The latest edition of the bestselling introduction to the field of linguistic semantics, updated throughout and featuring a wholly new chapter on inferential pragmatics Semantics, Fifth Edition, is a comprehensive and well-balanced introduction to the study of the communication of meaning in language. Assuming no previous background in semantics and limited familiarity with formal linguistics, this student-friendly textbook describes the concepts, theory, and study of semantics in an accessible and clear style. Concise chapters describe the role of semantics within contemporary linguistics, cover key topics in the analysis of word and sentence meaning, and review major semantic theories such as componential theory, formal semantics, and cognitive semantics. The updated fifth edition incorporates recent theoretical developments and important research in linguistic semantics, featuring an entirely new chapter examining the overlap between inferential pragmatics and Relevance Theory, truth-conditional meaning, and other traditional areas of semantics. Revised and expanded sections discuss the continuing growth and consolidation of cognitive semantics, various contextual features of language, conceptualization and categorization, and construal and perspective. This edition includes new exercises with solutions, up-to-date references to relevant literature, and additional examples with data from a wide range of different languages. Covers basic concepts and methods as well as key theoretical models, current lines of research, and important writers Explains general concepts in semantics before gradually moving to more advanced topics in semantic description and theoretical approaches Highlights the relation between cross-linguistic variation and language universals Provides students with the background necessary to understand more advanced and specialized primary semantics literature Includes a glossary of technical terms and numerous exercises arranged by level of difficulty Highlights the relationship between semantics and cross-linguistic variation, language universals, and pragmatics With detailed examples from a wide range of contexts and a wealth of practical exercises, Semantics, Fifth Edition, remains the perfect textbook for undergraduate students of linguistics, English language, applied linguistics, modern languages, and computer sciences.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables Preface Abbreviations and Symbols Part I Preliminaries 1 Semantics in Linguistics 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Semantics and Semiotics 1.3 Three Challenges in Doing Semantics 1.4 Meeting the Challenges 1.5 Semantics in a Model of Grammar 1.5.1 Introduction 1.5.2 Word meaning and sentence meaning 1.6 Some Important Assumptions 1.6.1 Reference and sense 1.6.2 Utterances, sentences, and propositions 1.6.3 Literal and non-literal meaning 1.6.4 Semantics and pragmatics 1.7 Summary 2 Meaning, Thought, and Reality 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Reference 2.2.1 Types of reference 2.2.2 Names 2.2.3 Nouns and noun phrases 2.3 Reference as a Theory of Meaning 2.4 Mental Representations 2.4.1 Introduction 2.4.2 Concepts 2.4.3 Necessary and sufficient conditions 2.4.4 Prototypes 2.4.5 Relations between concepts 2.4.6 Acquiring concepts 2.5 Words, Concepts, and Thinking 2.5.1 Linguistic relativity 2.5.2 The language of thought hypothesis 2.5.3 Thought and reality 2.6 Summary Part II Semantic Description 3 Word Meaning 3.1 Introduction 3.2 Words and Grammatical Categories 3.3 Words and Lexical Items 3.4 Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning 3.5 Lexical Relations 3.5.1 Homonymy 3.5.2 Polysemy 3.5.3 Synonymy 3.5.4 Opposites (antonymy) 3.5.5 Hyponymy 3.5.6 Meronymy 3.5.7 Member–collection 3.5.8 Portion–mass 3.6 Derivational Relations 3.6.1 Causative verbs 3.6.2 Agentive nouns 3.7 Lexical Typology 3.7.1 Polysemy 3.7.2 Color terms 3.7.3 Core vocabulary 3.7.4 Universal lexemes 3.8 Lexical Change 3.8.1 Introduction 3.8.2 Lexical shifts in meaning 3.8.3 System shifts in meaning 3.9 Summary 4 Sentence Relations and Truth 4.1 Introduction 4.2 Logic and Truth 4.3 Necessary Truth, A Priori Truth, and Analyticity 4.4 Entailment 4.5 Presupposition 4.5.1 Introduction 4.5.2 Two approaches to presupposition 4.5.3 Presupposition failure 4.5.4 Presupposition triggers 4.5.5 Presuppositions and context 4.5.6 Pragmatic theories of presupposition 4.6 Summary 5 Sentence Semantics 1: Situations 5.1 Introduction 5.2 Situation Types 5.2.1 States 5.2.2 Dynamic situation types 5.2.3 A system of situation types 5.2.4 Tests for situation types 5.4 Aspect 5.4.1 Aspect and tense 5.4.2 Comparing aspect across languages 5.4.3 Aspect and situation type 5.5 Modality and Mood 5.5.1 Modality 5.5.2 Mood 5.6 Evidentiality 5.7 Negation 5.7.1 Introduction 5.7.2 Clausal negation 5.7.3 Constituent negation 5.7.4 Metalinguistic negation 5.7.5 Polarity 5.8 Summary 6 Sentence Semantics 