Information about the book

● AUTHOR: Nick Riemer

● TITLE: Introducing Semantics
● PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
● YEAR: 2010
● Pages: 460
● REVIEWER: Mehdi ZOUAOUI, Instructor
● DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.20883.71205

Summary
Introducing Semantics is a book that any serious aspiring researcher in linguistics should get
down to and gain a solid background in the dynamics of this science. This academic work is the
product of Dr. Nick Riemer, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, who has a major
ınterest in the history of language, linguistics and semantics. Riemer divided the book into 11
chapters, with each explaining aspects related to semantics that we will be going over.

1- Meaning in the empirical study of language

The author begins the book by giving an overview about the definition and the scope of
semantics and lays down the foundational questions that semanticists try to answer:
● What are meanings?
● What explains relations between meanings?
● How do the meanings of words combine to create the meanings of sentences?
● How do meanings relate to the minds of language users, and to the things words refer
to?
● How do the meanings of words interact with syntactic rules and principles?
● Do all languages express the same meanings?
● How do meanings change?

With these questions in hand, semantics has several sub-fields and one of the most important
ones are:
- Lexical semantics: which is the study of word meaning.
- Phrasal semantics: which is the study of the principles which govern the construction of
the meaning of phrases and of sentence meaning out of compositional combinations of
individual lexemes.

It is important not to confuse semantics with pragmatics. The latter studies the basic literal
meanings of words as considered as parts of a language system. The former concentrates on
how these basic meanings are assigned referents in different contexts, and the differing (ironic,
metaphorical,.) uses to which language undergoes.
So, meaning is the fulcrum of this book and whenever we talk about the notion of meaning in
English, we are interacting with it into three ways:
- Meaning: describing meaning by emphasizing the speaker’s intentions
- Use: description in terms of use limits itself to a consideration of equivalences between
the piece of language in question and an assumed norm.
- Truth: that emphasizes the objective facts of the situation by concentrating on the
relation between language and reality.

In order to foreground the dynamics between language, mind, world and meaning, the author
introduces the famous semiotic triangle (see figure 2 in the appendix), often called the triangle
of reference or meaning, first published in The Meaning of Meaning book (1923) by Ogden and
Richards. The semiotic triangle comprises the following elements:

- Thoughts: which reflects that it came from a human being and therefore a brain product.
- Symbol: whatever perceptible token we choose to express the speaker’s intended
meaning.
- Referents: whatever things, events, or situations in the world the language is about.

The author then provides an account of circular definition and suggests some substitutes to get
over this issue. The first one is to shift gears towards the referent or denotation as the major
component of meaning. However, one problem of referential theory is that there are some words
that are hard to invoke in the real world, such as abstract words, and grammatical ones. Another
suggestion is to look at meaning as a fixed conceptual or mental representation instantiated in
our minds in some stable, finite medium, and which our thought consists of. Another suggestion
is to look at meanings as brain states which involves intentionality. An alternative to the three
previous enterprises is the view that a word’s meaning consists in the way we use it. This view
has been adopted by behaviorist psychologists such as Skinner (1957), and linguists such as
Bloomfield (1933). Despite its success, the principal objection against use theories of meaning
is the mind-boggling variety of situations in which we may use linguistic forms.

2- Meaning and definition

In the second chapter, the author posits that an understanding of definition is a lynchpin for any
attempt to develop a conceptual theory of word meaning. So, the definitions found in
dictionaries result from a word-based, or semasiological approach to meaning. This approach
starts with a language’s individual lexemes and tries to specify the meaning of each one. The
other approach, the onomasiological one, has the opposite logic where it starts with a particular
meaning, and lists the various forms available in the language for its expression.1

1
Semasiology (from Greek: σημασία, semasia, "signification") is a discipline of linguistics concerned with
the question "what does the word X mean?". It studies the meaning of words regardless how they are
pronounced.[1] It is the opposite of onomasiology, a branch of lexicology that starts with a concept or
In this regard, Riem discusses the units of meaning and the minimal meaning-bearing units of
language. So, the problem of wordhood can be approached at two levels:
- Phonological rules and processes: where stress is a good indicator of the phonological
word.
- Grammatical level: cohesiveness, fixed order and conventionalized coherence and
meaning. However, the level of grammatical structure a meaning should be attributed to
may be problematic, and boundary cases, where meanings seem to straddle several
grammatical units, occur frequently.

