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.
In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, and larger units of discourse (termed texts, or narratives). The study of semantics is also closely linked to the subjects of representation, reference and denotation.