2: Participants 6.1 Introduction: Classifying Participants 6.2 Thematic Roles 6.3 Grammatical Relations and Thematic Roles 6.4 Verbs and Thematic Role Grids 6.5 Problems with Thematic Roles 6.6 The Motivation for Identifying Thematic Roles 6.7 Causation 6.8 Voice 6.8.1 Passive voice 6.8.2 Comparing passive constructions across languages 6.8.3 Middle voice 6.9 Classifiers and Noun Classes 6.9.1 Classifiers 6.9.2 Noun classes 6.10 Summary 7 Meaning and Context 7.1 Introduction 7.2 Deixis 7.2.1 Spatial deixis 7.2.2 Grammaticalization of context 7.2.3 Extensions of spatial deixis 7.2.4 Person deixis 7.2.5 Social deixis 7.3 Reference and Context 7.4 Knowledge as Context 7.4.1 Discourse as context 7.4.2 Background knowledge as context 7.4.3 Mutual knowledge 7.4.4 Giving background knowledge to computers 7.5 Information Structure 7.5.1 The information status of nominals 7.5.2 Focus and topic 7.5.3 Information structure and comprehension 7.6 Inference 7.7 Speech Act Semantics 7.7.1 Introduction 7.7.2 Austin's Speech Act Theory 7.7.3 Evaluating performative utterances 7.7.4 Explicit and implicit performatives 7.7.5 Statements as performatives 7.7.6 Three facets of a speech act 7.7.7 Indirect speech acts 7.7.8 Understanding indirect speech acts 7.7.9 Speech acts: a summary 7.8 Summary Part III Theoretical Approaches 8 Meaning Components 8.1 Introduction 8.2 Lexical Relations in CA 8.2.1 Binary features 8.2.2 Redundancy rules 8.3 Katz's Semantic Theory 8.3.1 Introduction 8.3.2 The Katzian dictionary 8.3.3 Projection rules 8.4 Grammatical Rules and Semantic Components 8.4.1 The methodology 8.4.2 Thematic roles and linking rules 8.5 Talmy's Typology of Motion Events 8.6 Jackendoff's Conceptual Structure 8.6.1 Introduction 8.6.2 The semantic components 8.6.3 Localist semantic fields 8.6.4 Complex events and states 8.6.5 THINGS: Semantic classes of nominals 8.6.6 Cross-category generalizations 8.6.7 Processes of semantic combination 8.7 Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon 8.7.1 Event structure 8.7.2 Polysemy and Qualia Structure 8.8 Problems with Components of Meaning 8.9 Summary 9 Formal Semantics 9.1 Introduction 9.2 Model-Theoretical Semantics 9.3 Translating English into a Logical Metalanguage 9.3.1 Introduction 9.3.2 Simple statements in predicate logic 9.3.3 Quantifiers in predicate logic 9.3.4 Some advantages of predicate logic translation 9.4 The Semantics of the Logical Metalanguage 9.4.1 Introduction 9.4.2 The semantic interpretation of predicate logic symbols 9.4.3 The domain 9.4.4 The denotation assignment function 9.5 Checking the Truth-Value of Sentences 9.5.1 Evaluating a simple statement 9.5.2 Evaluating a compound sentence with ∧ “and” 9.5.3 Evaluating sentences with the quantifiers ∀ and ∃ 9.6 Word Meaning: Meaning Postulates 9.7 Natural Language Quantifiers and Higher-Order Logic 9.7.1 Restricted quantifiers 9.7.2 Generalized quantifiers 9.7.3 The strong/weak distinction and existential there sentences 9.7.4 Monotonicity and negative polarity items 9.7.5 Section summary 9.8 Intensionality 9.8.1 Introduction 9.8.2 Modality 9.8.3 Tense and aspect 9.9 Dynamic Approaches to Discourse 9.9.1 Anaphora in and across sentences 9.9.2 Donkey sentences 9.9.3 DRT and discourse anaphora 9.10 Summary 10 Cognitive Semantics 10.1 Introduction 10.2 Categorization 10.2.1 The rejection of classical categories 10.2.2 Embodiment and image schemas 10.2.3 Linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge 10.3 Polysemy 10.3.1 Prepositions 10.3.2 Modal verbs 10.4 Metaphor 10.4.1 Introduction 10.4.2 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 10.4.3 Features of metaphor 10.4.4 The influence of metaphor 10.5 Metonymy 10.6 Mental Spaces 10.6.1 Connections between spaces 10.6.2 Referential opacity 10.6.3 Presupposition 10.6.4 Conceptual integration theory 10.6.5 Section summary 10.7 Langacker's Cognitive Grammar 10.7.1 Nouns, verbs, and clauses 10.7.2 Construal 10.8 Construction Grammar 10.9 Summary 11 Inferential Pragmatics 11.1 Introduction 11.2 Propositions 11.3 Beyond propositions: Grice's conversational implicature 11.3.1 Introduction 11.3.2 Grice's maxims of conversational cooperation 11.4 Generalizing the Gricean Maxims 11.4.1 Horn's Q and R principles 11.4.2 Levinson's Q, I and M principles 11.5 Contextualism 11.5.1 Sentence and proposition mismatches 11.5.2 Gradable adjectives 11.5.3 Unexpressed temporal reference 11.5.4 Quantifier domain restriction 11.5.5 Cardinal numbers 11.5.6 Section summary 11.6 Relevance Theory 11.6.1 Introduction 11.6.2 Explicatures 11.6.3 Higher level explicatures 11.6.4 Implicatures 11.6.5 Implicature and explicature 11.6.6 Implicated premises and implicated conclusions 11.7 Lexical Pragmatics 11.7.1 Introduction 11.7.2 Polysemy and context 11.7.3 Microsenses and contextual modulation 11.7.4 Neo-Gricean lexical pragmatics 11.7.5 Lexical pragmatics in Relevance Theory 11.7.6 Section summary 11.8 Summary Solutions to Exercises Glossary Index