16.3540, Review: Semantics/Textbooks: Bennett (2002)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3540. Tue Dec 13 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3540, Review: Semantics/Textbooks: Bennett (2002)

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1)
Date: 07-Dec-2005
From: Verginica Mititelu < vergi at racai.ro >
Subject: Semantics: an Introduction to Non-Lexical Aspects of Meaning 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:44:58
From: Verginica Mititelu < vergi at racai.ro >
Subject: Semantics: an Introduction to Non-Lexical Aspects of Meaning 
 

AUTHOR: Bennett, Paul
TITLE: Semantics
SUBTITLE: An Introduction to Non-lexical Aspects of Meaning
SERIES: LINCOM Coursebooks in Linguistics 12
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2002
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1156.html 

Verginica Barbu Mititelu, School of Humanities, Languages and Social 
Sciences, University of Wolverhampton, and Romanian Academy 
Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK'S PURPOSE AND CONTENT

Semantics is generally defined as the linguistic subfield that studies 
the meaning of linguistic expressions, be they words, phrases, 
sentences, and texts (see Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990). 
There are more areas of study in semantics: the relations between 
different linguistic expressions (synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, 
meronymy, etc.), thematic roles, argument structure (thus having 
connections with syntax), the area of studying the sense and 
reference, the truth conditions, and the formalization of meaning.

Paul Bennett's ''Semantics'' is an intermediate-level textbook on 
semantics. As the subtitle indicates, the book covers topics related to 
non-lexical aspects of meaning, thus one cannot expect to find here 
discussions related to lexico-semantic relations and not even to 
formalization of the meaning of linguistic expressions (although this is 
also not specifically lexical in nature).

Besides delimiting the area of interest, the introductory chapter 
provides explanations for the grammaticalization phenomenon, the 
distinctions polysemy-monosemy, semantics-pragmatics, and for 
prototypes. These notions prove useful in the other chapters, where 
the author focuses on specific topics.

Chapter 2 deals with syntactic and semantic categories. The main 
questions receiving an answer here are the following: can one predict 
the syntactic category and behaviour of a word by only considering its 
meaning? do syntactic characteristics of words follow directly from 
their meaning? Both questions receive a partially affirmative answer. 
The prototype theory is helpful here to distinguish between words that 
are prototypical representatives of a syntactic category and those that 
are marginal within the syntactic category they belong to (see the 
case of words derived from members of other category and retaining 
the semantics of their source category).

Chapter 3 presents the proposition types, with special focus on 
Vendler classes (states, activities, achievements, accomplishments): 
their characteristics, some problems related to this classification, 
alternative approaches (Steedman1977, Chafe 1970), the distinction 
between grammatical relations and argument structure, two notions 
that are useful in some classifications of propositions.

Chapter 4 deals with deixis in its four forms: person, social, special 
and temporal. 

The semantics of the three tenses (past, present, future) makes the 
topic of the fifth chapter. The notion of time is also necessary to 
describe the tense system. Reichenbach's system is presented 
altogether with alternative analyses (Klein's, Bull's). The future tense 
stands alone among the English tenses due to its modal-like status 
(that is why this is also discussed in chapter 7 where modality is in 
focus).

A discussion of the semantics of tense must also consider aspect. 
Chapter 6 presents the characteristics of the perfective and 
imperfective (habitual and progressive) aspects, their more or less 
controversial status, and some aspect frameworks.

The semantics of verbs and of proposition also cannot ignore 
modality, which makes the topic of the seventh chapter. There are 
different ways of expressing modality, but special emphasis here is on 
the grammaticalized forms of expressing it: auxiliaries. The distinction 
between deontic and epistemic modality (and other types with a 
controversial or at least not widely recognized status) is exemplified 
and discussed drawing the reader's attention on the degrees of 
modality. Auxiliaries are polysemantic: they are used to express 
various modal meanings. Different approaches to this problem are 
critically presented.

