Abstract

This book is about meaning - not the meaning of certain concepts such as the meaning of life or the meaning of freedom but about what it means for linguistic expressions to mean something. It is also a book about meaning for humans. The qualification 'human meaning' is not yet common in linguistics book titles but it is increasingly important to add it. We are already experiencing fundamental differences in how, and what kind of, meaning is approached in computational linguistics and computer science in general on the one hand, and in philosophy of language or sociopragmatics on the other.