John I. Saeed

Saeed does a good job providing a (cognitive) theoretical framework for descriptive semantics. I am not so interested in theory, but his writing style was straightforward enough.
Kroeger’s recent semantics book follows this one in content in a lot of ways, but provides a lot less theory and a lot more diagnostics for language analysis.

I struggled to pass my Semantics class, but the content is definitely worth learning.