Key words:

pragmatics, inference, entailment, denotation, connotation, social meaning, affect, sense, reference, referential theory, extension, image theory

Overview

While the last chapter defined the lexical in lexical meaning, in this chapter we start to consider the meaning of meaning. While the term meaning is used in many ways inside and outside the discipline of linguistics, the semantic approach in this book is particularly concerned with denotative meaning. The next section compares denotative meaning to other meaning types and looks at the questions lexical semanticists ask and why they ask them. After that, we look at how to define denotative meaning, focusing on defining the difference between what a word refers to and what a word “means.”