Semantics: Volume 1

'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