Semantics & Pragmatics

Semantics & Pragmatics

A study app that teaches how language carries meaning: what sentences say literally (semantics) and what speakers mean in context (pragmatics).

Lessons

12 Semantics modules: sense and reference, word meaning and sense relations, homonymy, polysemy and synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, semantic features, prototype theory, sentence meaning and propositions, entailment and presupposition, truth conditions, semantic roles, quantifiers and formal semantics, and metaphor.

12 Pragmatics modules: context, deixis, speech act theory and its types, Gricean maxims, conversational and conventional implicature, relevance theory, politeness and face-threatening acts, discourse and conversation analysis, information structure, and cross-cultural pragmatics.

Each module has a short summary, key terms, an example, and a quiz question. The Context Lab shows the same sentence in different settings, so you can see the literal meaning stay fixed while the speaker's meaning changes.