Semantics : A Coursebook

Rating:
Summary: A Great Teach-Yourself Resource
Review: I stumbled across this book in the English-language stacks at our university library (2001 edition). As an English teacher and a long-time student of several foreign languages, I have a fairly broad background in general linguistics. But before I read this book, I didn't have much background in the field of semantics.

Some textbooks don't work so well as teach-yourself references, but this book is well suited to that purpose. At the beginning of each chapter is a pre-test which helps you to be certain you have mastered the items taught in the previous chapter. That pretest is a great tool for checking your progress and ensuring that you understand the concepts being presented.

The book teaches you the technical terms you need to know, but the language of the book itself is well suited even to complete laymen. I suppose it would be advisable to tackle a good intro book on linguistics (such as Fromkin & Rodman's An Introduction To Language, an excellent intro textbook which uses humor in an effective way to increase the pleasure of learning, now available in its 6th edition I've just learned) before moving on to this one, but I'm fairly confident that the average reader with no linguistic background at all could probably handle the material in this book with little difficulty.

At the end of the book, the authors include a list of useful references for furthering one's knowledge of semantics and pragmatics. I have cursorily examined a few of these, and they seem like very logical next steps.