ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, we presented the goals of linguistic semantics as the study of grammatical meaning. In the present chapter, we look at the nature and definition of meaning itself to get a sense of the fundamental issues in semantic analysis and to establish a backdrop against which to judge grammatically relevant meaning. Five views of meaning are considered: meaning as reference, meaning as logical form, meaning as context and use, meaning as culture, and meaning as conceptual structure. This five-part description is not designed to polarize the approaches, forcing all views of meaning into one of the categories. Rather, these are five general views of meaning, incommensurable with each other on some points, but compatible on others.
