Semantics and Pragmatics: A practical Course for the Study of MeaningZain Legal Publications,Beirut,Lebanon, 2017
This book is an introductory course to semantics and pragmatics for foreign university students of English. It is a textbook that has been specially designed to meet the needs of students who encounter the study of meaning for the first time. The main objective is to acquaint students of English, as a foreign language, with background information, basic ideas and concepts about the study of the two areas of meaning (semantics and pragmatics) with an edutaining flavour. In writing this book, we have tried to adopt the same approach and strategies used in writing the first textbook (Linguistics) for foreign university students of English. The approach is communicatively and interactively oriented. It is based on edutainment in that it educates and entertains as the same time. It employs a variety of strategies and techniques that depend on brainstorming, group work, discussion groups, video and image watching, report writing, all of which are presented in the Hintsections and Exercises sections. The book has also been designed to make the students’ learning task easier, and more beneficial and interesting. This is done by splitting the main topics into smaller manageable subtopics, in addition to simplicity of expression, straightforward style, clarity of presentation and comprehensive coverage of fundamental semantic and pragmatic issues and concepts. To put all these considerations into practical application, the strategies previously mentioned have been employed throughout the book. These aim at making the book easy to follow and handle, and make the study of meaning an interesting thing rather than boring, especially for students, and other readers who want to use it on their own as part of self-study. Vertically, each chapter begins with the Starter Section, followed by the Hint Section, the basic material to be delivered in the chapter, then the Reminder Section and ends with the Study Section. The Starter introduces the basic topics and terms to be presented in the chapter as headlines. The purpose behind this section is to direct the students' attention to what is to be dealt with in the chapter. The Hint is a two-fold activity. It is either a picture or a short video. But the two have one purpose in common; they function as a brainstorming stimulus for students to be actively and indirectly involved in the material to be presented later. Here students are required to watch the picture (in the figure) or the video and answer the relevant questions. The pictures and videos intend to prepare students for active involvement in the subject, but in an entertaining and easy manner by means of the information displayed on the picture or the video. These two means challenge the students’ ability to recall, observe, analyse, synthesize and infer to get at the correct answer. The Reminder, which comes at the end, is a summary of the main points and basic terms introduced in the chapter. It has been devised to help students have a brief account of the subject through skimming. The Study Section, which comes after the Reminder, is divided into two main parts; questions and exercises. The questions aim at checking the students' knowledge and understanding of the main ideas and important terms presented in the chapter. The exercises aim at developing the students' knowledge and giving them more practice to arouse their awareness of semantics and pragmatics. Horizontally, the book is divided into two parts. Part One: Semantics, which is supposed to be covered in the first semester, includes five chapters; Introduction (Chapter 1), Basic Terms (Chapter 2), Lexical Relations (Chapter 3), Semantic Concepts (Chapter 4), Multi-Word Chunks and Meaning (Chapter 5). Part Two: Pragmatics, which is to be covered in the second semester, also includes five chapters; Introduction (Chapter 6), Basic Terms (Chapter 7), Cooperation and Communication (Chapter 8), Speech Acts and Communication (Chapter 9) and Politeness and Interaction (Chapter 10). Last but not least, the book has been supplemented with PowerPoint Presentations covering its ten chapters. The purpose behind this is to provide both the teacher and students with a useful and entertaining tool to the study of meaning, which has always been looked upon (by most students) as a difficult and boring subject.
