This includes an introduction to approaches to reference, sense, mental images and prototypes. An important part of the study of meaning is a search for universal concepts. The topic of linguistic relativity is discussed in many examples from various languages, including cross-cultural studies of colour terms. These lectures also introduce the ideas of truth conditions and possible worlds. Other problems discussed include the interrelated topics of deixis, definite and indefinite noun phrases, presupposition, negation, and reported speech.
Separate lectures are devoted to tense and metaphor.
Discussion of the limitations of theories of sentence meaning leads to the introduction of the distinction between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The role of an account of intentions in assessing speaker's meaning is also emphasized, as well as the principle of cooperation to which speakers adhere in conversation and which allows us to say how the speaker can communicate more than is actually said. Other problems discussed include theories of politeness, indirectness in discourse, ethnocentrism of pragmatic approaches, cross-cultural communication, the interface between semantics and pragmatics, and an introduction to Discourse Representation Theory. See also Main Reading List below.