Concise Encyclopedia of Semantics is a comprehensive new reference work aiming to systematically describe all aspects of the study of meaning in language. It synthesizes in one volume the latest scholarly positions on the construction, interpretation, clarification, obscurity, illustration, amplification, simplification, negotiation, contradiction, contraction and paraphrasing of meaning, and the various concepts, analyses, methodologies and technologies that underpin their study. It examines not only semantics but the impact of semantic study on related fields such as morphology, syntax, and typologically oriented studies such as 'grammatical semantics', where semantics has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of verbal categories like tense or aspect, nominal categories like case or possession, clausal categories like causatives, comparatives, or conditionals, and discourse phenomena like reference and anaphora. COSE also examines lexical semantics and its relation to syntax, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics; and the study of how 'logical semantics' develops and thrives, often in interaction with computational linguistics.
As a derivative volume from Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Second Edition, it comprises contributions from 150 of the foremost scholars of semantics in their various specializations and draws on 20+ years of development in the parent work in a compact and affordable format. Principally intended for tertiary level inquiry and research, this will be invaluable as a reference work for undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as academics inquiring into the study of meaning and meaning relations within languages. As semantics is a centrally important and inherently cross-cutting area within linguistics it will therefore be relevant not just for semantics specialists, but for most linguistic audiences.
Read English at Cambridge, joined the British Council and worked in Uganda. He then taught at the University College of Cape Coast in Ghana before moving to Edinburgh, where he took his PhD in linguistics and subsequently taught in the Department of Linguistics. In 1984 he moved to the University of Essex, where he was Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics, and then to the University of Cambridge where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. He is now an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Heidelberg, Vienna and Düsseldorf. From 1990-94 he was President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and has been a member of Council of the Philological Society since 1998. He is Chairman of the linguistics committee of the Subject Centre for Languages Linguistics and Area Studies. He is co-editor of Transactions of the Philological Society and sits on other editorial boards. He is author of Linguistics Today (Fontana 1984) and co-author, with Jim Miller, of Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure and Syntax: Generative Grammar (Hutchinson 1981). He was syntax editor for the 1st edition of The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and was joint editor, with Jim Miller of A Concise Encyclopedia of Linguistic Theories and A Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories (Pergamon Press 1997 & 1998). He was joint editor of Common Denominators in Art and Science (Aberdeen University Press, 1983) and Language, Reasoning and Inference (Academic Press, 1986).
