The content of this textbook is organized as a theory of language for the construction of talking robots. The main topic is the mechanism of natural language communication in both the speaker and the hearer.

In the third edition the author has modernized the text, leaving the overview of traditional, theoretical, and computational linguistics, analytic philosophy of language, and mathematical complexity theory with their historical backgrounds intact. The format of the empirical analyses of English and German syntax and semantics has been adapted to current practice; and Chaps. 22–24 have been rewritten to focus more sharply on the construction of a talking robot.