Depending on context, a flowering plant could be referred to as a weed or a flower.
“Crash” can mean an auto accident, a drop in the Stock Market, to attend a party without being invited, ocean waves hitting the shore, or the sound of cymbals being struck together.A water pill could be a pill with water in it but it is understood to be a diuretic that causes a person to lose water from his body.Here are some examples of everyday words that can have more than one meaning: So, context (the current situation) will always play a role in everyday semantics. But, what if the woman told the man, “I love you,” and, after a long pause, all he said was, “I care for you… a lot.” She’d be crushed. The same word can be said to two people and they can interpret them differently.įor example, imagine a man told a woman, “I care for you… a lot.” Wouldn’t that made the woman’s heart melt? Sure, if he just said that out of the blue, walking down the beach one day. Once you have a handle on the words themselves, context comes into play. One part of studying language is understanding the many meanings of individual words. For a deeper dive, read these examples and exercises on connotative words. As such, semantics and connotation are deeply entwined. Connotation will be derived from the manner in which you interpret a word or sentence’s meaning. Meanwhile, connotation deals with the emotion evoked from a word. Denotation is the standard definition of a word. This is where context is important.Ĭonceptual semantics opens the door to a conversation on connotation and denotation. But, the word cougar has also come to indicate an older woman who’s dating a younger man. Conceptual Semantics - Conceptual semantics deals with the most basic concept and form of a word before our thoughts and feelings added context to it.įor example, at its most basic we know a cougar to be a large wild cat.This can include a study of individual nouns, verbs, adjectives, prefixes, root words, suffixes, or longer phrases or idioms.
It influences our reading comprehension as well as our comprehension of other people’s words in everyday conversation. Semantics involves the deconstruction of words, signals, and sentence structure.