CRITICAL BOOK REVIEW

"INTRODUCING SEMANTICS"

COMPILED BY :

MERIAH HATI LUBIS (0304172125)

LECTURE: MARYATI SALMIAH, M.Hum

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF TARBIYAH AND TEACHER TRAINING

STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY OF NORTH SUMATRA

MEDAN 2019
 PREFACE

Thanks to our god Allah swt. The one Almighty God who has given his bless to us to
make our paper assignment entitled “Critical Book Review”. The writers also wish to express
his deep and sincere gratitude for those who have guided in completing this paper. This English
paper contains review of Introducing Semantics books that suppose can helps university student
to understand what Semantics is.

And we also thanks to our lecture Miss Maryati Salmiah, M.Hum. to lead us finishing
our assignment papers and we hope this knowledge can be useful for our future.

We also thanks to our family especially our parents who support us to get knowledge in
everywhere, every time, and etc.

And the last we say thank you to our friends that support us to spirit us to finishing this
assignment paper and we hope that Allah give them bless too , Amin..

Medan, Juli 2019

MERIAH HATI LUBIS

 TABLE OF CONTENT

PREFACE...................................................................................................................i

TABLE OF CONTENT.............................................................................................ii

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION...............................................................................1

A.Background............................................................................................................1

B.The Benefit of CBR...............................................................................................1

C.The Aim of CBR....................................................................................................2

D.Books Identity........................................................................................................3

CHAPTER II BOOK SUMMARY............................................................................8

A.CHAPTER I...........................................................................................................8

B.CHAPTER II..........................................................................................................8

C.CHAPTER III and CHAPTER IV.........................................................................9

D.CHAPTER V.......................................................................................................12

E.CHAPTER VI......................................................................................................13

F.CHAPTER VII and CHAPTER VIII....................................................................17

G.CHAPTER IX......................................................................................................23

H.CHAPTER X.......................................................................................................27

I.CHAPTER XI.......................................................................................................34

CHAPTER III DISCUSSION.................................................................................38

A.Advantages of the book.......................................................................................38

B.Disadvantages of the book...................................................................................38

CHAPTER IV CLOSING.......................................................................................39

A.Conclusion...........................................................................................................39

B.Suggestion............................................................................................................39
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background
In our daily lives we are always faced with various problems or problems, both lay and
problem that require systematic solutions. The problem is the problem solving often with a
simple method and is immediate and does not require supporting data. Besides the problem of
lay problems, there are problems that are complex or complex problems whose solutions are
demanding and require the collection of a number of supporting data used to make decisions
and draw conclusions. This kind of problem is what concerns us, especially in the world of
education. Problems like this require the scientific method for its solution, namely through
certain steps in an effort to solve the problems encountered. The development of science is
minimal because of the low interest of many people at this time. Criticize the book one way that
is done to increase interest in reading someone's interest in a subject. Criticize books (Critical
Book Review), this is a writing or review of a work or book, whether in the form of a fiction or
non-fiction book, it can also be interpreted as a scientific work that describes the understanding
of the contents of a book. Criticizing a book is not intended to drop or increase the value of a
book but to explain what a book is, its advantages or disadvantages that will be taken into
consideration or a book review to the reader regarding a new book and a review of the book's
strengths and weaknesses. He explained in criticizing the book, we can describe the contents of
the author's thoughts from the book in question followed by an opinion on the contents of the
book.
Thus the book or reviewer report is very useful to find out the contents of the book. Besides
that, you will know about the shortcomings and excesses of the contents of the books that have
been read so that you can assess the contents of the book well and not just skim the book but
can understand what is in the book in depth
B. The Benefit of Critical Book Review
This Critical Book Review has several benefits such as the main one is to fulfill curriculum
and learning courses. Another benefit is to find out more in detail about the book that was
reviewed. In addition to know more about the contents of the book, the benefit is that we get
information and increase knowledge from the contents of the book. We can also know the
comparison of what is contained in the contents of the books. For the authors themselves the
benefit is to sharpen the mind so that they can think critically in responding to the contents of
both journals. Train yourself to be able to criticize, give advice and give conclusions from the
contents of both books
C. The Aim of Critical Book Review
The aim of the Critical Book Review is to review the contents of the book. In addition to
reviewing the contents of the book, another goal is to find out what information is contained in
books. And Train yourself to think critically in finding information provided by each chapter of
the first book and second book and comparing the contents of the first book and the other book.
D. Books Identity

