ABSTRACT
Semantics is in its most general sense the study of meaning, and meaning is obviously central to language. The categories of traditional grammar were more or less exclusively based on semantic considerations. Philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists have maintained an interest in problems of semantics for centuries. The early linguistic approaches to semantics were also based on the word as the fundamental unit of both syntax and semantics. The componential theory of meaning is the one most commonly used as the basis of the semantic component of a generative grammar, which not only assigns lexical meanings to items but also establishes rules for constraints on co-occurrence. The early work on transformational-generative grammar dealt largely with syntactic considerations and semantic problems. The true complexity of language is seen at the semantic level and it is precisely because meaning is so central to it that language is so complex.