Chapter 8 deals with negation: its types (sentential versus constituent 
negation), its scope and focus (here metalinguistic negation and 
negative raising are presented), polarity, its interaction with modality, 
the semantics of negative sentences, the pragmatic aspects involved 
in the use of negation. However, when discussing the semantics of 
negation, we think that it is worth mentioning expletive negation (a 
formally negative sentence with a positive meaning) (for a detailed 
classification of negation using various criteria and with examples from 
Romanian see Barbu Mititelu and Maftei Ciolaneanu 2004).

The last chapter focuses on the semantics of determination: its types, 
and its lexical ways of expression.

Each chapter is followed by some notes and suggestions for further 
reading on the topics dealt with in the respective chapter. The book 
also contains a short glossary of the key terms used, a bibliography 
and an index.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Whenever an approach is presented, it is critically evaluated by the 
author: its advantages and disadvantages, its coverage of the 
phenomenon, its applicability are discussed. Any shortcoming of an 
approach is exploited to justify alternative approaches existent in the 
literature dealing with the respective phenomenon. For instance, the 
fact that in Reichenbach's tense system there is no definition for the 
notion of reference time was objected to by W. Klein, who proposed 
another tense system. In cases when more than one approach to a 
phenomenon is presented, the correspondences between them are 
emphasized.

In chapter 3, we think that an enlarged discussion about the inventory 
of semantic roles would have been appropriate. The author's reasons 
for avoiding that are stated on page 54: ''defining semantic roles is 
extremely difficult'', ''they are no longer central objects of linguistic 
investigations'', ''their usefulness is very limited''. We agree with that 
position only partially. The FrameNet project 
(http://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu/), the attempts to build such a 
resource for other languages than English, and the utility of such a 
resource is proof that it is worth studying semantic roles and creating 
databases with such roles for predicates. They are useful for further 
applications in Natural Language Processing.

Terminology may vary from one school to another and sometimes from 
one linguist to another. The author mentions them and also provides 
reasons for the terminology he adopts (see for instance page 140 for 
the discussion of the terms ''mood'' and ''modality''). 

Each topic discussed is presented from both a monolingual and a 
cross-lingual perspective. Languages vary in the way semantic 
classes are realized syntactically, in the fact that translationally 
equivalent propositions may display different grammatical structures, 
in the means used to express the meanings associated with tense, 
aspect and modality, in the types of negation they display, etc. 

Phenomena in linguistics are not isolated from each other. And neither 
are they presented in isolation in this textbook. References from one 
chapter to another, that is from the presentation of one linguistic 
phenomenon to another, and presentations of the way phenomena 
interact are quite frequent throughout the book.

Examples are illustrative for the purpose they are given. However, 
there are situations when the reader would better understand some 
explanations had the author exemplified the facts presented. For 
instance, on page 4, grammaticalization is defined, after Hopper and 
Traugott (1993), as ''the process whereby lexical items and 
constructions come in certain contexts to serve grammatical functions, 
and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical 
functions'' but no example in the history of any natural language is 
provided for the reader, to ease understanding. 

The quality of this textbook is sustained by the clarity with which topics 
are introduced, by the fact that they are presented in the way they 
interact in language. However, some exercises at the end of each 
chapter would have helped students understand through practicing.

REFERENCES

Barbu Mititelu, V. and R. Maftei Cilaneanu (2004) The Main Aspects 
of the Grammar of Negation in Romanian, in E. Ionescu (Ed.) 
Understanding Romanian Negation: Syntactic and Semantic 
Approaches in a Declarative Perspective, Bucharest: University of 
Bucharest Publishing House, pp.32-67.

Chafe, W. (1970) Meaning and the Structure of Language, University 
of Chicago Press.

Cheirchia, G. and S. McConnell-Ginet (1990) Meaning and Grammar, 
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hopper, P. and. E. Traugott (1993) Grammaticalization, CUP.

Steedman, M (1977) Verbs, time and modality, Cognitive Science 1, 
216-234. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Verginica Barbu Mititelu is a PhD student in linguistics and her thesis 
theme subscribes to the area of lexical semantics. Her main scientific 
interests are corpus linguistics, lexical semantics, anaphora resolution, 
and machine translation.





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