ABSTRACT
Linguistics.—Four approaches in cognitive research bear the name semantics: logical semantics, linguistic semantics, psychological semantics, and cognitive semantics.
In this approach, meaning is defined as a relationship between a symbol and the object it denotes, in the world of what is, in a possible world, or in a counterfactual world (→COUNTERFACTUAL, MEANING AND SIGNIFICATION, SYMBOL). It contributes to maintaining the division between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics proposed by Charles Morris and Rudolf Carnap (→PRAGMATICS, SYNTAX). To describe natural languages, it applies principles, such as compositionality, that are used in the semantics of logic languages. Logical semantics has not produced an elaborate lexical semantics (→LEXICON), but it offers a detailed understanding at the sentence level of many problems like quantification, indexicality, and scope. In text semantics (→TEXT), the principal theoretical framework is still Hans Kamp’s highly programmatic theory. His discourse-representation structures (DRS) are logical notations that permit clear statements of problems like indeterminate reference and anaphora (→SENSE/REFERENCE).
