'Given Professor Lyons's achievements, the first volume of Semantics … is everything one might expect: lucid, scrupulous, comprehensive. After a preliminary chapter which introduces a host of terms and distinctions, three general chapters discuss language as a semiotic system … An excellent chapter on behaviourist semantics comes next, with a sympathetic but firm evaluation of its limitations. Chapter six, on logical semantics, will be very useful to many students of language as an introduction to propositional calculus, predicate calculus, the logic of classes, and model-theoretic and truth-conditional semantics … The last three chapters might be thought of as the heart of the book: a discussion of sense, reference and denotation, a general chapter on structural semantics and semantic field theory, and an excellent account of sense relations of various kinds.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
Typographical conventions; Preface; 1. Introduction: some basic terms and concepts; 2. Communication and information; 3. Language as a semiotic system; 4. Semiotics; 5. Behaviourist semantics; 6. Logical semantics; 7. References, sense and denotation; 8. Structural semantics I: semantic fields; 9. Structural semantics II: sense relations; Bibliography; Index.
