The Sphere of Semantics

Interpretive semantics establishes a clear distinction between aspects of interpretation that are founded on linguistic knowledge and aspects of interpretation that are derived from knowledge about the world. According to this theory, it is this distinction that makes it possible to draw the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Developed in the mid‐1960s in response to the interpretive semantics of Fodor and Katz, generative semantics stipulates that the semantic component is generative while the syntactic component is interpretive. This chapter presents Rastier's semantic approach and the levels of linguistic description that he identifies in order to clarify his terminology and situate his work within the general context. First‐order logic makes it possible to represent the semantics of natural languages in a more flexible and compact way than propositional logic. Contrary to the logic of propositions, which assumes that the world only contains facts, this logic assumes that the world contains terms, predicates and quantifiers.