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Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics
Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the ways in which meaning is conveyed in language, covering not only semantic matters but also topics normally considered to fall under pragmatics. Above all, the book displays and explains the richness and subtlety of meaning, with the aid of numerous examples and exercises throughout the text. Highly readable, written with style and wit, Meaning in Language is not bound to any particular theory, but provides explanations of theoretical approaches and perspectives as the context requires, with a stress throughout on the need for conceptual clarity. The text and exercises in this third edition have been fully updated to take into account the most recent developments in the field and new chapters have been added, one on the semantics of prepositions and another on the semantics of derivational affixes.
510 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 23, 2013
This book was interesting but, I did not understand half of it. Honestly in this case I think it would have helped if I had taking some type of semantics course in college. This book is definitely not for the couch potato scholar. When I grow up or grow smarter I plan to attempt to read it again.
November 28, 2025
Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning in Language and Discourse feels like a threshold text—one of those works that does not merely describe a field but initiates you into it. At first glance it appears technical, dense, and rigorously composed: the kind of book that demands a reader who is prepared to sit upright rather than lounge.
It belongs to that lineage of linguistic scholarship that does not rush to entertain but insists first on establishing clarity. And yet, as you move through it, a different rhythm emerges.
Beneath the framework of definitions, theories, and analytical debates, there is something alive—an exploratory impulse, a sense that meaning is not something we simply learn to decode but something we participate in, shape, and negotiate.
The early chapters position semantics not as a flat dictionary of meanings but as a system of relations—truth conditions, reference, predication, and logical form. There is a meticulousness in the way the concepts unfold, as if laying out an architectural blueprint. One sees how structuralist inheritances intersect with generative grammar and how Frege’s legacy persists in the shadow of modern cognitive approaches.
The theoretical landscape is mapped with care: componential semantics, prototype theory, cognitive semantics, truth-conditional accounts, and formal models. But every model is presented not as final doctrine but as a viewpoint—partial, sometimes brilliant, sometimes flawed, always context-bound.
Pragmatics enters not as an afterthought but as a challenge to any notion that meaning can be reduced to structure. The text shifts—sometimes abruptly—from formal analysis to the lived reality of communication. Here the notion of implicature begins to feel essential rather than peripheral: how much of what we say is not contained in the words we utter but in the assumptions we share?
Presupposition, deixis, context dependence, speech acts, politeness, and conversational inference—all appear not simply as terminology but as windows into how fragile and negotiated communication really is. Meaning becomes dynamic: contingent on culture, cognition, intention, history, and social relationships.
As the chapters progress, one senses the tension—sometimes productive, sometimes unresolved—between semantics as a formal enterprise and pragmatics as an interpretive one. The book does not pretend that synthesis is simple.
At times the boundaries blur; at others they resist compatibility. Certain pages feel almost philosophical, asking questions not about language alone but about the nature of interpretation itself.
What portion of meaning belongs to the grammar of a sentence, and what portion belongs to the world in which it is spoken?
Can meaning ever be fully formalized?
Or does its essence reside in the shifting grey territory where logic meets human expectation?
Yet the most striking aspect of Jaszczolt’s approach is the underlying conviction that semantics and pragmatics are not separate spheres but overlapping dimensions of the same phenomenon: meaning as action, meaning as negotiation, meaning as expectation and inference. The writing pushes the reader to see language not as code but as behaviour—something embedded in cognition and shaped by discourse.
By the final chapters, something shifts in the experience of reading. The material becomes less like a catalogue of theories and more like a meditation on language itself.
You begin to reflect not only on what these frameworks assert but also on how meaning operates in your own speech, memory, and interactions.
You start noticing that every utterance you produce is layered: the literal, the intended, the assumed, the unsaid. A simple statement—“It’s cold in here,” for instance—becomes a small universe of possibilities: a comment, a request, a negotiation, a complaint, or a test of shared understanding.
Somewhere along the way, the book stops feeling merely academic. It becomes reflective, almost existential. Language appears no longer as a tool humans use but as a mirror of how humans think, perceive, evaluate, and coexist.
Meaning becomes fluid—sometimes precise, sometimes elusive, sometimes impossible to pin down without collapsing its richness.
When you finally close the book, you carry something more than theory. You carry a sharpened awareness—a sense that every word spoken or heard is part of a fragile, intricate system held together not just by grammar but by trust, inference, memory, and the shared assumption that communication is possible.
You begin to notice how meaning expands in silence, how it mutates through irony or affection, how tone can betray a sentence’s surface, and how gestures and timing complete what the linguistic form cannot.
