What is meaning?

Abstract or Introduction

In order to deal with the question I would like to support Kess who wrote that it is rather an “enormous question” with which philosophers have dealt with reaching back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (1992: 196). For the purpose of our undergraduate studies in semantics I found out that it could be necessary to specify the question with regard to linguistics. Therefore the subheading to this assignment could be: the different linguistic approaches to account for meaning in language. As elaborated by Cruse the study of meaning is relevant to many different academic disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, neurology, semiotics and linguistics (2004: 10). In terms of semantics, which are the study of meaning in human language -and therefore a division of linguistics and language studies- meaning plays a rather vital role.
In order to examine the question of meaning linguists have developed several different approaches and have divided the question in sub questions. The different approaches result from different analysises how meaning could be determined in terms of word meaning, sentence meaning and utterance meaning.
A matter that influences these questions is how we conceive the world. In order to answer that question it seems to be necessary to analyse the underlying devices of how meaning or information is stored and represented in the mental brain.