Semantics is generally considered to be the study of meaning in language.
Meanings of meaning(2-1
1) Conceptual meaning(概念意义): logical, cognitive, denotative meaning  cup
2) Associative meaning(联想意义)
(1) Connotative meaning(内涵意义): the thoughts provoked by a word when in reference to an entity. e.g. statesmen and politician
(2) Social meaning: what is communicated of the social circumstances of language use. e.g. Ms Liu
(3) Affective meaning: what is communicated of the feelings and attitudes of the speaker/writer.
      e.g. I am happy.
(4) Reflected meaning(反映意义): what is communicated through association with another sense of the same expression, e.g. gay
(5) Collocative meaning(搭配意义): what is communicated through association with words which tend to occur in the environment of another word, e.g. head
3) Thematic meaning(主题意义): what is communicated by the way in which the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.
      A good student Tom is.

Theories of meaning(4-1)
Naming things
Words are names or labels for things. The meaning of language is the object in the world that it stands for, refers to or denotes.
Referential theory: the theory that relates words and things through the mediation of concepts in the mind. One best-known example to illustrate this view is the semantic triangle(语义三角) of Ogden and Richards.
Theories of meaning     Context and behaviorism
The leading British linguist J.R. Firth is one of the representatives of this approach who regards words as acts, events, habits.
Another representative is American linguist Bloomfield who argues that the meaning of a linguistic form should be viewed as the situation in which the speaker utters it, and the response which it calls forth in the hearer.

Lexical meaning
Sense(意义)/sense relationship: the relationship between the linguistic elements themselves (mostly the words), intra-linguistic relationships, e.g. big—small.
 Reference (所指): the relationship between the linguistic elements (words, sentence, etc.) and the non-linguistic world of experience.

Lexical meaning Sense Relations(18-1)
synonymy
antonymy
hyponymy
polysemy
homonymy

Synonymy (同义关系) : a technical term for the sameness relation between words.
Words of synonymy are called synonyms.
man, chap, gentleman, politician, statesman, autumn, fall, rotten, sour, addled, rancid,
1) Dialectal synonyms: words with the same cognitive meaning but belonging to different dialects of the language.
 cast --- throw --- chuck, gentleman--- man---chap
cast (literary, biblical), throw (casual, general), chuck (casual, slang),
gentleman (formal), man (general), chap (colloquial)
(2) Synonyms differing in ‘styles’ and ‘registers’ words with the same cognitive meaning but expressing different degrees of formality.
3) Synonyms differing in emotive or evaluative meanings: words with the same cognitive (conceptual) meaning but expressing different emotive or evaluative meanings
4) Collocationally-restricted synonyms
 These words can be considered as synonyms only when they occur in conjunction with certain words.
(5)? Near synonyms
This is the kind of synonyms that is exploited by dictionary compilers. They are close in meaning or their meanings overlap.

Antonymy (反义关系)
Antonymy (反义关系) : a technical term used for oppositeness of meaning between words.
1) Gradable antonymy (可分等级的反义关系)
old---young; big---small; hot---cold, tall---short
一，Characteristics of gradable antonyms:
They are gradable, different in terms of degree. The assertion of one is not necessarily the denial of the other. There may be intermediate degrees. 
(2) They are graded against deferent norms. The criterion varies with the object described.
(3) In a pair, the one for the higher degree serves as the cover term called “unmarked” and the covered term is called “marked”. It is the cover term that is usually used. If the covered term is used, there is something odd or unusual.

2)Complementary opposite(互补性反义词)
一，These antonyms are ungradable. The assertion of one means the denial of the other and the denial of one means the assertion of the other. There is not intermediate term.
(2) The norm in this type is absolute. The same norm is used for all the things it is applicable. E.g. the norms used to separate the male from the female are the same with both human beings and animals.
(3) There is no cover term for the two members of a pair.

3)Relational/ converse opposites(关系反义词)
Characteristics: (1)There is no positive-negative relationship between the words of a pair but reversal relationship between them. ‘if A sells to B, B buys from A; if A is B’s husband, B is A’s wife.’
(2) One word of the pair presupposes the other.
*He is a son. *He is a husband. He is a child--adult.

