Everything about Semantics
Study of meaning in language
Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication. Semantics, together with syntactics and pragmatics, is a part of semiotics. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: SemanticsA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics, and Task-Oriented CommunicationsInfluential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: The Devil's DictionaryThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasesCited 1,949 times
- Go sideways: Meaning (philosophy)A closely related topic
- Go sideways: Formal semantics (natural language)A closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun A branch of linguistics studying the meaning of words.
Noun The study of the relationship between words and their meanings.
Noun The meaning or set of meanings of a linguistic element, such as a word, morpheme or utterance.
Noun The meanings of individual words, as opposed to the overall meaning of a passage.
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases
Meta-analyzing left hemisphere language areas: Phonology, semantics, and sentence processing
SIMPLIcity: semantics-sensitive integrated matching for picture libraries
Social semantics: altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection
A cortical network for semantics: (de)constructing the N400
From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
A survey of content-based image retrieval with high-level semantics
Semantics of context-free languages
🆕 Influential since 2022
Beyond Transmitting Bits: Context, Semantics, and Task-Oriented Communications
Brain tumor segmentation based on the fusion of deep semantics and edge information in multimodal MRI
TOPIQ: A Top-Down Approach From Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment
Semantics-Empowered Communications: A Tutorial-Cum-Survey
Right temporal degeneration and socioemotional semantics: semantic behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia
📚 Books worth reading
The Devil's DictionaryAmbrose Bierce · 1840
The Book of SignsRudolf Koch · 1923
History in English wordsOwen Barfield · 1926
SemanticsJohn I. Saeed · 1997
The Unfolding of LanguageGuy Deutscher · 2005- 📕Précis de sémantique françaiseStephen Ullmann · 1952
The principles of semanticsStephen Ullmann · 1951
Speech actsJohn R. Searle · 1969
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
- Meaning (philosophy) Meaning is the sense or significance of something. It is what expressions, representations, or events convey, stand for, refer to, or make intelligible…
- Formal semantics (natural language) Formal semantics is the scientific study of linguistic meaning through formal tools from logic and mathematics. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes…
- Principle of compositionality In semantics, mathematical logic and related disciplines, the principle of compositionality (also known as semantic compositionalism) is the principle…
- Structural semantics Structural semantics (also structuralist semantics) is a linguistic school and paradigm that emerged in Europe from the 1930s, inspired by the structuralist…
- Philosophy of language Philosophy of language, or sometimes linguistic philosophy, is the study of the nature of language. It investigates the relationship between language,…
- Computational linguistics Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate…
- Linguistics wars The linguistics wars were extended disputes among American theoretical linguists that occurred mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, stemming from a disagreement…
- Distributional semantics Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between…