Borg, Emma - Minimal Semantics

In this book I want to consider the question of what a semantic theory (that is, a theory of literal linguistic meaning) is for—if I were to give you a good, working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Prima facie, there are some minimal things anything deserving the title of 'theory of meaning' must be able to do—say, tell you the meaning of primitive lexical items, and explain how to move from the specification of the bits of a sentence and their relationship to one another (the sentence's logical or syntactic form) to a specification of the meaning of that sentence (its semantic assignment). Equally obviously, there are a vast range of things for which having a semantic theory won't be much direct help—things like seeing, or digesting, or walking to Timbuktu. But in between these two extremes a vast penumbra opens up, containing issues which we may or may not expect a semantic theory to address, and it is this penumbra which forms the territory for this book.