Discourse Plans and Linguistic Meaning

There are two different approaches to meaning formalization: one logical, another cognitive. The logical approach, going back to Frege and developed and explicitly applied to natural language semantics by Montague, is characterized by establishing semantics from primitive semantic structures of sentential type. This approach is most consistently represented by type logical grammars (see collections (Gamut 1991, van Benthem and ter Meulen 1997)). The cognitive approach treats linguistic meaning as a structure (e.g., a graph, a DAG, a feature structure) encoding the content of a text in enough detail to represent it at the syntactic, morphological and phonological levels, independent of the propositional attitude. This is the way it appears in the theory “Meaning ⇔ Text” (Mel’čuk 1997). Formalized or completely formal descriptive definitions of cognitive meaning are well known: cf. semantic networks of Sowa 1991 and situation theory of Barwise and Perry 1983. However, these definitions construct meaning structures per se independent of their realization in natural