An Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics

This is an accessible undergraduate textbook for this key area of English linguistics.

This introduction to the linguistic study of meaning outlines the meaning potential (semantics) of English and ways in which the potential is put to use (pragmatics).

Readers will gain a systematic overview of meaning in English, as well as learning how to argue for analyses.

The sense of a word is derived from the contributions it makes to the entailments carried by sentences.

Patrick Griffiths presents sense relations, such as antonymy and hyponymy, as summarising patterns of entailment, integrating the idea of prototypes within them.

Chapters cover adjective, noun and verb meanings, tense, aspect, modality, quantification, word-building affixes, figurative language, and focus.

Explanations of entailment, compositionality and scope provide the basis for students wishing to progress to study of formal semantics.

The main pragmatic notions included are: implicature, deixis, reference, definiteness, presupposition, illocutionary force and indirectness.