Compositional Semantics

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.

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).

- 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