ABSTRACT
The word 'meaning' and its cognates occur in a diversity of contexts. Central debates in the theory of interpretation and in criticism itself have focused on whether to give a the meaning of the text. In everyday situations of conversation people might similarly distinguish speaker's meaning, sentence meaning and utterance meaning. Sentence meaning is given by giving the meanings of the words which comprise the sentence uttered: the sentence has a literal meaning in which it can be used to refer to and describe what someone is doing when they play with certain scale-models of soldiers, made out of tin. But as uttered on this occasion, the sentence does not have its literal meaning. For example, it is disputed whether there is something which can be called 'sentence meaning', derived by invoking the rules of an independent and context-free system of meaning.
