Compositional Semantics: An Introduction to the Syntax/Semantics Interface

This book provides an introduction to compositional semantics and to the syntax/semantics interface, combining Direct Compositionality with approaches based on Logical Form. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, philosophy of language, and other 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).