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Category
Semantics
Summary
Semantics () is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer science.
In English, the study of meaning in language has been known by many names that involve the Ancient Greek word σῆμα (sema, "sign, mark, token").
In 1690, a Greek rendering of the term semiotics, the interpretation of signs and symbols, finds an early allusion in John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:
The third Branch may be called σημειωτική [simeiotikí, "semiotics"], or the Doctrine of Signs, the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also λογικὴ, Logick.
In 1831, the term sematology is suggested for the third branch of division of knowledge akin to Locke; the "signs of our knowledge".
In 1857, the term semasiology (borrowed from German Semasiologie) is attested in Josiah W. Gibbs' Philological studies with English illustrations:
The development of intellectual and moral ideas from physical, constitutes an important part of semasiology, or that branch of grammar which treats of the development of the meaning of words. It is built on the analogy and correlation of the physical and intellectual worlds.
In 1893, the term semantics is used to translate French sémantique as used by Michel Bréal. Some years later, in Essai de Sémantique, Bréal writes:
What I have tried to do is to draw some broad lines, to mark some divisions and as a provisional plan on a field not yet exploited, and which requires the combined work of several generations of linguists. I therefore ask the reader to consider this book as a simple Introduction to the science I have proposed to call Semantics. [In footnote:] σημαντική τέχνη, the science of signification [i.e., what it means], from the verb σημαίνω "to signify", as opposed to Phonetics, the science of sounds [i.e., what it sounds like].
In 1922, the concept of semantics is attested in mathematical logic amidst a group of scholars in Poland including Leon Chwistek, Leśniewski, Łukasiewicz, Kotarbinski, Adjukiewicz, and Tarski.
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