The author then moves to the ways of defining meaning which are:

- Real and nominal definition: according to Aristotle, a definition (horismos) has two quite
different interpretations: in defining,’ says Aristotle, ‘one exhibits either what the object is
or what its name means’. We can therefore consider a definition either as a 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 definition; Latin
nomen ‘name, noun’).
- Definition by ostension: by pointing out the objects which they denote.
- Definition by synonymy: one problem with this strategy is that it is possible to challenge
the identity between the definiens (the metalanguage word proposed as the definition;
Latin ‘defining’) and the definiendum (the object language word for which a definition is
required; Latin ‘needing to be defined’).
- Definition by context: which is to situate the word in a system of wider relations through
which the specificity of the definiendum can be seen.
- Definition by genus and differentia: which is the theory that Aristotle developed in the
Posterior Analytics. According to Aristotle, definition involves specifying the broader
class to which the definiendum belongs (often called the definiendum genus), and then
showing the distinguishing feature of the definiendum (the differentia) which
distinguishes it from the other members of this broader class.

It is important here to mention that a minimum requirement on a term’s definition to check its
accuracy is that the substitution of the definiens for the definiendum should be truth preserving
in all contexts.2 However, one of the most frequent criticisms of definitional theories of semantics
is that no satisfying definition of a word has ever been formulated.

object and asks for its name, i.e., "how do you express X?" whereas semasiology starts with a word and
asks for its meanings. "Semasiology - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semasiology. Accessed 20
Dec. 2020.
2
The rationale of this requirement is the principle of identity under substitution articulated by the
seventeenth-century German philosopher Leibniz: eadem sunt, quae sibi mutuo substitui possunt, salva
veritate (Latin for ‘things are the same which can be substituted one for the other with truth intact’).
3- The scope of meaning I: external context

In the third chapter, the author talks about the relation of meaning with external contexts, which
is an essential element to have an adequate description of meaning. One of the most basic
types of context is the extralinguistic context of reference, which concerns the entities an
expression is about. It was the German logician and philosopher of mathematics Gottlob Frege
(1848–1925) who first saw the significance of this distinction between an expression’s referent
and its sense.Frege conceptualized three aspects of a word’s total semantic effect:
- Force: which covered whether it was a statement or a question.
- Tone: which refers to differences of register and connotation.
- Sense.
There are certain types of expressions, called deictic or indexical expressions (or deictics or
indexicals), which we can define as those which refer to some aspect of the context of utterance
as an essential part of their meaning and among them we can mention:
- Person deixis: by which speaker (I), hearer (you) and other entities relevant to the
discourse (he / she / it / they) are referred to.
- Temporal deixis: (now, then, tomorrow)
- Discourse deixis: which refers to other elements of the discourse in which the deictic
expression occurs (A: You stole the cash. B: That’s a lie).

4- The scope of meaning II: interpersonal context

In the fourth chapter, the author introduces the interpersonal context in the scope of meaning,
starting by the elocutionary force and speech acts.Givón (1984: 248), in this context, noted that
the fundamental role of assertion in language can be seen because of four large-scale features
of human social organization:
• Communicative topics that are often outside the immediate, perceptually available
range.
• Much pertinent information is not held in common by the participants in the
communicative exchange.
• The rapidity of change in the human environment necessitates periodic updating of the
body of shared background knowledge.
• The participants are often strangers.

