**Section 1**

**Background** 

**1** 

**Let Us First Agree on what the Term** 

**to an Age-Old Debate** 

Emanuel Diamant

*VIDIA-mant,* 

*Israel* 

**"Semantics" Means: An Unorthodox Approach** 

Semantics, as a facet of human language, has always attracted the attention of notable philosophers and thinkers. Wikipedia relates the first insights into semantic theory to Plato, the great Greek philosopher of the ancient times, somewhere about the end of the 4th century BC (Wikipedia, 2011). Nevertheless, despite the long history of investigations, the notion of semantics remains elusive and enigmatic. Only in the second half of the passed century (and partially on the verge of the current one) some sort of a consensual definition

Alfred Tarski defined semantics as "a discipline which, speaking loosely, deals with certain relations between expressions of a language and the objects… 'referred to' by those

Jerry Fodor defines semantics as "a part of a grammar of (a) language. In particular, the part of a grammar that is concerned with the relations between symbols in the language and the

In the latest issue of "The Handbook of Computational Linguistics", David Beaver and Joey Frazee give another, slight different, definition of semantics: "Semantics is concerned with meaning: what meanings are, how meanings are assigned to words, phrases and sentences of natural and formal languages, and how meanings can be combined and used for

The list of such citations can be extended endlessly. Nevertheless, an important and an interesting point must be mentioned here – the bulk of citations presuppose a tight link between semantics and the language that it is intended to work for. And that is not surprising – language was always seen as an evolutionary feature that has made us human, that is, a thing that has facilitated our ability to interact and cooperate with other conspecies. It is commonly agreed that the spoken language was the first and the ultimate tool that has endowed us (humans) with the ability to communicate, thus enormously improving our

things in the world that they refer to or are true of" (Fodor, 2007).

inference and reasoning" (Beaver & Frazee, 2011).

**1. Introduction** 

had emerged.

expressions" (Tarski, 1944).

chances of survival.
