"Linguistic semantics is a relatively young discipline. Only half a century ago, ideas about the structure of the semantic component of grammar were still sketchy and programmatic. Around 1970, developments outside linguistics instigated a dramatic change. New analytic tools from logic and the philosophy of language paved the way to a systematic account of meaning in language in terms of reference and truth conditions. In the following decades, linguists adapted and refined these methods to arrive at a much clearer picture of the semantic component and its interfaces, thereby passing from a handful of formalization strategies adapted from formal logic to a wide range of semantic phenomena observed across the languages of the world. Today semantic theory has attained a level of maturity that makes it mandatory for any linguist to be acquainted with its main methods and results. It is our hope that the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics will become one of the primary sources for those seeking such an acquaintance"--
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