# Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning in words, sentences, and larger linguistic structures. It examines how expressions relate to concepts, entities, events, truth conditions, and one another. In narrative and influence analysis, semantics helps identify the explicit conceptual content of a message. It works with pragmatics, which studies what speakers accomplish or imply through context, and with discourse analysis, which studies meaning across extended communication. Related: [[wiki/Linguistics|Linguistics]], [[wiki/Pragmatics|Pragmatics]], [[wiki/Computational Linguistics|Computational Linguistics]], [[wiki/Narrative Intelligence|Narrative Intelligence]]. ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > “Continuity is strongest when ideas depend upon one another without sentences becoming helpless without one another.” > **— Bryant McGill**, *The Argument in Miniature, 2026* [[reminders/Writing/Strong Continuity Does Not Make Sentences Helpless by Bryant McGill|Strong Continuity Does Not Make Sentences Helpless by Bryant McGill]] ## Relationships - **Corpus project:** [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], Bryant McGill's symbolic language engine, built from 1994 into the mid-2000s, with its phonological engine, sound indexes, and lexical knowledge graph.