Identity Book

Tittle : Introducing Semantics

The Author : Nick Riemer
Website : www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521851923
City of Publish : Published in the United States of America by Cambridge
University Press, New York
Publish book : ISBN-13 : 978-0-511-67746-56 eBook (NetLibrary)
ISBN-13 : 978-0-521-85192-36Hardback
ISBN-13 : 978-0-521-61741-36Paperback
Year : First published 2010
Pages of book : 460 pages include cover, table of content and refereces
 CHAPTER II

BOOKS SUMMARY

A. CHAPTER I
What is Semantics?

Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a
number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics, which studies
the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical form, lexical
semantics, which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual semantics, which
studies the cognitive structure of meaning.

Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικός sēmantikós, "significant") is the linguistic and
philosophical study of meaning in language, programming languages, formal logics, and
semiotics. It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs,
and symbols—and what they stand for in reality, their denotation.

In International scientific vocabulary semantics is also called semasiology. The word

semantics was first used by Michel Bréal, a French philologist. It denotes a range of ideas—
from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language for denoting a
problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of
understanding has been the subject of many formal enquiries, over a long period of time,
especially in the field of formal semantics. In linguistics, it is the study of the interpretation of
signs or symbols used in agents or communities within particular circumstances and contexts.
Within this view, sounds, facial expressions, body language, and proxemics have semantic
(meaningful) content, and each comprises several branches of study. In written language, things
like paragraph structure and punctuation bear semantic content; other forms of language bear
other semantic content.

But not only sentences have meanings. Even the shortest, most everyday words, which we
would not normally consider as containing information, like the, not, of, or even ouch!,
contribute something specifi c to the meanings of utterances in which they occur and can thus
be legitimately considered as having meanings in their own right.8
B. CHAPTER II

What is relation between meaning and definition?

As a result, an understanding of defi nition is necessary for any attempt to develop a

conceptual theory of word meaning. Furthermore, when people think of a word’s meaning, they
are inclined to think of something like its definition in a dictionary. Since about the sixteenth
century, dictionaries have played an extremely important role in the way we think about and use
our own language, and their existence and popularity can be related to a complex of
pretheoretical ideas about the nature and role of language: a whole linguistic ideology. As a
result, it is important to clarify the similarities and differences between the defi nitions that
might be proposed in theoretical linguistic semantics, and the types that can be found in
dictionaries.

As discussed there, a defi nition (horismos) has two quite different interpretations: ‘in defi
ning,’ says Aristotle, ‘one exhibits either what the object is or what its name means’ (Tredennick
1960: II.7.92b). A definition can therefore be considered either as a sort of summation of the
essence or inherent nature of a thing (real definition; Latin res ‘thing’), or as a description of the
meaning of the word which denotes this thing (nominal defi nition; Latin nomen ‘name, noun’).
Since Aristotle is interested in providing a basis for an understanding of nature, it is the first
interpretation which he adopts: a definition of thunder, for example, is not a description of the
meaning of the word thunder, but expresses thunder’s essential nature (for Aristotle, the noise of
fi re being extinguished in the sky).

Some people have considered that definitions of the underlying nature of objects are the
only type of definitions which can be of interest. Diderot, for example, stated that ‘defiitions of
words differ in no way from definitions of things’ (quoted in Meschonic 1991: 102). And since
it is scientific research which is taken to reveal this underlying nature, these defi nitions will be
formulated by scientifi c disciplines. The infl uential American linguist Leonard Bloomfi eld
stated in a well-known passage that9

C. CHAPTER III and CHAPTER IV

Relation between word meaning and word using

 One of the main questions to be answered by any theory of meaning concerns the scope of
an expression’s meaning: how much of the total effect of an expression is to be attributed to its
meaning, and how much to the context in which it occurs?

