Foreword: On using this book; PART I Foundational Concepts: Building a Fragment; 1 Introduction; 2 Semantic Foundations; 3 Compositionality, Direct Compositionality, and the Syntax/Semantics Interface; 4 Expanding the Fragment: Syntactic Categories and Semantic Types; 5 Transitive Verbs: Resolving an Apparent Syntax/Semantics Mismatch; 6 Categorial Grammar; 7 The Autonomy of Syntax; 8 Adjectives, Nouns, Determiners, and More; 9 Interlude: The Semantics of Variables, and the Lambda Calculus; Part II: Enriching the Domain; 10 Returning to English: Generalized Quantifiers; 11 Ordinary NPs and Type Lifting; 12 Generalized Conjunction; Part III: Relative Clauses, Scopes, and Binding: Some Theoretical Controversies; 13 Relative Clauses: Sketching Two Accounts; 14 Generalized Quantifiers in Object Position: Two Approaches; 15 The Interpretation of Pronouns: Two Accounts; Appendices to Parts I - III: The Full Fragment; Part IV: Further Topics; 16 Negative Polarity Items, Semantic Strength, and Scalar Implicature Revisited; 17 More Binding Phenomena; 18 Additional Semantic Dimensions: The Semantics of Focus; 19 Intensionality and the Syntax/Semantics Interface; References

Pauline Jacobson is currently Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She has held visiting appointments at Ohio State University and Harvard University, and has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research is mainly concerned with constructing formal models of the semantics and syntax of natural language - and in particular on the way that the syntax and the semantics interact. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Journal of Semantics, Natural Language Semantics, and Linguistics and Philosophy, and she is co-editor, with Chris Barker, of Direct Compositionality (OUP 2007).

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface. It is rooted within the tradition of model theoretic semantics, and develops an explicit fragment of both the syntax and semantics of a rich portion of English.
Professor Jacobson adopts a Direct Compositionality approach, whereby the syntax builds the expressions while the semantics simultaneously assigns each a model-theoretic interpretation. Alongside this approach, the author also presents a competing view that makes use of an intermediate level, Logical Form. She develops parallel treatments of a variety of phenomena from both points of view with detailed comparisons. The book begins with simple and fundamental concepts and gradually builds a more
complex fragment, including analyses of more advanced topics such as focus, negative polarity, and a variety of topics centering on pronouns and binding more generally. Exercises are provided throughout, alongside open-ended questions for students to consider. The exercises are interspersed with
the text to promote self-discovery of the fundamentals and their applications.
The book provides a rigorous foundation in formal analysis and model theoretic semantics and is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and related fields.