In the same realm and in his attempt to identify acts present in utterances, Austin divided and
defined acts as follows:
• Locutionary act: the act of saying something.
• Illocutionary act: the act performed in saying something.
• Perlocutionary act: the act performed by saying something.
The author then moves to speaker’s intention and hearer’s inference, where the idea that
conventions underlie the illocutionary force of utterances has been much criticized. The major
problem with such a theory is that it proves to be difficult to state what the convention behind
any speech act might be. Added to that, linguistic communication is an intentional-inferential
process, in which hearers try to infer speakers’ intentions on the basis of the ‘clues’ provided
by language.

It is necessary to separate those aspects of an utterance’s effect with its use in a particular
context from those created by the meanings of its constituent elements. For this purpose, we
have the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice.

The implicatures of an utterance are what it is necessary to believe the speaker is thinking, and
intending the hearer to think, to account for what they are saying. Also, conventional
implicatures are what we might otherwise refer to as the standard meanings of linguistic
expressions, and these conversational implicatures are those that arise in particular contexts of
use, without forming part of the word’s characteristic or conventional force. Grice started the
famous Gricean maxim which are:
- The maxim of quality.
- The maxim of quantity.
- The maxim of relevance.
- The maxim of manner.
However, the Gricean maxims must not be seen as universal principles governing the entire
range of human conversational behavior, since conversational maxims seem to vary
situationally and cross-culturally, and the set of maxims operative in any culture is a matter for
empirical investigation.

In the end of the chapter, the author mentions relevance, which is an important notion in the
Gricean enterprise developed by Sperber and Wilson. For them language use is an
ostensive-inferential process where the speaker ostensibly provides the hearer with evidence of
their meaning in the form of words and, combined with the context. This linguistic evidence
enables the hearer to infer the speaker’s meaning. Every utterance for Sperber and Wilson
communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance.

5- Analyzing and distinguishing meanings

In the fifth chapter, the author moves to the analysis of meaning and semantic relations that glue
them together in which knowing an expression’s meaning does not involve knowing its definition
or inherent semantic content.

Relationships like synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, and so on all concern the paradigmatic
relations of an expression, or the relations which determine the choice of one lexical item over
another. These lexical relations are:
 - Antonymy: characterized as a relationship of incompatibility between two terms
regarding some given dimension of contrast. Non-gradable antonyms do not admit a
midpoint, such as male-female or pass-fail. A gradable pair of antonyms names points
on a scale which contains a midpoint.
- Meronymy (Greek meros: ‘part’) 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.
- Hyponymy (Greek hypo- ‘under’) is the lexical relation described in English by the
phrase kind / type / sort of.
- Taxonomy shows five ranks, each of which includes all those below it and every rank in
the hierarchy is thus one particular kind of the rank above it.
- Synonymy is a context-bound phenomenon where two words are synonyms in a certain
given context, whereas for others it is context-free. If two words are synonymous they
are identical in meaning in all contexts.

We should know that semantic relations reveal aspects of meaning is one motivation for a
componential approach to semantic analysis. Thus, The information in componential analysis is
similar to the information contained in a definition. In principle, anything that can form part of a
definition can also be rephrased in terms of semantic components. Its embodiment in binary
features (i.e. features with only two values, + or −) represents a translation into semantics of
the principles of structuralist phonological analysis, which used binary phonological features like
[± voiced], [± labial] [± nasal], etc.

The author then moves to the term polysemy, which is reserved for words like ‘pièce’ that show
a collection of semantically related senses. We can, therefore, define polysemy as the
possession by a single phonological form of several conceptually related meanings. A word is,
in that sense, monosemous if it contains only a single meaning. For that can be tested by
means of:
- The definitional test: that identifies the number of senses of a word with the number of
separate definitions needed to convey its meaning accurately.
- Logical test: A word (or phrase) is polysemous on this test if it can be simultaneously
true and false of the same referent.

One possible alternative to the view of words having a determinate and finite number of senses
would be to think of a word’s meaning as a continuum of increasingly fine distinctions open to
access at different levels of abstraction

6- Logic as a representation of meaning

In the sixth chapter, the author heads to logic, which is the study of the nature of valid
inferences and reasoning. Logic is important to linguistics for at least three reasons:
- The study of logic is one of the oldest comprehensive treatments of questions of
meaning.
 - Logical concepts inform a wide range of modern formal theories of semantics and
are also crucial in research in computational theories of language and meaning.
- Logical concepts provide an enlightening point of contrast with natural language.

