Reviewed Work: SEMANTICS: The Study of Meaning (Second edition) by Geoffrey N.

Leech, Chs, 1, 2,
5, 6, 7, and 13. (Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England)

First published in Pelican Books 1974

Second edition 1981
Pages:389

Reviewed by: Nissrine Jabbar Hussain

In his comprehensive work ‘’Semantics: The Study of Meaning’’ in 1981, first published in 1974,
Geoffrey Leech presents his own theory of semantics. The term meaning, according to Leech, is a ‘’systematic
account of the nature of meaning’’ (p.4). He considers the term as problematic and it is difficult to distinguish
between the different types of meaning. Nevertheless, he admits that such theoretical differences do exist.
At the beginning, Leech mentions different authors who dealt with his subject in order to show the
complexity of the topic. In this regard, he mentions the book of C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, published in
1923, who suggested 22 definitions for the word ‘meaning’. (p.1). Leech then mentions the work done by
Bloomfield in (1933) namely: ‘language’, which adopts a point of view regarding ‘meaning’ no completely
different from that of Ogden and Richards. Both sides agree that the scientific advancement of meanings
would be the great help for defining the term ‘meaning’.
According to Leech, meaning should be defined within the science of language not to be reduced to the
terms of other sciences such as psychology or chemistry. Meaning then is a linguistic phenomenon in its own
right where relations between sentences are recognised and the distinction between grammatical and non-
grammatical sentences are investigated, in other words, to know language semantically. At the end of chapter
One, leech make a distinction between ‘knowledge of language’ and ‘knowledge of real world’ explaining
that by two sentences:

1) My uncle always sleeps on one toe. (inconsistent with the “real world”)
2) My uncle always sleeps awake. (inconsistent with the “language”) (1981, 6)

In chapter Two entitled, Seven Types of meaning, Leech proposed seven types of meaning as mentioned
in his quotation below:

“On the basis, I shall break down „meaning‟ in its widest sense into seven
different ingredients, giving primary importance to logical meaning or (as
I shall prefer to call it) CONCEPTUAL MEANING, the type of meaning I
was discussing earlier in connection with ‘semantic copetenc’. The six
other types I shall consider are connotative meaning, social meaning,
affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic
meaning’’ (1981:9)

