Salahaddin University-Hawler
Postgraduate Studies Board
(Applied Linguistics/Master)
Semantics
Book Review
F. R. Palmer
Reviewer
Pishtiwan Abdullah Sabir
MA student in applied linguistics
2011
Introduction:
In recent years there has been a greatly increased in semantics, with
inevitably new ideas and new attributes. "Semantics" is written by F.R. Palmer in
1977 is a guide to Semantics. The book contains a broad selection of classic
articles on semantics. It is Comprehensive in the variety and breadth of
theoretical frameworks and topics that it covers, it includes articles
representative of the major theoretical frameworks within semantics. The fruitful
information concerning the basis and most used semantic items can be seen. The
aim of this book review is to shed lights on some basic semantic terms and
concepts quickly, precisely and accurately. At the same time it gives good offer to
understand the semantics as a field of general linguistics which all MA students
either in applied linguistics or in linguistics fields should have an idea about that.
This Review consists of eight chapters, first chapter is an introduction to
semantics, the definition of semantics was done it by Palmer very clearly which he
says "Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning, and
since meaning is a part of language, semantics is a part of linguistics". Also the
history of semantics, semantics and linguistics, semantics in other disciplines and
much other information can be found in this chapter.
The second chapter was devoted for Naming, Concepts, sense, reference, the
word, and the sentences, which are the key words in the study of semantics,
when we are talking about semantics we will hear the mentioned words
inevitably.
In the third chapter the author talks about linguistics relatively, the exclusion of
the content, context of situation and behaviorism. The ideas of this chapter are
totally new to me because I was not coming across this information in my
academic life.
The fourth chapter shed lights on lexical semantics, fields and collocations. It
talks about the difficulty in relating language to external world that arise from the
fact that the way that we see the world is to some degree dependent on language
we use.
1
Chapter five is about the known part of semantics which are lexical semantics
and sense relations. To me the most interesting part of semantic can be found in
this chapter because hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy, Polysemy, and hyponymy
are clearly defined and good examples for each of them are provided. At the
same time the author removes the unclearly parts of each words that were
mentioned.
Chapter six is devoted for Semantics and grammar, the author describes the
formal grammar, grammatical categories, components and sentences, case
grammar and sentences types and modality.
In chapter seven utterance meaning was described. The spoken language, topic
and comment, and presupposition are clarified with explicit examples.
In chapter eight which is the last chapter is an important new chapter on
'Semantics and logic', showing clearly and simply the influence that logical models
have had on the study of meaning
2
Chapter one: Introduction
Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning, and since
meaning is a part of language, semantics is a part of linguistics. The term
semantics is a recent addition to English language. It has a long history, there are
several works can be considered as the study of meaning, but the word semantics
does not occur until it was introduced in 1894 in a paper read to the American
Philological Association entitled "Reflected meanings, a point in semantics"
The most famous books of semantics is "the meaning of meaning" by C.K. Ogden
& I. A. Richards which was published in 1923. Semantics is a controversial subject
because since it is dealing with meaning and meaning has not clear definition yet.
Ogden and Richards listed 16 different meanings for meaning.
Semantics and Linguistics:
Semantics is a component or level of linguistics of the same kind as phonetics or
grammar. Most of the linguists have accepted a linguistic model in which
semantics is at one end and phonetics at other, with grammar somewhere in the
middle. De Saussure refers semantics as signifier. For example if we take the
traffic signs, they are communication with people through sign, for example Red
signifying stopping!
Historical Semantics
Great deal of work that has been done on semantics has been a historical kind,
the term semantics was first used to refer to the development and change of
meaning. Bloom Field noted a number of types of word with their traditional
names:
Meat ………..Food
Town………fence
Stove………heated room
3
There are several reasons behind changes; the most important reason is
invention. Apart from scientific study of the change of meaning, it is an obvious
fact that people are interested in ETYMPOGY, the discovery of the earlier
meanings of words.
Semantics in other disciplines
Semantics is not the only interest of linguists, but it was the interest of
psycholinguists, philosophers and anthropologists, but since their approach to
semantics is different than linguists and their aims will be different too. Most
philosophers suggest that many philosophical problems can be solved by the
study of ordinary meaning.
