The meaning of language

SEMANTICS

According to Fromkin,Rodman & Hyams (2011)Semantics is the branch that studies the meaning of words, expressions or sentences 

 As it is known one of the main purposes of language is to produce meaningful sentences.

It is important to know that there is literal and non literal meaning. As we can see in the next pícture

 Another example could be the phrase " the door is behind you” may be literal answer for the question where is the door? Or might be non literal if it means it’s time for you to leave. Another thing that also influences meaning is the context and the tone of voice. For example, if someone says “what a good film” depending on the context and our tone of voice it could also have a sarcastic meaning that 

the film was bad Clouston (1991). 

Teachers need to communicate students that words can have different meaning, therefore teachers can help students to develop not only skills to learn words from lists or from the dictionary, but also he / she has to help them to acquire the ability to infer other meanings from the words by making activities like reading or listening passages Clouston(1991) 

Teachers thus need to teach similarities and differences that we found in common with our first language. However they also need to clarify that there are some words that may have similar form as Actually in English and Actualmente in Spanish but in fact they have different meanings. Teachers need to promote in classroom authentic meaning which is the one given by the context and the culture. Sometimes the language has phrases that do not have predictable meanings on the basis of the meanings of the individual words they are idioms. Here is where the usual semantic rules for combining meanings do not apply.

 Idioms, grammatically as well as semantically, have special characteristics. They must be entered into the lexicon or mental dictionary as single items with their meanings specified, and speakers must learn the special restrictions on their use in sentences. 

As we could see semantics is a very important element when teaching a foreign language, 

and knowing that implies to understand that the language that we are teaching have some 

features and patterns, thereby, this knowledge will help professors to know what activities

to do to teach vocabulary taking into account that words have a meaning but also that this 

meaning can be change or affected by other agents like ambiguity or the context.

In this picture we can se a tree for an ambiguous sntence