Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language & Literature
First-Semester 2015/2016
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Course Syllabus
Course Title: Semantics
Level: 4th
Prerequisite (s): 0120220
Co requisite(s): -
Course Code: 0120426
Credit Hours: 3
Lecture Time: Sunday, Tuesday&
Thursday 11:10-12:00
Lecturer's Name: Dr. Kadhim Al-Rifaee
Rank: Assistant Professor
Office Number: Department of English
Phone: + 962-64799000
Ext: 2420
Office Hours: Sun., Tues., & Thurs. 10:00-11:00
Mon. & Wed. 11:00-12:00
E-mail: kad72@hotmail.com
Course Description:
The fundamental goal of this course is to enable the student to comprehend the meaning of what
he reads or listens to. It teaches the student that the meaning is the combination of word meaning,
sentence meaning and his knowledge of the order of words. Therefore it is vital that the student
become acquainted with lexical semantics, sentence semantics and pragmatics. The student is
expected, at the end of this course, to understand the intricacies of what is said fairly
discriminately. Topics like lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, synonymy, antonymy,
hyponymy and entailment will be introduced.
Aims (Course Purpose):
This course aims to introduce the students to the basic principles of semantics. The notions of
reference, sense, Generic sentences, equative sentences, predicates, and predicator will be
introduced.
Teaching Methods:
The material will be presented through lectures, handouts, and assignments of different exercises
on a daily basis.
Course/ Course Components:
Books
Saeed, J. (1997 ). Semantics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Supplementary Readings (Books, Periodicals….. etc)
Cruse, A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Intended Learning Outcomes:
knowledge and understanding:
The students will be introduced to different types of meaning, reference, sense, generic sentences,
paraphrase and entailment, equative sentences, the universe of.
*Intellectual skills: The students will be able to distinguish literal meaning and intended meaning.
They will also be able to understand ambiguous sentences and disambiguate them.
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Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language & Literature
First-Semester 2015/2016
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
*Practical Skills: The students will be given practical training on different pieces of conversation
in order to master the above mentioned concepts.
Transferable Skills: Students will be able to reflect their understanding of the above mentioned
concepts in their actual use of language.
Assessment Instruments
Modes of Assessment
Score
First Exam
Second Exam
Assignments / Seminars / Projects / Quizzes / Tutorials ,Reports,
Research Projects, Presentations
Final Exam
Total
Date
20
20
20
Week 6
Week 12
40
100
Week 16
Documentation and Academic Honesty
Students are expected to complete all homework, papers and projects independently
(unless otherwise specified); any work must be yours and yours alone. Working together
for anything other than data collection, relying on students' work from previous semesters
and/or plagiarizing published research is considered cheating.
Course Outline:
Week
Basic & Support Material to be covered
1
October 18-22, What is Semantics?
2015
2
October 25-29, Semantics in Linguistics
2015
3
Nov. 1-5,
2015
4
Nov. 15-19,
2015
5
6
7
Overload
Works
A paper on
Semantics
The Semantic Theory & Semantic Units
Meaning, Thought and Reality: Concept of
Reference
A paper on
Meaning
Semantics Description (SD) Word Meaning
and Truth
Nov. 22-26,
Sentence Relationships
2015
Nov. 29-Dec. 3 , First Exam
2015
Dec. 6-10,
2015
Types of Meaning
a. Analytical & synthetic meaning
b. Lexical & grammatical meaning
c. Contextual & stylistic meaning
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Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language & Literature
First-Semester 2015/2016
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Similarity of Senses
a. Synonymy, paraphrase & hyponymy
b. Entailment
c. Entailment-paraphrase relationship
d.. Entailment-hyponymy relationship
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Dec. 13-17,
2015
9
Dec. 20-24,
2015
Dissimilarity of Senses
a. Antonymy
b. Types of antonym
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Dec. 27-31,
2015
Situations in Sentence Semantics
11
Jan. 3-7,
2016
12
Jan. 10-14,
2016
13
Jan. 17-21,
2016
14
Jan. 24-28,
2016
15
Ambiguity of Senses
a. Homonymy & polysemy
A paper on
Similarity &
Dissimilarit
y
b.
A paper on
Ambiguity
Second Exam
Ambiguity of Senses
b. Sentence ambiguity
c. Word-ambiguity & grammatical ambiguity
Semantic Fields
a. Nature of the semantic fields
b. Types & applications of the
semantic Fields
A paper on
Semantic
Fields
General Revision
 Make-up exams will be offered for valid reasons only with consent of the Dean. They may be
different from regular exams in content and format.
Attendance Policy:
Lecture attendance is mandatory. Student is allowed maximally 15% absentia of the total course
hours. More than this percentage, student with an excuse will be drawn from the course.
Otherwise, student will be deprived from the course with zero mark assigned.
Course/ Course Policies:
1. Students are allowed up to (5) absences If they exceed this number, they will fail the course.
2. Tardiness will not be tolerated. If students come to class after I take attendance, you are
welcome to attend, but they will be considered absent.
3. Participation is an essential part of course works. It does not merely mean coming to class; it
involves preparing before hand and playing an active role in class discussion.
4. Make-up exams will be offered for valid reasons only with the consent of the Dean.
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Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language & Literature
First-Semester 2015/2016
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Text Book(s):
Saeed, J. (1997 ). Semantics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Supplementary Readings (Books, Periodicals….. etc)
Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
References:
Palmer, F. (1981). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Leech, G. (1981). Semantics. Oxford University Press.
Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Journals
Students are to be asked frequently to refer to the journals available in the library for
assignments and reports writing.
Websites
http://websearch.about.com/od/internetresearch/a/translate.htm
http://www.appliedlanguage.com/free_translation.shtml
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