Anthropologists are concerned with language as an essential part of the cultural
and behavioral patterns of the people they study.
Chapter Two: The Scope of Semantics
Naming: Language is a communication system which with on the one hand the
signifier, on the other the signified. One of the oldest views found in Plato's
dialogue "Cratylus" is that the signifier is a word in the language and signified is
the object in the real world.
There are many difficulties with this naming view because:
1- It is difficult to extend the theory of naming to include other parts of
speech. It includes only nouns.
2- Some nouns do not exist in the world like, unicorn, fairy, and goblin; these
are some names of creatures which do not exist in the real world.
3- Abstract nouns don’t have any objects in the real world, like love, nice,
hate…etc.
4- There are lots of visible objects in the world while they have one single
word. Like Chair.
4
Concepts: It is one of the sophisticated views of relating objects through the
mediation of concepts of mind. According to de Saussure, we realized that
linguistic signs consist of signifier and signified, more strictly, a sound image and a
concept, both linked by psychological "associative" bond. Both of them are
mirrored in some way by conceptual entities. Ogden suggests the semantic
triangle which exists between linguistic items, referent and the object. According
this theory there is no direct link between symbols and referent ( language and
the world).
Sense and Reference: Reference deals with the relationship between the
linguistic elements, words, sentences, etc and the non linguistic world of
experience. Sense relates to the complex system of relationship that hold
between linguistic elements themselves (mostly words) . It is concerned only intra
linguistic relations.
In the old English, this problem was solved because everything has its own gender
whether male, female, or neutral. Also there is other relationship between word
like father, son, uncle, nephew etc.
Here we have two types of semantics, one that deals with semantic structure and
the other deals with meaning in terms of our experience outside language.
The word: Dictionaries appear to concerned with stating the meaning of words
and it is reasonable to assume that the word is one of the basic units of
semantics. But no all the words have meaning; English grammarian Henry Sweet
drew a distinction between "Full" words and "Form" words. Full word like tree,
blue, gently and form word like it, the, of, and. The form words have only
grammatical functions because these words cannot be stated in isolation but only
in relation to other words. The best definition for word is "minimum free form"
which is done by Bloomfield.
Ullmann made a distinction between Transparent and Opaque, Transparent
words are whose meaning can be determined from the meaning of their parts,
Opaque are opposite of Transparent. Chopper and doorman are transparent, but
5
axe and porter are opaque. Also both these two term has degree, for example we
can say chopper is chopping meat, but we cannot say screwdriver is drive screw!
Idioms are another case to be studied in semantics because group of words are
combined to give one meaning and the meaning cannot predicted from the
meaning of the words.
Sentence: The traditional definition of sentence is "The expression of a complete
thought" The sentence is essentially a grammatical unit; indeed it is the function
of syntax to describe the structure of the sentence and thereby to define it. In
English a sentence should minimally consist of Subject and Verb. But sometimes
this will not be applied, we can use coming? Instead of are you coming?
Another problem arouses when we are talking about the meaning of sentences
because sentences can be translated according to deep or surface meaning. EG I
went to bank is ambiguous. We can say that to understand the meaning of
sentences we have to know the intonation, stress rhythm loudness etc of
sentences.
Chapter Three: Context and Reference:
Linguistic relativity: Parts of difficulty in relating language to external world that
arise from the fact that the way that we see the world is to some degree
dependent on language we use. Human categorize the objects of our experience
with the aid of language. Sapir suggests that the world that we live "is to large
extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group" His view was
expanded by Whorf and become Sapir-Wharf hypothesis. They suggest that we
are unaware of the language around us as we are unaware of air. Also he states
that there are several words for one thing, for example Eskimo have 4 words for
snow and in Arabic there are several words for camel. Human beings do not live
in the objective world alone, not alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has
become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to
6
imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and
that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of
communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a
large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two
languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same
social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not
merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and
otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our
community predispose certain choices of interpretation.
