Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
1st Semester, 2013/2014
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Course Syllabus
Course Title: Semantics
Level: 4th
Prerequisite (s): 0120324
Co requisite(s): -
Course Code: 0120426
Credit Hours: 3
Lecture Time: Monday, & Wednesday
8:15-9:30
Lecturer's Name: Dr. Kadhim Al-Rifaee
Rank: Assistant Professor
Office Number: 405
Phone: + 962-64799000
Ext: 2644
Office Hours: Sun, Tues. Thurs. 9:00-10:00, Mon, Wed 10:00- 11:00
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:
1. Books
Saeed, J. (1997 ). Semantics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
2. Supplementary Readings (Books, Periodicals….. etc)
D. A. Cruse. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Contribution to Program Learning Outcomes:
A1, A2, A3, B1, B3, C1, C2, C3, D1, D2, D3
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Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
1st Semester, 2013/2014
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Intended Learning Outcomes:
a) 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
b) 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.
c) Practical Skills: The students will be given practical training on different pieces of
conversation in order to master the above mentioned concepts.
d) 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
(1) + (2)
(3)
(4) + (5)
(6)
(7)
(8)+ (9)
(10)
(11)
(12)
(13)
(14)
(15)
(16)
Subject
Remarks
Semantic in Linguistics
Meaning , Thought and Reality
Word Meaning
First Exam
Sentence Relations and Truth
Referring Expressions
Sentence Semantics 1 : Situations
Sentence Semantics 2 : Participants
Second Exam
Functions of Language: Speech as Action
Formal Semantics
Cognitive Semantics
Revision + Final Exam
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Philadelphia University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English
1st Semester, 2013/2014
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
 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.
Text Book(s):
Saeed, J. (1997 ). Semantics. Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
3. Supplementary Readings (Books, Periodicals….. etc)
Cruse, D. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
In addition to the above, the lecturer will provide the students with handouts.
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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