semantika

Semantika is the branch of linguistics that studies meaning in language. It examines how words, phrases, and sentences convey information, how meanings combine, and how speakers and listeners determine truth, reference, and interpretation. Semantics is distinct from pragmatics, which investigates how context and speaker intent affect meaning.

Key areas include lexical semantics, which looks at word meaning and relationships such as synonymy, polysemy, and antonymy; and formal or compositional semantics, which analyzes how the meaning of larger expressions is built from their parts, often using tools from logic and mathematics. Central concepts include reference and sense, truth conditions, entailment, and semantic compositionality—the idea that the meaning of a complex expression depends on the meanings of its constituents and their syntactic arrangement.

History features early work by Frege on sense and reference, theories of description by Russell, and later developments in model-theoretic and possible-world semantics. In the latter part of the 20th century, Montague grammar bridged linguistics and formal logic, while Kripke and others refined theories of reference and meaning in philosophy.

Methods include formal semantics, using model theory, lambda calculus, and type theory; alongside cognitive and lexical semantics that explore mental representations and conceptual structures. Semantics interacts with phonology, syntax, and pragmatics, and is not confined to any single language.

Applications span natural language processing, machine translation, information retrieval, knowledge representation, and lexicography. Cross-linguistic semantics investigates how different languages encode similar concepts, contributing to theories of language universals and variation.