1. Meaning of Words and Sentences:
* Lexical Semantics: Studies the meaning of individual words and their relationships to other words within a language (e.g., synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms).
* Sentence Semantics: Examines the meaning of sentences and how the meaning of individual words contributes to the overall meaning of the sentence. This includes understanding sentence structure, logical relationships between words, and the context in which the sentence is used.
* Compositional Semantics: Explores how the meaning of a sentence is constructed from the meanings of its individual parts, considering grammatical rules and word order.
2. Meaning in Context:
* Pragmatics: Focuses on the meaning of language in context, taking into account factors like speaker intent, social context, and cultural norms.
* Discourse Semantics: Analyzes the meaning of larger units of text (e.g., paragraphs, conversations), considering the relationships between sentences and how meaning is built up over time.
* Cognitive Semantics: Explores the mental processes involved in understanding and interpreting meaning, including the role of conceptual metaphors and mental models.
3. Formal Representations of Meaning:
* Formal Semantics: Uses formal logic and mathematical tools to represent and analyze meaning, often using systems like predicate logic or truth-conditional semantics.
* Computational Semantics: Develops computational methods for representing and processing meaning, including techniques like natural language processing and machine learning.
4. Applications of Semantics:
* Natural Language Understanding (NLU): Semantics is crucial for developing computer systems that can understand human language, such as chatbots and search engines.
* Machine Translation: Semantic analysis is essential for translating text accurately, by capturing the meaning of the source language and generating equivalent meaning in the target language.
* Knowledge Representation: Semantic models can be used to represent knowledge in a structured and organized way, enabling efficient retrieval and reasoning.
In summary, the scope of semantics covers the study of meaning in its various forms, from the meaning of individual words to the meaning of complex texts and the cognitive processes involved in understanding language. It has applications in numerous fields, from linguistics and philosophy to computer science and artificial intelligence.