Semantics

Geoffrey Leech’s Semantics, first published 1974, with David Crystal as advisory editor for linguistics. Leech, born 1936, had been Reader in English at Lancaster since 1969 and was directing the Computer Archive of Modern English Texts; he had already co-written A Grammar of Contemporary English with Quirk, Greenbaum and Svartvik. The chapters run from “Meanings of Meaning” and the seven types of meaning through semantics and society, componential analysis, logic in everyday language, and two case studies in “universal semantics” on colour and kinship. The cover continues the Pelican series design, showing the phrase-structure tree for “the linguist saw the pelican”.