Szemantikát

Szemantikát is a term that refers to the study of meaning in language. It is a branch of linguistics that investigates the relationship between words, phrases, sentences, and larger linguistic units, and the concepts or referents they represent. This field explores how meaning is constructed and understood by speakers and listeners.

Semantics encompasses various aspects of meaning, including lexical semantics, which focuses on the meaning of individual words, and compositional semantics, which examines how the meanings of individual words combine to create the meaning of larger expressions. It also considers pragmatic meaning, which is the meaning that arises from the context of a situation and the intentions of the speaker, often going beyond the literal meaning of words.

Key areas of inquiry within semantics include ambiguity, where a word or phrase can have multiple meanings, and synonymy and antonymy, which deal with words that have similar or opposite meanings, respectively. Furthermore, semanticists study how meaning can change over time, a phenomenon known as semantic change. The ultimate goal of semantics is to provide a systematic account of how language conveys meaning and how this meaning is interpreted by humans.