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.

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

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
Townfence
Stoveheated 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.

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 dont have any objects in the real world, like
love, nice, hateetc.
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 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.
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?

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 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.

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 dont 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 dont 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.

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 AngloSaxons 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

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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.
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 dont 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.
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.

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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)
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 dont 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.
Performance and speech acts: Austin published a book
entitled "How to o 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 is that defines that set. Thus the extension of cow is

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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:
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 metalanguage.

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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.

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