The exclusion of context: there are lots of linguists who exclude context from the
study of semantics because the meanings of some sentences are ambiguous. This
ambiguity leads to confusion.
Context of situation: the term context of situation associates with two scholars,
first an anthropologist and a linguist. Both were concerned with stating meaning
in terms of the context.
Behaviorism: This view was emerged by Bloomfield. He claims that human beings
have stimulus and response. He shows the example of Jack and Jill. When Jill is
hungry and sees an apple then makes a stimulus through language, after that Jack
fetches an apple which is a reaction or response. Throughout this story Bloomfield
say that Human beings have Stimulus and Response.
Context, Culture and Style: Every context has its own disciplines, for example the
speaker must identify the participants, the persons to whom he is speaking. AT
the same time he has to have information about the place. In English we have
here and there, that and this according to the position of the things. Also there
should be time relationship with the manner of the discourse.
One important thing to be mention in discourse is that, the speaker should have
information about the social ranking and relationship of the person to whom he is
speaking. Style is another thing to make distinction between people. There are
lots of people speaking in different dialects within the same geographical area.
7
Chapter four: Lexical semantics : Fields and Collocations
Paradigmatic and syntagmatic: This chapter clarifies de Saussure's notion of
"value". He states that there is relationship between the words. For example the
knight in chess is called knight not because of its size, shape, etc but because of its
relationship with other pieces of the board. He makes a distinction between
paradigmatic and syntagmatic. The former we can find substitute words or
linguistics items in a particular environment, but in latter the relationship
contrasts by the virtue of its co-occurrence with similar units. For example in a red
and a green door, the green and red are in a paradigmatic relationship but each of
them is in syntagmatic relationship.
Color system: we don’t have any evidence to say that Red is more than blue or
blue is more than yellow, because colors are not accounted in terms of single
dimension. Most of the languages have their own system of color, for example in
Philippine language there are only four basic types of color, white, black, red and
green. Then among each of the basic colors there are grades for being light or
dark. English has 11 colors, white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple,
pink, orange and grey. That is to say colors have their own ordering system and
they are not arranged randomly.
Collocation: Porizg urged that an important relationship can be seen in
syntagmatic relationship for example between blond and hair, bite and teeth,
bark and dog. Then Firth invented Collocation idea, this is collocation that we
don’t need to say white milk because originally milk is white.
Idioms: sometimes we cannot predict the meaning of a phrase or a sentence by
the interpretation of the words. For example kick the bucket equals to die! At the
same time we cannot give tenses to idioms. At the same time we cannot make
idioms passive.
8
Chapter Five: Lexical semantics: sense relation
Some simple logic: Here the logical and semi logical relations between the words
of a sentence is shown. E.G John is a man, here M will stand for "a man" and a
stands for John. If we extend this sentence we say "John loves Mary", we will have
(L(a,b)). Also if we say "Mary loves John" the formula will be (L(M,J)).
Hyponymy: it involves us in the notion of inclusion in the sense that tulip and rose
are included in flower, loin and tiger in animal.
Synonymy: it is used to mean the sameness of meaning. Synonyms are more in
English language because it has taken words from two sourses, from AngloSaxons and from French, Latin and Greek. The words that have been taken from
Anglo-Saxons are considered to be Native words and the words that have been
taken from other languages are called foreign words. Mostly the native words are
shorter less learned E.G. universe and world.
At the same time we can say that there are no two words that have the same
meaning exactly. There are several reasons behind this case; the first one is the
availability of different kinds of dialects in English language like fall and autumn,
the second reason is the availability of different styles. The third one is using the
words according to the situations. The fourth and the last reason is that the
meaning of the words is close to each other for example we have the word
govern, we can use control, determine, direct require etc.
Antonymy: The term Antonymy is used for oppositeness of meaning, the words
that are opposite are antonyms. For example Big X Small, High X Low. We have
not to forget that Antonyms are gradable for example we have Cold and Hot but
between them we have Cold, cool, warm and hot. Lyon introduced the term
complementary, because male is complementary of female, married is
complementary of single.
