York, United Kingdom

Comparative Syntax and Semantics

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Qualification: MA
Kind of studies: full-time studies, part-time studies
Master of Arts (MA)
University website: www.york.ac.uk
Comparative
In linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality, or degree. See comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well as positive and superlative degrees of comparison.
Semantics
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός sēmantikós, "significant") is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning, in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, usually including word order. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.
Semantics
All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.
Felix Frankfurter, Reply to counsel who said a challenge from the bench was “just a matter of semantics,” Reader’s Digest (June 1964).
Semantics
[ Semantics can be defined as] the science of the meanings of words, [the central issue of which is] the problem of the relationship between words and designata.
Witold Doroszewski, "Uwagi o semantyce" [Comments on Semantics], in Mysl Filozoficzna, 1955, No. 3 (17); As cited in Schaff (1962;6).
Semantics
"What is good in Korzybski's work," they say, "is not new, and what is new is not good." On the other hand, many "Korzybski-ites" proclaim that Korzybski's work has "nothing to do" with semantics. They go so far as to say that the very term "general semantics" was an unfortunate choice; that had Korzybski known what confusion would arise between semantics and general semantics he would not have used it at all. Korzybski himself has maintained that while semantics belongs to the philosophy of language and perhaps to the theory of knowledge, general semantics belongs to empirical science: that it is the foundation of a science of man, the basis of the first "non-aristotelian system," which has had no predecessor and which no academic semanticist has ever achieved.
Anatol Rapoport in Et Cetera, (1953), p. 14.
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