What do dictionaries mean when they tell us that semantics is “the study of meaning”? The concept that people intuitively refer to as “meaning” is an abstraction inspired by observing how we use language in everyday situations. However, we use language for many different purposes, and those various usages may inspire conceptions of meaning that are radically different from one another. We cannot reasonably expect a theory of meaning to cover everything that people do with their languages. A more tractable way of studying meaning is by discerning specific properties of language use that are amenable to scientific investigation. These aspects of language use, if stable across speakers and situations, will ultimately guide us toward a theory of language “meaning”.

ENTAILMENT

One of the most important usages of natural language is for everyday reasoning. For example, let us consider sentence (2.1):

From this sentence, any English speaker is able to draw the conclusion in (2.2) below:

Thus, any speaker who considers sentence (2.1) to be true, will consider sentence (2.2) to be true as well. We say that sentence (2.1) entails (2.2), and denote it (2.1)⇒(2.2). Sentence (2.1) is called the premise, or antecedent, of the entailment. Sentence (2.2) is called the conclusion, or consequent.

The entailment from (2.1) to (2.2) exemplifies a relation that all English speakers will agree on. This consistency is remarkable, and all the more so since words like Tina, tall and thin are notoriously flexible in the way that they are used.