ABSTRACT
Term introduced by Carnap (1952) to designate a type of general semantic rule which describes a semantic relation between predicates in an artificial language of formal logic. Applied to natural languages, a meaning postulate establishes semantic constraints between different expressions that can be formulated in the form of meaning relations such as synonymy. Seen language-internally, an expression of a language is semantically described, when all of the meaning postulates that refer to it have been formulated. Within the scope of generative semantics (see Lakoff 1970), meaning postulates serve to describe the semantic relations between semantic primitives (i.e. basic semantic expressions). In Montague grammar, meaning postulates serve to limit the concept of interpretation: only those interpretations which make all meaning postulates true in at least one possible world are permitted.
