This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life. N. J. Enfield draws on semantic and pragmatic case studies from his extensive fieldwork in Laos to investigate a range of semantic fields including emotion terms, culinary terms, landscape terminology, and honorific pronouns, among many others. These studies form the building blocks of a conceptual framework for understanding meaning in language.
Syntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual structure; since we can express our conceptual thought in many different linguistic ways, we cannot equate conceptual and semantic structures.
1. 8 fundamental reading skills and strategies: Characters, Story Structure, Main Idea & Details, Compare & Contrast, Sequence, Cause & Effect, Problem & Solution, and Fact & Opinion
2. 20 engaging units cover both real life and school subject content
3. A captivating photo and a semantic map encourage students to actively predict the text
The Handbook of Semantics provides a broad and state-of-the-art survey of this field, covering semantic research at both word and sentence level. It presents a synoptic view of the most important areas of semantic investigation, including contemporary methodologies and debates, and indicating possible future directions in the field.
This monograph centers on a group of statistical methods referred to as linguistic profiles that have been developed recently by researchers at the University of Tromso (Norway). These methods are based on the observation that there is a strong correlation between semantic and distributional properties of linguistic units. This book discusses grammatical, semantic, constructional, collostructional and diachronic profiles."
