ABSTRACT
Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning. In contemporary linguistics, it has generally taken the form of a theory of truth, which borrows its technical tools from mathematical logic. This connection between meaning and truth is motivated by the observation that a speaker who knows the meaning of a sentence knows, at the very least, under what conditions it is true or false. To put it differently, if we provide any speaker with a syntactically well-formed sentence S, together with a sufficiently detailed situation (i.e. a description of the way the world is), the speaker should in principle be in a position to determine whether S is true or false. It is clear that speakers have this ability for infinitely many distinct sentences and situations, which they could not all have memorised. Therefore they must have access to certain rules that allow them to compute the truth conditions of complex sentences on the basis of memorised facts about their smallest component parts. Lexical semantics is concerned with the meaning of these smallest parts – words or morphemes. In this chapter I will be concerned with compositional semantic, which seeks to uncover the rules by which complex meanings can be formed.