We can distinguish two essential types of context:

 the external or real-world context to which linguistic expressions refer, and

 the interpersonal context of linguistic action in which any utterance is placed.

External context: sense and reference

Frege distinguished an expression’s reference, which concerns the entities which the
expression is about, from its sense, which is the way in which we grasp or understand its
referent. In the Fregean view, two crucial features of sense are as follows:

 sense is what our minds ‘grasp’ when we understand the meaning of a word;

 sense determines reference; words’ referents are identified through their senses.

Truth has a central place in Frege’s semantics. To know the sense of a sentence is, for
Frege, to know how the sentence could be assigned a value as true or false: to know what the
conditions are that would make it true or false. Knowledge of a sentence’s truth conditions
allows us to determine, by looking at the sentence’s referents, whether the world actually is the
way the sentence represents it, and thus whether or not the sentence is therefore true.10

The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a linguistic
expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of affairs. The
assertion of facts about the world is just one of the acts which we can use language to perform:
we also ask questions, issue orders, and make requests, to mention only the three most obvious
types of other act for which language is used. For much of the history of refl ection on language
(principally in philosophy), it was the asserting function that was seen as the most basic and
important. Language was seen essentially as a means of describing (asserting facts about)
reality, and its importance as an instrument which could perform a whole variety of different
functions was not fully appreciated.
 Antonymy

Antonymy (oppositeness) may be characterized as a relationship of

incompatibility between two terms with respect to some given dimension of contrast. The
principal distinction to be made in discussion of antonymy is between gradable (e.g. hot–cold)
and non-gradable (e.g. married–unmarried) antonyms, i.e. antonyms which do and do not admit
a midpoint.

Meronymy

Meronymy is the relation of part to whole: hand is a meronym of arm, seed is a meronym
of fruit, blade is a meronym of knife. Not all languages seem to have an unambiguous means of
lexicalizing the concept PART OF, but meronymy is often at the origin of various polysemy
patterns in languages.

Hyponymy and taxonomy

Hyponymy and taxonomy (kind of-ness) define different types of classinclusion

hierarchies; hyponymy is an important structural principle in many languages with classifiers,
while taxonomy has been argued to be basic to the classification and naming of biological
species.

Synonymy

Synonymy is frequently claimed to exist between different expressions of the same

language, but genuine lexical synonyms prove extremely hard to find: once their combinatorial
environments have been fully explored, proposed lexical synonyms often prove not to be such.

Componential analysis

The importance of appreciating a lexeme’s semantic relations in order to understand its

meaning is one of the motivations for a componential approach to semantic analysis.
Componential analysis analyses meaning in terms of binary features (i.e. features with only two
possible values, + or –), and represents a translation into semantics of the principles of
structuralist phonological analysis. As a type of definitional analysis, componential analysis
inherits the failings of traditional 12definitions, and words for which it proves hard to couch
definitions are also hard to analyse componentially.

Polysemy and monosemy

Theoretical and ordinary description of meaning would both be impossible without the
recognition of separate senses within the same word. Words with several related senses are
described as polysemous. Polysemy contrasts simultaneously with monosemy, the case where a
word has a single meaning, and homonymy, the case where two unrelated words happen to
share the same phonological form. In spite of the intuitive obviousness of these distinctions,
there are many instances where it is not clear whether a word should be analysed as polysemous
or monosemous, and no absolute criteria have ever been proposed which will successfully
discriminate them.12

D. CHAPTER VI

Analysis of natural language meanings12

 The nature and importance of logic

Logic investigates the properties of valid arguments and chains of reasoning, and specifies the
conditions which arguments must meet in order to be valid. It is important to linguists for three
principal reasons:

 it constitutes one of the oldest and most developed traditions of the study of
meaning

it is at the heart of formal and computational theories of semantics

 certain logical concepts, like ¬ or ), provide an interesting point of contrast with

their natural language equivalents.

