Semantics Fourth Edition John I. Saeed Semantics Introducing Linguistics This outstanding series is an indispensable resource for students and teachers – a concise and engaging introduction to the central subjects of contemporary linguis- tics. Presupposing no prior knowledge on the part of the reader, each volume sets out the fundamental skills and knowledge of the field, and so provides the ideal edu- cational platform for further study in linguistics. 1 Andrew Spencer Phonology 2 John I.
Saeed Semantics, Fourth Edition 3 Barbara Johnstone Discourse Analysis, Second Edition 4 Andrew Carnie Syntax, Third Edition 5 Anne Baker and Kees Hengeveld Linguistics 6 Li Wei, editor Applied Linguistics Semantics Fourth Edition John I. Saeed This fourth edition first published 2016 © 2016 John I. Saeed Edition History: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd (1e, 1997); Blackwell Publishing Ltd (2e, 2003; 3e, 2009) Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of John I.
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Cover image: Wassily Kandinsky, Network Seen from Above, No. 231 (Geflecht von Oben, No. © SuperStock Set in 10/11.5pt PlantinStd by Aptara Inc., New Delhi, India 1 2016 To Joan, Alexander, and Isabel Contents List of Figures and Tables xv Preface xvii Abbreviations and Symbols xix Part I Preliminaries 1 1 Semantics in Linguistics 3 1.2 Semantics and Semiotics 5 1.3 Three Challenges in Doing Semantics 5 1.4 Meeting the Challenges 7 1.5 Semantics in a Model of Grammar 8 1.2 Word meaning and sentence meaning 9 1.6 Some Important Assumptions 10 1.1 Reference and sense 11 1.2 Utterances, sentences, and propositions 11 1.3 Literal and non-literal meaning 13 1.4 Semantics and pragmatics 15 1.7 Summary 17 viii Contents Exercises 17 Further Reading 19 Notes 19 References 20 2 Meaning, Thought, and Reality 22 2.1 Types of reference 24 2.3 Nouns and noun phrases 27 2.3 Reference as a Theory of Meaning 29 2.3 Necessary and sufficient conditions 33 2.5 Relations between concepts 36 2.5 Words, Concepts, and Thinking 37 2.2 The language of thought hypothesis 40 2.3 Thought and reality 41 2.6 Summary 42 Exercises 43 Further Reading 44 Notes 44 References 45 Part II Semantic Description 49 3 Word Meaning 51 3.2 Words and Grammatical Categories 52 3.3 Words and Lexical Items 53 3.4 Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning 56 3.6 Meronymy 66 Contents ix 3.8 Summary 75 Exercises 76 Further Reading 78 Notes 79 References 80 4 Sentence Relations and Truth 84 4.2 Logic and Truth 86 4.3 Necessary Truth, A Priori Truth, and Analyticity 91 4.2 Two approaches to presupposition 98 4.5 Presuppositions and context 103 4.6 Pragmatic theories of presupposition 104 4.6 Summary 105 Exercises 106 Further Reading 108 Notes 108 References 110 5 Sentence Semantics 1: Situations 112 5.2 Verbs and situation types 115 5.3 A system of situation types 118 5.4 Tests for situation types 120 5.7 Comparing aspect across languages 130 5.8 Combining situation type and aspect 132 5.3 Modality and Evidentiality 134 5.4 Summary 142 Exercises 143 Further Reading 146 Notes 146 References 147 6 Sentence Semantics 2: Participants 149 6.1 Introduction: Classifying Participants 149 6.3 Grammatical Relations and Thematic Roles 155 6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids 156 6.5 Problems with Thematic Roles 158 6.6 The Motivation for Identifying Thematic Roles 161 6.2 Comparing passive constructions across languages 169 6.9 Classifiers and Noun Classes 175 6.10 Summary 178 Exercises 179 Further Reading 182 Notes 182 References 184 7 Context and Inference 189 7.2 Grammaticalization of context 193 7.3 Extensions of spatial deixis 194 7.5 Social deixis 195 Contents xi 7.3 Reference and Context 196 7.4 Knowledge as Context 197 7.1 Discourse as context 198 7.2 Background knowledge as context 199 7.4 Giving background knowledge to computers 201 7.1 The information status of nominals 203 7.2 Focus and topic 205 7.3 Information structure and comprehension 208 7.1 Grice’s maxims of conversational cooperation 211 7.2 Generalizing the Gricean maxims 214 7.9 Summary 219 Exercises 220 Further Reading 224 Notes 224 References 225 8 Functions of Language: Speech as Action 229 8.2 Austin’s Speech Act Theory 232 8.2 Evaluating performative utterances 234 8.3 Explicit and implicit performatives 234 8.4 Statements as performatives 235 8.5 Three facets of a speech act 237 8.3 Categorizing Speech Acts 237 8.4 Indirect Speech Acts 239 8.2 Understanding indirect speech acts 241 8.3 Indirect acts and politeness 242 8.6 Summary 247 Exercises 248 Further Reading 250 Notes 250 References 252 xii Contents Part III Theoretical Approaches 257 9 Meaning Components 259 9.2 Lexical Relations in CA 260 9.3 Katz’s Semantic Theory 262 9.2 The Katzian dictionary 262 9.4 Grammatical Rules and Semantic Components 265 9.2 Thematic roles and linking rules 269 9.5 Talmy’s Typology of Motion Events 273 9.6 Jackendoff’s Conceptual Structure 278 9.2 The semantic components 279 9.3 Localist semantic fields 281 9.4 Complex events and states 282 9.5 THINGS: Semantic classes of nominals 283 9.6 Cross-category generalizations 284 9.7 Processes of semantic combination 284 9.7 Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon 