Semantics is the study of meaning. Linguistic semantics focuses on study of meaning that is used by humans to express them through language. Other forms of semantics include the semantics of programming languages, formal logics and semiotics. Semantics is different from syntax which is the study of rules of a language and pragmatics which is the study of relationship between symbols of a language, their meanings and users of a language. The word “semantics” itself denotes a range of ideas, ranging from the popular to the highly technical ones. Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. According to Felix Frankfurter, “All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.”
