[Revised entry by Luca Gasparri and Diego Marconi on June 7, 2024.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporary philosophy of language, which focused more on the compositional processes whereby words combine to form meaningful sentences, rather than on their individual meanings (see the entry on compositionality). Nowadays, there is widespread consensus that the study of word meaning is crucial to our understanding of human language. This entry provides an overview of the way issues related to word meaning have…

Originally appeared on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Read More