One of the crucial elements in logic is the notion of proposition, which is something that serves
as the premise or conclusion of an argument. In that regard, there are different logical operators
such as conjunction, disjunction and material conditional. Despite its instrumentality, many
linguists maintain that discontinuities between natural language and logic are to be explained by
the fact that natural languages possess a pragmatic dimension, which prevents the logical
operators from finding exact equivalents in ordinary discourse.

Reference and truth are considered as the semantic facts when it comes to logical approaches
to semantics. Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (2000: 72) said that, ‘if we ignore the conditions
under which S [a sentence] is true, we cannot claim to know the meaning of S. Thus, knowing
the truth conditions for S is at least necessary for knowing the meaning of S.’

Riem also discusses here the relation between propositions which we can summarize as
follows:

- Entailment: when we say that p entails q, we mean that:

• whenever p is true, q must be true.
• A situation describable by p must also be a situation describable by q.
• p and not q is contradictory (can’t be true in any situation)
- Presupposition: a proposition p presupposes another proposition q if both p and the
negation of p entail q.
- Contradictories, contraries, and subcontraries: contradiction is a pair of propositions with
opposite truth values.

The author ends the chapter with the remark that despite that logic is useful for language, there
seem to be areas of clear incompatibility between logical constructs and the natural language
terms which partly translate them.

7- Meaning and cognition I: categorization and cognitive semantics

In the seventh chapter, the author considers the meaning from a cognitive perspective, where
he starts with the idea that words in natural language can be seen as categories. In fact,
categorization is an important topic in semantics because we can see language as a means of
categorizing experience.

As seen in chapter 6, standard logical approaches to language are two-valued approaches. This
means that they only recognize two truth values, true and false. However, another way of
describing this view is the idea that definitions are lists of necessary and sufficient conditions for
particular meanings. Aristotelian categories have the following two important characteristics:
- The conditions on their membership can be made explicit by specifying lists of necessary
and sufficient conditions.
- Their membership is determinate:whether or not something is a member of the category
can be checked by seeing whether it fulfills the conditions.

Also, the author postulates that category membership is graded and is at the heart of the
prototype theory of categorization, which is most associated with the psychologist Eleanor
Rosch and her colleagues. However, there are some problems when it comes to prototype
categories in terms of attributes:

a. attributes can often only be identified after the category has been identified.
b. attributes are context-dependent.
c. there are many alternative descriptions of the attributes of a category.

Riem then moves to the various approaches cognitive semantics covers which are
characterized by a holistic vision of the place of language within cognition. For many
investigators, this involves the following commitments:
• A rejection of a modular approach to language: which assumes that language is one of
several independent modules or faculties within cognition.
• An identification of meaning with conceptual structure.
• A rejection of the syntax–semantics distinction.
• A rejection of the semantics–pragmatics distinction.

Despite the practicality of cognitive semantics, there are some problems with it:

• The ambiguity of diagrammatic representations.

• The problem of determining the core meaning.
• The indeterminate and speculative nature of the analyses.

8- Meaning and cognition II: formalizing and simulating conceptual

representations

In the eighth chapter, the author looks at some attempts to formalize the conceptual
representations of the language. According to Jackendoff, conceptual semantics aims to situate
semantics ‘in an overall psychological framework, integrating it not only with linguistic theory but
also with theories of perception, cognition and conscious experience’. Jackendoff claims that a
decompositional method is necessary to explore conceptualization.

The author confirms that computer technology has taken on great importance in linguistics
generally since the 1970s, and semantics is no exception. Computer architectures certainly are
the closest simulations available for the complexity of the brain, but they still vastly
underperform humans in linguistic ability.3

One of the topics related to lexicon is word-sense disambiguation which can identify two main
approaches to word-sense disambiguation in computational linguistics:
- Selectional restriction approach that generates complete semantic representations for
all the words in a sentence and then eliminates those which violate selectional
restrictions coded in the component words.
- The other approach uses the immediate context of the target word as a clue in
identifying the intended sense.

