Semantics

Citation

Saeed, J. I. (2023). Semantics (5th ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. (Introducing Linguistics series; released November 2022.)

Chapter Summary

The fifth edition runs to about 590 pages in eleven chapters arranged in three parts: Preliminaries (Chapters 1–2), Semantic Description (Chapters 3–7) and Theoretical Approaches (Chapters 8–11). Every chapter ends with a summary, exercises, further reading, notes and its own reference list, and the back of the book holds about 35 pages of solutions to the exercises, a glossary and an index. The new chapter in this edition is Chapter 11, on inferential pragmatics. Saeed states his approach at the start of Chapter 1: the book is not an introduction to any single theory, and it treats semantic knowledge as part of what speakers know about their language.

Chapter 1: Semantics in Linguistics

The opening chapter places semantics among the levels of linguistic analysis and within the wider study of signs (semiotics, with Peirce's icon, index and symbol). It then tests a naive "definitions theory" of meaning against three challenges: circularity, the line between linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge, and context. It previews the book's strategies for meeting them (semantic metalanguages, models of concepts, literal meaning, and handing context to pragmatics) and introduces working distinctions: reference and sense; utterances, sentences and propositions; literal and non-literal meaning; semantics and pragmatics. Saeed deliberately postpones drawing the semantics/pragmatics line until Chapter 11.

Chapter 2: Meaning, Thought, and Reality

How language connects to the world and to the mind: types of reference, names and noun phrases, and the limits of reference as a theory of meaning, followed by mental representations (concepts, necessary and sufficient conditions, prototypes) and the debate over linguistic relativity versus the language of thought hypothesis.

Chapter 3: Word Meaning

What counts as a word and why word meaning is hard to pin down, then the lexical relations (homonymy, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy and others), derivational relations, lexical typology across languages (the LINGUIST List review mentions colour terms and universal lexemes) and lexical change.

Chapter 4: Sentence Relations and Truth

A short introduction to logic and truth (with truth tables for the connectives), necessary and a priori truth and analyticity, and then entailment and presupposition and how far truth relations can describe them.

Chapter 5: Sentence Semantics 1: Situations

How languages encode situations: situation types (states, activities, accomplishments, achievements), tense, aspect, modality and mood, evidentiality and negation.

Chapter 6: Sentence Semantics 2: Participants

Thematic roles, their link to grammatical relations, verbs' thematic role grids, the problems with and motivation for thematic roles, then causation, voice, and classifiers and noun classes.

Chapter 7: Meaning and Context

Deixis, reference in context, background knowledge as context, information structure (given and new information), inference, and speech act semantics.

Chapter 8: Meaning Components

Componential analysis and its treatment of lexical relations, Katz's semantic theory, semantic components in grammatical rules, Talmy's typology of motion events, Jackendoff's conceptual structure and Pustejovsky's generative lexicon, ending with problems for the componential approach.

Chapter 9: Formal Semantics

Builds on Chapter 4: model-theoretical semantics, translating English into a logical metalanguage and interpreting it, checking truth values, meaning postulates, natural language quantifiers and higher-order logic (including monotonicity and negative polarity items), intensionality, and dynamic approaches to discourse.

Chapter 10: Cognitive Semantics

Meaning as part of general cognition: categorization, polysemy, metaphor, metonymy, mental spaces, Langacker's cognitive grammar and construction grammar.

Chapter 11: Inferential Pragmatics

The new chapter returns to the semantics/pragmatics boundary: propositions, Grice's conversational implicature, generalizations of the Gricean maxims, contextualism, Relevance Theory and lexical pragmatics.

Key Concepts

Part I: Preliminaries (Chapters 1–2)

• Sense and reference: the distinction between what an expression means and what it picks out in the world.
• Utterance, sentence, proposition: a specific act of speaking, the abstract grammatical unit, and the descriptive content that can be true or false.
• Prototypes: concepts organised around typical members rather than strict necessary and sufficient conditions.
• Linguistic relativity: the hypothesis that a language's categories shape its speakers' thinking.

