Semantics is the study of meaning in language, there is more interest in certain aspects of meaning than in others. We have already ruled out special meanings that one individual might attach to words. We can go further and make a broad distinction between conceptual meaning and associative meaning.
Semantic role
The noun phrases in the sentence describe the roles of entities, such as people and things, involved in the action. We can identify a small number of semantic roles (also called “thematic roles”) for these noun phrases.