MEANING IN LANGUAGE: AN INTRODUCTION TO SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS (2nd ed.). Alan Cruse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 441. $29.95 paper.

This volume, which has been only moderately revised from the first edition (a couple of important exceptions will be mentioned later), is divided into four parts. The first is titled “Fundamental Notions” and consists of four chapters: “Introduction,” which introduces the subbranches of the field (e.g., lexical semantics, grammatical semantics, linguistic pragmatics) and its relations to other fields; “Logical Matters,” which introduces basic concepts like proposition, entailment, and scope; “Types and Dimensions of Meaning,” which concerns aspects of descriptive (or referential) meaning such as vagueness and specificity as well as nondescriptive meaning (associative and social meanings); and “Compositionality,” a brief discussion of this fundamental notion and some of the difficulties associated with it.