Logical form, validity and soundness

Logic analyses the underlying logical structure of arguments, known as their logical form. This
is independent of the way in which the argument happens to be phrased in any given
language.12
We distinguished between valid and sound arguments:

 Valid arguments are ones in which, if the premises are true, the conclusion must also be
true.

 Sound arguments are valid arguments which have true premises.

Propositional logic

Propositional logic is the branch of logic that studies relations between propositions. A
proposition is something which serves as the premise or conclusion of an argument. These
connectives are truth-functional. This means that whether the propositions to which they are
added are true or not depends solely on the truth of the original propositions. The values or
meanings of the operators can be specified in the form of truth tables, which display the way in
which logical connectives affect the truth of the propositions in which they appear.Logic as
representation and as perfection of meaning. The truth-functional definitions of the
propositional connectives are quite often counter-intuitive and unnatural. None of the operators
corresponds perfectly with any English equivalent. Predicate logic‘Some’ and ‘all’ are the basic
notions of predicate logic.

Predicate logic studies the logical form of propositions involving three kinds of expression:

 singular terms or individual constants, which refer to individuals (whether things or

people). Singular terms are symbolized by lower case letters.

 predicates, which represent properties or relations, such as ‘primate’, ‘hairy’ or ‘adore’.

Predicates are symbolized by upper case letters.

 quantifiers, like ‘some’ () and ‘all’ ().

Predicates have a certain number of arguments. An argument is the individual or

individuals to which the property or relation expressed by the predicate is attributed. is called
the existential quantifier. (x) is read as ‘there is at least one x, such that’. is called the universal
quantifier. (x) is read ‘for every x, it is the case that’. Quantification may be single or multiple.
A singly quantified proposition contains only a single quantifier. A multiply quantified
proposition contains several.
 Relations between propositions

Entailment is the relation between propositions where the truth of the first guarantees the
truth of the second. Presupposition is the relation between two propositions p and q, such that
both p and ¬p entail q. A contradictory is a pair of propositions which always have opposite
truth values. Pairs of propositions which cannot both be true but can both be false are called
contraries. Pairs of propositions which cannot be simultaneously false, but can be
simultaneously true are called subcontraries.14

E. CHAPTER VII and CHAPTER VIII

Discussion of illuminate linguistic semantic

Categorization is a fundamental psychological process: the human mind can class different
things in the world in the same category, and denote them with a single term. Since words can
be seen as the names of categories, categorization has been a major focus of investigations of
word meaning. Linguists and psychologists typically contrast two views of categorization:

 the classical view, on which membership of a given category is an either-or

property, with no in-between cases. For example, on the classical view, something
either is or is not a flower, or a lie, or red.

 the prototype view, on which a category is structured in terms of a central tendency.

On this view, categories like FLOWER, LIE or RED each have more and less
central (prototypical) members.

Problems with classical categorization

The classical view of categorization is rejected by many semanticists since it seems unable to
account for basic semantic phenomena, such as the following:

 There are categories in which some members are better exemplars of the category than
others.

 There are categories in which the boundaries of membership are not clear-cut: it is not
always possible to say whether or not something is a member of the category.
Problems with prototype categorization

The prototype view is certainly able to account for these facts, but is open to several questions
and problems:

 how do we identify the relevant attributes in a category?

 how can we account for the boundaries of prototype categories?

 how much of the vocabulary is structured according to prototypecategories?

Semantic extension and radial categories

Metaphor and metonymy constitute the principal mechanisms of semantic extension, as

seen in expressions like head of a queue, head of cattle and so on. This type of structure, where
there is a central case and conventionalized variations on it which cannot be predicted by
general rules, is called a radial structure. For head, the central case is represented by uses
consistent with the ICM described above, and the variations are the metaphoric and metonymic
extensions.15

F. CHAPTER IX

Explores the semantics of the parts of speech and of tense and aspect15

Exploration of semantic aspects of grammar has not come to an end once we have a
satisfactory theory of the parts of speech: we still have to understand the meanings of the many
morphosyntactic categories to which grammatical principles apply, principally number and case
for nouns, and tense, mood and aspect for verbs. In this section, we will focus on the semantics
of the verbal categories of tense and aspect. These are categories with interesting and complex
semantics, which show close relations with other grammatical properties of the clause.15

Tense

Tense is the name of the class of grammatical markers used to signal the location of
situations in time. Three basic temporal divisions are relevant to the representation of time in
language: what is happening15now, what will happen afterwards, and what has already
happened. Some languages display a three-way division between past, present and future, with
each tense marked separately on the verb. Others have a two-way distinction; either between
past and non-past, or (more rarely) future and non-future. Perfect tenses are often described in
terms of relevance to the speech situation, but this definition is problematic.

