BASIC NOTIONS IN SEMANTICS

An Indonesian student who learns English at the beginner level may misunderstand the meaning of the sentence I could eat a horse even though he understands the meaning of each word in the sentence. His limited semantic knowledge cannot help him recognize the non-literal meaning of the above sentence. Semantics can eqquip a language learner with this linguistic ability that allows him to communicate facts, feelings, or intentions to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him. Saeed (2003: 47) defines semantics as ‘the study of meaning of words and sentences’. In similar vein, Kreidler (1998: 3) asserts that ‘semantics is the systemic study of meaning’. Hurford et.al (2007: 7) says that ‘native speakers of languages are the primary source of information about meaning’. However, non-native speakers of a language can study the meaning of a language by recognizing the forms of communication: verbal and non-verbal communication.

In verbal communication, there are three levels of meaning: utterance, sentence, and proposition. Utterance is something that people express whether it is in written or spoken form (Saeed 2003: 12). Utterance is the concrete unit that can be a sequence of sentences, a single phrase, or even a single word (Hurford et.al 2007: 16). ‘Sentence is concieved abstractly, a string of words put together by grammatical rules of a language’ (Hurford et.al 2007: 17). Kreidler (1998: 27) points outs that a sentence is a construction of words in a particular sequence that is meaningful. There are three people in the same room uttering:
(1)‘This room is hot’,
It means that there are three utterances but there is only one sentence. In (1) hot is the predicator and describes the state This room is. The predicator in declarative sentence can be of various parts of speech: adjectives, verbs, prepositions, and noun. They share the property of being able to function as the predicators of a sentence. In order to know the meaning of (1), we need to know the proposition of this sentence. Proposition is the content of the sentence. It is ‘the part of the meaning of the utterance of a declarative sentence which describes some state of affairs’ (Hurford et.al 2007: 20). True proposition corresponds to the facts while false proposition does not. In (1), it is true that the room is hot. Proposition consists of an argument and a predicate. Argument is what the proposition is about and predicate is what is attributed to the argument. In (1), the argument is This room and the predicate is hot. Thus, the relationship between these notions is that the sentence This room is hot can be expressed with another different sentence (say This room is not cool) and each of these sentences can be uttered an infinite number of times.

Meaning can also be communicated by the way it is said. Utterances are produced with variations of prosody that consists of accent and intonation (Kreidler1998: 30). In additon to this, paralanguage, appearance, tone of voice and gesture can communicate something about the mood of the speakers, which eventually contribute to meaning intrepretation. As an example, when the sentence (2) I got the scholarship is uttered with falling intonation, it means that the speaker informs the hearer that she got the scholarship. In contrast, when it is uttered with rising intonation, the speaker does not believe or she is surprised that she got the scholarship.

Another important aspect to understand meaning is by studying lexical semantics. Cruse (2004: 26) suggests extentional approach to correlate expressions in language with the things in the world referred to. In the dialog below:
(3) A : ‘Do you live around here ?’
B : ‘No, my house is in the suburb’
both A and B have the knowledge that the word house denotes the whole class of potential referents of the object house. Reference in wider sense is ‘the relationship between a word and or phrase and its entity in the external world’ (Richards and Schmidt 2002: 450). However, My house, which refers to a particular house (B’s), may be intrepreted differently. The word house to A may be a 21 square meter house whereas to B it is a two story luxurious house. This is called connotation. It refers to ‘the affective or emotional associations it elicits, which clearly need not be the same for all people who know and use the word’.(Kreidler1998: 45). To turn from reference to sense, sense is the relationship inside the language (Hurford et.al 2007: 26). The sentences below show that the same word can have more than one sense:
(4) I have a chicken.
(5) She is a chicken.
In (4) chicken refers to the object ‘chicken’ in the real world while in (5) chicken means timid. Because of this sense, a word co-occurs or does not co-occur with another word meaningfully.
Saeed (2003: 68) devides the lexical relations into several types. Those expressing identity and inclusion between word meanings are called homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, hyponymy, and meronymy. The others expressing opposition and exclusion are antonymy.
Homonymy is unrelated senses of the same phonological word, e.g.:
(6) bank can mean a financial institution or the side of the river
A polysemy deals with multiple senses of the same phonological word, e.g.:
(7) He hurt his foot.
(8) He stood at the foot of the stairs.
A synonymy is different phonological word which have the same or very similar meanings, e.g.:
(9) seaman/sailor
A hyponym is also called the superordinate or hyperonym e.g.:
(10) rose and jasmine are hyponyms of animal
Meronymy is decribed as a part-whole relationship between lexical items, e.g:
(11) wheel, engine, door are meronymy of car.
An antonymy is traditionally described as words which are opposite in meaning, e.g:
(12) dead/alive
While Cruse (2004: 150) puts forward that taxonymy is a subtype of hyponymy, e.g:
(13) A mustang is a type of a horse but a stallion is not. A stallion specifies sex

In summary, these basic notions of semantics is essential to enrich language users’ linguistic competence. As a result, misintrepretation in understanding the meaning of words can be eliminated.

References
Cruse, D.A. 2004. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics. (2nd ed)
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hurford, J.R.and B. Heasly. 2007. Semantics: A course book (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kreidler, Kate. 1998. Introducing English Semantics. London: Routledge.
Saeed, J.I. 2003. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Richards, J.C and R. Schmidt, 2002. Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied
Linguistics. (3rd ed) Harlow: Longman Group.