’Tis the season of list making. Leiter, for example, has people list the most significant books in philosophy over the last quarter century](http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000594.html)), divided by subfields.

I am starting to prepare for next semester’s advanced semantics course. One thing I plan to hand out at the beginning is a list of the essential readings in semantics (including pragmatics and philosophy of language). I have made a start, drawing mostly on the table of contents of Portner and Partee’s Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings and Veltman’s list of 40 classics in formal semantics and pragmatics](http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~veltman/classics.htm)). I put the result) up for your perusal.

Please use the comments (or email, if you prefer) to suggest additions, subtractions, substitutions. In the next iteration, I plan to add some more recent “instant classics” to lead students closer to current research. I would especially like suggestions for such articles.

In a separate post, I will comment on what it means for the field that such a list seems like a useful idea (I doubt that a similar thought would occur to a nuclear physicist).

Update Routledge has just published a huge 6 volume set “Semantics”, edited by Javier Gutirrez-Rexach, containing “the most important contributions to semantic theory ranging from Gottlob Frege’s 1892 essay”On Sense and Reference” to recent cutting-edge scholarship from leading journals in the field”. The table of contents lists 101 items. This could serve as a useful long short list to select readings from. I have found it difficult to link directly to a page with the contents of this collection, so I uploaded the table of contents) myself.

Update See this entry) and associated comments at Lambda the Ultimate](http://lambda.weblogs.com/)). It appears that my comments are already anticipated with bated breath.