Aspect

Aspect is the grammatical category which expresses differences in the way time is
presented in events. Aspectual categories express the internal temporal constituency of an
event; whether the event is viewed from the distance, as a single unanalysable whole (perfective
aspect), or from close-up, so that the distinct stages of the event can be seen individually
(imperfective aspect). The perfective/imperfective distinction has nothing to do with the actual
nature of the event, but is all about how the event is construed by the speaker. In particular, it is
independent of the actual duration of the event in question. Tense is deictic, aspect isn’t A major
difference between tense and aspect is that tense is deictic and aspect isn’t. The particular time
reference of any tense therefore has to be anchored deictically in the moment of utterance.16

The internal structure of achievements

Botne showed that achievement verbs have a more complex temporality than was
originally assumed. What is punctual about achievement verbs like find, die, notice, or
recognize is their nucleus; in addition to this nucleus, a verb may contain a preceding onset
phase or a subsequent coda phase. Languages differ in the temporal phases surrounding the
central nucleus.

Tense and aspect-less languages

Some languages lack any grammatical means of expressing tense–aspect contrasts. In such
languages, the relevant contrasts will be achieved through non-grammatical (lexical and
pragmatic) means. The complete absence of grammatical coding of tense and aspect is not
uncommon in the languages of the world.16

G. CHAPTER X

The linking problem

 The linking problem is the problem of accounting for the relations between a verb and its
associated noun phrases. According to the traditional generative understanding, the lexical
entries for verbs include a specification of the types of argument they have associated with
them. It was assumed that the possible arguments of all verbs could be classified into a small
number of classes, called thematic roles, theta-roles, participant roles or semantic roles. Typical
roles include agent, patient/theme, goal, source, location, instrument, beneficiary and
experiencer. Some roles are more likely to be coded as subject, and others as object. It was
suggested that it is possible to rank the different roles in an order which shows their relative
accessibility to subject position.

Problems with thematic roles

There are three main problems with thematic roles:

 The arguments of many verbs seem hard to assign to any of the conventional thematic
roles.

 There are also many occasions where an argument could be assigned to several thematic
roles.

 It has not proven possible to formulate a universal thematic hierarchy ranking these
roles.

Proto-roles

Dowty (1991) suggested that the different participant roles are cluster concepts, like
Roschean prototypes, and that thematic roles are based on entailments of verb-meanings. The
argument with the most ProtoAgent entailments will be coded as subject, and the one with the
most Proto-Patient entailments as object.

Thematic roles and conceptual structure

Jackendoff’s theory of semantic representation dispenses completely with theta-roles, and

derives argument structure directly from the semantics of the verb. This means that the thematic
hierarchy can be completely restated in terms of underlying conceptual configurations. In
Jackendoff’s theory of conceptual structure, selectional restrictions are also specified directly
by the conceptual structure: they are not extra information which needs to be learnt in addition
to the meaning of the verbs themselves.18

Verb classes and alternations

Many verbs show several different argument structures. These different types of argument
structure are known as alternations. Theyinclude the causative, middle, resultative, conative and
others. Levin and Hovav proposed that which alternations a verb participates in is explained by
its underlying semantic structure. On their theory, verbs fall into semantically defined classes,
which all show similar syntactic behaviour with respect to their alternations.

