After a long dry spell in which there were few—if any—satisfactory introductory texts in semantics and pragmatics available, the first edition of Saeed's Semantics appeared in 1997. Since then, a number of other texts have appeared: de Swart's Introduction to natural language semantics (1998), Kearns' Semantics (2000), Allan's Natural language semantics (2001), among others. The primary advantage of the original Saeed text as well as this revised and updated version is its comprehensiveness. It includes descriptive lexical semantics, an introduction to formal semantics, the cognitive approaches of Lakoff and others, and more pragmatics than most of its competitors.

The book is divided into three parts: Part 1, “Preliminaries,” Part 2, “Semantic Description,” and Part 3, “Theoretical Approaches.” Part 1 contains two chapters. Chapter 1, “Semantics in Linguistics,” introduces basic concepts and distinctions, such as reference versus sense and semantics versus pragmatics. Chapter 2, “Meaning, Thought, and Reality,” is a broad-ranging overview of issues in word meaning. This includes sketches of the componential approach (which defines words in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions), the prototype approach (which defines words in terms of stereotypical instances, or properties, or both), and the causal theory (which applies most naturally to proper names and does not postulate descriptive properties). This chapter includes brief discussions of Whorf's ideas about linguistic relativity, and Fodor's language of thought hypothesis.

Part 2, “Semantic Description,” attempts to avoid the contentious theoretical issues that are introduced in Part 3. Chapter 3, “Word Meaning,” discusses basic semantic properties and relations of words, such as polysemy, varieties of antonymy, and causation. Chapter 4, “Sentence Relations and Truth,” is essentially an introduction to propositional logic but also includes a relatively long section on presupposition. Chapters 5 and 6 introduce further aspects of sentence semantics, such as aspect and modality (chapter 5) and thematic relations like Agent and Theme (chapter 6). The last two chapters of Part 2 concern pragmatics. Chapter 7, “Context and Inference,” includes discussions of deixis, discourse analysis, and conversational implicature. Chapter 8 is devoted to speech acts.

Part 3 is entitled “Theoretical Approaches,” although it includes illustrative descriptive content as well. Chapter 9, “Meaning Components,” is largely a return to issues in lexical semantics, but from a theoretical point of view. The chapter starts at the modem beginning with material from Katz and Fodor (1963) and continues with the more recent versions of the componential approach found in the work of Jackendoff (1990) and Pustejovsky (1995). Chapter 10, “Formal Semantics,” contains an introduction to first-order predicate logic with quantification. For this edition, we also have the welcome addition of an introduction to generalized quantifier theory, which—unlike the traditional logical analysis—allows a semantic value to be assigned to quantificational noun phrase like every student. Saeed includes related discussions of there-be sentences and negative polarity items like any and ever. This chapter, which is the longest in the book, also contains sections on intensionality and dynamic semantics. These are formal approaches that can deal with phenomena such as intersentential pronominalization. Chapter 11, “Cognitive Semantics,” begins with a discussion of metaphor and its application in the “cognitive” approach of Lakoff and his colleagues (see, e.g., Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). This chapter also looks at the mental spaces approach of Fauconnier (1997) and Langacker's (1987) cognitive grammar.

My main objection to this book is its idiosyncratic organization. Students with whom I used the first edition objected to the fact that the introduction to logic was split into two widely separated sections in the book; this feature is retained in this edition. The discussion of word meaning also spans different chapters (chapters 2, 3, 9, and 11). On the other hand, as noted at the outset, the coverage is unusually broad and the material is generally sound and very clearly presented, making this text a valuable resource and a useful introduction to the field.