Definition of semantics:

   the study of language meaning(meaning is central to the stuady of communication)

 Four views on meaning:

   naming theory(Plato)

   the conceptalism view

   contextualism

   behaviorism

 The difference among meaning, sense and reference

Lexical meaning

sense and reference are both concerned with the study of word meaning .They are two related but different aspects of meaning.

 Major sense relations:

  synonymy: refers to the sameness or close similarity of meaning

    1.dialectal synonyms     2.stylistic synonyms

    3.synonyms that differ in their emotive or evaluative meaning

    4.collocational synonyms  

    5.semantically different synonyms

  polysemy: the same one word may have more than one meaning

  homonymy: the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form

     1. homophone  2. homograph   3. complete homonym

    A pilysemic word is the result of the evolution of the primary meaning of the world while complele homonyms are often brought into being by concidence.

   hyponymy: the sense relation between a more general, more inclusive word and a more specific word

      1.superordinate   2.hyponyms    3.co-hyponyms

   antonymy:the opposite in meaning

      1.gradable antonyms   2.complememtary antonyms

      3.relational opposites