Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!rjh
From: rjh@cs.purdue.EDU (Bob Hathaway)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntax vs Semantics (silliness!)
Message-ID: <6532@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 89 23:42:19 GMT
References: <7708@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <5160016@hpfcdc.HP.COM>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Reply-To: rjh@cs.purdue.edu (Bob Hathaway)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
Lines: 36

In article <5160016@hpfcdc.HP.COM> marc@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Marc `Play Ball!' Sabatella) writes:
>>I'm not even real sure of the *informal* English distinction between 
>>"syntax" and "semantics". 
>>
>>How do you linguistics people use these words?
>
>One of my pet peeves is when two people are arguing over some fine distinction
>is the the exact meaning of a word, and one will exclaim, "That's just
>semantics".  I always wondered what it is that this person thinks is more
>high-level than semantics, and what he would call it.

I can remember an interesting set of linguistic definitions:
	Syntax		Specifies the correct form for objects
	Semantics	Specifies what the objects mean
	Pragmatics	Specifies relationships among the objects
I've also seen pragmatics defined as the use, history, and style of 
programming.  Syntax is specified by grammars and semantics specify the
meanings of syntactic entities but I've found a common confusion exists 
between syntax directed translation and semantics.  English can be specified
by a grammar but a grammar alone cannot recognize valid English sentences;
semantics must be used to understand the syntactic entities.  In other words,
I can build parse trees for the correct translation of valid English
sentences but the translation process resulting in these parse trees should
not be performed through simple syntax directed translation, semantics and
pragmatics are used to distinguish syntactic entities.  In classical synthetic
languages, syntax directed translation is sufficient to parse correct programs
but they also recognize syntactically correct but semantically incorrect 
programs such as the inconsistent declaration and use of definitional
objects and the incorrect use of context sensitive constructs such as 
break statements not contained within loops.  So, my understanding of 
these terms are: syntax specifies correct forms, semantics specifies their
meanings and pragmatics can specify additional information for understanding
the context of usage.

Bob Hathaway
rjh@purdue.edu