A Short Introduction to Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning. Seen by Breal, in the late 19th century, as an emerging science (French, „semantique‟) opposed to phonetics („phonetique‟) as a science of sounds: similarly for Bloomfield in 1930, it was a field covering, as one account of meaningful forms, and the lexicon. Also seen more narrowly, in a traditional lasting into the 1960s, as the study of meaning in the lexicon alone, including changes in word meaning. Later, in accounts in which the study of distribution was divorced from that of meanings, opposed either to grammar in general; or, within grammar and especially within a generative grammar from the 1960s onwards, to syntax specifically. Of the uses current at the beginning of the 21st century, many restrict semantics to the study of meaning is abstraction from the contexts in which words and sentences are uttered: in opposition, therefore, to pragmatics. Others include pragmatics as one of its branches. In others its scope is in practice very narrow: thus one handbook of „contemporary semantic theory‟, in the mid-1990s deals almost solely with problems in formal semantics, even the meanings of lexical units being neglected.