Relational opposites: a quite different kind of opposite is found with fairs of
words which exhibit the reversal of a relationship between items. For example
buy and sell, husband and wife.
At the same time we have symmetric
9
relationship which means the same relation holds between the arguments in both
directions, so that only one term not two is required. For example cousin,
parents, child, grandparents have symmetric relation because their sexes are not
clear whether they are male or female.
Polysemy, homonymy: Polysemy means a word may have a set of different
meanings, for example word of fight may mean "passing through the air", "power
of flying" " air journey" " unit of the Air forces" homonymy means there are
several words have the same shape but different meanings. Homography means
words have the same shape but different pronunciations and meanings like read.
Homophony means words have the same pronunciation but different meaning
and shapes like site and sight.
The problem of universal: There is a question always come across in the minds of
the readers of this book, whether all the languages of the world have the same
semantic features or not? Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that each language
may create its own semantics. In the other hand all the languages have the
components of male and female, basic colors and kinship relations. There is
universal inventory of semantic features, but whether all the languages have the
same inventory features or not?
In some languages the linguistic system bears very little resemblance to any of
this analysis. Thus in Pawnee the term that we might translate as father is used
for all the males whose relationship is traceable through the father, while uncle is
used for all males traceable through the mother, and conversely, all the females
traceable through the mother are " mother" and all the females traceable though
the father are "aunt" the rules for son, daughter, nephew, niece are converse of
these.
10
Chapter Six: Semantics and Grammar
Formal Grammar: most of the traditional grammarians assumed that grammatical
categories were essentially semantics. Nouns were defined as names of things,
gender was concerned with sex, while plural simply meant more than one.
In the other hand many linguists have urged that grammar must be kept distinct
from semantics and grammatical categories must be wholly defined in terms of
the form of the language.
There are two arguments for excluding meaning from grammar, first one is that
meaning is very vague, because of the vagueness we might seem to be obvious
semantic categories in terms of are often definable in terms of the formal
features of a language. The second argument is that, when we establish semantic
and grammatical categories independently, they often don’t coincide. One of the
clear examples is wheat and oats where there is clear lack of correspondence
between grammatical number, singular and plural, with numerical quantity. We
can say the wheat is in the barn and the oats are in the barn. Here no one surely
would seriously argue that wheat is singular mass and oats consist of a collection
of grains.
As we go into more detailed investigation of grammar, we find the correlation
between grammar and semantics becomes closer and closer until there will not
be clear answer for some cases. For example John is seeming happy, this sentence
is ungrammatical, but is this in fact a grammatical rule or it is that for semantic
reasons John cannot be in continuous state of seeming? There is no clear answer,
the line between grammar and semantics is not a clear one. There are some
puzzling aspects of relation between grammar and meaning, first we can set up
formal categories, they will be found to have some correlation but not one-to-one
with semantics. Secondly we find a difficult that there is a difficult boarderline
area.
The controversy about semantics and grammar was revived by Chomsky in 1965,
he claimed that there is a syntactic deep structure and that is at this level that we
can relate active and passive sentences and the only difference between active
11
and passive sentence would be the absence or presence of an element passive.
For example the piano was played by John can be analyzed as John, play, past
tense, the piano and passive.
Grammatical categories: English doesn't have any problem with grammatical
gender because it is not available. It has he, she and it and they are markers of
sex.
Grammar and lexicons: Full words are essentially those that can be dealt with
satisfactory in dictionaries, but the form words have to be discussed in relation to
grammar of the language. Fries recognized only four parts of speech, the parts are
nouns, verbs, adjectives sand adverb, at the same time he mentioned a list of
function words. The distinction between Grammar and lexicons can be
determined by the grammatically and semantically correct sentences. For
example " the man ate the car is grammatically right but semantically wrong, that
I why we cannot say this sentence is correct sentence.
Case Grammar: It was proposed by Fillmore in 1968 as one of the arguments in
favor of generative semantics. If we take these sentences, John opened the door
with a key, the key opened the door, and the door opened. There is the same
verb "open" in all three, and it is active in all the three. Here if we analyze the
sentences we will know that John is Agentive (actor), throughout the key
(instrumental) and the door is objective. Fillmore suggests that his case notions
are a set of universal presumably innate concepts and proceeds to define them in
semantic terms.
