ABSTRACT
This introduction chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. It refers throughout purely to the formal semantic aspect of language, and not to some more all encompassing use of the term to indicate 'utterer's meaning' in the context of a speech situation. It will refer to this same level of representation as the level of Pragmatic Representation so that any possible confusion of this level of representation with formal semantic representations may be avoided. It will give a partial explication of the set of Stylistic rules to which Chomsky and Lasnik refer. It will suggest that the affective conditioned inversion construction is a marked syntactic construction in English, much as is the cleft construction. It will use the term 'utterer's meaning' to refer to aspects of meaning which are not formally determined by semantic rules: conventional and conversational implicature, presupposition.
