Volume 1 provides a
general and comprehensive introduction to semantics, synthesizing work on meaning and
communication from many disciplines and setting semantics in the larger framework of
semiotics.
Anyone who writes an
up-to-date textbook of semantics has to be au fait with an extremely wide range of
contemporary academic activity. John Lyons's new book demonstrates a remarkable ability
to achieve such catholicity of expertise. In Volume 1 he takes his readers, with
impressively sustained clarity and thoroughness, through the technical apparatus that
structural or Saussurean linguistics has gradually built up for dealing with semantic
problems, and also provides students of language with an invaluably simplified
introduction to those developments in modern philosophy and logical theory which they will
have to understand if they are to come to grips with current literature in professional
journals of linguistic inquiry.
Jonathan Cohen, The Times Literary Supplement
Given Professor Lyons's
achievements, the first volume of Semantics ... is everything one might expect:
lucid, scrupulous, comprehensive. After a preliminary chapter which introduces a host of
terms and distinctions, three general chapters discuss language as a semiotic system ...
An excellent chapter on behaviourist semantics comes next, with a sympathetic but firm
evaluation of its limitations. Chapter six, on logical semantics, will be very useful to
many students of language as an introduction to propositional calculus, predicate
calculus, the logic of classes, and model-theoretic and truth-conditional semantics ...
The last three chapters might be thought of as the heart of the book: a discussion of
sense, reference and denotation, a general chapter on structural semantics and semantic
field theory, and an excellent account of sense relations of various kinds.
The Times Higher Education Supplement
Contents
Typographical conventions;
Preface;
1. Introduction: some basic terms and concepts;
2. Communication and information;
3. Language as a semiotic system;
4. Semiotics;
5. Behaviourist semantics;
6. Logical semantics;
7. References, sense and denotation;
8. Structural semantics I: semantic fields;
9. Structural semantics II: sense relations;
Bibliography;
Index.
384 pp.