What's Wrong with Me?

When I was in 2nd grade, I started to play piano at Yamaha School. I don't really understand it that time. Well, I'm just a little girl so I just keep on playing. My teacher always angry to me because I never practice my song at home. But I was a kid, that's forgivable.

When I was in 5th grade, I felt comfortable when I play piano. I love piano! I always practice and play piano almost 2 hours per day. Can't you believe that!? I love to play pop-music, even to play and sing-a-long in same time. Piano was like 'love of my life' I can't live without it. Although sometimes I felt bored, but it didn't take long to make me love it again..

When I was a Junior high school student, I still love it! Everytime I felt happy, upset, or even angry, I would play my piano but at this time, I found another instrument i interested at....... Saxophone! But I still chose piano as my beloved music's instrument.Until one day, Mr. Eric can't teach me anymore and almost more than a month I didn't have teacher, I didn't learning, so I try to play Saxophone by watching Youtube in a month. Ya... at least I know how to use Saxophone. Back to my 'piano life' and I just played what I want to play not what I HAVE to play, I played some kind of 'easy-busy' stuff.

Then I got the replacement, Miss Elsa who is a really good teacher. But I just feel wrong, I feel something in me is empty, something was in me is already gone and hard to take it back.
I had no more feeling for piano.
When all the people tried to motivate me, I kept saying "it's because of the teacher! She is new, and I can't accept her. She is different than him! It's hard for me. Please wait until I can play like before."
But it's almost a year for me, and my parents can't stand it any longer. There was one day my dad or mom said to me, "If you still lazy to play just quit and I will sell back this piano! You don't need it, do you?!" and that time in my heart i said, "Sell it as you want. I don't want it either. Just throw it out. I'm sick of seeing it."
I realize that's wrong. There are so many advantages the piano can give to me.

But I still can't find that hole in my heart. My family said, I'm the one who should try to motivate myself and stop being lazy.
You know what, it took about Rp 400.000 per month and that's so expensive! (at that time)
My family support me, my friends support me, my piano miss me.
But I still can't get that feeling, when I played the piano 2 years ago.
What happened to me that time so I can love piano with whole my heart?
What happened to the piano so it made me want to play it all the time?
What happened to my heart that I can't feel the way I feel before?

Even I practice my songs, I play the piano, I enter every competition to motivate me. It doesn't work.
I don't ask for time, or advices, or preech, or anything else.
I don't know what I really want right now.
But maybe.....yes, this is for sure.
I want my LOVE for the piano BACK and I just don't know how.

I'm sorry Mom, Dad, everyone.... But thanks for understand me 'til now.

Article review

Article review Nur Hidayah

Semantics

Definition:

The field of linguisticsconcerned with the study of meaning in language.

• ·         Linguistic semantics has been defined as the study of how languages organize and express meanings.

• ·         General semantics is a discipline and/or methodology intended to improve the ways people interact with their environment and with one another, especially through training in the critical use of words and other symbol.
  

The term general semantics was introduced by Alfred Korzybski in the book Science and Sanity (1933).

In his Handbook of Semiotics (1995), Winfried Nöth observes that "General Semantics is based on the assumption that historical languages are only inadequate tools for the cognition of reality, are misleading in verbal communication, and may have negative effects on our nervous systems."

Observations:

• "The technical term for the study of meaning in language is semantics. But as soon as this term is used, a word of warning is in order.
  
  "Any scientific approach to semantics has to be clearly distinguished from a sense of the term that has developed in popular use, when people talk about the way that language can be manipulated in order to mislead the public. A newspaper headline might read. 'Tax increases reduced to semantics'--referring to the way a government was trying to hide a proposed increase behind some carefully chosen words. Or someone might say in an argument, 'That's just semantics,' implying that the point is purely a verbal quibble, bearing no relationship to anything in the real world. This kind of nuance is absent when we talk about semantics from the objective point of linguistic research. The linguistic approach studies the properties of meaning in a systematic and objective way, with reference to as wide a range of utterances and languages as possible."
  (David Crystal, How Language Works. Overlook, 2006)

• Basic Divisions
  "Based on the distinction between the meanings of words and the meanings of sentences, we can recognize two main divisions in the study of semantics: lexical semantics and phrasal semantics. Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning, whereas phrasal semantics is the study of the principles which govern the construction of the meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of compositional combinations of individual lexemes
  
  "The job of semantics is to study the basic, literal meanings of words as considered principally as parts of a language system, whereas pragmatics concentrates on the ways in which these basic meanings are used in practice, including such topics as the ways in which different expressions are assigned referents in different contexts, and the differing (ironic, metaphorical, etc.) uses to which language is put."
  (Nick Riemer, Introducing Semantics. Cambridge University Press, 2010)

• The Scope of Semantics
  "A perennial problem in semantics is the delineation of its subject matter. The term meaning can be used in a variety of ways, and only some of these correspond to the usual understanding of the scope of linguistic or computational semantics. We shall take the scope of semantics to be restricted to the literal interpretations of sentences in a context, ignoring phenomena like irony, metaphor."
  (Stephen G. Pulman, "Basic Notions of Semantics." SRI International, Cambridge, England)
  
  
  "[S]emantics is the study of the meanings of words and sentences
  
  "As our original definition of semantics suggests, it is a very broad field of inquiry, and we find scholars writing on very different topics and using quite different methods, though sharing the general aim of describing semantic knowledge. As a result, semantics is the most diverse field within linguistics. In addition, semanticists have to have at least a nodding acquaintance with other disciplines, like philosophy and psychology, which also investigate the creation and transmission of meaning. Some of the questions raised in these neighboring disciplines have important effects on the way linguist do semantics."
  (John I. Saeed, Semantics, 2nd ed. Blackwell, 2003)

• Linguistic Semantics and Grammar
  "The study of meaning can be undertaken in various ways. Linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any speaker of a language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feelings, intentions and products of the imagination to other speakers and to understand what they communicate to him or her. . . . Early in life every human acquires the essentials of a language--a vacab and the pronounce, use and meaning of each item in it. The speaker's knowledge is largely implicit. The linguist attempts to construct a grammar, an explicit description of the language, the categories of the language and the rules by which they interact. Semantics is one part of grammar; phonology, syntax and morphology are other parts."  (Charles W. Kreidler, Introducing English Semantics. Routledge, 199