Irene Heim

This is a textbook on Montague-style compositional semantics in a generative syntactic framework that covers such areas as compositionality, intersective vs. non-intersective predicates, anaphora, and quantifiers. The emphasis is on using the theory of types to implement these ideas, so this is a good book from which to learn lambda calculus. There isn't much on world-relative assignment functions (see the textbook Introduction to Natural Language Semantics for this), and intensional show more semantics only gets a brief treatment in a concluding chapter. (Apparently Heim and Kratzer have a separate textbook on intensional semantics in manuscript.) As in many advanced linguistics textbooks, Heim and Kratzer adopt a Socratic method, exploring various theoretical alternatives in each chapter before settling on their preferred solution. The exposition is clear and there are exercises throughout. This book would be a suitable sole text for an advanced undergraduate or graduate semantics course.



Errata:
The exercise at the end of chapter 9 on page 257 has an incorrect definition of only. In a situation in which there were two people, John and Bill, neither of whom could start the car, the sentence Only Bill could start the car would be true. A better definition would be:

[[only]] = λx. λf. for all y such that y ≠ x, f(y) =0, and f(x) = 1 show less

Ieder kind komt vroeg of laat wel eens in een probleemsituatie terecht. Sommige
problemen zijn voor kinderen moeilijk op te lossen. In dit boek staan vijfentwintig
powerverhalen die kinderen helpen hoe oplossingen te vinden.