Natural Language Semantics discusses fundamental concepts for linguistic semantics. This book combines theoretical explanations of several methods of inquiry with detailed semantic analysis and emphasises the philosophy that semantics is about meaning in human languages and that linguistic meaning is cognitively and functionally motivated.

Keith Allan is Reader in Linguistics at Monash University, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has taught in Britain, Kenya, Nigeria, and the United States. His research and publications focus mainly on aspects of meaning in language and his previous books are Linguistic Meaning (2 volumes, 1986) and Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon (co-authored with Kate Burridge, 1991).