Semantics

Semantics is the branch of linguistics that studies the meanings of linguistic units constituting the lexicon of a language: morphemes, words, phrases, idioms, sentences, or texts. Semantics studies the relations among these meanings, and how they can form semantic domains or fields. Semantics is connected to syntax and morphology, which respectively study sentence and word structure, and to pragmatics and discourse analysis, which respectively study language use and discourse relations and structures. Semantics is also connected to psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and the study of language and communication disorders since each of these experimental disciplines investigate how speakers can acquire, access, use, and lose these meanings and relations. This entry presents key notions of semantics, theoretical and experimental alike.