Throughout this paper the ring R and the semigroup S are commutative with identity; moreover, it is assumed that S is cancellative, i.e., that S can be embedded in a group. The aim of this note is to determine necessary and sufficient conditions on R and S that the semigroup ring R[S] should be one of the following types of rings: principal ideal ring (PIR), ZPI-ring, Bezout, semihereditary or arithmetical. These results shed some light on the structure of semigroup rings and provide a source of examples of the rings listed above. They also play a key role in the determination of all commutative reduced arithmetical semigroup rings (without the cancellative hypothesis on S) which will appear in a forthcoming paper by Leo Chouinard and the authors [4].