ABSTRACT
One might have thought that since the role of language is primarily to convey meaning, the study of meaning would always have been a major focus of attention within the scientific study of language. Yet this is not so. Of course, philosophers (and others) have been preoccupied with questions of meaning for millennia; but of the major branches of modern linguistics, semantics is paradoxically the youngest and least evolved. In recent years, however, meaning has come to be taken much more seriously by linguists. It is probably true to say that the most influential work to date in semantics has been somewhat theoretical in orientation, and has been directed preponderantly towards elucidating and accounting for the logical properties of sentences within the framework of some system or other of formal logic. There has been relatively less in the way of descriptive work. However, systematic descriptive work is also important, and ideally engages in a continual dialogue with theory. This chapter looks at meaning primarily from the point of view of its embodiment in words, and is biased towards disciplined description rather than formalised theory.
