Semantics I acknowledgements
The Relation of Semantics with Other Branches of Linguistics
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| 2. 2 The Relation of Semantics with Other Branches of Linguistics To speak about the relation of semantics with the other branches of linguistics like phonology, morphology, and syntax is to relate meaning with sounds, words or morphemes and the arrangement of words into a larger unit like sentences. Words or morphemes are formed from phonological elements. Morphemes are meaningful in a sense which makes them contrast with nonsense syllables and non-words. They cannot convey full messages in linguistic communication as do words and sentences. For example, the words like girl, chair, and plane are meaningful in a different way from affixes like un-, -ness, and ed. So, morphemes have no intrinsic semantic content. The larger constituents then are formed from them, and it is of course, the meaning of higher level syntactic constituent comes from the meanings of their component words. But the meaning of the higher level constituents does not depend only on the meaning of its words. It also depends on the syntactic structure, that is, the words are syntactically arranged. The same words can mean different thins when arranged indifferent order, as illustrated in Lydia had visited Robert. - Robert had visited Lydia. The sentence can be semantically-ill if it is rearranged like, - Lydia Robert visited had. So, to be able to understand sentences, we must be able to go from the meaning of words in syntactic relations to the meaning of sentences. SEMANTICS Page Learning the sounds, the meaning, the words and the rules to combine these words to form sentences constitute the grammar of a language (Fromkin & Rodman, 1974 Our question then, to which semantics has the close link among those branches of linguistics It will be more easily seen in a model of theory of grammar, that is, Standard theory of Chomsky, which is quoted in Leech (1981 : 344), ad diagrammed below (read from top to bottom) : TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR Semantic interpretation (Projection Rules) (Base) DEEP STRUCTURE (Transformational Rules) SURFACE STRUCTURE (Phonological Rules) Phonetic Interpretation The deep structure from which we come (as the base) give information of the meaning (Semantic interpretation) through projection Rules, that is, the projection of sentence meaning from word meanings, SEMANTICS Page and rules that use information about the syntactic structures of sentences are abstract representations which most clearly reflect the meaning of the sentence. The surface structure is what the speaker actually utters which is transformed from Deep Structure through transformational Rules. Then, it is interpreted through phonological rules to determine the phonetic form of the sentence. To make clear, let’s have a look to the sentence like The red book is new. The deep structure of the sentence from which it derives is The book is red. - The book is new. Which can be drawn in three diagrams as follows : S NP Aux VP NP S adj P AIP aux VP The book the book is red is new SEMANTICS Page Actually, this Deep Structure is transformed into Surface Structure through transformation rules by process of adding, deleting and rearranging constituents (Wardhaugh, 1977 : 253). So the surface Structure The red book is new has undergone process of deletion into which it remains so. The surface is what speaker actually utters, and this constitutes the phonetic form of the sentences which is interpreted by phonological rules. So the phonetic form of The red book is new Phonological from them determine surface structure but it seems to be unaffected since the sentence is understood in terms of its lexical items and grammatical relations among the lexical items, not merely in the surface presentation of an utterance. From this we can see a close link between meaning and structure (Semantic and Syntax). In the diagram above an arrow from the Base to DEEP STRUCTURE shows us that before producing the surface structure, our mind had been filled by lexical items and deep syntactic of it. We are not only concerned with the lexical tem (word meaning) but also sentence meaning. Sentence meaning derived from word meaning, which is determined by its grammatical relation. Download 332.89 Kb. Share with your friends:
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