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More About This Textbook
Overview
Natural Language Semantics discusses fundamental concepts for linguistic semantics. This book combines theoretical explanations of several methods of inquiry with detailed semantic analysis and emphasises the philosophy that semantics is about meaning in human languages and that linguistic meaning is cognitively and functionally motivated. Providing the reader with the basic tools and skills needed to progress to original research, this volume introduces fundamental assumptions about meaning in language, discusses lexicological semantics, and explains formal semantic tools. It reviews cognitive and functional approaches to semantics, investigates the internal semantics of clauses and turns from the semantics of predicates to the internal semantics of noun phrases. Throughout each chapter, exercises are provided to reinforce the text and facilitate learning.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
"The field of semantics within linguistics needs Allan's book tostand as a marker of the clash of two traditions (theformalist/logical tradition and the pragmatic discourse-basedtradition) and as a partially successful attempt to integrate thesetraditions and to produce a workable synthesis of them. The work isextremely impressive from the point of view of scholarship. Allanis clearly widely read, and has given deep thought to the centralproblems of the field." James R Hurford, University ofEdinburgh."Allan's book is a wonderful and useful addition to thesemantics literature. It covers all topics, from formal toconceptual, to typological, and does so with insight andaccessibility. I especially like the problems, which are wellthought out and effective teaching tools. Allan is to be praisedfor taking on the immensely difficult task of writing this book andproducing such a good book." William Frawley, University ofDelaware.
Every computational linguist should own at least one semanticstextbook. Allan's book stands apart from many other texts in theway it conveys a real sense of the variety and fecundity oflanguage as spoken by living, breathing human beings."Computational Linguistics
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Meet the Author
Keith Allan is Reader in Linguistics at Monash University, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has taught in Britain, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United States. His research and publications focus mainly on aspects of meaning in language and his previous books are Linguistic Meaning (2 volumes, 1986) and Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon (co-authored with Kate Burridge, 1991).
Table of Contents
Preface.
Symbols Used.
1. Some Fundamental Concepts for Semantics.
2. Words and Worlds and Reference.
3. The Lexicon and The Encyclopedia.
4. Morphology and Listemes.
5. The Power of Words: Connotation and Jargon.
6. Semantic Relations between Sentences.
Predicate Logic, Sets, and Lambda: Tools for SemanticAnalysis.
8. Frames, Fields, and Semantic Components.
9. Cognitive Semantics: Backs, Colours, and Classifiers.
10. Using the Typical Denotatum to Identify the IntendedReferent.
11. Mood, Tense, Modality, and Thematic Roles.
12. The Semantics of Clause Predicates.
13. Quantifiers in English.
Epilogue.
References.
Index.