Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners does not go that route. It opens with a shot of a snowy forest, where a deer quietly noses around for food. Into the frame comes the barrel of a shotgun.
Just so, semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning are, pretty clearly, different sorts of theories. The term âtheory of meaningâ has, in the recent history of philosophy, been used to stand for both semantic theories and foundational theories of meaning.
Semantics is the study of meaning. Meaning itself is a broad area of study. It can refer to lexical meaning or structural meaning (the meaning related to the structure of sentence). I will try to give the example of structural meaning. A sentence consists of pragmatic information and semantic information.