It is important to mention Pustejovskian semantic approach, dubbed as the generative lexicon

approach4, that claims to solve many of the problems by adopting a different picture of lexical
information. Pustejovsky criticizes the standard view of the lexicon, on which we associate each
lexeme with a fixed number of senses.

9- Meaning and morphosyntax I: the semantics of grammatical

categories

In the ninth chapter and the chapter that follows, the author tackles some semantic phenomena
related to morphosyntax. Talking about the semantics of parts of speech is analyzing a
language grammatically and involves analyzing it into a variety of elements as well as structures
such as phonemes, morphemes, and words, and, within the words, syntactic categories of
various types. Among these categories there are the parts of speech (also known as lexical or
grammatical categories): noun, verb, adjective, determiner, and so on. However, parts of speech
systems vary among the languages of the world. In a typical sentence of any language, we can
identify constituents which are translated by, and seem to function similarly, nouns and verbs in
English or other familiar languages. Another delimiting parts of speech is based on:

- Morpho-distributional criteria: A distributional approach to parts of speech classifies parts

of speech on the basis of the way they are in sentences. One way of defining these
patterns is to advance sample contexts which can serve as test frames.
- Semantic criteria: one obvious way of delimiting the categories is based on semantic
criteria. In other words, on the basis of commonalities in the meanings of words in any
class.

3
The most comprehensive attempt to model lexical knowledge on a computer is the WordNet project,
which has been running since 1985. WordNet is an online lexical database which sets out to
represent and organize lexical semantic information in a psychologically realistic form that facilitates
maximally efficient digital manipulation.
4
"Generative lexicon - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_lexicon. Accessed 5 Nov.
2020.
The author moves on to the semantics of morphosyntactic categories such as tense, time, and
aspect. Due to the difficulty of fathoming the notion of time, Saint Augustine (354–430 AD) once
said: ‘What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who
asks, I do not know.’ Tense is generally the name of the class of grammatical markers used to
signal the location of situations in time and one hallmark of English in tense is the availability of
a contrast between the simple past or preterite tense and the present perfect. This perfect is
often explained as conveying the continuing relevance of the past action. Another
morphosyntactic category is the concept of aspect. In that line, different tenses show different
locations of the event in time and different aspects show different ways of presenting time within
the event itself as flowing, or as stationary. The aspectual system is about how the internal
temporal constituency of an event is viewed and it’s about whether the event is viewed from the
distance, as a single unanalysable whole, with its beginning, middle and end foreshortened into
one, or from close-up, so that the distinct stages of the event can be seen individually.

10- Meaning and morphosyntax II: verb meaning and argument

structure

In the tenth chapter, the author moves from word level to clause level and the relation between
a verb and its participants, often called argument structure. Verbs are the core of the clause and
play an important role in the interaction between meaning and syntax. This is because verbs are
typically accompanied by nouns which refer to the participants in the event and these
participants receive a range of morphosyntactic markers. One challenge of a verb and its
participants is, in fact, a problem syntax-semantics interface, or generative grammar. This latter
imposed strict division between different components of the grammar: syntax, phonology,
semantics and so on, and each of which is assumed to have its own explanatory principles and
structure. It was assumed that the plausible arguments of all verbs could be classified into a few
classes, called thematic roles, participant roles, semantic roles or theta roles.

11- Semantic variation and change

In the eleventh chapter, the author talks about semantic variation, synchronic and diachronic,
and the resulting change in meaning. The author starts by mentioning the difference between
universality, variation of sense and universality, and variation of reference. In addition to the
previous point, the author talks about the problems of the appropriate metalanguage in
undertaking cross-linguistic or historical semantic study. Having said that, one of the important
characteristics of semantic change is that it crucially involves polysemy and we have to
understand that 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. Thus, early studies of semantic change set up broad categories of
change described with general labels like ‘weakening’, ‘strengthening’ and so on. One of these
categories is grammaticalization that can be defined as the process by which open-class
content words turn into closed-class function forms by losing elements of their meaning, and by
a restriction in their possible grammatical contexts.

