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In international scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The word semantics was first used by Michel Bréal, a French philologist. It denotes a range of ideas—from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many formal enquiries, over a long period of time, especially in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of the interpretation of signs or symbols used in agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts. Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic (meaningful) content, and each comprises several branches of study. In written language, things like paragraph structure and punctuation bear semantic content; other forms of language bear other semantic content.

The formal study of semantics intersects with many other fields of inquiry, including lexicology, syntax, pragmatics, etymology and others. Independently, semantics is also a well-defined field in its own right, often with synthetic properties. In the philosophy of language, semantics and reference are closely connected. Further related fields include philology, communication, and semiotics. The formal study of semantics can therefore be manifold and complex.

Bibliography

Keith Allan. 1980. Nouns and countability. Language, 56(3):541–67.
Francis Bond and Caitlin Vatikiotis-Bateson. 2002. Using ontology to determine English countability. In Proc. of the19th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2002), Taipei, Taiwan.
Brendan S. Gillon Towards a Common Semantics for English Count and Mass Nouns Linguistics and Philosophy, Vol. 15, No. 6 (Dec., 1992), pp. 597-639 

 
Lou Burnard.  User Reference Guide for the British National Corpus. Technical report, Oxford University Computing Services.
 
Ted Briscoe and John Carroll. . Robust accurate statistical annotation of general text. In Proc. of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

(LREC2002), pages 1499–1504, Las Palmas, Canary Islands.)