A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

428 semanticity
semanticity (n.) A very general defining property of language (and other semiotic
systems): the ability of a system to convey meaning, by virtue of the
associative ties which relate the system’s signals to features of the external
world.
semantic meaning
see meaning, semantics
semantic prosody A term sometimes used in corpus-based lexicology to
describe a word which typically co-occurs with other words that belong to a
particular semantic set. For example, utterly co-occurs regularly with words of
negative evaluation (e.g. utterly appalling).
semantic relations
see sense
semantic role A term used in syntax and semantics to refer to the semantic
relations that link a predicate to its arguments in the description of a situation.
Thus in the sentence Roger milked the cow the entities are related by the
action described by the verb: Roger as the volitional instigator is often termed
the agent; and the cow as the affected entity, the patient. There is no general
agreement on the number of participant roles available to speakers of
languages, but others include: instrument, the means by which an action is
performed or something comes about; theme, the entity which is moved by an
action, or whose location is described; experiencer, the entity which is aware
of the action described by the predicate but which is not in control; beneficiary,
the entity for whose benefit the action was performed; location (locative),
the place in which something is situated or takes place; goal, the entity or place
towards which something moves; and source, the entity or place from which
something moves. It has been suggested that these roles may be subsumed into
two main types: the macro-roles of actor and undergoer, or, in an alternative
terminology, the proto-roles of agent and patient. These roles have been important
in the establishment of semantic classes of verbs. Other names for these roles
include deep semantic cases, functional roles, participant roles, and, especially in
Chomskyan linguistics, thematic (or theta, θ) roles.
semantics (n.) A major branch of linguistics devoted to the study of meaning
in language. The term is also used in philosophy and logic, but not with
the same range of meaning or emphasis as in linguistics. Philosophical semantics
examines the relations between linguistic expressions and the phenomena in
the world to which they refer, and considers the conditions under which such
expressions can be said to be true or false, and the factors which affect the
interpretation of language as used. Its history of study, which reaches back to
the writings of Plato and Aristotle, in the twentieth century includes the work of
such philosophers and logicians as Charles Peirce (1839–1914), Rudolf Carnap
(1891–1970) and Alfred Tarski (1902–83), particularly under the heading
of semiotics and the ‘philosophy of language’. ‘Logical’ or ‘pure’ semantics
(formal semantics) is the study of the meaning of expressions in terms of logical
systems of analysis, or calculi, and is thus more akin to formal logic or mathematics
than to linguistics.