Semantics (review)

Semantics is a welcome addition to the field of introductory textbooks, having both breadth of topic and in-depth discussions of basic semantic concepts, as well as being accessible to students with a limited linguistic background. The book is divided into three main parts: ‘Preliminaries’, ‘Semantic description’, and ‘Theoretical approaches’.

The first two chapters make up the preliminaries section, covering ‘the place of semantics in linguistics and its relations with the disciplines of philosophy and psychology’ (xvii). John I. Saeed discusses the complexities involved in studying semantics and in so doing introduces many of the basic ideas in the field. Ch. 2 is especially helpful for the uninitiated who need to become familiar with the vocabulary and concepts underlying semantics.

The next six chapters constitute the core of the book by investigating meaning at the word and sentence levels. Ch. 3 examines the word and its lexical relations, as well as discussing some of the universals—color terms and core vocabularies. This would have been an appropriate place to also mention those words that do not show up in any language (‘impossible’ words), but as S mentions in the preface, there are so many subtopics in semantics that he could not manageably include them all. Ch. 4 is an overview of propositional logic and predicate logic easy enough for beginners to follow. While most beginning textbooks discuss sentence relations, many omit the use of algorithms, which S does introduce. Furthermore, he includes in the theoretical section a chapter (Ch. 10) on formal semantics where he translates English into the language of logic and discusses a mathematical model to describe language situations.

Ch. 5 focuses on the semantics of verbs, covering types, tense, aspect, modality, mood, and evidentiality. Ch. 6 deals with thematic roles in much more depth than other introductory textbooks. In addition to delineating the types, S discusses thematic roles and grammatical relations, the problems thematic roles pose, why thematic roles are important, and their role in voice constructions.

Ch. 7 begins the discussion of context with a thorough look at deixis, information structure, and inference. Conversational implicature is also introduced in this chapter. Ch. 8 explains speech acts.

The last three chapters focus on the main theoretical approaches in semantics, building upon the concepts discussed in earlier chapters. Ch. 9 looks at various theories, including those of Jerrold Katz, Leonard Talmy, Ray Jackendoff, and James Pustejovsky. The last chapter details cognitive semantics, beginning with a brief explanation of the main principles and moving on to metaphor, image schemas, and mental spaces, and finishing with Ronald W. Langacker’s theory.

Overall, this book is a standout among introductory textbooks. Every chapter is followed by exercises designed to give semantics students practice working with the concepts, and some of them require students to think about how semantics works in their daily lives—an invaluable teaching tool. I especially like the inclusion of languages other than English to exemplify topics such as deixis and thematic roles since some phenomena do not exist in English or can be better illustrated by other languages. The book also contains extensive notes and a list of references. I, for one, am excited to find a long overdue textbook that is well written and accessible. It has many examples and appropriate student exercises—plus, in paperback, it is affordable for students.