ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the fundamental nature of meaning and its effects on how linguists can investigate a xenolanguage. Underpinning our work are limits to what we can observe inside a mind, and the consequent assumptions we make to work around them. Also crucial are conceiving of meaning as being truth-conditional and compositional, and remaining mindful of cases when they appear not fully so. Lexical meaning can tell us about the conceptions and construals that an alien mind uses to organize their thoughts and their world, which might be so different that elicitation may prove difficult. Finally, as semanticists, we can explore universals of human language to compare them to what we might find in an alien language.
