Lecture Introduction. Fiction. System of literature. Plans

Lecture 8.Semantic method
The word semantic first appeared in English in 1894. It comes from the French semantique, “the psychology of language,” and derived from the Greek semantikos, indicating “significant,” and semainein, “to show by sign, signify, point out, indicate by a sign.”
Semantic method plays a significant role in our ability to understand and be moved by literary works, as we must be able to grasp both the individual meaning of words and their relationship to their context.
Philosophers and linguists alike have long debated the intricacies of language, how we construct meaning, and how stationary those meanings really are. You've probably heard the line, 'That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.' Shakespeare asserts here then that a name doesn't matter - it's what that thing or concept really is. Even if we ceased to call a rose a rose, we could still smell its fragrance, feel its velvety petals, and be pricked by its thorns.
You can see from the picture above the mental image I had when I read the word 'rose.' Human communication would become extremely tricky if we all associated completely different meanings with a given vocabulary word. If you said 'mango' when I saw a rose, and we were trying to describe the same thing, you can see where we'd have a problem.
Semantics means the meaning and interpretation of words, signs, and sentence structure. Semantics largely determine our reading comprehension, how we understand others, and even what decisions we make as a result of our interpretations. Semantics can also refer to the branch of study within linguistics that deals with language and how we understand meaning. This has been a particularly interesting field for philosophers as they debate the essence of meaning, how we build meaning, how we share meaning with others, and how meaning changes over time.
The purpose of semantics is to propose exact meanings of words and phrases, and remove confusion, which might lead the readers to believe a word has many possible meanings. It makes a relationship between a word and the sentence through their meanings. Besides, semantics enable the readers to explore a sense of the meaning because, if we remove or change the place of a single word from the sentence, it will change the entire meaning, or else the sentence will become anomalous. Hence, the sense relation inside a sentence is very important, as a single word does not carry any sense or meaning.
Literal language is used to mean exactly what is written. For example: “It was raining a lot, so I rode the bus.” In this example of literal language, the writer means to explain exactly what is written: that he or she chose to ride the bus because of the heavy rain. Figurative language is used to mean something other than what is written, something symbolic, suggested, or implied. For example: It was raining cats and dogs, so I rode the bus. In this example of figurative language, there were not actually cats and dogs falling from rain clouds, instead, the rain felt so heavy and large that it was almost as if small animals were falling from the sky!
In the examples below, identify the phrases as literal or figurative. If phrases are figurative, underline the figurative language and explain what the author is suggesting, implying, or meaning
1.I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.
2. She is as fast as a cheetah! 3.That dog is a clown; it makes us laugh all the time.
4. He was late to dinner.
5. Time is money.
6.They sky is pale blue with few clouds
7. The sky is full of dancing stars.