2. 2013
Acknowledgement
First of all, I would like to thank to Almighty God because still give me mercy and
blessing, for helping me to arrange this papers
I would also like to thank to my lecturer, Sir David Berthony Manalu M.Pd, whose guidance has
enlightened me to complete this assignment.
I am arranging this paper to comply my last task about Reading III. In this paper I try to provide
about analysis scientific book “Introducing to semantic and introducing English semantic”. The
analysis such as, theories, research, experiences, and argument.
Although I have try to make this papers with maximum, but I am sure this papers is not perfect,
and when I do this paper, I am always stay up all night, because I have much assignment from
another lesson and I must do it one by one, but I always try to finish this paper soon, if this paper
finish I shall fell free of worry. Because of it, I need criticism and suggestion to make this papers
become the best.
I hope this paper have beneficial from all of people, special to reader and the last I say thanks
Pematang siantar, December 2013
Composer
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Table of content
Acknowledgment……………………………………………………………………
Table of content……………………………………………………………………..
1. Introduction.
1.1.Identities of book 1……………………………………………………………...
1.2. Identities of book 2……………………………………………………………..
2. Reading summary.
2.1. Reading summary of book 1……………………………………………………
2.2. Reading summary of book 2……………………………………………………
3. Evaluation
3.1. Evaluation of book 1……………………………………………………………
3.2. Evaluation of book 2……………………………………………………………
4. Introduction
Book’s identities:
Identities of book 1
Title : Introducing to semantics
Writer : Nick Riemer.
Year of publication : first published in print format 2010
ISBN : - ISBN- 13 978-0-511-67746-5
(EBook (Net library)
-ISBN-13-978-0-521-85192-3
Hardback
-ISBN-13 978-0-521-61741-3
Paperback
Identities of book 2
Title : Introducing English semantics
Writer : Charles W. Kreidler
Year of publication : First published 1998
ISBN : -ISBN 0-203-02115-0 Master e-book
-ISBN 0-203-17370-8 (Adobe reader Format)
-ISBN 0-415-18063-5 (hbk).
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-ISBN 0-415-18064-3 (pbk).
Purpose of writing reading report:
To complied my last task about reading III.
To motivated the writer to read scientific text or scientific book.
To indicate the writer to do research and selecting theorist
Technique(s) and step used while reading book 1and book 2.
Pre reading : Preview and Predicting
While reading : Scanning and Skimming
Post reading : make conclusion
6. Reading summary of book 1
Theory
For the purposes of linguistics, we can isolate three particularly important factors relevant
to the study of meaning: the psychology of speakers, which creates and interprets
language expression as projected by the language user’s psychology and the linguistic
expression its self. As Ogden and Richard points outs, these three points constitute the
semiotic triangle.(1949:10)
Tredennick distinguish two types of definition: Definition of the essence of a thing (real
definition) Definition of the meaning of a word (nominal definition). Most linguists take
nominal definition to be the type that is of interest to linguistic research.(1960:90)
The relation between language and context are not limited to those in which a linguistic
expression describes a preexisting world. The assertion of facts about the world is just
one of the acts which we can use language to perform. As noted by Grice we also ask
questions, issue orders and make requests, in these types of speech act, truth is not a
relevant parameter in the appreciation of meaning.(1989)
As noted by diesel, all languages have at least two deictically contrastive demonstratives:
proximal is usually called this demonstrative and distal is usually called the that
demonstrative (1999:13)
As noted by Givon, the fundamental role of assertion language can be seen as a
consequence of four large-scale features of human social organization and the types of
talk-exchange it engenders: first, communicative topics are often outside the immediate,
perceptually available range, second, much pertinent information, third, the rapidity of
change in the human environment, and the last, the participants.(1984:248)
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Austin’s theory of speech acts distinguished three types of act we perform in any
utterance: first, the locutionary act is the act of saying something: the act of expressing
the basic, literal meanings of the words chosen. Second, The illocutionary act is the act
performed in saying something: the act of using words to achieve such goals as warning,
promising, guaranteeing, etc. third, The perlocutionary act is the act performed by saying
something: the act of producing an effect in the hearer by means of the utterance.
