语义学和语用学的区别

The relationship between semantics and pragmatics As a branch of linguistics, semantics can be simply defined as the study of linguistic meaning, which studies literal, structural or lexical meaning conveyed by words, phrases and sentences. What we concerned with is the denotation of the word, namely the relationship between words , phrases and sentences not the possible connotations. It is context independent, de-contextualized.and it deals with what is said.

while pragmatics is a study which can be defined as the analysis of meaning in a particular context, which studies non-literal, implicit meaning. It deals with the relations between language and context that are basic to language understanding. pragmatics is context dependent, contextualized. What we concerned is what is communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener.

Through the definition of semantics and pragmatics, we can see that semantics and pragmatics both concern the meaning of language. But they research the different sides of language, and they have different study methods. The study objects of semantics is words, phrases and sentences, what we need to know is their meaning, sense , reference and presupposes. Different words may have the same or similar meaning, the same one word may have more than one meaning. And one word may belong to another word. So we can conclude the words to these relations, Such as synonymy, polysemy, homonymy,hyponymy and antonymy. And when we talk about the sense relations between sentences ,we may think of presupposes. Whether it is right under the presupposes. All those are semantics. It would not change with the

context.

Pragmatics study the meaning of natural language understanding, whether the discourse behavior is appropriate in a special context. It mostly study the relation between words and sentence or sentence and sentence. The meaning of the language can be divided into several act. Such as locutionary act, illocutionary and perlocutionary act.words are used to refer to the events or objects in the real world. But the relationships between the words and their referents are not straightforward. The same words or sentences in different context, the meanings are totally different. For example, the sentence"it is so cold "may be you just want to express the whether is so cold through the sentence. And may be you want to use this sentence to ask someone to do something, such as close the window,give you a cloth and so on. Or you just want to giving a joke. And the same sentence would lead to different act . After listening to the sentence, maybe someone would went to close the window or give you a cloth or doing nothing. So if we want to understand what the speaker's real meaning, we would better learn pragmatics.

So through the comparison of pragmatics and semantics, we can see that they not only have similarities but also have differences. But they play their own respective role, and do not affect each other.