How do words mean? How do we find them when we need them, and how do we interpret them when we hear them? And how do we know when to understand them literally, and when to 'shift' meaning from literal to contextually implied? Where, and what is meaning? These are just some of the questions that we will adress in this course.

The aim of the course is to introduce students to the key concepts and problems in semantics and pragmatics, and enable them to deal with the problem of meaning in their own (research) work.

The course offers an introduction to the basic concepts and methods in the analysis of natural language meaning through a survey of four major current approaches and their findings: philosophical semantics, descriptive (traditional) semantics, cognitive semantics, and pragmatics. It should help students gain a better grasp of the relation between meaning and thought (concept), and ultimately help them tackle issues related to meaning both in intra- and crosslinguistic work.