Subject: available for review : semantics

the books listed below are in the linguist office and now available for review . if you are interested in reviewing a book ( or leading a discussion of the book ) ; please contact our book review editor , andrew carnie , ph . d . , at : carnie @ linguistlist . org please include in your request message a brief statement about your research interests , background , affiliation and other information that might be valuable to help us select a suitable reviewer . do not include an electronic cv or a url linking to a personal homepage . these will be ignored . please also send a surface mail address for us to send the book to . * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * semantics : ishikawa , kiyoshi ( 1998 ) a network thoery of reference . iulc publications . bloomington . noting specific inadequacies with truth-conditional approaches , ishikawa develops a dynamic theory of reference incorporating features of discourse representation theory , file change semantics and situation semantics , and also deals with non-monotonic belief revision . he argues that the task of natural language semantics is to describe meaning in terms of the psychological relation of language to our cognition of external reality . in his approach , a linguistic expression 's meaning is its potential to change the information state of a cognitive agent . reference is not understood as a link to a real individual external to an agent , but as the agent 's act to link a character in a linguistic frame of individuation to characters in other ( linguistic or nonlinguistic ) frames . as the target of inquiry , the distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions is analyzed through the construction of conversation scenarios . in addition , ishikawa extends his theory to an analysis of belief and attitude reports . application of the theory to cleft and pseudocleft constructions is also outlined . semantics klein , henny ( 1997 ) adverbs of degree in dutch and related languages . john benjamins