What Leech calls conceptual meaning was the same as what others call ‘denotative’, or ‘designative’, or
‘cognitive’, or ‘descriptive’ Leech, then, concentrate on conceptual meaning as it is of central importance for
it “has a complex and sophisticated organization which may be compared with, and cross-related to, a similar
organization on the syntactic and phonological levels of language”. This is connected with “two principles of
all linguistic patterning”, i.e. the principle of contrastiveness and the principle of structure. (1981, 9).
Connotative meaning ‘’ is the communicative value of expression based on what it refers to, over and
above its purely conceptual content." (Leech 1981, 12) As can be seen from the definition, the notion of
‘reference ‘overlaps with certain aspects of conceptual meanings. In this context, the relationship between
conceptual and connotative meaning can easily be compared to the one between the language (conceptual)
and the “real world” (connotative). For this reason, connotative meaning can be seen as peripheral,
indeterminate, an open-ended, and unstable category in comparison to conceptual meaning. (Leech 1981, 12).
Social and Affective meaning: These two meaning are concerned with two aspects of communication
which are derived from the situation or environment in which an utterance or sentence is produced. Leech
states that the social type of meaning includes all the social circumstances regarding the use of a piece of
language. (1981, 14). Hence, the social meaning can also include what is called ‘the illocutionary force of an
utterance’, which can then be interpreted as a request, an apology, a threat, etc., as stated by Leech. (1981,
15). Affective meaning, on the other hand, is the one which deals with the way a language can reflect personal
feelings of the speaker that may include attitude to a listener or something he/she is talking about. (ibid).
Reflected and Collocative meaning These two types of meaning refer to the relation between words and
the interconnection on the lexical level. Reflected meaning was the meaning which arises in cases when a
word has multiple conceptual meaning (P.16) or polysemy, when one sense of a word form part of our response
or the reaction to another sense. Collocative meaning, on the other hand, consists of the association a word
acquires on account of the meaning of words which tend to occur in its environment. (p.17). To clarify his
definition, Leech gives examples of the adjectives “pretty” and “handsome” These words have common
meaning of ‘good looking’. Nevertheless, these adjectives are distinguished according to the nouns to which
they collocate, e.g., the word pretty is collocated with girl, flower, garden, colour, village, etc, while the word
handsome is collocated with boy, man, vessel, typewriter, car, etc.
Associative meaning: this kind of meaning is called by Leech as the summary term. Except conceptual
meaning and thematic meaning the other five types, mentioned so far, are grouped under the heading of
associative meaning since they have open ended, variable character and cannot be analyzed in clear cut either-
this-or-that term. (p.18).
Finally, Thematic meaning refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer
organise their own message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. (p.19). To clarify this definition, Leech
show by an example how an active sentence and its passive equivalent may look differently, yet they are the
same as far as the conceptual content is concerned. Moreover, Leech states that thematic meaning is a “matter
of choice between alternative grammatical construction”, as illustrated in the following sentences:
A man is waiting in the hall., and
There is a man waiting in the hall.
Emphasis by substituting one element with another or stress and intonation can also be of great
importance when dealing with this type of meaning. (1981, 19-20)
Moving to chapter Five, Is Semantic Scientific? Leech argues that the first four chapters of his book
are unscientific or prescientific because they, though proposed different ideas, classifications, and structuring
of semantic phenomenon, add nothing to the scientific theory. Although he presented language function, there
is no criteria to confirm or disconfirm this classification; no objective evidence; and no experiment, rather his
analysis presents some sort of intuitive satisfaction.
Leech argues, then, that semantics can be regarded as a science. Scientific theory, for him, makes
predictions which are Falsifiable, explicit, complete, simpler, than other theories which account to the same
data. It should be stronger than other competing theories, testable by objective means. Accordingly, Leech
sees the possibility for the semantics to be scientific (as he postulates a big ‘yes’ at the beginning of this
chapter), as it shares with the natural sciences the general method of inquiry: Hypothetico-Deductive method
adopted in the empirical investigation.
Leech claims that there are earlier attempts which prevented semantics to be scientific. These are the
following:
1- The contextual view of meaning. According to Leech, contextual semantics made little progress as
there is no systematic account of how particular meaning in particular language is produced and to
direct attention to the previously neglected areas of social and collective meaning. This kind of study
gives priority to the observational aspect of scientific investigation and attempt to base meaning on
context. Contextualism (meaning=observable context) is supported by anthropologists, philosophers,
and psychologists, behaviourists and linguists such as Wittgenstein, Firth, Bloomfield and Morris.
Leech considers this view of meaning as a defect as it is incapable but dealing with primitive and
simplest situations, and the inadequacy of this simple contexts is that speech may take place in the
absence of the objects being talked about, such as words which have no observable referent in the
world (e.g. dragon).
2- Mentalism and intuition. As contexualism is rejected, for Leech, the first and last resort is the intuition
which is consistent enough to form the basis of satisfactory organisation. While contextualism led
precisely to the illusion, mentalism has brought progress. What is needed, accordingly, is a means by
which intuitive data can be securely backed up by other kinds of evidence. Nevertheless, Leech states
about the accessibility to intuition arguing that ‘’ if we want to check our basic statements against the
intuition of other speakers (those who are not logician) …. is to replace something which the ordinary
language user can understand and react to by something which is more obscure. (P. 78)
3- Truth-based Semantics. This approach to semantics assumes that ‘knowing the meaning of a sentence
would be true and all statements, therefore, about meaning are formulated as statements about truth
conditions. Although, this mathematical approach looks scientific as it is first applied to mathematics
by Tarsky who proposed the possibility of applying this formal language to specify meaning in natural
language. Nevertheless, it has the problem of ‘contingent truth’ – ‘truth by virtue of fact , rather than
by virtue of linguistic necessity.’ (P. 77)
4- Ambiguity. Leech raises a question of whether ambiguity should be a basic datum of semantics?
Although ambiguous sentences are self-evident to native speakers, there are situation in which
ambiguity looks far from clarity since, sometimes, it is explained depending on context, paraphrasing,
etc. Leech clarifies this point by giving ‘Hugo is drawing a cart’ as an example. This sentence is
ambiguous since it proposes two meanings and in one place it is synonymous with ‘Hugo is drawing
a picture of a cart’ and in another synonymous with; Hugo is pulling a cart’. (P.78).
5- Translation Equivalence. Leech defines translation as ‘finding a synonymous expression in another
language’ (P.80). Since the ideal translation is one that translate the whole communicative value of a
text into another language, and since this is generally impossible, the translation of sense ‘is often
sacrificed in order to preserve other types of meaning-equivalence’ (ibid)
6- Analytic and Synthetic threatens completeness since deciding what is the domain of observation that
the theory is meant to account for cannot be done unless we decide which truth-stements are analytic
and which are synthetic: semantic knowledge and factual knowledge.
7- Prototypic categories assume that our ability of interpretation and organising experience depends
basically on mental schema called categorisation when we recognise memebers of a category by
matching them with a prototype. Since there is a psychological way of interpreting the boundaries
between linguistic and real –world knowledge, this view prevents us from assuming absolute boundary
between analytic and synthetic.