Hyponymy(上下义关系)
Hyponymy(上下义关系) refers to a paradigmatic relation between a more specific lexeme and a more general lexeme.
The upper term like flower or animal is called the superordinate (上义词).
The lower term like rose or cow is called the hyponym (下义词).
(1) One superordinate usually has several hyponyms and all the members that can be grouped under the same superordinate are called co-hyponyms(并列下义词).
(2) A superordinate may be a superordinate to itself, a hyponym may be a hyponym of itself
      living
3) A superordinate may be missing.
There is no superordinate for beard, moustache, and whiskers.
(4) Hyponyms may also be missing.
e.g. uncle

Polysemy (多义性) refers to the phenomenon that the same word may have a set of different meanings, e.g. mouth.

Homonymy (同音/形异义) refers to the case that two, or more meanings may be associated with the same linguistic form phonologically and/or morphologically, e.g. bank
Homonymy can be further classified into homography and homophony.
Homography refers to the phenomenon that two words have the same spelling but with different pronunciations, lead [li:d]        lead [led].
Homophony refers to the case that different words have the same pronunciation, site        sight;
meat          meet. 

Sentence meaning  Definition
The meaning of a sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning.
(1)?? X is synonymous with Y----synonymy
(2)?? X is inconsistent with Y----inconsistency
(3)?? X entails Y----entailment
(4)?? X presupposes Y-----presuppositionX: His bike needs repairing.
Y: He has a bike.If X is true, Y must be true; If X is false, Y is still true.
(5)?? X is a contradictionThe orphan’s parents are pretty well-off.
(6)?? X is semantically anomalous       The man is pregnant

Analysis of meaning
Componential analysis
Predication analysis
Componential analysis--- a way to analyze lexical meaning. The approach is based on the belief that the meaning of a word can be dissected into meaning components, called semantic features. For example,
Man: [+HUMAN, +ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE]
Boy: [+HUMAN, -ADULT, +ANIMATE, +MALE]
Woman: [+HUMAN, +ADULT, +ANIMATE, -MALE]
Girl: [+HUMAN, -ADULT, +ANIMATE, -MALE]
Predication analysis
1)?The meaning of a sentence is not to be worked out by adding up all the meanings of its component words, e.g “The dog bites the man” is semantically different from “The man bites the dog” though their components are exactly the same.
2)?There are two aspects to sentence meaning: grammatical meaning and semantic meaning, e.g.
*Green clouds are sleeping furiously.
*Sincerity shook hands with the black apple.
Whether a sentence is semantically meaningful is governed by rules called selectional restrictions.

Predication analysis---- a way to analyze sentence meaning (British G. Leech).
Predication----the abstraction of the meaning of a sentence.
A predication consists of argument(s) and predicate.
An argument is a logical participant in a predication, largely identical with the nominal elements in a sentence.
   He loves her.
A predicate is something said about an argument or it states the logical relation linking the arguments in a sentence.
According to the number of arguments contained in a predication, we may classify the predications into the following types:
One-place predication
Tom smokes.
Two-place predication, He loves her.
Three-place predication
He gave her a warm hug.
No-place predication: It is hot.

An Integrated Theory(1
The idea that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the constituent words and the way they are combined is usually known as the principle of compositionality (复合性).
The theory putting the principle into practice in the framework of transformational grammar is called integrated theory

An integrated semantic theory consists of two parts: a dictionary and a set of projection rules.
 The dictionary provides the grammatical classsification. The projection rules(投射规则) are responsible for combining the meanings of words together.

Propositional logic /propositional calculus/ sentential calculus: the study of the truth conditions for propositions: how the truth of a composite proposition is determined by the truth value of its constituent propositions and the connections between them.
A proposition (命题)is what is expressed by a declarative sentence when that sentence is uttered to make a statement.
He arrived late.
There are four logical connectives: conjunction      &,       disjunction   V,
 implication            ,     equivalence   

All men are rational.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore, Socrates is rational.
Predicate logic/predicate calculus studies the internal structure of simple proposition.