ABSTRACT
This chapter sums up the theory, first as a full account of the principles outlined in Chapter 1 and developed through the book as their applications occurred, and second as a conventional summary of the chapters. The power of the previous chapters to convince the reader constitutes the main reason why the theory should be accepted, but this chapter adds more abstract reasons for its acceptance as a complete and coherent account of “semantics” – significance in language. In particular, it discusses the methodology used; it outlines how significance in language is explained from within semantics itself and from the other strata of language, from other fields of linguistics, and from fields outside linguistics. Finally, it shows how the theory integrates most previous work in semantics.
