970: Semantics and Pragmatics Aug 5, 2017

There are a lot of words that each communicate different concepts, but this does not cover all of the ways that people understand the meaning of a sentence, even just in English. Most of the time, meaning is understood through semantics, which can be thought of as the sum of all the meanings of words individually. In the sentence "it is lovely to pet cats and dogs" one only needs to know what each word denotes (assuming comprehension of how the order of words indicates syntax) in order to understand what it all comes together to mean. In the other sentence "it is raining cats and dogs", the semantic value of each word does not communicate what this sentence would almost certainly connote (unless it were the apocalypse or something), which is that it is raining very heavily, as that sentence relies on pragmatics, i.e. understanding that the context of the words in a sentences creates a new, not necessarily related concept.