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But philosophy, sociology, and anthropology have long established traditions in contrasting the different nuances of the terms and concepts we use. Translation theory, ethnolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and cultural linguistics specialize in the field of comparing, contrasting, and translating words, terms and meanings from one language to another (see Herder, W. Are words like love, truth, and hate universals? Is even the word sense – so central to semantics – a universal, or a concept entrenched in a long-standing but culture-specific tradition? These are the kind of crucial questions that are discussed in cross-cultural semantics. Various fields or disciplines have long been contributing to cross-cultural semantics. Semantic constituents that cannot be broken down into more elementary constituents are labeled minimal semantic constituents. In order to accomplish this distinction, any part of a sentence that bears a meaning and combines with the meanings of other constituents is labeled as a semantic constituent. Therefore, a distinction between degrees of participation as well as modes of participation are made. Here, the meaning of a word is constituted by its contextual relations. This theory understands that the meaning of a word is fully reflected by its context. Disciplines and paradigms in linguistic semantics Formal semantics Ī linguistic theory that investigates word meaning. For semantics, the most crucial interfaces are considered those with semantics (the syntax–semantics interface), pragmatics and phonology (regarding prosody and intonation). In linguistics, it is typical to talk in terms of "interfaces" regarding such interactions between modules or levels.
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The semantic level of language interacts with other modules or levels (like syntax) in which language is traditionally divided.
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One of the crucial questions which unites different approaches to linguistic semantics is that of the relationship between form and meaning, and some major contributions to the study of semantics have derived from studies in the 1980–1990s in related subjects of the syntax–semantics interface and pragmatics. Several disciplines and approaches have contributed to the often contentious field of semantics. Other prominent issues are those of context and its role on interpretation, opaque contexts, ambiguity, vagueness, entailment and presuppositions. Two of the fundamental issues in the field of semantics are that of compositional semantics (which pertains on how smaller parts, like words, combine and interact to form the meaning of larger expressions such as sentences) and lexical semantics (the nature of the meaning of words). Semantics can address meaning at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, or larger units of discourse. In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that studies meaning. 1.1 Disciplines and paradigms in linguistic semantics.
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