Semantics

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ivisions are crossed. In machine translation, for instance, computer scientists may want to relate natural language texts to abstract representations of their meanings; to do this, they have to design artificial languages for representing meanings.

There are strong connections to philosophy. Earlier in this century, much work in semantics was done by philosophers, and some important work is still done by philosophers.

Anyone who speaks a language has a truly amazing capacity to reason about the meanings of texts. Take, for instance, the sentence

(S) I can't untie that knot with one hand.

Even though you have probably never seen this sentence, you can easily see things like the following:
1) The sentence is about the abilities of whoever spoke or wrote it. (Call this person the speaker.)
2) It's also about a knot, maybe one that the speaker is pointing at.
3) The sentence denies that the speaker has a certain ability. (This is the contribution of the word `can't'.)
4) Untying is a way of making something not tied.
5) The sentence doesn't mean that the knot has one hand; it has to do with how many hands are used to do the untying.

The meaning of a sentence is not just an unordered heap of the meanings of its words. If that were true, then `Cowboys...