(1962:145-147)
As noted by Nyckees there five important types of lexical relation have been identified.
Synonymy, antonymy, meronymy, hyponymy and taxonomy. They play a determining
role in linguistic intercomprehension.(1998)
As noted by Murphy, some words seem to have more than one antonym, depending on
the dimension of contrast involved (girl has both boy and woman, depending on the
whether the dimension of contrast is sex or age; sweet has both bitter and sour)
(2003:173)
As Davidson says, the fact that a single linguistic structure may serve an unlimited
number of contextual communicative ends points up a fundamental feature of human
language that he calls the autonomy of linguistic meaning. (1973:73)
“The unit of linguistic communication is not, as has generally been supposed, the
symbol, word or sentences, or even the token of the symbol, word or sentences, but
rather the production or issuance of the symbol or word or sentence in the performance
of the speech act.” (Searle 1969:16)
Grice distinguished four general maxims in conversation; they are the maxim of quality,
the maxim of quantity, the maxim of relevance and the maxim of manner. Not all the
maxim have equal importance (1989:27)
In the word of Jackendoff (2002:293),”we must consider the domain of linguistic
semantics to be continuous with human conceptualization as a whole”.
In the word of Langacker 1987:98), studying linguistic meaning is the same thing as
study in the nature of human conceptual structure, a cover all term for our thoughts,
concepts, perceptions, images, and mental experience in general.
On the conceptual theory of metaphor view, lakoff says that, metaphor is a cognitive
process which helps us to conceptualize our experience by setting up correspondences
8. between easily understood things like burdens and hard to understand things like
obligations. Metaphor is a cognitive operation first and foremost. (1987:416-461)
For sperber and Wilson, in contrast, language-use is an ostensive-inferential process: the
speaker ostensively 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.(1995)
“The relevance of an input for an individual at a given time is a positive function of the
cognitive benefits he would gain from processing it, and a negative function of the
processing effort needed to achieve these benefits.” (Sperber and Wilson 2002:14)
For Carnap, pragmatic consideration like reference assignment, scope interpretation and
implicatures like the temporal subsequency reading of and may enter into the truth-
conditional approach to meaning, then, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics
is porous, acts considered as prototypically part of the domain of pragmatics are
necessary to the very calculation of truth-conditional meaning.(1942:42)
Litowitz and Evens isolate four different types of meronymy in English: the relation of
the functional component to its whole, such as the relation between heart and body; the
relation of a segment to a preexisting whole (slice-cake); the relation of a member to a
collection or an element to a set (sheep-flock); and the relation they call subset-set(fruit-
food) (1988)
For example of hyponymy as noted by Wierzbicka (1984),every (male) policeman is
necessarily someone’s son, and not every member of the category someone’s son, is a
policeman, but this doesn’t mean that a male policeman is a ‘kind of son’, and wouldn’t
want to describe the relation between male policeman and someone’s son.
As noted by Atran (1999:121), consider for example the partial taxonomy animal-
mammal-cow. Learning that one cow is susceptible to the disease but not that all
mammal or animals are.
Ullmann (1972:141) points out that one of the few places where full word synonymy
seems reasonably common is technical vocabulary, giving as example the fact that in
medicine inflammation of the blind gut can be synonymously referred to as either
caecitis or typhlistis.
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Murphy says that everybody and everyone are not lexical synonyms since they are not
mutually substitutable in every context.
As noted by Halliday and Matthiessen (2004:117), semantics has nothing to do with
truth, it is concerned with consensus about validity, and consensus is negotiated in
dialogue.
According to Rosck, prototypical category members are those which share the most
attributes with other members of their category, and the fewest with members of other
categories, bird , for instance , might be defined through attributes such as ‘egg-laying’,
‘flaying’, ’small’, ‘vertebrate’, ’pecks food’, ‘winged’, ‘high-pitched call’, ‘builds nets’
and so on. (1978:38)
“The kinds of features that subjects associate with certain concepts vary widely and
almost without limit when one varies the experimental context in which they are tested.
Rather than accessing a fixed set of features in conjunction with each concept, there is
apparently no limit to the features that even a single subject associates with a certain
concept depending on the context in question “ (khalidi 1995:404)
As kneale and kneale explain (1962), logic investigates the properties of valid
arguments and chains of reasoning, and specifies the conditions which arguments must
meet in order to be valid. It is important to linguists for the principle reasons: first, its
constitutes one of the oldest and most developed traditions of the study of meaning.
Second, It is at the heart of formal and computational theories of semantics, third certain
logical concepts provide and interesting point of contrast with their natural language
equivalents.
Lyons says that, meaning postulates are not just limited to the formalization of the
specific lexical relations, they can also be used to express more particular interrelations
between particular words.(1963)
Bertrand Russell (1905), Russell’s theory of definite descriptions offers an analysis in
logical term of the meaning of propositions involving the English determiner the,
according to which such propositions contain disguised quantifications.
10. Pustejovsky’s theory is that each of these roles can operate independently within the
semantics of a clause. For example, we know that a fast car is one that moves quickly,
and a fast motorway is one on which cars can move quickly, since fast applies to the
telic role of the noun: the role that refers to the function or purpose which the referent
fulfils. (1995:421-423)
Huddleston says that, the categories of semantic criteria interpretations of the part of
speech like noun (word used as the name of a living being or lifeless thing.), verb (word
which denotes action or a state of being), and adjective (word which denotes a property
of characteristic of some object, person or thing.) (1983)
Many languages show widespread multicategoriality (roots which may appear as
different parts of speech). Hopper says that, we can think of nouns and verbs as ‘slots’
or contexts available in each clause, each of which comes associated with the
appropriate grammatical machinery. The grammatical slots themselves can be seen as
the carriers of the noun hood or verb hood which the word ends up acquiring.(1988)
Jackendoff’s theory of semantic representation dispenses completely with theta-roles,
and derives argument structure directly from the semantic of the verb. This means that
the thematic hierarchy can be completely restated in terms of underlying conceptual
configurations. In Jackendoff’s theory of conceptual structure, selectional restrictions
are also specified directly by the conceptual structure: they are not extra information
which needs to be learnt in addition to the meaning of the verbs themselves.(1987,2002)
11. i
Research
Keenan says that we can readily imagine situations even in our own society which do not
observe the first maxim of quantity, which stipulates that hearers are to make their
contributions as informative as is required for the current purposes of the
exchange.(1976:218)
Cruse investigated antonyms meaning long-short, good-bad and hot-cold in English,
French, Turkish, Macedonian, Arabic, and Chinese. For the adjective meaning ‘longer’,
‘shorter’, and ‘bitter’ all language allow an impartial or uncommitted use, suggesting that
antonym behavior may show some cross linguistic uniformity.
Rosch says that the prototypicality of items within a category can be shown to affect
virtually all of the major dependent variables used as measures in psychological research
for instance category membership of the form ‘An [exemplar] is a [category name]’ (e.g.
‘a robin is a bird’)
Lakoff (1973) for example of a category, a sentence like a sparrow is a true bird is
perfectly normal, unlike a penguin is a true bird: sparrows, not penguins, are prototypical
exemplars of the category bird. Conversely, technically can only be applied to non-
prototypical category members: a penguin is technically a bird is acceptable, but a
sparrow is technically a bird.
Rosch point out of the category, that some attributes, like ‘large’ for the category piano,
depend on considerable background knowledge: pianos are large for pieces of furniture,
but small for buildings. It could therefore be objected that attributes like this are not more
basic cognitively than the whole objects to which they belong, and that they cannot be
considered the basic for the categorization. (1978:42)
Levin and Hovav (2005: 18) observe that, “verb classes are similar in status to natural
classes of sounds in phonology and the elements of meaning which serve to distinguish
among the classes of verbs are similar in status to phonology’s distinctive features.
