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.
Volume 1 provides a general and comprehensive introduction to semantics, synthesizing work on meaning and communication.
'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
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