This volume, which has been only moderately revised from the first edition (a couple of important exceptions will be mentioned later), is divided into four parts. The first is titled “Fundamental Notions” and consists of four chapters: “Introduction,” which introduces the subbranches of the field (e.g., lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, linguistic pragmatics) and its relations to other fields; “Logical Matters,” which introduces basic concepts like proposition, entailment, and scope; “Types and Dimensions of Meaning,” which concerns aspects of descriptive (or referential) meaning such as vagueness and specificity as well as nondescriptive meaning (associative and social meanings); and “Compositionality,” a brief discussion of this fundamental notion and some of the difficulties associated with it.

Part 2 of the volume is entitled “Words and Their Meanings” and contains 10 chapters devoted to topics such as the polysemy versus monosemy debate, similarity of meaning, types of antonymy, semantic fields, and metaphor and metonymy. The last chapter of this portion of the volume, “New Directions in Lexical Semantics: A Dynamic Construal Approach” (chapter 14), was not present in the first edition. It puts forward an approach that claims to eschew dictionary-type meanings in favor of a more flexible and contextually determined approach.

Part 3, entitled “Semantics and Grammar,” consists of just one chapter, “Grammatical Semantics,” which includes sections on tense, aspect, modality, thematic roles, and quantification. Part 4, “Pragmatics,” has chapters devoted to the topics of reference and deixis, speech acts, and conversational implicatures. This last chapter—at 32 pages the second longest chapter in the volume (after “Grammatical Semantics”)—has been significantly and usefully revised from the corresponding chapter in the first edition, although Grice's theory of conversational implicatures is still somewhat downplayed to allow more prominence for relevance theory.

Cruse is known for his work on lexical semantics, so it is not surprising that this introductory semantics and pragmatics text should emphasize that area of study to some extent. However, the emphasis in this case is rather overwhelming: a total of 10 chapters (almost 200 pages) devoted specifically to word meaning, but only 1 chapter (of 34 pages) for the remainder of semantics. The volume does have good coverage, in the sense that it at least mentions almost every imaginable topic in semantics and pragmatics (although presuppositions get no more than a mention and conversational analysis is omitted altogether). For the most part, the discussion is sound, with a few notable exceptions: The rationale for compositionality (p. 65) does not mention the central cognitive explanandum—that is, our ability to produce and understand novel utterances on first encounter; the discussion of the need for generalized quantifiers (p. 305) does not mention specifically the problem for the classical logical approach of constituenthood; and propositions (p. 22) are viewed as structured entities—the possible worlds view is not mentioned. (In fact, possible worlds are not mentioned anywhere in the volume.)

Several aspects of this volume will make it particularly useful to those interested in SLA. One is the overall focus on descriptive, rather than theoretical, issues (although theoretical issues are not completely ignored and take center stage in the new chapter 14). Another is the aforementioned emphasis on lexical semantics and the very detailed discussion of aspects of word meaning such as metaphor, idiom, and collocation. Yet another is the very straightforward presentation, generally in small sections, each of which is devoted to a specific topic. There are useful exercises, discussion questions, or both at the end of almost every chapter, and answers are provided at the end of the volume. In general, technical terms are clearly defined and illustrated, although there are a few occasions when this is not the case and a few instances in which technical terms are used before they have been introduced at all (e.g., “autoholonymy” [p. 109]). All in all, this will be a useful addition to the shelves of both theoretical and applied linguists as well as others in related fields.