As these problems are recognised, Leech suggests the elements of ideal semantic description
as mentioned below:
1. It should predict basic statements.
2. It relates meaning to syntax.
3. It relates meaning to pragmatics
4. It should be part of a general theory and constitutes a specification of language universals.

Although Leech admits with pessimistic ‘No’ to question raised in the title of this chapter, he
assures the possibility of applying the scientific method in semantics.
 Chapter six, entitled Components and Contrast of Meaning gives a good explanation of
componential analysis and together with chapter seven concentrates on the formal description of word
meaning. Leech argues that the analysis of word meaning is a process of breaking down the sense of a
word into its minimal components. According to him, some words belong to one semantic field and
the relation between them can be represented by dimensions of meaning. For example, man, woman,
girl, boy are words which belong to same semantic field ‘human race’ and their relatedness is
represented by three dimensions: sex, adulthood, and human. This relationship can be represented in
terms of a formula in which the dimensions of meanings are expressed by feature symbols: like positive
or marked (+) to show the presence of the feature, and unmarked (-) to show the absence of the feature.
Any individual item can express its meaning by combination of these features: + MAN +HUMAN
+ADULT +MALE. These features are called componential definitions of the item concerned. The
dimension of meaning is termed as semantic oppositions.
Componential analysis then is a method of analysis which reduces the world’s meaning to its
ultimate contrastive elements. It is used as an analogy of arithmetical proportions. Semantic
relationships such as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, etc. are determined by the relation of the
components which these words have. Leech often classifies the componential relationships into two
pairs:

1. Synonymy and polysemy which refer to the relation between form and meaning.
2. Hyponymy and incompatibility which refers to the inclusion of one meaning into another, and the
exclusion of one meaning from another, respectively. For example, the word child is included
within the meaning of the word woman.

Leech asserts the importance of semantic notation, which is similar to the language of mathematics
and formal language. Signs serves to clarify ambiguity a natural language may have. The formal
language has specific properties in that it is unambiguous and arbitrary. Therefore, any expression has
one distinct meaning, and any written symbol can be replaced by some other written symbol.

At the end of this chapter, Leech concludes that the componential analysis can greatly be justified as
it is rich and varied and the data of semantic analysis is regarded as a set of basic statements such as
entailment, inconsistency, etc. He states that all types of oppositions are interconnected and can be
predicted, for example, the tautology involves a connection between a polar opposition (tall/ short) and
a relative opposition (taller than/ shorter than). Hence all types mentioned in the chapter under
discussion can ultimately be reduced to one or two basic types: polar meaning is explained in terms of
relative meanings.

