Ladislav Tondl's insightful investigations into the language of the sciences bear directly upon some decisive points of confrontation in modern philos ophy of science and of language itself. In the decade since his Scientific Procedures was published in English (Boston Studies 11), Dr Tondl has enlarged his original monograph of 1966 on the promise, problems and achievements of modern semantics: the main topic of his later work has been semantic information theory. A Russian translation, considerably expanded as a second edition, was published in 1975 (Moscow, Progress Publishers) with an appreciative critical commentary, in the form of a conclusion, by Professor Avenir I. Uemov of Odessa. Indeed many Soviet studies in the problems of the semantics of science show the same sort of philosophical curiosity about the relationship of meanings in scientific language to pro cedures in scientific epistemology that characterizes Tondl's work, as in the work of Mirislav Popovich (Kiev) and Vadirn Sadovsky (Moscow) and their colleagues. But we know that interest in these matters is world-wide, ranging from such classical topics as sense and denotation, empiricist reduction, vagueness and denotational opacity, to the new and equally exciting topics of the semantics of non-unique preference choices, the nuances of informational synonymity, and the semantics of a picture shape (so briefly but beautifully sketched in Tondl's dense and promising last chapter). We are pleased to have had Tondl's kind cooperation in producing this English edition, actually a third edition, of his research about semantics.

The essays in this collection are the outgrowth of a workshop, held in June 1976, on formal approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of natural languages. They document in an astoundingly uniform way the develop ments in the formal analysis of natural languages since the late sixties. The avowed aim of the' workshop was in fact to assess the progress made in the application of formal methods to semantics, to confront different approaches to essentially the same problems on the one hand, and, on the other, to show the way in relating semantic and pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena. Several of these papers can in fact be regarded as attempts to close the 'semiotic circle' by bringing together the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of certain constructions in an explanatory framework thereby making it more than obvious that these three components of an integrated linguistic theory cannot be as neatly separated as one would have liked to believe. In other words, not only can we not elaborate a syntactic description of (a fragment of) a language and then proceed to the semantics (as Montague pointed out already forcefully in 1968), we cannot hope to achieve an adequate integrated syntax and semantics without paying heed to the pragmatic aspects of the constructions involved. The behavior of polarity items, 'quantifiers' like any, conditionals or even logical particles like and and or in non-indicative sentences is clear-cut evidence for the need to let each component of the grammar inform the other.

Syntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual structure; since we can express our conceptual thought in many different linguistic ways, we cannot equate conceptual and semantic structures. The research reported in this book shows semantic structure to be in part hierarchic, fitting the syntax in which it is expressed, and partly a network, fitting the nature of the mind, from which it springs. It is complex enough to provide for the emotive and imaginative dimensions of language, and for shifts of standard meanings in context, and the “rules” that control them. Showing the full structure of English semantics requires attention to many currently topical issues, and since the underlying theory is fresh, there are fresh implications for them. The most important of those issues is information structure, which is given full treatment, showing its overall structure, and its relation to semantics and the whole grammar of English. As of October 2024, this e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, beginning with the idea that language can be described as a system for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a correct transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, this volume discusses in detail the problems of Semantic Representation —including the semantic structure of utterances, the semantics of Causation in English, and communicative, or information, structure. Based on the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.

This is a comprehensive and wide ranging introduction to various approaches to meaning. The book contains a critical discussion of these approaches and gives accessible explanations of relevant terminology.