A lively, up-to-date and compact introduction to semantics, accessible to those with no prior knowledge of linguistics.

Javier Valenzuela is a Tenured Professor in Linguistics at the University of Murcia. He is the author of Lingüística y cognición: el lenguaje desde la lingüística cognitiva (with Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, forthcoming) and editor of Lingüística Cognitiva (with Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2012) and he has published in journals including Cognitive Science, the Journal of Pragmatics, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and Language Sciences. He also served as President of the Spanish Cognitive Linguistics Association from 2012 to 2016.

1. What is semantics?; 2. Analyzing meaning; 3. Language and thought; 4. Word meaning; 5. Meaning relations; 6. Acquisition of meaning and cross-linguistic meaning; 7. Figurative meaning; 8. Sentential meaning; 9. Discourse meaning and pragmatics.