Syntactic Semantics

Introduction
• A language is a set of valid sentences. What
makes a sentence valid? You can break validity
down into two things: syntax and semantics.
• The term syntax refers to grammatical
structure of the sentence whereas the term
semantics refers to the meaning of the words
in that structure.
• Grammatical (syntactically valid) does not
mean that the sentence will be sensible as well
(semantically valid). For example, the
grammatical sentence "cows flow supremely"
is grammatically ok (subject verb adverb) in
English, but makes no sense.
Syntactic semantics means the understanding of
sentences based on the meanings of the
words inside it. As we know, there are some
words whose meaning is understood
according to the other words around them.
Why? Because they have more than just a
single meaning.
For example,
‘The bat is flying ’.
Now the word bat has two meanings. Bat as an
object and bat as a mammal. In the above
sentence, bat means the mammal because of
the verb ‘flying’. This sentence is both
syntactically and semantically correct.
• Sentences vary in their meanings according to
the grammatical structure (syntax) and
vocabulary (semantics). Understanding of a
sentence from these two point of views
means syntactic semantics.
• Syntactic semantics is studied through the
following ways:
• Ambiguity
• Contradiction
• Entailments
• Semantic anomaly
• Presupposition
Now go and check the video in the below given
link to understand the concepts of ambiguity,
contradiction and entailments. We will discuss
semantic anomaly and presupposition in the
next lecture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_mxmQO
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