Reaching Chapter 7 entitled Componential Analysis: Extensions and Problems, Leech hopes to
complete and develop the idea about how word-meanings are structured already presented in previous
chapter. In this chapter goes deeper in tackling serious issues about the componential analysis, such as
redundancy rules, marked and unmarked terms, fuzziness of meaning in addition to criticism of this
theory. Redundancy rules are named like that because they add features which are predictable from the
presence of other features then they are considered as redundant to the economical semantic
representation. For example, the dimension + MALE and – MALE presuppose the presence of a feature
+ ANIMATE according to the following formula: if + MALE or – MALE is present in a componential
formula, then +ANIMATE is also.

By markedness, Leech asserts that binary opposition have marked and unmarked terms which are
not of the same weight: the unmarked one is neutral or positive in contrast to the other. For example, in
polar oppositions when we ask questions about length we say: How long that is that rope? rather than
How short is that rope? The second question is felt to contain the assumption that X is short, while no
such assumption is present in how long is X?

Leech believes that meaning is Fuzzy in that word meanings are essentially vague, and that we
cannot give criteria for the reference of words: the idea which supported by both philosophers and
linguists. According to Leech this kind of vagueness is referential one and does not affect componential
analysis because it has to do with category recognition: the mental encyclopaedia rather than the mental
dictionary. For example, the problems of defining cup or game are basically related to prototypic
categories in that we match members for (cuphood) against a prototype or standard notion of a cup.

Componential analysis as a theory of word meaning has been criticised as it, first, accounts for only
neatly organised vocabulary; second, suffers from vicious circle as it explains set of symbols by another
set of symbols; third, postulates abstract semantic entities; forth, postulates universal features of
meaning; fifth, it is not completely explanatory.

Finally, Leech suggest that CA is not expected to provide theory of meaning and reference: conceptual
and connotative meaning, because it cannot have this wider goal. Rather it is meant to explain word
sense, not the encyclopaedic knowledge which must enter into the theory of reference.

‘Semantic Equivalence and Deep Semantics’ is the title of chapter thirteen in which Leech strives
to set up special rules to account for the semantic equivalence of one semantic representation to another
as these rules are important to provide, as Leech hopes, an evidence for a level of ‘deep semantics’.
Deep semantic is a deep level of linguistic of linguistic organisation which is deeper than the phonetic
substance of language. Depending on this endeavour, Leech presents the rules of implications as
‘semantic transformations’. These rules postulates that it is possible to substitute on semantic formula
for another. In another words, the formula A B assumes that the logical consequences derived from
B can be applied to formula A. On the other hand, a formula of rule implication does not refer to specific
semantic feature, but states the equivalence of one generalised semantic tree-structure to another.

The importance of these rules has been justified as they are needed to show the possibility to
infer the basic statements of an analysis (tautology, inconsistency, contradiction, etc.) from the form the
semantic representation assign to utterance. Moreover, these rules preserve the mapping procedures
between semantic and syntactic structure.

Leech challenges himself as he addresses himself to a task of explaining the importance of these
rules of implications and how they are valuable addition to the semantic theory. These needed rules are:

1. Subordination rules which equates two semantic representations. This rule serves first to
explain the synonymous sentences such as:
We slept for three hours, and
Our sleeping lasted three hours

and secondly to explain how some sentences are ambiguous while others are not:

All cats eat some bats. Ambiguous

Some cats eat some bats. Not ambiguous

2. Identical rules: these rules assume one- place or two- place predication can be transformed
into one equalitive prediction. For example, although the following sentences are syntactically different,
they are both tautology and express the same prediction (gander: MALE):
 That gander is male.
That gander is a male.

In addition to these two basic rules, Leech introduces additional sub-rules: namely, coreference
rule and rule of attribution. Coreference rule occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same
person, then substitution may occur without changing in meaning. Rule of attribution states that if an
argument a contains a feature Fi, then argument b can be substituted to a.

Finally, Leech assumes that an analogy with transformation rules at the syntactic level is
applicable on the semantic level and which is relational network not a dependency-structure trees as
explained in the following example:

Brutus killed Caesar because he loved Rome.

Brutus killed Caesar. This was because he loved Rome.
Brutus loved Rome, for this reason he killed Caesar.

The deep semantics hypothesis accounts for the principle that every downgraded predication is
linked by co-reference to the main prediction of which it is a part.