of Semantics
(a life-long Odyssey)

I learned the word 'semantics' at my mother's literal knee, and it seems I've been dancing with its unpacking for about 75 years, sometimes wittingly and sometimes with no idea that I'd been speaking prose all along.

To begin in the middle, I completely missed the emergence of semiotics in the mid-1970s (being otherwise engaged at the time, deep in regional systems and agricultural transformation in Nova Scotia), and didn't catch wind of it again until the early 1990s (by which time computational linguistics had invaded, and neural nets were being woven). The last 25 years have seen the emergence of you-know-what (hoo boy is 'Artificial Intelligence' the wrong name, and its reduction to 'AI' is a lexical odyssey all its own...).

My sensibilities are much more mind-centered, intensely curious about language as a center-pivot for culture, and lexicon as where the most fun is to be found (syntax and phonology and grammar and so on aren't where the joyeux dwells). It's meaning and signification that I want to explore, and that's semantic territory.

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A forest of links collected 8iii25:

Seme (semantics) Wikipedia

Semantics Wikipedia

Lexical semantics Wikipedia

Semantic field Wikipedia

Semantic network Wikipedia

Semantic change Wikipedia

Semantic neural network Wikipedia

Ann Berthoff from the Margins: An Infusion of All-at-once-ness for Contemporary Writing Pedagogy Paige Arrington

Predicting research trends with semantic and neural networks with an application in quantum physics PNAS

Semiotics Wikipedia

Peirce's Theory of Signs Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Semiotics Explained Sign Salad

Definitions of Semiotic Terms uvm.edu

Semiotics Media Studies 101

Semiotics for Beginners Daniel Chandler at Princeton

Sign (semiotics) Wikipedia

Medieval Semiotics Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Semiotic Society of America

semiotics cs.princeton.edu

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