‫ملخص كتاب‬

‫‪F. R. Palmer‬‬

‫مكتبة ‪NBS BOOKSHOP‬‬

‫توصيل لكافة المحافظات‬
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!

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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

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 ETYMPOLOGY, the discovery
of the earlier meanings of words.

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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:

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 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.

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 to 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 nonlinguistic
world of experience. Sense relates to the complex system of
relationship that holds 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
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relationship between words 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 concern 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.

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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 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 driving 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?

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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 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
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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

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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

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sentence by the interpretation of the words. For example kick

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the bucket equals to die! At the same time we cannot give tenses to
idioms. At the same time we cannot make idioms passive.

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
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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 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.

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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

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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.

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

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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 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.

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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.

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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)
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.

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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
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 given.
4- We often use accent for contrast. In John hit Bill, any one of
the three words may be accented.

Performance and speech acts: Austin published a book entitled "How

to things with words" in which she pointed out

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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
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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.

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:

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 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

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