Furthermore, since these grammatically relevant facets of meaning are viewed as
12. constituting the interface between a full-fledged representation of meaning and the
syntax, most researchers have assumed that, like the set of distinctive features, the set of
such meaning elements is both universal and relatively small in size.”
Argument
As Sperber and Wilson’s argument “it is not enough to point out that information may be
carried over from one conceptual process to the next, one would like to know which
information is kept in a short term memory store, which is simply erased”.(1995:138-
139)
As commented by Lehrer about prototype categorization, “when we look at some of the
detailed lexical descriptions that have been done, the data themselves often have forced
the investigator to posit fuzzy boundaries and partial class inclusion, implicitly
acknowledging something like prototype theory”. (1990:380).
Jackendoff claims that a decomposition method is necessary to explore conceptual
structure, in which the concepts underlying word meaning are broken down into their
smallest elements: conceptual primitives envisaged as the semantic equivalents of
phonological features (1978)
Hopper and Thompson suggest that parts of speech can be understood as prototype
categories defined by their discourse functions. The difference in the grammatical options
available to a given occurrence of a noun or verb correlates with its discourse function in
a given context – the closer the noun or verb is to playing its prototypical discourse role,
the closer it comes to exhibiting the full range of grammatical possibilities of its class.
(1984:710-711)
Chung and Timberlake (1985:204-205) says that, tense is the name of the class of
grammatical markers used to signal the location of situations in time. Three basic
temporal divisions are relevant to the representation of time in language: what is
happening now, what will happen afterwards, and what has already happened.
Dowty (1991) suggested about the problem with thematic roles that, the different
participant roles are cluster concepts, like Roschean prototypes, and that thematic roles
are based on entailments of verb-meanings.
13. i
Reading summary book 2
Theory
“language is purely human and non instinctive method of communicating ideas,
emotions, and desires by means of a system of voluntary symbols” (Sapir, 1939)
“Linguistic is a scientific study of language or languages” (T.A. Ridwan, 1982:10)
Allan Keith says, linguistic semantics is an attempt to explicate the knowledge of any
speakers of language which allows that speaker to communicate facts, feelings, intentions
and product of the imagination to other speaker and to understand what they
communicate to him or her.(1986)
“Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It is concerned with that sentences and
other linguistic objects express, not with the arrangement of their syntactic parts or with
their pronunciation” (Katz, 1972:1)
“Meaning signifies any and all phrases of sign-process (the status of being a sign, the
interpreted, the fact of denoting, the signification.) and frequently suggest mental and
valuation process as well” (Morris, 1946:19)
“We can define the meaning of speech-form accurately when this meaning has to do with
some matter of which we posses scientific knowledge. We can define the names of
plants, or animals by means of the technical botany or zoology, but we have no precise
way of defining love or hate and these latter are in the great majority” (Bloomfield 1933)
As a noted by George Dillon (1977) about demonstrating semantic knowledge, he says
that speaker of language have an implicit knowledge about what is meaningful in their
language, and its easy to show this in our account of what that knowledge is, it is ten
aspects of any speakers semantic knowledge, anomaly, paraphrase, synonymy, semantic
feature, antonymy, contradiction, ambiguity, adjacency pairs, entailment and
presupposition.
14. Lenneberg (1967),Clark (1977:295-430), says that processes like making question and
negative statements are acquired, processes that go beyond a mere reflection of what is
in the environment and make it possible for the child to express himself and interact with
others.
As noted by Clark (1996:121) that speaker and hearer use the same vocabulary, they have
similar pronunciations, and they have the same ways of putting words together in the
sentences.
As Fillmore (1979:781) put it, we need to know not only what the speaker says but also
what he talking about, why he bothers to say it, and why he says it the way he does.
Comprehension is not just talking in words, as listeners we use our background
information to interpret the message.
