Compositional Semantics

Reviews / Votes

A simple and intuitive hypothesis about the relation between form and meaning is that every principle of grammar that says something about the syntactic composition of two expressions also says something about the meaning of the resulting complex expression. This hypothesis, known as direct compositionality, can sometimes appear difficult to maintain in the face of the complexity of human language, in which structure and meaning often seem to be related in fairly abstract ways. And yet Pauline Jacobson has shown conclusively in her work over the past thirty-five years how this approach can lead to insightful analyses and significant new discoveries about the nature of meaning. Now Jacobson has distilled this work into a new textbook in which she skilfully leads students through the complexities of building a theory of the syntax-semantics interface from the ground up, taking direct compositionality as the guiding principle but also engaging with other perspectives on the relation between syntax and semantics and identifying points of divergence and convergence. This book masterfully equips students with the technical and formal skills that will allow them to engage with contemporary work in semantic theory. * Chris Kennedy, University of Chicago * This is a welcome and unique addition to the growing selection of textbooks in formal semantics. With just the right mixture of empirical challenge and technical detail, it will work well as a stand-alone text for novice semanticists. At the same time, more advanced students will benefit from this accessible introduction to direct compositionality, and more broadly from the book's lessons in thinking about the foundations and architecture of linguistic theory. * Irene Heim, MIT *