3/31/2021 0 Comments General Semantics Principles
Antonyms also help speakers to avoid repetition, making speech richer and clearer.It also suggests strategies for attaining and retaining vocabulary by grouping and connecting words based on semantics.We use our knowledge, physical experience and cultural understanding of the world and environment to label things, objects, processes and events.Every person, every nation, every culture may have a different understanding and experience with the surrounding world.
Lets take a man from Dubai: he may describe mountains as normal brown mountains. So, you see how different experiences with things can cause confusion and misunderstanding. While some meanings stay the same across languages, others differ immensely. This variation in a words meaning is why semantics is important. Semantics is the study of the interpretation and meaning of words, phrases, sentences and symbols. English language learners have to spend extra time memorizing phrases, idioms, collocations and verb patterns, to name a few. Significance of Semantics for Fluency The more fluent we get in a language, the deeper understanding of words and their meaning we need. Knowing only one meaning of a word becomes limiting and inefficient. Words have conceptual, connotative, collocative, affective, stylistic and other meanings. Replacing any word with a synonym affects the meaning, e.g., collocative pairs are right on time, draw attention, big deal. For English language learners attaining and retaining vocabulary is a part of becoming fluent. Vocabulary activities, such as reading, writing and listening, provide a good start for exploring new words. However, to make activities less abstract and build cognitive structures, we can have students group and connect unfamiliar words to other words they know. Synonyms These words have similar meanings: pretty, beautiful, attractive, gorgeous. It is tricky for students to pick the most appropriate synonym but as they gain more knowledge and vocabulary, it becomes easier. At first students use synonyms to avoid repetition and later they start grasping stylistic, connotative and affective meaning. A good exercise for learning synonyms is to have students look for a synonym for an underlined word or phrase in a sentence. Antonyms These words have the opposite meaning: big-small, tall-short, hot-cold. They are another great technique for expanding vocabulary and can be taught in conjunction with synonyms. Antonyms can be further systematized by creating themes: feelings, adjectives, nouns, etc. This creates a context and structure, which makes memorization easier.
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