Semantic Fields

Semantic fields are often celebrated as brilliant devices to analyse language (or is it structure?), but if I'm honest, I've always wondered what exactly students are supposed to say about them.

Is it that they 'establish' or even 'develop' a certain theme, mood or idea? It's hard to see how to push our analysis beyond this.

However, yesterday a student and I came up with a really interesting reading of an AQA Language paper. Here we noticed that there were multiple semantic fields - one was 'nature'; the other was 'violence'- and that one semantic field was in conflict with the other.

This idea of identifying two semantic fields - and noting the conflict between them - was far more interesting than the usual approach!