Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics

Download or read book Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics written by Patrick Griffiths and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-29 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the linguistic study of meaning, this book outlines the meaning potential (semantics) of English and how language knowledge is put to use (pragmatics). As well as gaining a systematic overview of meaning in English, readers can learn how to argue for analyses. Among the significant concepts introduced are denotation, sense relations, event types, explicature, implicature, presupposition, metaphor, reference, speech acts and (at an elementary level) Generalised Quantifier Theory. Sense relations--such as antonymy and hyponymy--are presented as summarising patterns of entailment. The sense of a word is seen as the contributions it makes to the entailments carried by sentences.