LINGUIST List 8.1015

Fri Jul 4 1997

Books: Semantics

Editor for this issue: Ann Dizdar <annlinguistlist.org>

 * THE SEMANTICS OF MEDIA
 by Jeff Ross, Perkin Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia

 Media are objects with content and character that we describe
using in- phrases: in the story, in the picture, in the movie, in the
dream... Like the propositional attitudes, these objects present a
variety of hard problems for semantic and philosophical analysis. The
Semantics of Media is an organized exploration of fundamental
questions in the semantics of media. The first three chapters set out
a straightforward model within the possible-worlds framework, and
consider how it might account for a range of notions applying to media
generally: implicit vs. explicit content, propositional vs. individual
content, causal vs. intentional content and the idea of a single World
of the Medium. The final three chapters examine ways of elaborating
the model to cover a range of phenomena keyed to the functionality of
particular forms of media.

 STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY 64
 1997 148 pp. Hardbound ISBN 0-7923-4389-1 $77.00

The following contributing LINGUIST publishers have made their backlists available on the World Wide Web:

• Blackwells
• Cascadilla Press
• Cornell University Linguistics Dept.
• CSLI Publications
• Garland Publishing
• Holland Academic Graphics
• John Benjamins
• Kluwer Academic Publishers
• MIT Working papers in Linguistics
• Mouton de Gruyter
• U. of Massachusetts Graduate Linguistics Association
• Pacific Linguistics Publications
• Routledge
• Summer Institute of Linguistics