semàntiques

Semàntiques is the branch of linguistics that studies meaning in language. It examines how words, phrases and sentences convey content, how meanings relate to each other, and how context affects interpretation. The term derives from Greek semantikos meaning signifying.

The field is typically divided into subareas. Lexical semantics studies the meaning of individual words and relations among them—synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, hyponymy. Compositional or formal semantics studies how the meaning of larger units (phrases, sentences) follows from the meanings of their parts and the syntactic structure, often using truth-conditions and model-theoretic methods. The philosophy of language has long influenced semantics, with problems such as sense and reference, truth-conditions, and the nature of entailment. Practical theories include cognitive linguistics, which emphasizes mental representations and image schemas, and frame semantics, which analyzes meaning in terms of structured knowledge frames.

Approaches include Fregean semantics (sense and reference), Montague-style formal semantics (possible-worlds and formal models), and distributional or contextual semantics (meaning derived from statistical patterns in corpora).

Across languages, semantics also addresses semantic change, polysemy, and semantic roles like agent, patient, and experiencer.

Applications include natural language processing, dictionary compilation, machine translation, and information retrieval. Researchers use tools from linguistics, computer science, and cognitive science, including corpora, lexical databases, and vector-space models, to model and analyze meaning.