Semantics

John I. Saeed is Professor of Linguistics and Head of the School of Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences, Trinity College, University of Dublin. He is the author of several books, including Somali Reference Grammar (second edition, 1993) and Somali (1999).

List of Figures and Tables xiv Preface xvi Part I Preliminaries 1 1 Semantics in Linguistics 3 1.1 Introduction 3 1.2 Semantics and Semiotics 5 1.3 Three Challenges in Doing Semantics 6 1.4 Meeting the Challenges 7 1.5 Semantics in a Model of Grammar 9 1.6 Some Important Assumptions 11 1.7 Summary 19 2 Meaning, Thought and Reality 23 2.1 Introduction 23 2.2 Reference 25 2.3 Reference as a Theory of Meaning 30 2.4 Mental Representations 32 2.5 Words, Concepts and Thinking 41 2.6 Summary 46 Part II Semantic Description 51 3 Word Meaning 53 3.1 Introduction 53 3.2 Words and Grammatical Categories 55 3.3 Words and Lexical Items 55 3.4 Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning 59 3.5 Lexical Relations 63 3.6 Derivational Relations 72 3.7 Lexical Universals 74 3.8 Summary 79 4 Sentence Relations and Truth 87 4.1 Introduction 87 4.2 Logic and Truth 89 4.3 Necessary Truth, A Priori Truth and Analyticity 95 4.4 Entailment 99 4.5 Presupposition 102 4.6 Summary 111 5 Sentence Semantics 1: Situations 117 5.1 Introduction 117 5.2 Classifying Situations 118 5.3 Modality and Evidentiality 138 5.4 Summary 146 6 Sentence Semantics 2: Participants 152 6.1 Introduction: Classifying Participants 152 6.2 Thematic Roles 153 6.3 Grammatical Relations and Thematic Roles 158 6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids 160 6.5 Problems with Thematic Roles 162 6.6 The Motivation for Identifying Thematic Roles 165 6.7 Voice 169 6.8 Classifiers and Noun Classes 178 6.9 Summary 182 7 Context and Inference 190 7.1 Introduction 190 7.2 Deixis 191 7.3 Reference and Context 198 7.4 Knowledge as Context 199 7.5 Information Structure 205 7.6 Inference 211 7.7 Conversational Implicature 213 7.8 Summary 220 8 Functions of Language: Speech as Action 230 8.1 Introduction 230 8.2 Austin's Speech Act Theory 233 8.3 Categorizing Speech Acts 239 8.4 Indirect Speech Acts 241 8.5 Sentence Types 248 8.6 Summary 250 Part III Theoretical Approaches 257 9 Meaning Components 259 9.1 Introduction 259 9.2 Lexical Relations in CA 260 9.3 Katz's Semantic Theory 262 9.4 Grammatical Rules and Semantic Components 266 9.5 Components and Conflation Patterns 274 9.6 Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure 278 9.7 Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon 289 9.8 Problems with Components of Meaning 295 9.9 Summary 297 10 Formal Semantics 305 10.1 Introduction 305 10.2 Model-Theoretical Semantics 308 10.3 Translating English into a Logical Metalanguage 309 10.4 The Semantics of the Logical Metalanguage 315 10.5 Checking the Truth-Value of Sentences 318 10.6 Word Meaning: Meaning Postulates 323 10.7 Natural Language Quantifiers and Higher Order Logic 325 10.8 Intensionality 333 10.9 Dynamic Approaches to Discourse 340 10.10 Summary 347 11 Cognitive Semantics 355 11.1 Introduction 355 11.2 Metaphor 358 11.3 Metonymy 365 11.4 Image Schemas 366 11.5 Polysemy 370 11.6 Mental Spaces 377 11.7 Langacker's Cognitive Grammar 388 11.8 Summary 393 Further reading 394 Exercises 394 Solutions to Selected Exercises 400 Bibliography 418 Index 443