In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (referred to as "texts").
The basic area of study is the meaning of signs, and the study of relations between different linguistic units: homonymy, synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, paronyms, hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, metonymy, holonymy, exocentricity / endocentricity, linguistic compounds. A key concern is how meaning attaches to larger chunks of text, possibly as a result of the composition from smaller units of meaning.
Traditionally, semantics has included the study of "sense" and denotative "reference", truth conditions, argument structure, thematic roles, discourse analysis, and the linkage of all of these to syntax.

Formal semanticists are concerned with the modeling of meaning in terms of the semantics of logic. Thus the sentence "John loves a bagel" can be broken down into its constituents (signs), of which the unit "loves" may serve as both syntactic and semantic head.

In the late 1960s, Richard Montague proposed a system for defining semantic entries in the lexicon in terms of lambda calculus. In these terms, the syntactic parse of the sentence above
would now indicate "loves" as the head, and its entry in the lexicon would point to the arguments as the agent, "John", and the object, "bagel", with a special role for the article "a" (which Montague called a quantifier). This resulted in the sentence being associated with the logical predicate "loves (John, bagel)", thus
linking semantics to categorial grammar models of syntax.
The logical predicate thus obtained would be elaborated further, e.g. using truth theory models, which ultimately relate meanings to a set of Tarskiian universals, which may lie outside the logic. The notion of such meaning atoms or primitives is basic to the language of thought hypothesis from the 70s.

Despite its elegance, Montague grammar was limited by the context-dependent variability in word sense, and led to several attempts at incorporating context, such as:

Prototype theory प्रतिकृती सिद्धांत
भाषाशास्त्र Linguistics
The dynamic turn in semantics
संगणक विज्ञान