Elements of Formal Semantics: An Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Meaning in Natural Language

Yoad Winter’s Elements of Formal Semantics is a lucid, well-organized, rather concise, and opinionated introductory textbook of formal natural language semantics. “Formal semantics” here refers to the study of sentence meaning and its tight connection to sentence structure, described with precision using mathematical methods. Elements introduces the central questions, concerns, and techniques of formal semantics, motivated by discussion of successively more complex phenomena in English. The end result presented is a particular flavor of categorial or type-logical grammar.