This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface, combining Direct Compositionality with approaches based on Logical Form. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and other related fields.

• 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).