By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

This book introduces the essential principles and techniques of formal semantics. In formal semantics, structure is treated as the essential ingredient in the creation of sentence meaning from individual word meaning. This approach synthesizes the traditions of logical language analysis with the scientific findings of contemporary empirical linguistics and introduces new ways to understand language meaning. Designed as a quick yet thorough introduction to one of the most vibrant areas of research in modern linguistics today this volume reveals the beauty and elegance of the mathematical study of meaning. It contains examples and exercises. It offers an accessible style that is aimed at students developing knowledge of formal semantics. It can be applied to logic, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.