Semantics and Pragmatics I chose Edinburgh University for postgraduate studies because I wanted to learn semantics from John Lyons, one of whose books I had read. It turned out that he was not teaching semantics the year that I took the taught graduate course, but there were eventually seminars of his that I could attend, and I read more of his work. His influence can be traced in this book. It was Martin Atkinson, a fellow research assistant on an Edinburgh University Linguistics Department project, who first ex-plained to me how the study of meaning can be split between semantics and pragmatics. Semantics is concerned with the resources (vocabulary and a system for calculating phrase-, clause- and sentence-meanings) provided by a language, and pragmatics is concerned with how those resources are put to use in communication. My grasp got firmer when I began to teach semantics and pragmatics myself at York University (UK), and later at the University of the South Pacific, York St John and Beppu University (Japan). Finding examples that communicate a point but which cannot easily be dismissed or misunderstood by students is a valuable discipline, especially when one tries to figure out, in relation to particular theoretical notions, what it takes to be a good example. I am grateful that Heinz Giegerich, general editor of this series, came up with the idea of introductory textbooks offering compact descrip-tions of English unobtrusively grounded in defensible theory – it is an approach congenial to my ways of teaching and learning. My contribu-tion to the series aims to present a reasonably detailed first look at the main features of the meaning system of English and the pragmatics of using that system. I owe thanks to Anthony Warner for encouraging me to write the book. In lunchtime conversations that I used to have with him at York University, he several times straightened out muddled ideas of mine regarding meaning. Beppu University provided me with an environment conducive to writing. Professor Kenji Ueda, Head of the English Language and Literature Department, encouraged me and also kindly authorised the purchase of some of the books that I needed to consult. x Pragmatics deals with inferences that listeners and readers make, or that – when speaking or writing – they invite others to make. These inferences are often conscious, so pragmatics tends to be easier to understand than semantics, because the latter is about abstract potential meanings that are often best described by means of notations drawn from logic and set theory. Linguistic meaning cannot usefully be studied by someone who knows only about pragmatics, however. A view widely shared among linguists is that semantics and pragmatics are essential components that work together in a full description of meaning. In this book, I attempt to integrate semantics with pragmatics, but I hold back a detailed exposition of pragmatics until near the end (Chapter 8), with a detailed illustration of it in the closing chapter (Chapter 9). But Chapter 1 has a brief introduction to pragmatics and it is mentioned in all chapters – sometimes there is rather more than a mention: for instance, Chapter 5 introduces presupposition and puts the notion to work. The pragmatics is Gricean, supplemented by Austin-Searle speech acts, and making use in a couple of places of ideas from Relevance Theory. The point of the early concentration on semantics is to encourage readers to grapple with semantics before they have seen pragmatics as a possible “soft option”. Chapter 1 introduces entailment as the foundation of semantics, together with compositionality and scope, the latter seeing some service in Chapters 2 and 7. Chapters 2 and 3 show how lexical sense relations are based on entailment. Throughout, but particularly in Chapter 4 (on verbs and situation types), the text presents not just analyses of meanings, but the evidence and reasoning that motivates them. Exercises at the end of each chapter, with suggested solutions at the end of the book, are intended for consolidation and to encourage further exploration. Chapter 5 is a short account of figurative elabor-ations of meaning, mainly through a non-technical retelling of Josef Stern’s theory of metaphor. Chapter 6 treats the basics of English tense and aspect. Chapter 7, on the inter-related topics of modality, scope and quantification, is the semantic summit of the book, including a short introduction to Generalised Quantifier Theory. Theoretical concepts and technical terms are introduced to the extent needed for making essential points in the description of meaning in English. Though the book is a self-standing introduction to English semantics and pragmatics, I hope that readers will be interested enough to want to learn more. For any who have the opportunity to do additional reading, the terminology introduced here should suffice for them to make headway with a range of intermediate-level books about semantics and pragmatics. At the end of each chapter there is a section of recom-PREFACE xi mendations for further reading. Bold printed items in the index point to places in the text where technical terms are explained – not just when they first come up, but also to any subsequent elaborations. Sarah Edwards, Commissioning Editor at Edinburgh University Press, provided clear guidance and responded efficiently to queries. She earned even greater gratitude from me for her forbearance in the face of my repeated failures to deliver chapters on time. Norman Macleod, as a member of the Editorial Board, scrutinised first drafts of all the chapters and read a revised version of the whole book too. Norman made very concise suggestions for improvements and alerted me to a number of subtleties in English meaning and usage. It was he who reminded me that a reversing dog is not followed by its tail (see Chapter 2). Heinz Giegerich kindly read a near-final version of the whole text. I thank James Dale, the Managing Desk Editor, and Sarah Burnett, the Copy Editor, for quality control on the text. Near the end, Andrew Merrison, doing it simply as a favour for a fellow linguist, read the book and passed on a list of inconsistencies, mistypings and questionable punctuations, many of which have now been eliminated. Sole responsibility for the published wording and content lies with me, however. “Slow food”, with time lavished on it in the growing, preparation and savouring, tastes better. It took me a long time to write this book. Unfortunately, not all of it was composed in a measured and reflective way. Some was done in haste because other jobs and projects demanded attention. I hope that there are enough considered bits to make it an interesting read and that the “fast food” intrusions will not be too off-putting. Janet Griffiths, my spouse, supported me throughout and was the person most available for verification (or a headshake) of my intuitions about meaning. She checked drafts of several of the chapters and diagnosed confusing wording in quite a few places. I thank her with all my heart. Jane Griffiths visited around the time that I finished a second version of Chapter 5. She read it and offered comments that I appreciated. Thanks, Jane
Rawda Mohamed
