Semantics

Semantics is the subfield of linguistics that studies meaning: how words, phrases and sentences convey it, how meaning composes as smaller units combine into larger ones, and how it relates to the world a language describes. It is usually distinguished from pragmatics, which studies how meaning depends on the context in which an utterance is actually used, and from lexical semantics specifically, which focuses on the meanings of individual words and how they relate to one another. Ferdinand de Saussure's account of the linguistic sign as an arbitrary pairing of a sound image and a concept is among the field's founding ideas.