Daniel Altshuler – författare

This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an alternative. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken a linguistics course before.

After introducing such concepts as truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification, relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative progression.

A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled “Important practice and looking ahead” prepare students for material to come; those labeled “Thinking about ” invite students to think beyond the content of the book.

This volume is a tribute to Roger Schwarzschild''s immense contributions in the formal semantics of nouns, focus, degrees and space, and tense and aspect. Collectively, the papers in the volume reveal parallels across ontological domains, in particular in the context of elements with internal structure, like plural sets, alternative sets, degree intervals, temporal intervals, and vectors. This research suggests that the structure of an entity could inform the semantic behavior of that entity just as much (if not more) than its semantic type or lexical category. And because these structures dictate the formation of semantic alternatives, it can help inform focus semantics and scalar implicature as well.   

Old questions on plurals, focus and degree expressions get new answers in this collection of papers in honor of Roger Schwarzchild. Roger Schwarzschild is one of the leading scholars in semantics, and the editors have beenhighly successful in requesting contributions by his teachers, peers and former students. Some papers have circulated in draft form for many years, and find their final home in this edited volume, which well reflects the state of the art in the field. Prof. dr. Henriëtte de Swart, Utrecht University, The Netherlands