Semantic Theory THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

CHAPTER II THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 Semantic Theory

One of the insight modern linguistics is that speakers of a language have different types of linguistics knowledge, including how to pronounce words, how to construct sentences, and about the meaning of individual words and sentences. To reflect this, linguistics description has different level of analysis. One of them is in giving the meaning of linguistics expressions we should establish definitions of the meanings of words. Semantics is commonly defined as the study of meaning communicated through language. The word semantics comes from the Greek word, Semantikos mean “significant”, Semainein mean “to show”, “signify” or “indicated by a sign”; from Sema means “sign”. The concept of semantics has been use until the 20 th century as can be evident from ‘The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English’, published in 1972, which defines semantics ‘branch of philosophy concerned with changes in the meaning of words’. It is also interesting to know that their dictionary has classified semantics into plural nouns, so has linguistics The study of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, and paraphrased. Regarding the term semantics, let us see some definitions of semantics by some linguists below: 1. Semantics is the study of meaning communicated through language Saeed, 1997:3 Universitas Sumatera Utara 2. Semantics is a mayor branch linguistics devoted to the study of meaning in language Crystal, 1980:315 3. Semantics is the study of word meanings and the ways in which words are related to one another lexicon in our mental Gleason, 1998:13 4. Semantics is the study of meaning. It concerned with what the sentence and other linguistics objects express, not with the arrangements of their syntactic parts of their pronunciation J.J Katz, 1972:1 Leech 1974:ix said, “Semantics is central to the study of communication; and as communication becomes more and more a crucial factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing. Semantics is also at the centre of the study of human mind-thought process, cognition and conceptualization”. In conveying the meaning within communication, there are usually different perceptions and views from the listeners. We have to know the speaker’s intent and the context of utterance in order to avoid misunderstanding. It means that semantic analysis become more complicated than attaching definitions to linguistic expressions. Modern linguistics assumed that when a speaker combines words to form sentences according to the grammatical rules of his language, the word definitions are combined to form phrase and then sentence definitions, giving us the meanings of sentences. In attaching the definitions of words, we will be faced with 3 problems. The first is the problem of circularity. If the definitions of word meaning are given in words, the process might never end. How can we state the Universitas Sumatera Utara meaning of a word, except in other words, either in the same or a different language? Then, a second problem is how to make sure that our definitions of a word’s meaning are exact. If we ask where the meanings of words exist, the answer must be in the mind of native speakers of the language. So, what should we do if we find that speakers of a language differ in their understanding of what a word means ? Whose knowledge should we pick as our ‘meaning’ ? The third problem comes from looking at what particular utterances mean in context. If features of context are part of an utterance’s meaning then how can we include them in our definitions ? These three issues show that our definitions theory is too simple to do what we want.

2.2 Scope of Semantics