Barker, Stephen J. - Renewing Meaning: A Speech-Act Theoretic Approach

The theoretical framework that currently informs most thinking about linguistic meaning is one whose roots lie with Frege. Frege invented modern logic—quantification theory—originally to understand mathematical language, but his invention was soon bent to the task of constructing semantic theories of natural languages. The central goal of natural-language semantics is the systematic account of sentence-meanings and semantic contents—the content that results from the application of a sentence's linguistic meaning to a context. The framework Frege instigated, the Frege model, analyses semantic content in terms of mapping relations between words and world-parts—objects, properties, relations, and so on—employing as an integral part of such mappings the structures of quantification.