Abstract

Montagovian semantics treats word meanings in terms of intensions and extensions which are meant to capture speakers' ability to decide which words are to be used for what objects, properties, events, etc. The aim of the present paper is to refine this view in order to model facts about language change, acquisition, and knowledge of language. I will reconstruct intensions in terms of (a) given core referents, and (b) contextually detennined ways to generalize these to füll sets of (real or counterfactual) extensions. This reconstruction of word meanings is clarifying in several ways. lt can explain how speakers can install the meanings of new words in a language on the basis of a limited set of intended referents, it makes clear how the limited knowledge of single speakers allows them to grasp the meaning of words in their language, and it allows to model certain types of historical meaning change and creative language use. The approach will finally be related to conceptual semantics, prototype theory, and classical truth value based semantics.