Natural language semantics : formation and valuation / Brendan S. Gillon.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 683-691) and index.

Language, linguistics, semantics : an introduction -- Basic set theory -- Basic English grammar -- Language and context -- Language and belief : implicatures and presuppositions -- Classical propositional logic notation and semantics -- Classical propositional logic deduction -- English connectors -- Classical predicate logic -- Grammatical predicates and minimal clauses in English -- Classical quantificational logic -- Enrichments of classical quantificational logic -- The Lambek calculus and the Lambda calculus -- Noun phrases in English.

"This textbook, which is completely self-contained and can be read by anyone with a secondary school education, is the result of the author's material prepared over the past 15 years of teaching introductory natural language semantics to graduate and undergraduate students at McGill University. The intended audience comprises undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics as well as those in philosophy, computer science and psychology with an interest in natural language semantics. The aim of the textbook is to teach the fundamentals of natural language semantics, with English as the principal, though not the exclusive, target language. The principal aim of the textbook is to provide the student with all the basics necessary to be able him or her read research in natural language semantics, regardless of the theory assumed by the author of the research. In contrast to other textbooks in the field, which aim to introduce students to a particular theory of natural language semantics, this textbook seeks to give to its reader a clear overview of the kind of natural language phenomena which, at least prima facie, fall within the ambit of an investigation of natural language semantics; to assist the reader in developing a mastery of the mathematical tools used to formulate hypotheses about the natural language phenomena studied; and to impart to the reader an appreciation of the interplay between hypothesis and data. As a result, the textbook is rich in its presentation of the patterns of English, drawing extensively on the best and most contemporary descriptive grammars of English. The textbook also has more than 500 exercises, with answers to half of them"-- Provided by publisher.