The author then moves to semantic typology that focuses on the question of cross-linguistic
regularities in denotation or extension. Semantic typology also attempts to answer questions
related to the range of variation shown by the world’s languages in words for colours, body
parts, and basic actions and whether there are any universal or widespread similarities in the
boundaries between different words in each of these domains. Interestingly, despite the fact that
body parts being, per se, universally shared, cross-linguistic investigation reveals that there is
vast variety in the extensions of human body-part terms and different languages divide color in
various incompatible ways

Evaluation
The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle once said, reflecting on the worthlessness of
economics:”Not a "gay science", I should say, like some we have heard of; no, a dreary,
desolate and, indeed, quite abject and distressing one; what we might call, by way of eminence,
the dismal science’’5. That view towards economics is often shared by some learners studying
semantics since it is a blend of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and language. This shared
feeling that semantics is a dismal science may originate from the fact that it may be challenging
for some to see how its concepts fit in real world problems. However, in today’s world,
semantics plays a crucial role in many fields such as technology where researchers depend on
it a lot in artificial intelligence, which aspires to simulate and clone human behavior and unique
feature that distinguishes him from other creatures: language.

Introducing Semantics is one of the must-read references for linguistics majors because it
provides a sound overview of this science that is widely used in natural language processing,
voice recognition, logic and so on. Even though the book is meant to be an introductory
textbook for learners, it may not be suitable for those who have just entered the world of
linguistics in general and semantics in particular. This is due to its digression in some chapters
which may not be useful for a first timer. Therefore, the book is considered to be a good read for
intermediate majors, junior researchers, those who are in their graduate degrees in Linguistics,
or a hardworking undergraduate student. The book also assumes that a reader should have
some background in linguistics and by that it would be a perfect fit for those who have good
knowledge about logic and philosophy, which is in itself a shortcoming in the book. In saying so,
the book should have given an adequate introduction to philosophy and logic to make the job
easier for the reader to follow along with the concepts and dynamics of semantics explained in
the book. Also, the book is a good companion for those who want to study semantics by
themselves thanks to the activities provided by the end of each chapter. The author also

5
"The dismal science - Wikipedia." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science. Accessed 7 Nov.
2020.
provides the reader with references and extra readings that they can refer to for more in-depth
understanding of the concepts tackled in the book. However, I think that it would have been
more instrumental if there were systematic answers to the questions and how a semanticist
would approach them as it is challenging for many students to put theory into practice. As a way
of strengthening the readers’ understanding, it provides a plethora of examples from different
world languages in an attempt to objectify and universalize semantic phenomena found
throughout different languages. One perk that book offers at the end is a glossary that contains
semantic and linguistic terms mentioned in the book.
Since the author has stated that the present book is designed for undergraduate students, it
wouldn’t be wise for non linguistics majors who need or want to study semantics such as
informatics students, philosophy majors and mathematics to start with this book. Thus, the
present book is exclusively for linguistics majors who are in their second or third year.
The date of the publication of the book is 2010, and therefore 20 years has passed since its
publication, which means that some of its data may be outdated given the fact that this field is
constantly changing.The book instigates research through some questions provided in the
activities that require critical thinking and points out to questions that are yet to be answered by
researchers.

About the reviewer:

Mehdi ZOUAOUI is a lecturer at Istanbul University with an interest in general linguistics,
education, E-learning, and global affairs. He’s a frequent article writer on E-learning affairs.
Appendix
Figure 01 (Introducing Semantics, Nick Riemer):

Figure 02: Semiotic Triangle (Introducing semantics, Nick Riemer):

Figure 03: Classification of definition (Introducing semantics, Nick Riemer)

Figure 04: The square of opposition

Source: Introducing Semantics (Nick Riemer)

Figure 05: Typology of tense-aspect interaction

Source: Introducing Semantics (329)