The meaning of constructions

Words are not the only meaning-bearing units in grammar. Semantic representations are
also associated with constructions. Goldberg put forward a constructional account of the
syntax–semantics interface, in which arguments can be subcategorized by the construction
itself. Not all verbs can appear in all constructions. A verb’s meaning determines whether it is
compatible with a given construction. The constructional account reduces the proliferation of
verb-senses.18

H. CHAPTER XI

 Diachronic and cross-linguistic meaning comparison presupposes a correct

metalanguage claims about the variation or change of given meanings necessitate a
particular metalanguage in which the meanings can be described, a situation which
immediately introduces complications since there is not yet any agreement about
what the correct metalanguage for semantic description is. Linguistics in general,
and semantic theory in particular, assume that languages are mutually translatable in
a way that preserves important meaning components. Importance of polysemy in
meaning change Meaning change crucially involves polysemy. A word does not
suddenly change from meaning A to meaning B in a single move; instead, the
 change happens via an intermediate stage in which the word has both A and B
among its meanings.

The traditional classification of semantic change:

 Specialization (narrowing), in which a word narrows its range of reference

 Generalization (broadening), in which a word’s meaning changes to encompass a

wider class of referente

 Pejorization, in which a word takes on a meaning with a less favourable evaluative

force

 Ameliorization, in which a word takes on a meaning with a more favourable

evaluative force

 Metonymy, the process of sense-extension in which a word shifts to a contiguous

meaning

 Metaphor, changes based on similarity or analogy

Conventionalization of implicature

Much modern work on semantic change examines pathways and regularities of semantic
change, stressing the role of the conventionalization of implicature. This is the theory that
semantic change occurs through the progressive strengthening of the implicatures of
expressions in particular contexts, until the implicated meaning becomes part of the
expression’s literal meaning. These explanations can supersede ones based on the traditional
categories19

Grammaticalization

One particular context for semantic change is grammaticalization, the process by which
open-class content words turn into closed-class function forms. They do this by losing elements
of their meaning, and by a restriction in their possible grammatical contexts. Study of these
processes has revealed a number of regular pathways which recur again and again in the
world’s languages linking particular open-class lexemes with particular grammaticalized
functions.

CHAPTER III

DISCUSSION

A. Advantages of the book

1. This book literally more nice and recommended

2. The contents of this book of course more complete and update
3. This book have already ISBN.
4. This book is very good because the writer provide glossary, appendixes, and another
information about that very support this book to read and understand by reader.
5. This book is the first edition
6. This book is recommended to be reference for the college student especially.
7. This book arranged very interesting with the table and mind mapping to facilitate the
reader Intel understanding it.

B. Disadvantages of the book

1. There is not much explanation from experts at the experimental stage so there are few
references to find out more about the experiment or discussion.
2. The author at least makes a concept map at the beginning of the discussion, so that the
reader knows what is contained in each chapter.
3. This book has too many problems, the content is not short and dense, tends to be wordy.
4. Motivational words at the beginning of the discussion should be included so that the
reader is motivated to read them.
 CHAPTER IV

CLOSING

A. Conclusion

Semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning. There are a
number of branches and subbranches of semantics, including formal semantics, which
studies the logical aspects of meaning, such as sense, reference, implication, and logical
form, lexical semantics, which studies word meanings and word relations, and conceptual
semantics, which studies the cognitive structure of meaning.

The relations between language and context are not limited to those in which a
linguistic expression simply names or describes an already existing referent or state of
affairs. The assertion of facts about the world is just one of the acts which we can use
language to perform: we also ask questions, issue orders, and make requests, to mention only
the three most obvious types of other act for which language is used.
Some languages lack any grammatical means of expressing tense–aspect contrasts. In
such languages, the relevant contrasts will be achieved through non-grammatical (lexical and
pragmatic) means. The complete absence of grammatical coding of tense and aspect is not
uncommon in the languages of the world.21

B. Suggestion
 Maybe we cannot give many suggestion for this book, because we think it was a
complete book, maybe just added the picture to make this book more interesting and then
don’t give too much theory. I think the writer must be creative to make this book cover be
interest and give some color to make us want to read it. We suggest this book to our friends,
from student that engage with English subject so they can achieve more knowledge about
semantics.