Semantics: the meaning of ‘meaning’

We are all, in a sense, walking dictionaries. In addition to a set of grammatical rules which tell us, for example, that the article comes before the noun in English and not after it (as in Danish), we have a mental dictionary or lexicon which stores the form of a lexeme, any irregularities associated with it (for example that the past tense of bring is brought and not *bringed), its syntactic properties (e.g. that the verb give realizes a three-place predicate) and its meaning. But linguists are noticeably less confident about offering rules and generalizations in the area of meaning than they are about grammar or phonology, and have long regarded semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, as the ‘weak point’ in our understanding of language.

We will address the thorny problem of meaning in language. We will examine ways in which linguists have attempted to understand meaning through an analysis of sense relations and semantic features, and have grappled with types of meaning which go beyond the propositional content of the words a speaker utters.