Blog 6 - Semantics Explained
Above is a link for a document written by Richmond H. Thomason. This article, or document as he calls it when you read through the entry is all about semantic language, something talked about in Chapter 5 of our textbook. Thomason defines semantics as the the study of the meaning of linguistic expressions. Arrangement of words plays a large role in semantic language. Semantic rules are not the same across all languages, but all languages have semantics.
He also talks about something that is more and more prevalent in our society today: something called natural-language semantics. Basically this has to do with computers and the language they use and the language we use. The majority of the population today knows that computers operate in written code and have little to no knowledge of this code, so computers and programs have a natural language interface that allows us to type or drag and drop things exactly as we want them without dealing with the artificial language of computers. Because of the ambiguity of our languages, this natural language interface is becoming a very studied part of human and computer interaction.
I thought this article was very interesting and covered a lot of material from chapter 5. I also liked that it explained some things in a different way than the book. It helped me with some understanding, so I thought it would be the perfect thing to talk about if some other people were struggling with any of the covered concepts.
I read that all languages have semantics, but it is not the same across all languages as well. I am curious as to how our language would evolve and how the semantics of our language would change from using computers or electronics that changes our way of communicating with each other. This was a good read and it did help me some!
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