Basic Concepts: Semantics, Pragmatic and Grammatical Elements.

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Semantics

Is the study of meaning, reference, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines including linguistics, philosophy, and computer science.

Semantic Categories

Agent: Brown noted that children usually make a distinction between animate beings and inanimate objects. Animate beings are things that are alive such as dogs, cats, horses, people, and so on.

Action: A third semantic category is that of ACTION. Words in this category which express the idea of action include such words as kick, run, bark, and so on.

Object: In contrast to animate beings, inanimate objects are not alive and they are, therefore, not capable of acting independently or of making decisions.

Location: Words in this semantic category express the notion of place. They may indicate where an AGENT or OBJECT is, or moves to, and where an ACTION is performed.

Theories in linguistic semantics

●Formal semantics

Formal semantics seeks to identify domain-specific mental operations which speakers perform when they compute a sentence's meaning on the basis of its syntactic structure.

●Conceptual semantics

This theory is an effort to explain properties of argument structure. The assumption behind this theory is that syntactic properties of phrases reflect the meanings of the words that head them.

●Cognitive semantics

Cognitive semantics approaches meaning from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In this framework, language is explained via general human cognitive abilities rather than a domain-specific language module.

●Lexical semantics

A linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations.

Pragmatic

Is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies how context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics and anthropology.

Pragmatics outlines the study of meaning in the interactional context

●It looks beyond the literal meaning of an utterance and considers how meaning is constructed as well as focusing on implied meanings. It considers language as an instrument of interaction, what people mean when they use language and how we communicate and understand each other.

●Pragmatics acts as the basis for all language interactions and contact. It is a key feature to the understanding of language and the responses that follow this. Therefore, without the fuction of Pragmatics, there would be very little understanding of intention and meaning.

Theories of Pragmatics

Speech act theory by Searle: Words do not have meaning by themselves.

Cooperative Theory: The way in which people try to make conversations work.

Relevance Theory: The meaning of a concept is the subtotal of its impication for posible observations and actions.

Argumentation Theory: Interdisciplinary study of how humans do reach conclusions though logical reasoning.

Scope of Pragmatics

Semiotic

●Syntax addresses the formal relations of sings to one another.

●Pragmatics the relation of signs to their users and interpreters.

●Semantics the relation of sings to what they denote.

Grammatical elements

Letter, Number, or symbol of Punctuation, as-well-as other symbolic characters such as Scientific, Mathematical, and Computational Symbols. Each of these Pictographic Symbols function as a single individual “Element” within a Grammatical Unit.

All Grammatical Units are made-up-of the Grammatical Elements known-as: “Letters” — and sometimes, the Grammatical Elements known-as: “Punctuation” (for example the Grammatical Element of the “Apostrophe” in the Grammatical Unit of the contracted Word, “You’re”.) Grammatical Units are (often) then, combined with the help of the Grammatical Elements known-as: “Punctuation” to form Grammatical Devices like those mentioned above.

Grammar method

The practice of gramar: Grammar practice should aim to develop precision when using the language system, and to develop automatic use of language; this is known as automatization. In the teaching of grammar those terms are also known as accuracy and fluency.

Bibliography

. "Meaning (Semantics and Pragmatics) | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2017-08-25.

.Brown, R. (1973) A First Language London: Allen and Unwin.

.Buckley, B. (2003) Children’s Communication Skills: From Birth to Five Years London: Routledge. https://www.sltinfo.com/semantic-categories/

.Bertuccelli, M. (1993). Qué es la pragmática. Barcelona: Paidós, 1995.https://all-about-linguistics.group.shef.ac.uk/branches-of-linguistics/pragmatics/what-is-pragmatics/