Finegan 6 Read & Retell

Finegan 6 dealt with semantics. I like to use the phrase "It's all semantics" sometimes when having a disagreement about an issue with a friend or colleague. After reading the chapter, I have a much better understanding about what semantics really is.

I liked the explanation that linguistic meaning is often refered to as denotation while connotation usually includes both social and affective meaning. It's helpful connecting known terms like denotation and connotation to more technical, linguistic terms.

I enjoyed the sections on hyponymy and part/whole relationships. It amazed me how technical various aspects of semantics can get. For example, I knew about antonymy, but never heard of gradable and nongradable aspects of it. The discussion about determining homonymy and polysemy never occurred to me as far as how dictionaries decide on how to include words in the entries of their book. Very interesting.

The way culture affects semantics struck me at several points in the reading. I just took my first semester of Spanish last fall. Reading about deixis made me think of having learned about the spatial deixis for "near the speaker," "a little distant from the speaker," and "far from the speaker." The other example of culture affecting semantics that was fun to read about was the seat of emotions metaphor...for us we think "heart" while others think "stomach." I totally get the stomach metaphor...butterflies in the stomach, stomach ache when facing something difficult to do, getting an upset stomach because of a situation rather than an illness.

The many terms in the chapter were a bit overwhelming, but they did make sense to me. I suppose you have to have a language to talk about these aspects of language.