This course gives the students access to some of the central ideas in the field of semantics and the contributions of some of its most important writers. It, therefore, aims to help the students gain a feel for what doing semantics is like, and gain the background to proceed to more advanced and specialized material in the field. To this end, the course first highlights the place of semantics within linguistics and its relations with the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. This is followed by a discussion of the mechanisms employed in semantic description and the most influential theories of semantics.