And perhaps this is the book’s quiet achievement: it teaches you not only what semantics and pragmatics are, but also how to listen.
It reminds you that language is both rule-bound and unpredictable, both engineered and human.
It gives you the intellectual scaffolding, yes—but also the sensitivity to see language as something living, unfinished, and deeply interwoven with experience.
A textbook becomes a lens; a field of study becomes an invitation to see differently.
Recommended.
It belongs to that lineage of linguistic scholarship that does not rush to entertain but insists first on establishing clarity. And yet, as you move through it, a different rhythm emerges.
Beneath the framework of definitions, theories, and analytical debates, there is something alive—an exploratory impulse, a sense that meaning is not something we simply learn to decode but something we participate in, shape, and negotiate.
The early chapters position semantics not as a flat dictionary of meanings but as a system of relations—truth conditions, reference, predication, and logical form. There is a meticulousness in the way the concepts unfold, as if laying out an architectural blueprint. One sees how structuralist inheritances intersect with generative grammar and how Frege’s legacy persists in the shadow of modern cognitive approaches.
The theoretical landscape is mapped with care: componential semantics, prototype theory, cognitive semantics, truth-conditional accounts, and formal models. But every model is presented not as final doctrine but as a viewpoint—partial, sometimes brilliant, sometimes flawed, always context-bound.
Pragmatics enters not as an afterthought but as a challenge to any notion that meaning can be reduced to structure. The text shifts—sometimes abruptly—from formal analysis to the lived reality of communication. Here the notion of implicature begins to feel essential rather than peripheral: how much of what we say is not contained in the words we utter but in the assumptions we share?
Presupposition, deixis, context dependence, speech acts, politeness, and conversational inference—all appear not simply as terminology but as windows into how fragile and negotiated communication really is. Meaning becomes dynamic: contingent on culture, cognition, intention, history, and social relationships.
As the chapters progress, one senses the tension—sometimes productive, sometimes unresolved—between semantics as a formal enterprise and pragmatics as an interpretive one. The book does not pretend that synthesis is simple.
At times the boundaries blur; at others they resist compatibility. Certain pages feel almost philosophical, asking questions not about language alone but about the nature of interpretation itself.
What portion of meaning belongs to the grammar of a sentence, and what portion belongs to the world in which it is spoken?
Can meaning ever be fully formalized?
Or does its essence reside in the shifting grey territory where logic meets human expectation?
Yet the most striking aspect of Jaszczolt’s approach is the underlying conviction that semantics and pragmatics are not separate spheres but overlapping dimensions of the same phenomenon: meaning as action, meaning as negotiation, meaning as expectation and inference. The writing pushes the reader to see language not as code but as behaviour—something embedded in cognition and shaped by discourse.
By the final chapters, something shifts in the experience of reading. The material becomes less like a catalogue of theories and more like a meditation on language itself.
You begin to reflect not only on what these frameworks assert but also on how meaning operates in your own speech, memory, and interactions.
You start noticing that every utterance you produce is layered: the literal, the intended, the assumed, the unsaid. A simple statement—“It’s cold in here,” for instance—becomes a small universe of possibilities: a comment, a request, a negotiation, a complaint, or a test of shared understanding.
Somewhere along the way, the book stops feeling merely academic. It becomes reflective, almost existential. Language appears no longer as a tool humans use but as a mirror of how humans think, perceive, evaluate, and coexist.
Meaning becomes fluid—sometimes precise, sometimes elusive, sometimes impossible to pin down without collapsing its richness.
When you finally close the book, you carry something more than theory. You carry a sharpened awareness—a sense that every word spoken or heard is part of a fragile, intricate system held together not just by grammar but by trust, inference, memory, and the shared assumption that communication is possible.
You begin to notice how meaning expands in silence, how it mutates through irony or affection, how tone can betray a sentence’s surface, and how gestures and timing complete what the linguistic form cannot.
And perhaps this is the book’s quiet achievement: it teaches you not only what semantics and pragmatics are, but also how to listen.
It reminds you that language is both rule-bound and unpredictable, both engineered and human.
It gives you the intellectual scaffolding, yes—but also the sensitivity to see language as something living, unfinished, and deeply interwoven with experience.
A textbook becomes a lens; a field of study becomes an invitation to see differently.
Recommended.
January 4, 2014
I found it a little complex as it start with advanced information about two rich branches of linguistics. It summarizes all the principles of Semantics and Pragmatics in a brief way, with simple explanation.
Want to read
April 12, 2020im so dddddddddd
Read
May 11, 2020none of this made any sense to me but it helped me pass my class so yay
May 31, 2021
Bagunçadinho, mas por bons motivos.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews