title: Semantics (Oxford Introduction to Language Study Series)
author: Anthony Cowie
description: A. P. Cowie is Honorary Reader in Lexicography at the School of English, University of Leeds.
zlib_text: Invitation to
  Formal Semantics
  (Formerly known as Semantics Boot Camp)
  Elizabeth Coppock
  &
  Lucas Champollion
  Draft of August 21, 2020
  
  Preface
  Semantics, the study of meaning, is a core subﬁeld of linguistics, a
  discipline that integrates methods from the social sciences, liberal
  arts, and mathematics to study the nature of language. Since the
  1970s, much of semantics has taken a formal turn, including tech-
  niques from mathematics such as logic and set theory. This text-
  book is a gentle and compact introduction to these techniques,
  and focuses on the way the meaning of individual expressions in
  natural language (words and phrases) combine to produce larger
  meaningful expressions such as sentences and texts.
  Students are guided through the development of a formally
  precise, compositional, model-theoretic account of semantics, us-
  ing a logical representation language that is well-rooted in intel-
  lectual tradition, yet modern. The book familiarizes students with
  the main tools and tec