- Semantics is the study of meaning in language, with a focus on widely accepted objective or factual meanings, not subjective or personal meanings.

- There are two types of meanings: referential and associative/emotive.

- Referential meaning covers the basic, essential components of meaning conveyed by the literal use of a word. It's the type of meaning that dictionaries describe.

- Associative or emotive meaning refers to feelings or reactions to words that may vary among individuals or groups.

- The word "needle" in English, for example, has a referential meaning of "thin, sharp, steel instrument", but different people might associate it with "pain", "illness", "blood", "drugs", "thread", "knitting", or "hard to find".

- Studying basic referential meaning can help explain why certain sentences seem odd, even if they are syntactically correct.

- For example, the sentence "The hamburger ate the boy" is syntactically correct but semantically odd because the referential meaning of "hamburger" doesn't include the capability of "eating", which is a property of "boy".

- Semantic features  are crucial elements or features of meaning that a noun must have to be used in certain contexts. For example, to be the subject of the verb "ate", a noun must denote an "animate being".

- Words can be described as having either plus (+) or minus (-) a particular feature. For instance, the noun "boy" has the feature "+animate" (denotes an animate being), while the noun "hamburger" has the feature "–animate" (does not denote an animate being).

- Semantic features like "+animate / –animate", "+human / –human", "+female / –female" can differentiate the meaning of each word in a language from every other word.

- (Table 9.1) showing the semantic features of several English words, including "table", "horse", "boy", "man", "girl", and "woman".

- The concept of words could be used as a "containers" of meaning. However, it points out that this approach has limitations. It may not be easy to come up with neat components of meaning for many words, and the approach may be too restrictive and limited in practical use. There is more to the meaning of words than these basic types of features.

Words can be seen as fulfilling “roles” within the situation described by a sentence, rather than just being containers of meaning.

These roles are known as semantic roles (or thematic roles or case roles).

The most common semantic roles are “agent” (the entity that performs the action) and “theme” (the entity involved in or affected by the action).

If an agent uses another entity to perform an action, that other entity fills the role of “instrument”.

When a noun phrase designates an entity as the person who has a feeling, perception, or state, it fills the semantic role of “experiencer”.

Other semantic roles include “location” (where an entity is), “source” (where the entity moves from), and “goal” (where it moves to).

A single entity can appear in several different semantic roles in a scenario.

- Words can have relationships with each other, analyzed as lexical relations.

- Examples of lexical relations include synonymy (conceal/hide), antonymy (happy/sad), and hyponymy (animal/horse).

- Synonyms are words with closely related meanings, while antonyms have opposite meanings.

- Antonyms can be gradable (opposites along a scale), non-gradable (direct opposites), or reversives (one is the reverse action of the other).

- Hyponymy involves the inclusion of one word's meaning in another, creating a hierarchical relationship.

- Prototypes represent the characteristic instance of a category, influencing word interpretations.

- Homophones have the same pronunciation but different meanings (bare/bear), while homonyms have unrelated meanings (bat-flying creature/bat-used in sports).

- Polysemy occurs when one form has multiple related meanings (head of a person, head of a company).

- Word play often involves lexical relations, such as riddles and puns.

- Metonymy is a relationship based on close connections, like container-contents, whole-part, or representative-symbol relationships.

- Research indicates that understanding the meaning of words and phrases is linked to their typical contexts.

- Examples include expressions like "don't know what to do" (six words), "you know what I mean" (five words), or "they don't want to" (four words).

- The role of context in interpreting meaning will be explored further in Chapter 10.