Clark and Clark 1977:49) says that, as a listeners we begin by identifying the phonetic
message and through the phonetic message identify the semantic message.
It is important to distinguish between linguistic meaning, as a point out of Schifrin
(1994), what is communicated by particular pieces of language and utterance meaning,
what is a certain individual meant by saying such and such in a particular piece, time and
to certain others individuals.
A mentalistic theory about meaning Ogden and Richards (1923), an attempt to explain
meaning in term of what is in people’s mind. Meaning are expressed by units that may be
smaller than words and expressed in units sentences that are large than words, meaning is
more than denotation, also express opinions, favorable and unfavorable.
Hjelmslev (1971:109-10) pointed out that among the Eskimos a dog is an animal that
used for pulling a sled, the Parsees regard dogs as nearly sacred. Hjelmslev added that in
certain societies the flesh of dogs is part of the human diet and in others societies it is not.
Austin says that, in every speech we can distinguish three things, what is said, the
utterance, can be called the locution, what the speakers intends to communicate to the
addressee is the illocution, the massage that the addressee gets, his interpretation of what
the speaker says is the perlocution. (1962)
As theory of grice, such communication is guided by four factors, called maxims, the
maxims of quantity requires the speaker to give as much information as the addressee
15. i
need but no more, the maxim of relevance requires us, as speakers, to make our
utterances relative to the discourse going on and the contexts in which they occur, the
maxims of manner is to be orderly and clear and to avoid ambiguity, the maxim of
quality is to say only what one believes to be true. (1975-1978)
A stative predicate, according to Comrie (1976:49), a stative predicate is typically
durative in aspect, it is relates a situation that does not change during the time when the
predication is valid.
Vandler (1967) proposed a four-way classification of predicates as stative, activity,
achievement and accomplishment predicates. Stative and activity predicate are atelic, and
achievement predicate are telic.
Vlach (1981:279) says that, the progressive form indicates that the activity predicated is
distributed over a period of time with an implied endpoint.
Kiparsky and kiparsky (1970) point out that certain predicates, among them the verb
forget, are factivy. A factivy predicate has a predication as one of its argument and
whether affirmative or negative, it presupposes the truth of that predication.
Native speakers of English learn these verbs so early in life that they are unaware of
having learned them. As Joos (1964:147-8) points out, a child of four may ask the
meaning of duty but is not likely to ask about the meaning of must.
Perceptual verbs, also called ‘sensory verbs,’ express the sensations that we receive from
outside stimuli through our five sense, as a noted by Viberg (1983:123-6), our
perceptions are reactions to stimuli: reflected light strikes our retinas, vibrations impinge
on our eardrum, other sensations affect the nerves in our tongue, skin, or nose.
Note that in such sentences the person affected, named by the subject, is not affected by
the perception of an entity nor of a simultaneous event but by a mental reaction to what
has been observed. (kirsner and Thompson 1976:205-8)
Adjectives derived from verbs are either active- subjective or passive objective
(Magnusson and persson 1986:195-8). An envious person is one who envies, an enviable
person is one that we envy, one to be envied. Envious is active subjective, enviable is
passive objective.
16. Evaluation
Evaluation 3.1
Strengths and weakness of book 1
Strengths: 1. this book has complied explained about the topic
This book has complied explained about the semantic
This book is clear and comprehensive
It contains more 200 exercises and discussion question design to test and deepen reader’s
understanding.
It is clearly explain and contrasts different theoretical approaches, summarizes, and
provides helpful suggestion for further reading.
This book also highlights the connections between semantics and the wider study of
human language in psychology, anthropology and linguistic itself.
Weakness:
This book has much difficult word.
Strengths and weakness of book 2
Strengths:
This book has a wealth of exercise
Discusses the nature of language
Includes a glossary of term
Weakness:
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This book has much difficult word.
Recommendation of book 1 and book 2
This book “introducing English semantics” will be an essential text for any student which
following an introductory course in semantics, and also for lecturer or teacher. We can read the
book whenever we want to read it and in wherever you want.
