Semantics: An Introduction to Non-Lexical Aspects of Meaning (review)

Most recent textbooks in semantics are lexical semantics texts, formal semantics texts, or texts that try to cover everything from lexical semantics to formal semantics to pragmatics to cognitive linguistics. This book breaks from those categories, providing a non-formal introduction to specific nonlexical issues in semantics. As such, it is closest in spirit to Thomas Hofmann’s Realms of meaning (London: Longman, 1993—out of print) and William Frawley’s Linguistic semantics (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992). In comparison to Hofmann’s, this book’s coverage is narrower and deeper, and its organization a bit more straightforward. In comparison to Frawley’s, this text is considerably shorter because it does not cover some of the same areas (e.g. Frawley’s attention to gender and animacy), it includes less background on the nature of meaning and linguistic semantics, and it discusses most areas in less depth. Depending on the amount of time your curriculum gives to semantics, the issues of length and cost may make Bennett’s book more usable as a textbook and Frawley’s more valuable as an additional resource.

The book is divided into nine chapters. The introduction introduces some useful background concepts: grammaticalization, prototypes, pragmatics, and polysemy and monosemy. Ch. 2 discusses the relationships between syntactic and semantic categories. The remaining chapters cover proposition types, deixis, tense, aspect, modality, negation, and determination, in that order. In each chapter (sometimes in a dedicated section), attention is given to languages other than English (plus nonstandard varieties of English), ranging from Afrikaans to Yimas. The purpose here is mostly contrastive—having seen what English does, we’re asked to consider the range of possibilities of what could be done in a language. Varieties of types of evidence are employed and explained, including corpus evidence. Ample examples are given, and each chapter ends by discussing suggestions for further reading. For the most part, these are excellent, although I found the suggested texts for pragmatics a bit dated. There is a short glossary, with cross-references to the chapters in which the defined concepts were introduced. Unfortunately, the author provides no practice exercises.

The explanations are very accessible but do assume some familiarity with linguistics. (I myself intend to use it in a second-year course in our rather intensive linguistics major, following a first-year course on lexical semantics.) Particularly impressive is the way in which alternative views to or problems with the semantic analyses presented are discussed and taken seriously. One contrast to other semantics textbooks is the downplay of semantic (thematic) roles ‘partly because defining semantic roles is extremely difficult, partly because they are no longer central objects of linguistic investigation, and partly because their usefulness is very limited’ (54). But even though B does not catalogue varieties of semantic roles, he introduces the reader to the part that semantic roles play in various approaches, attempts to define proto-roles, and demonstrates cases that contradict the generalizations of argument selection principles. So, even though his approach is brief and not formal, it is not in any way ‘baby semantics’, as it expects the reader to appreciate the questions in semantics at least as much as the answers.

Given all the above, this probably isn’t an ideal ‘teach yourself semantics’ book, and as a course textbook, it would require the accompaniment of strong teaching. Nevertheless, the specialized coverage and attention to natural language rather than formalism makes it a very welcome addition to the growing number of semantics texts currently available.