The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory

The study of the semantics of natural language has evolved rapidly over the last two decades. Reflecting great strides made in the field, the second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory presents a detailed and systematic view of cutting–edge research, methodologies, and developments in contemporary theoretical and computational semantics. New and revised contributions, by leading international semanticists, highlight the radical shift in methods and theories that now shape linguistic semantic research. These include the application of modern computational techniques, type theory, and probabilistic models—methodologies that capture previously untapped subtleties of meaning and interpretation in natural language. The chapters of the Handbook also show these recent innovations have brought semantics into closer collaboration with ongoing research in computer science, AI (artificial intelligence), and cognitive science. Forward–looking and timely, the second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory provides insights into the bold new ideas that are now shaping research in semantic theory.

Shalom Lappin is Professor of Computational Linguistics at King’s College London, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Member of the Academia Europaea. He is co–editor, with Alexander Clark and Chris Fox, of The Handbook of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (Wiley–Blackwell, 2010), and author, with Alexander Clark, of Linguistic Nativism and the Poverty of the Stimulus (Wiley–Blackwell, 2011). Chris Fox is a Reader in the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex. He is the author of The Ontology of Language (2000) and, with Shalom Lappin, Foundations of Intensional Semantics (Wiley–Blackwell, 2005).