I have read over the material in chapter 2 that covers semantics and pragmatics. However, I am still a bit confused about the difference(s) between the two. I understand the book's definitions but I don't think I could explain to someone else the difference, nor would I probably be able to distinguish between the two on a test--and that could be bad! =]
Can anyone offer a suggestion as to how to make the distinction? Sometimes it helps to have another's perspective.
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hey - i was a little confused too and so looked them up on the web and found a few websites that might help:
this one is a linguistics lesson from a college - the beginning talks about pragmatics and semantics:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003/ling001/lecture5.html
then this website is a little confusing but a few of the sentences helped me. if it is too confusing then just ignore this website haha..
http://www.criticism.com/linguistics/semantics-vs-pragmatics.php
the website did copy...here it is in bits:
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Summer_2003
/ling001/lecture5.html
Interesting website!
"Semantics invites a focus on meaning and truth conditions without regard to communication and context."
What you UNDERSTAND. . .about language is semantics. It is the how we create MEANING. We will discuss vocabulary. We will consider figurative language and idioms. We will also talk about humor. All those convey what we MEAN or the MESSAGE.
It doesn't matter the CONTEXT...it doesn't matter with WHOM or WHERE you are communicating. . . SEMANTICS is SEMANTICS is SEMANTICS...it is the message you are conveying with words, ideas, verbal pictures (metaphors) or humor.
The website also said, "Pragmatics involves how speakers use language in contextualized social interactions."
What did we discuss about the differences in how we communicate with different people? What were the things we listed on the board that often change when we communicate with a different person or the "contextualized social interaction" changes?
Can we list those here to review and discuss?
Mrs. White in your comment you asked: What did we discuss about the differences in how we communicate with different people?
We discussed how our body language, tone, and content of our conversations change with different groups we communicate with (e.g. we communicate differently with our friends than with our professors).
Good job, Melissa. To add further clarification or help those who were not in class there are a couple of more specifics ways we talked about "content of our conversations."
Anyone want to add to this?
How would this impact a student's learning or school success?
We will go deeper in upcoming classes and look at specific "skills" or tasks we do to "use" communication in those various settings to do as the website suggests and consider HOW we use language to communicate.
I completely agree I read chapter 2 before class and i wasn't understanding all the different clarifications, however being in class did help tremendously. We used a variety of words like ray say lay pay to explain phonology how they all have the smallest unit of sound. It took me a while but the more I said the words and wrote more and more different example i started to understand. While learning Morphology we used the word baseball or baseballs as an example where baseball has only two smallest units of meaning and baseballs has 3 because the s makes it many baseballs not one.
I hope this helped you a little better cause it definitely helped me out.
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