Semantics

Semantics studies linguistic meaning — how words, phrases, and sentences convey meaning and how meaning is composed.

Scope

It covers lexical and compositional semantics, reference and sense, truth-conditional and formal semantics, and the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Core questions

• What is linguistic meaning?
• How is sentence meaning composed from word meanings?
• How do expressions refer?
• How are meaning and truth related?

Key concepts

• Sense and reference
• Compositionality
• Truth conditions
• Lexical semantics
• Quantification
• Formal semantics

Key theories

Sense and reference

Frege distinguished an expression's sense (Sinn) from its reference (Bedeutung), founding modern semantics and philosophy of language.

Formal/Montague semantics

Montague applied formal logic to natural-language meaning, giving compositional truth-conditional semantics.

Linguistic semantics

Lyons synthesized lexical and structural semantics within linguistics.

History

Semantics draws on Frege's sense/reference distinction and developed formal (Montague) and lexical/structural approaches, now integrated with pragmatics and cognitive semantics.

Debates

Truth-conditional versus cognitive semantics

Whether meaning is best modelled by truth conditions or by conceptual structure in the mind.

Key figures

• Gottlob Frege
• Richard Montague
• John Lyons

Seminal works

• frege-1892
• montague-1973
• lyons-1977

Frequently asked questions

What is compositionality?

The principle that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its parts and how they are combined.