Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the "Government-Binding" model. It covers the fundamental constructions thoroughly with analyses, but goes well beyond that core, providing extensive discussion of quantification, binding and anaphora, and ellipsis.
With exercises and guides to further reading, the volume will be a key text for graduate level and advanced undergraduate introductory courses in semantics.
The discussion of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics has also undergone various changes of emphasis and style. In the 1970s, sense-generality and pragmatic inference were brought to the fore (see e.g., Cole 1981; Atlas 1989; Turner 1999; Jaszczolt 1999). Almost two decades later, dynamic perspective in semantics allowed for contextual information to be semanticized (see Kamp & Reyle 1993...
Sense and Sensitivity advances a novel research proposal in the nascent field of formal pragmatics, exploring in detail the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse. The authors develop a new account of focus sensitivity, and show that what has hitherto been regarded as a uniform phenomenon in fact results from three different mechanisms.
Nirenburg and Raskin first discuss ontological semantics in relation to other fields, including cognitive science and the AI paradigm, the philosophy of science, linguistic semantics and the philosophy of language, computational lexical semantics, and studies in formal ontology. They then describe the content of ontological semantics, discussing text-meaning representation, static knowledge sources (including the ontology, the fact repository, and the lexicon), the processes involved in text analysis, and the acquisition of static knowledge. link corrected
This book presents a typological survey and analysis of the co-compound construction. This understudied phenomenon is essentially a compound whose meaning is the result of coordinating the meanings of its components, as when in some varieties of English 'mother-father' denotes 'parents'. In the course of the work Dr Walchi examines and discusses topics of great theoretical and linguistic interest. These include the notion of word, markedness, the syntax and semantics of coordination, grammaticalization, lexical semantics, the distinction between compounding and phrase formation, and the constructional meanings languages can deploy. The book makes many observations and points about typology and areal features and includes a wealth of unfamiliar data. It will be invaluable for typologists and of considerable interest to a variety of specialists including lexicologists, morphologists, construction grammarians, cognitive linguists, semanticists, field linguists, and syntacticians.
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