.
Hence, this book is restricted to issues such as what meaning is, types of meaning, relationships between word meanings, literal meaning, denotative meaning, connotative meaning, figurative meaning, referential meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, word meaning, sentence meaning, utterance meaning, and meaning categories comprising tense, modality, reference, sense, and deixis.
However, figures of speech that are not commonly dealt with in linguistics books, including semantics books are included in this book. In my viewpoint, figures of speech, in spite of the fact that they are dominantly used in literary works such as poems, novels, dramas, and plays, should also be elaborated in linguistics, especially semantics for they are concerned with meaning in daily communication, the core of semantic analysis. This book does not contain all figures of speech of which number is hundreds. This book discusses only dozens of them since some of them are just subfields of the other or their contradictions and their close relations. For instance, irony is closely related to paradox, metaphor is closely related to simile and hyperbole, hyperbole is closely related to overstatement and its contradiction with understatement, synocdeche is closely related to metonymy, oxymoron is closely related to paradox, etc. Shortly speaking, the figures of speech discussed in this book are those that are more frequently used. If every one of figures of speech is elaborated it requires too vast and broad elaboration.
Referring to this book, the readers are expected to know important principles of semantics especially lexical semantics, how central it is in the study of language, and literature as well as daily exchanges and its relations with other branches of linguistics.
Despite that the content of this book is a bit more than just basic or primary understanding of semantics, not only is it important for beginners but also for intermediate learners of semantics. But in order for the readers to get more rigorous wit on semantics in higher level, it is important that other references be accessed. This book can be used as practical materials for undergraduate students of university before going further to the study of lexical semantics and sentence semantics in an advanced level.
The materials are organized beginning from the preliminary things to a more complex study to make the readers capable of seeing the continuity of one component to another one so the interrelation between the components may be understood.
B410008156 | 421 HIM o | My Library (Bahasa) | Tersedia |
Tidak tersedia versi lain