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Semantics and pragmatics
Semantics concerns conventional meaning; pragmatics concerns what a speaker or writer does with an expression in context. Ancient evidence gives us texts, not direct access to every conversation. Interpret what is signalled by the form and what must be inferred from genre and situation.
Semantics and pragmatics
Meaning in a construction
Semantics studies conventional meanings and how they combine. The sense of a dictionary headword is only one part of a sentence: argument structure, negation, quantification and modifier scope also matter. A word glossed “all” may take scope over a noun phrase or over a wider proposition; a fluent translation should not conceal that choice. Start by identifying the grammatical construction and testing each interpretation against parallel passages.
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A reading check
Worked question
A demonstrative is translated “that.” What must you know before claiming it means “far from the speaker”?
Show the analysis
Check the language’s demonstrative system, the form’s syntactic use, the speaker or narrator’s deictic centre, and the local passage. English “that” is not a universal feature definition.