Abstract
Semantics is derived from the Greek σημα, or sign. This same word underlies the title of Bertin’s Semiology of Graphics. In linguistics, semantics involve questions of meaning. In this concluding chapter, I intend to show how the grammar of graphics can inform our understanding of the meaning of graphics. With Pinker (1990) and MacEachren (1995), I believe that understanding the meaning of a graphic is a lexical task. The syntactical information is expressed in its grammar and its semantic information is encapsulated in its associated data. We will examine this proposition through a detailed analysis of two statistical graphics.
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© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Wilkinson, L. (1999). Semantics. In: The Grammar of Graphics. Statistics and Computing. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3100-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3100-2_15
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
Print ISBN: 978-1-4757-3102-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4757-3100-2
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