ABSTRACT
Meaning is not limited to language, because all kinds of symbols have meaning, whether linguistic or not. The encyclopaedic nature implied in this view of meaning links language to culture which, from this perspective, amounts to individually stored knowledge. Philosophers were perhaps the first to devote many efforts to elucidate the nature of meaning. In the classical tradition, meaning was thought of as a relationship between signs and the kinds of things they mean. The classical views on meaning have permeated the relatively scarce reflections on translation before the twentieth century, and their refined versions developed by logical positivism have coloured linguistic and early cognitive approaches within translation and interpreting studies until the end of this century. Corpora have been very practical means to demonstrate the embedded and extended nature of meaning, uncovering the role of the linguistic and cultural milieu in meaning construal.
