'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 2 he examines in detail all the main contemporary problem areas in the semantics of natural languages. Homonymy and polysemy, conversational implicature and polysemy, deixis and anaphora, tense and aspect, mood and illocutionary force - all such issues are discussed with patiently comprehensive discernment. Indeed it is this second part of the book that will be of primary interest to other linguists because of the originality of some of the things Professor Lyons says in it.' 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 of subjects; Index of personal names.