Salahaddin University-Hawler

Postgraduate Studies Board

(Applied Linguistics/Master)

Semantics

Book Review

F. R. Palmer

Reviewer

Pishtiwan Abdullah SabirMA 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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 Anglo-Saxons 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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

Conclusion

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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.

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