What It Means to Do Semantics

Semantics is both a field of study and a task: a way of going about the analysis of meaning. Many approaches exist, but the longest tradition traces to philosophy and mathematics, with the mathematician Gottlob Frege applying mathematical principles to language in a new way around the turn of the twentieth century. From his work grew formal semantics, which uses mathematical tools specifically to analyze language, and much contemporary discussion still begins there.

The task itself is captured in a well-known formulation by the semanticist Angelika Kratzer, who wrote that it is the job of semantics to describe those features of the meaning of utterances that stay invariable in whatever context the expressions are used, calling this invariable element the meaning proper of a linguistic expression.

Meaning Proper and the Invariable Element

What semantics deals with, then, is utterances and their meanings, and specifically the features of those meanings. The goal is to identify a feature, represent it in some way, and communicate it: to be able to say that a given expression means such-and-such. Crucially, the features sought are the ones that hold constant across every context in which the expression occurs, not the ones supplied by any particular context.

Consider the sentence the bear escaped from the zoo. To analyze the past tense (escaped), one must determine what the past-tense morpheme itself contributes. A morpheme is simply a meaningful linguistic unit; it need not be a whole word, and here it is just the suffix -ed. A first analysis might say that the past tense tells us the event happened prior to the moment of speaking. But that describes only how the morpheme is interpreted in this one context. What semantics really wants is the morpheme's contribution in any context, its invariable element.

Parsing Contribution From Context

Doing semantics therefore means parsing out the meaningful elements contributed by a morpheme and separating them from what the surrounding context contributes. Once the invariable contribution is fixed, it becomes possible to explain what a particular use of the morpheme means in a particular context.

Six core concepts serve this program and build on one another: functional versus lexical morphemes, compositionality, entailment versus implicature, meaning versus use, sense versus reference, and truth conditions. Each is a tool for the same underlying task: taking a morpheme and figuring out which of its meaningful elements are its own invariable contribution, and which belong to the context in which it happens to appear.