Another textbook on formal semantics? Before you reach for the Tylenol, relax; this is a textbook with a twist: It is an informal textbook on formal semantics. Portner's book is actually a very ambitious endeavor because it sets out to teach the basics of the scientific study of meaning in an accessible and user-friendly way. Readers of SSLA who have struggled with formal semantics as undergraduates, in graduate school, or both will appreciate the challenge. I believe that Portner is mostly successful in his endeavor. As I will explain, he is almost too successful; as a result, the apparent raison d'être of the book is defeated, to an extent. In what follows, I will qualify this claim.

This textbook is clearly addressed to undergraduate students, but it is possible to use it as a self-help book if one wants to refresh one's stale knowledge or learn the basics. It is written in a lucid and helpful—but not condescending—way, with numerous examples and drawings throughout. Chapter 1 tackles the fundamental question of what is meaning and how we should think of it. The author presents the idea theory, which maintains that meanings are concepts, thoughts, and ideas in our mind/brain, and he rejects it due to its psychological implausibility. He then introduces the theory that meanings are social practices and shows that this cannot be the whole story. He argues for word meanings as based in language-external and mind-external reality and shows that the meanings of sentences are their truth conditions. To illustrate the concept of possible worlds, he gives drawings that represent the true situation and some false situations for the sentence The circle is inside the square. Next, he introduces propositions and gives three arguments from logical words, semantic relationships, and the usefulness of language for communication in daily life.

This style of presentation is representative of his approach throughout the book. Chapter 2 introduces compositionality and the saturation of propositions with arguments. I will illustrate Portner's style with one more example, in which he uses an analogy from real life to explain the division of labor between syntax and semantics. If a company (understand, language user) wants a new building (meaning), its cost can either be calculated on an individual operation basis (so much for the plans, so much for the scaffolding, so much for the workers), or the company can be charged a lump sum regardless of the operations performed in the process. The first choice represents the rule-by-rule approach, in which interpretation is calculated at each step of the syntactic tree. The second choice represents the interpretive theory, which calculates the interpretation of the final clause but does not require that every syntactic step along the way have semantic relevance. Chapter 3 deals with models of predication. If you have always wanted to understand functions and the lambda calculus, this is the chapter for you. Chapter 4 introduces modification as another semantic relation and elaborates on the differences and similarities between sentence semantics and lexical semantics. Chapter 5 deals with referring expressions, touching on definites, indefinites, mass/bare plural nouns, and anaphora. In this and later chapters, Portner describes contradictory theories and hypotheses, illustrating how and what semanticists argue about, all the while managing to convey that a theoretical debate can be very fruitful even if it does not lead to one side winning decisively over the other.

Chapters 6 (quantifiers), 7 (intensional meaning), 8 (tense, aspect, modality), and 9 (propositional attitudes) are the real stuff of formal semantics. To the exceptionally lucid style of presentation, Portner adds a neat didactic technique—repetition! For example, every time he mentions a property, he repeats its definition: an unsaturated proposition. The book finishes with two chapters on linguistic pragmatics, bringing home the distinction between semantic meaning and speaker meaning.

So why do I think that this textbook is almost too successful in its accessibility quest? The answer, of course, depends on what one expects. If one wants to get a good idea of the fundamental topics and issues of formal semantics as a piece in the bigger picture of linguistic knowledge, this book is great. If one wants to prepare for reading real semantics as published in journals and scholarly books, this book will not do. It introduces almost no formalisms (symbols, functions, equations), which are the language of semantics in the same way as syntactic trees are the language of syntax. Although I would not recommend it for use as a textbook for linguistics majors, it might be quite profitable reading for language acquisition students.