ABSTRACT
Semantics is the part of linguistics that is concerned with meaning. Whilethis is the kind of definition which may satisfy, say, your friend who happens to see you with this book in your hands and asks what it is about, the author is of course faced with the task of explaining to you more precisely what the object of semantic study is. ‘Meaning’ is a notion with a wide range of applications, some of which belong to the field of semantics while others lie beyond it. Meaning is always the meaning of something. Words have meanings, as do phrases and sentences. But deeds may have meaning too. If a government pursues a certain policy, we may ask what the meaning is of doing so. The ‘meaning’ of an action or a policy is what sense it makes or what purpose it serves or what it is good for. More generally, we apply the notion of meaning to all sorts of phenomena that we try to make sense of, asking what is the ‘meaning’ of it all.
