Semantics & Pragmatics Meaning in Language & Discourse

SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

`Semantics and Pragmatics¿ provides a comprehensive introduction to various approaches to meaning. It covers the subjects of word meaning, sentence meaning and speaker's meaning and presents the most popular and successful theories of these in a way that makes them accessible to all students of linguistics. It also contains a critical discussion of these approaches, which makes the book relevant for more advanced researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, social anthropology and some aspects of psycholinguistics.

The main strength of this introduction lies in its wide scope, covering many aspects of the study of meaning from concepts to the structure of discourse. Its novelty lies in an attempt to demonstrate compatibility of various approaches to concepts and various aspects of cognitive linguistics with meaning as truth-conditions. It also contains a reader-friendly introduction to formal semantics. Moreover, it presents in great detail how the boundary between semantics and pragmatics may be drawn. In this way, semantic and pragmatic theories introduced in the book sum up to a coherent picture of meaning in language system and in language use. The introduced views are amply illustrated with pertinent examples.

K.M. Jaszczolt is Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Cambridge and Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of `Discourse, Beliefs and Intentions¿ (1999).

Dr. Jaszczolt¿s strength lies in her ability to incorporate under a specific subject, studies produced in dfferent fields with different theoretical backgrounds, allowing many people to benefit from those studies.

S & P¿s strength also lies in the integration of the subjects included: various subjects are integrated so well that a discussion on each subject is given depth and S & P as a whole provides a consistent picture of meaning.

Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning in Language and Discourse makes an ideal book for students and linguists whose interest is in semantics and the semantics¿ pragmatics interface.

Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2003) 1277¿1279

Semantics is a core topic on the majority of undergraduate linguistic degree courses: it is the study of meaning in language, both in terms of definition and the way meanings are conveyed and vary within everyday situations.  This book provides a comprehensive introduction to approaches to meaning and presents the most popular and successful theories in a way that makes them accessible for undergraduates. It also explores how the boundry between semantics and pragmatics may be drawn and sums up a coherent picture of meaning in language system and in language use.

Dr K Jaszczolt lectures in the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge

1. Word meaning, sentence meaning, speaker meaning
2. Concepts
3. Sentence Meaning
4. Sentential connectives
5. Quantified expressions and predicate logic
6. Syntax and semantics of predicate logic: an overview
7. Referring expressions and propositional attitude reports
8. Topic, focus and presupposition
9. Deictic expressions
10. Implicature
11. What is said and the semantics/pragmatics interface
12. Temporality
13. Dynamic semantics and Discourse Representation Theory
14. Speech acts and intentionality
15. Linguistic politeness
16. Cross-cultural pragmatics
17. Metaphor