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 expressed by elements of any language, characterizable. as a symbolic system. It is the goal of linguistic semantics to describe the meaning of linguistic elements and to. study the principles which allow (and exclude) the assignment of meaning to. combinations of these elements.