ABSTRACT
Structural semantics treats meanings of names as known to every member of a society in a like manner. That is, the name has an identical meaning not only every time it is used but for every member speaking to any other member. Members of both of these latter schools have proposed that the semantic aspects of language, like the grammatical aspects, have a rulelike character in the gametheoretic sense of rules. The consequences of proposing a rulelike semantics rather than focusing on the indexical properties of everyday language use may be seen by examining the nature of a society that members would experience if they did speak with a rulelike semantics. A phoneme, as a class of noncontrastive phone types that share a distinctive bundle of phonetic features that members of a society are presumed to use in discriminating between sounds, is analogous to a kin class.