Sentences types and modality: throughout these sentences we know three types
of sentences:
John shut the door. (Declarative)
Did John shut the door? (Interrogative)
Shut the door. (Imperative)
12
Some problems raise here when we say some sentences like can you pass the salt
to me? It is in the shape command, but if we add please at the beginning or at the
end of the sentences it will be somehow a interrogative.
The term modality is intended to suggest some uses of model verbs e.g. can to
express ability o r will for willingness.
Chapter Seven: Utterance Meaning
The spoken language: Spoken language has priority over written language
because:
1- The human race had speech long before it had writing and there are still
many languages that have no written form.
2- The child learns to speak long before he learns to write.
3- Speech plays a greater role in our lives than writing.
4- Written language can be converted in to speech without loss. But the
converse is not true.
Topic and comment:
In English and in any other languages it is not easy to know what is meant by topic
and comment, but there are four features that can b related to this notion,
1- Topic means putting emphasis on something or someone in a sentence
which can be called topicalisation too. For example when we say the man
over there I don’t like very much.
2- We can choose alternative syntactic constructions whose chief difference
lies in what is subject. An obvious example is "John hit Bill and Bill was hit
by John.
3- English has clear devices for dealing with the given and the new, the
information that is already known in the discourse and the information that
is being freshly stated. John hit Bill and Fred hit him, here Fred is new, hit
and him are already given.
4- We often use accent for contrast. In John hit Bill, any one of the three
words may be accented.
13
Performance and speech acts: Austin published a book entitled "How to o things
with words" in which she pointed out that there are number of utterances will not
be true or false, but they may be parts of speech. For example, I name this ship
Elizabeth; here the speaker is not making any kind of statement that can be
regarded as true false. The sentences that he is concerned with here are
grammatically all statements, but they are performative.
Chapter Eight: Semantic and Logic
Logic and language: there is stricter sense of the terms to refer to formal logical
system (Reasonable) and which deal with the validity of interference, an example
for that is below:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Here the conclusion is logic, but this will not be logic if Socrates will be the name
of a cat. The issue is not whether language is or not logical, but, how far the
application of logic will serve to explain some linguistic phenomena.
Prepositional Logic: the main concern here is with the relations that hold
between sentences, especially relations involving complex sentences. For
example John is in his office and John is at home. Given that the second is false,
we conclude that the first is true. This conclusion can be drawn irrespective of the
form of the sentences themselves. Here we need a connective to give a semantic
logic to this sentence; we can say John is either at home or in his office.
Intension and extension: Extension of an expression is the set of entities which
that expression denotes, while its intention is whatever it is that defines that set.
Thus the extension of cow is the set of all the cows in the world, but its intention
is the property that is described as bovine. Knowing the meaning of an expression
cannot be equivalent to know its extension.
14
Truth conditional semantics: the starting point of the argument that to know the
meaning of a sentence is to know the conditions under which a sentence is true.
Tarski defines true sentence as one which states that the state of affair is so and
so, and the state of affair is so and so, an example for that:
Snow is while if and only if snow is white
In fact, Tarski proposes this as the basic of a theory of truth, but it is easy to see
how it can be converted into a theory of meaning. At first glance this dictum
completely u informative. Of course snow is white. But this can be true when it is
a part of meta-language.
15
Conclusion
In summary, throughout this review I realized that Semantics is a set of
studies of the use of language in relation to many different aspects of experience,
to linguistic and non linguistic context, to participants in discourse, to their
knowledge and experience. What I liked is that the author has understandable
style of writing and he clarifies all the subjects and concepts very precisely and
attentively. At the same time all the important topics of semantics can be seen in
that book.
In this review I tried to review what the author stated in the book accurately
and with shorter and simpler phrases. I hope I could capable of reaching the
intended target of the ideas and terms of the book.
Finally, I recommend all MA students of applied linguistics and general
linguistics to read this book because in their course of study and in their academic
life, they have to come across these terms.
16
17
18