Part II: Semantic Description (Chapters 3–7)

• Lexical relations: systematic sense relations between words, such as polysemy, antonymy and hyponymy.
• Entailment and presupposition: relations in which the truth of one sentence follows from, or is taken for granted by, another.
• Situation types and aspect: how verbs and grammar present events as states or processes, completed or ongoing.
• Thematic roles: the parts participants play in a situation, such as agent or patient.
• Deixis and information structure: meaning anchored to the speech situation, and the packaging of given and new information.
• Speech acts: utterances understood as actions, not only as true or false statements.

Part III: Theoretical Approaches (Chapters 8–11)

• Componential analysis: describing word meanings as combinations of smaller semantic features.
• Model-theoretic semantics: giving meaning as truth conditions relative to a model of the world.
• Metaphor, metonymy and mental spaces: the cognitive mechanisms through which cognitive semantics explains meaning.
• Implicature and relevance: meaning inferred beyond what is said, in Grice's account and in Relevance Theory.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Clear progression. Rebecca Madlener's review for LINGUIST List (34.1777, 2023) calls the book readable and easy to follow and notes that the chapters build logically on each other. The contents confirm the design the publisher describes: general concepts first, then description, then theories, with frequent cross-references (Chapter 1 alone points ahead to Chapters 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11).
• Neutral survey of theories. Saeed states that the book is not an introduction to any single theory, and Madlener found every approach treated from a neutral perspective, letting students compare componential, formal and cognitive approaches and draw their own conclusions.
• Exercises with solutions. Each chapter has exercises, the publisher says they are arranged by level of difficulty, and the solutions take up about 35 pages at the back, which makes the book usable for self-study. The Chapter 1 exercises, for example, ask students to sort compound nouns by how predictable their meaning is and to write their own dictionary definitions, then compare them with a real dictionary.
• Updated pragmatics. The new Chapter 11 brings Grice, contextualism, Relevance Theory and lexical pragmatics into the book, and the per-chapter reference lists point to current literature.

Limitations

• Mostly English examples. The publisher stresses data from many languages and sections on lexical typology, evidentiality and classifiers support that, but Madlener observes that the great majority of examples are English, which the author acknowledges as a matter of space.
• Formal semantics is introductory. Chapter 9 is one chapter of about 50 pages; students who need to do compositional analysis themselves will need a dedicated formal semantics text.
• Long for one term. At nearly 600 pages, with Part III running to over 200, few courses can cover everything, and instructors must choose among the theory chapters.

Where It Fits in the Course

For the semantics half of this course, Saeed is a natural main text. Two shorter books can come first or run alongside: Hurford, Heasley and Smith's Semantics: A Coursebook teaches the basic ideas in short units with practice and feedback, which suits students who want drill; Cruse's Meaning in Language is an introduction that treats semantics and pragmatics together for readers with no background. Saeed covers more ground than either, especially in Part III.

For the pragmatics half, Birner's Introduction to Pragmatics goes further into implicature, presupposition, reference and speech acts than Saeed's Chapters 7 and 11, and Levinson's Pragmatics is the classic systematic textbook that set out the field's core topics. After Saeed's Chapter 9, Heim and Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar is the graduate-level step for building truth-conditional semantics on syntactic structure with a typed lambda notation.

How to Use This Book

The publisher pitches the book at undergraduates in linguistics, English language, applied linguistics, modern languages and computer science; it assumes no previous semantics and only limited familiarity with formal linguistics. A first course in linguistics is enough preparation.

A practical plan for a one-semester course:

• Core: Chapters 1–7 in order. Chapter 1 sets up the questions and terms the rest of the book uses; Chapter 4 is required before Chapter 9.
• Theory block: choose according to the course's slant. A course leaning toward formal linguistics should take Chapter 9 (and Chapter 8); one leaning toward cognitive linguistics should take Chapter 10; a course that continues into pragmatics should end with Chapter 11, which picks up the questions Chapter 1 left open.
• Self-study: read a chapter, attempt its exercises before looking at the solutions, and use the glossary for terms that recur across chapters.

Use the further reading at the end of each chapter to go deeper; the Chapter 1 list, for instance, points to Lyons and Allan as large reference surveys and to Birner for pragmatics. Because most examples are English, students who speak other languages can strengthen their understanding by testing the concepts (aspect, evidentiality, classifiers, deixis) on those languages.