Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning in Language and Discourse (Longman Linguistics Library) - Softcover

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Dr K Jaszczolt lectures in the Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge and Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge

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SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS

`Semantics and Pragmatics¿ provides a comprehensive introduction to various approaches to meaning. It covers the subjects of word meaning, sentence meaning and speaker's meaning and presents the most popular and successful theories of these in a way that makes them accessible to all students of linguistics. It also contains a critical discussion of these approaches, which makes the book relevant for more advanced researchers in the fields of semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, cognitive science, social anthropology and some aspects of psycholinguistics.

The main strength of this introduction lies in its wide scope, covering many aspects of the study of meaning from concepts to the structure of discourse. Its novelty lies in an attempt to demonstrate compatibility of various approaches to concepts and various aspects of cognitive linguistics with meaning as truth-conditions. It also contains a reader-friendly introduction to formal semantics. Moreover, it presents in great detail how the boundary between semantics and pragmatics may be drawn. In this way, semantic and pragmatic theories introduced in the book sum up to a coherent picture of meaning in language system and in language use. The introduced views are amply illustrated with pertinent examples.

K.M. Jaszczolt is Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Cambridge and Fellow, Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of `Discourse, Beliefs and Intentions¿ (1999).