'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

• 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.