Customer Reviews

Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction (Cambridge Approaches to Linguistics)

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For an introductory text, Lyons' book is strikingly precise. The author takes pains to be consistent in his use of semantic terminology and explicitly warns the reader where he isn't. Lyons also tries not to simplify matters too much and, again, cautions the reader whenever he needs to.

Unfortunately, the precision comes at a price: extreme verbosity, which makes the book a real pain to read. Lyons takes pages and pages to justify why he has chosen one term over the other, to remind the reader of simplifications that had to be made and, above all, to discuss exceptions and special cases. While exceptions are certainly interesting and should have a firm place in every academic textbook, Lyons' treatment of them is just way over the top. He discusses all kinds of exceptions at great length while hardly touching on the important stuff which you would expect from a textbook: semantic models, theories, classifications and their application.

One could argue that the book is for students who already know the basics. But for them, the book is definitely too easy (for me it certainly was). Lyon's work thus fills a niche where there is none: it is too difficult and confusing for novices, but too easy and not comprehensive enough for intermediates.

Now that I have finished the book, I know the difference between a sentence and an utterance, between mood and modality, between tense and aspect, etc. But unfortunately, Lyons has missed the opportunity to teach me what is behind these concepts.

The book arrived sooner than I expected it would and was exactly as described. Excellent customer service.

I believe Lyons would be a nice person to meet, and no doubt knows his stuff, but in my opinion, his style of explaining the material would be somewhat irritating to someone with little knowledge of semantics.

This book tries to explain things from the side too much, making it difficult to keep sight of any straight forward material. He adds too many exceptions and gives opaque references to bits and pieces of important items.

His writing style in this book is too "beat around the bush", and hardly creates a coherent, straight forward, explanation of the material -- its just too far from "spilling the beans" in style.