This is not to say that syntactic analysis is of no value in itself—it can provide a useful support in applications such as grammar checking and statistical MT. But for the more ambitious goal of inferring and expressing the meaning of language, an essential requirement is a theory of semantic representation, and how it is related to surface form, and how it interacts with the representation and use of background knowledge. We will discuss logicist approaches, cognitive science approaches, and (more briefly) emerging statistical approaches to meaning representation.