Linguistic semantics is exclusively concerned with the meanings of linguistic expressions such as words, phrases, grammatical forms and sentences, but not with the meanings of actions or phenomena.
1.1 levels of meaning
Even if we restrict the study of meaning to words and sentences, the notion of meaning has to be further broken down into different levels at which we interpret words and sentences.
- Expression meaning: the meaning of words, phrases and sentences, taken out of any particular context constitute the level of meaning.
*Expression is just a cover term for words, phrases and sentences. The term expression meaning covers in particular word meaning and sentence meaning. The determination of expression meaning requires an abstractionfrom the use of the expressions in concrete contexts.
We may exactly know how to get from one place to another, yet be unable to tell the way to some else. We may be able to sing a song by heart, but unable to describe its melody. We are able to recognize tens of thousands of words when we hear them. But the knowledge that enables us to do is unconscious. Uncovering the knowledge of the meanings of words and sentences and revealing its nature is the central objective of semantics.
*The technical term for using an expression for something is reference.
*The entity referred to by an expression is called its referent. - Utterance meaning: It comes about when a sentence with its expression meaning is actually used in a concrete context and all references get fixed. When this happens, another central notion comes into play, the notion of truth.
*CoU(context of utterance) comprises the following aspects of the situation in which an utterance is produced:
1⃣️ the speaker (or producer) of utterance
2⃣️ the addressee(s) (or recipient(s)) of the utterance
3⃣️ the time at which the utterance is produced and/or received
4⃣️ the place where the utterance is produced and/or received
5⃣️ the facts given when the utterance is produced/or received
Utterance meaning can be defined as the meaning that results from an expression being used and interpreted in a given CoU. Utterance meaning derives from expression meaning on the basis of the particulars provided by the CoU. - Communicative meaning:
*Neither the level of expression meaning nor that of utterance meaning is the final and crucial level of interpretation. In an actual exchange, our main concern inevitably is this : what does the speaker intend- in particular, what does the speaker want from me?
*A theory that addresses this level of interpretation is Speech Act Theory, introduced in the 1950s by the philosopher John L. Austin and developed further by others, in particular John R. Searle. The central idea of speech act theory is that whenever we make an utterance in a verbal exchange we act on several levels.
Locutionary act(defined as the act of saying an expression with a certain utterance meaning in the given CoU.
Illocutionary act(a certain type of speech act: a statement, a question, a request, a promise, an offer, a refusal, a confirmation, a warming, etc.)
The speech act level of interpretation will be referred to as communicative meaning. - Three levels of meaning
expression meaning: the meaning of a simple or complex expression taken in isolation.
utterance meaning: the meaning of an expression when used in a given context of utterance resulting from fixing reference.
communicative meaning: the meaning of an utterance as a communicative act in a given social setting.
1.2 Sentence Meaning and Compositionality
- Lexical meaning: In our mind, we host a huge lexicon where all words we know and their meaning are stored and at our disposition. Stored meanings are therefore called lexical meanings. Lexical meaning is also to be taken to subsume the meanings of complex words, whether semantically regular or irregular. This is in line with the dynamic view of the lexicon which sees it not just as a store of entries, but also as comprising components for the formation of new words and their meaning. The meaning of different word forms are not all stored in our lexicon. Rather the lexicon contains the meaning(or meanings) of only one form of the word. For a verb, this is a tenseless and aspectless active meaning, for a noun it is its singular meaning and for an adjective its positive meaning. The meanings of particular word forms are derived from the basic lexical meanings by general rules.
- Compositional meaning: We are usually able to understand the expression meaning of a sentence without any conscious effort. Nevertheless, this ability is based on complex cognitive process by which take place in our minds automatically and unconsciously. The process by which we calculate the meaning of a sentence is called composition, and the resulting meaning is known as compositional meaning. ( e.g. The early bird catches the worm.)
*Words can also be used to create new words. This is called word formation, and its products complex words. - The products of word formation need not all be stored in the lexicon and yet they can be as easily and straightforwardly understood as sentences. But some other complex words that carry irregular or special meanings have to be stored in the lexicon in order to receive their proper interpretation.
- Grammatical meaning: the meaning of grammatical forms.
*The meaning of a word in a particular form is the combination of its basic lexical meaning and the grammatical meaning of its form. 
The meaning of complex expression is determined by semantic composition. This mechanism draws on three sources:
the lexical meanings of the basic expressions(expressions with a lexical meaning)
the grammatical forms of the basic expressions
the syntactic structure of the complex expression
semantic composition-----bottom-up process; it proceeds from the basic units to the complex ones. The lexical meanings of the smallest units serve as input for the rules of grammatical meaning, whose output is the input for the compositional rules.- That complex expressions receive their meaning by the process of composition is the central idea underlying semantics. This is called the Principle of Compositionality. (Gottlob Frege)
- *The meaning of a complex expression is determined by the lexical meanings of its components, their grammatical meanings and the syntactic structure of the whole.(The principle implies that the meaning of complex expressions are fully determined by the three resources mentioned, by the linguistic input alone. Therefor, this principle does not apply to utterance meaning and communicative meaning because at these levels non-linguistic context knowledge comes into play.)
1.3 Semantics: its scope and limits
One way of explaining what semantics is about is to say that it describes this part of our linguistic knowledge: the cognitive equipment that enables us to interpret regular linguistic expressions out of context, simply as linguistic forms.
- The scope of semantics
A: explaining sentence meaning
(lexical semantics, semantics of regular word formation, ------lexical semantics,
semantics of grammatical forms, compositional sentence semantics------sentence semantics)
B: Interface of expression meaning with other levels of interpretation
It also concerns the links of sentence meaning to utterance meaning and communicative meaning.
more precise definition about Semantics: the study of the meanings of linguistic expressions, either simple or complex, taken in isolation. It further accounts for the interfaces of expression meaning with utterance meaning and communicative meaning. - Beyond Semantics
Semantics ends where contextual knowledge comes in. Thus, utterance meaning and communicative meaning are beyond semantics; they fall into domain of pragmatics.
People vary greatly in how much knowledge they have about certain things. Therefore, word meaning needs to be distinguished from general world knowledge.
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