287 9.8 Problems with Components of Meaning 294 9.9 Summary 295 Exercises 295 Further Reading 299 Notes 300 References 301 10 Formal Semantics 305 10.2 Model-Theoretical Semantics 307 10.3 Translating English into a Logical Metalanguage 308 10.2 Simple statements in predicate logic 309 10.3 Quantifiers in predicate logic 311 10.4 Some advantages of predicate logic translation 313 10.4 The Semantics of the Logical Metalanguage 315 10.1 Introduction 315 Contents xiii 10.2 The semantic interpretation of predicate logic symbols 315 10.4 The denotation assignment function 316 10.5 Checking the Truth-Value of Sentences 317 10.1 Evaluating a simple statement 318 10.2 Evaluating a compound sentence with ∧ “and” 318 10.3 Evaluating sentences with the quantifiers ∀ and ∃ 320 10.6 Word Meaning: Meaning Postulates 321 10.7 Natural Language Quantifiers and Higher-Order Logic 323 10.3 The strong/weak distinction and existential there sentences 327 10.4 Monotonicity and negative polarity items 329 10.3 Tense and aspect 334 10.9 Dynamic Approaches to Discourse 336 10.1 Anaphora in and across sentences 337 10.3 DRT and discourse anaphora 339 10.10 Summary 344 Exercises 345 Further Reading 348 Notes 348 References 350 11 Cognitive Semantics 353 11.1 The rejection of classical categories 356 11.2 Embodiment and image schemas 358 11.3 Linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge 362 11.2 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 371 11.3 Features of metaphor 372 11.4 The influence of metaphor 375 11.5 Metonymy 376 xiv Contents 11.1 Connections between spaces 378 11.4 Conceptual integration theory 385 11.7 Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar 388 11.1 Nouns, verbs, and clauses 389 11.9 Summary 394 Exercises 395 Further Reading 398 Notes 398 References 400 Solutions to Exercises 405 Glossary 435 Index 458 Figures and Tables Figures 1.1 Components of grammar 8 1.2 Reference and sense in the vocabulary 11 5.2 Complex past tense 123 9.2 Conceptual structure of example 9.86 as a tree structure 280 9.3 Conceptual structure of example 9.87 as a tree structure 281 9.4 Conceptual structure of example 9.89 as a tree structure 281 10.1 Instants in the flow of time 335 10.2 Intervals of time 335 11.5 Removal of restraint 361 11.6 Prototypical above-across sense of over 365 11.7 Sam walked over the hill 366 11.8 The above sense of over 366 11.9 The covering sense of over 367 11.10 Reflexive sense of over 367 11.11 Person–image connector 379 xvi Figures and Tables 11.12 World–mind connector 380 11.13 Image–person connector 380 11.14 First interpretation of In the film, Michelle is a witch 382 11.15 Second interpretation of In the film, Michelle is a witch 382 11.16 Transparent reading of example 11.17 Opaque reading of example 11.18 Conceptual integration network 386 11.19 Prototypical event schema 390 12.1 The camera is on the table 430 Table 8.1 Possible Somali markers of sentence type 246 Preface This is an introduction to semantics for readers new to the subject.
The aim of the book is not to propose a new theory of semantics, nor to promote any single current approach, but to give the reader access to some of the central ideas in the field and an introduction to some of its most important writers. Semantics, however, is a very broad and diverse field and keeping the book to a manageable size has involved a fairly firm selection of topics. Inevitably this selection will not please everyone but I hope readers will be able to gain a feel for what doing semantics is like, and gain the background to proceed to more advanced and specialized material in the primary literature. The book assumes no knowledge of semantics but does assume a general idea of what linguistics is, and some familiarity with its traditional division into fields like phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and so on.
Thus it would be useful if the reader had already looked at a general introduction to linguistics. The book is organized into eleven chapters, which are grouped into three main sections. Part I, Preliminaries, consists of the first two chapters and is concerned with the place of semantics within linguistics and its relations with the disciplines of philosophy and psychology, which share some of the same interests. Part II, Semantic Description, is the main part of the book and introduces central topics in the analysis of word and sentence meaning.
Part III, Theoretical Approaches, reviews three important semantic theories: componential theory, formal semantics and cognitive semantics. Each chapter includes a set of exercises to allow the reader to explore the issues raised, and suggestions for further reading. These will be a small selection of works which provide accessible investigations of the chapter’s topics. In the text there are xviii Preface a large number of references to the semantics literature.
These will frequently be works which are too specialized to attempt before the reader completes this book, but are given so that any particular interests may be followed up. Examples from different languages are given in the transcription of the original source, and are commented on only when it is germane to the discussion.