This book is perhaps the only guide available through the minefields of semantics in present-day linguistics. It is essentially a teaching book : intended to give the linguistics undergraduate some grip on its many conflicting theories, and the examples and arguments used to establish standard positions. The present openness of generative linguistics to ideas from philosophy, after long decades of a closed, self-sufficient and syntax-dominated linguistics, means that this book has also to summarize a considerable number of the principal topics in contemporary philosophy as well. However, the book may well be of interest to those committed to some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI), or other non-linguistic, approach to meaning and language because it shows, in a small and compact space, the distance that generative linguistics has moved from the Chomskian positions of the past: the positions that AI writers often assume to be still the central tenets of linguistics when they criticize it.
The sections and subsections of the book may be worth listing as a more precise guide to its content and scope:
- Semantics and Generative Grammar 2. Theories of Meaning 2.1 What is Meaning? 2.2 Meaning and Reference, Ideas, Behaviour 2,3 Meaning and Use 2.4 Meaning and Truth 2.5 Meaning and Necessity 2.6 Meaning and Analyticity 2.7 The Meanings of Non-assertive Sentences 2.