Semantic analysis studies the structure and meaning of speech, including colloquial language and foreign languages. It is used in literature to analyze dialects and characters’ speech patterns, and to set the tone of a work. Linguists use it to understand foreign languages by comparing them with their native language.
Semantic analysis is the study of semantics, i.e. the structure and meaning of speech. It is the job of a semantic analyst to discover grammatical patterns, the meanings of colloquial speech and to discover specific meanings of words in foreign languages. In literature, semantic analysis is used to give meaning to the work by looking at it from the point of view of the writer. The analyst examines how and why the author structured the language of the piece as he or she did. When using semantic analysis to study dialects and foreign languages, the analyst compares the grammatical structure and meanings of different words with those of his native language. When the analyst discovers the differences, she can help him understand the unfamiliar grammatical structure.
When you study the literature, semantic analysis almost becomes a kind of critical theory. The analyst investigates the dialectal and linguistic patterns of a work, comparing them with the type of language that the author would have used. Literary works that contain language that mirrors how the author would have spoken are then examined more closely.
In narratives, each character’s speech patterns could be scrutinized. For example, a character who suddenly uses a so-called inferior type of speech than the author would have used might be seen as low-class in the eyes of the author, even if the character is positioned high in society. Dialogue patterns can influence how readers and analysts feel about different characters. The author can use semantics, in these cases, to make his readers like or dislike a character.
An author could also use semantics to set a certain tone for an entire work. For example, a semantic analysis of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn would reveal that the narrator, Huck, does not use the same semantic patterns that Twain would have used in everyday life. An analyst would therefore have to understand why this might be happening by examining Huck himself. The reason Twain uses very conversational semantics in this work is probably to help the reader warm up to and sympathize with Huck, since his somewhat lazy but earnest delivery often makes him seem lovable and real.
Linguists often use semantic analysis to examine foreign languages. Most languages do not share exact grammatical patterns, nor do many foreign words have exact translations. In these cases, it is the linguist’s job to show examples of the foreign grammar in his native language. For example, a linguist studying Spanish might explain that language’s juxtaposition of nouns and adjectives by saying that, in Spanish, a blue house is actually a “blue house.”
The example above can also help linguists understand the meanings of foreign words. Native Inuit, for example, have several dozen different words for snow. A semantic analyst studying this language would translate each of these words into an adjective-noun combination to try to explain the meaning of each word. This type of analysis helps to deepen the overall understanding of most foreign languages.
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