There a number of techniques for analyzing different aspects of referential and emotive meanings. All of these have varying degrees of usefulness as heuristic tools, and many are valuable for describing certain domains of meaning and some of the problems of contextual conditioning. None of these theories, however, provide a comprehensive system for semantic analysis, for in one or more ways they lack certain indispensable features. For one thing, these theories fail to show the relationship between those elements of meaning which are linguistically structured and those which are dependent upon nonlinguistic elements in the cultural setting. At the same time, in most instances referential meanings and emotive meanings are so isolated from catch other that they seem structurally unrelated. Furthermore, it is extremely difficult in most cases to incorporate extensions of meaning into the structural analysis, and in fact peripheral meanings are in general carefully excluded or "selectively forgotten." Another rather conspicuous failure is the lack of proper co-ordination between features of field and context.

What we require in an adequate theory of semantics is a system which will provide an explanation of the procedures whereby the native speaker of a langưage may interpret an infinite variety of messages, most of which are novel to him. We need to know how he is able to select the appropriate meaning of terms, how he recognizes ambiguity when it does exist, and how he senses that two quite different utterances are essentially paraphrases of each other. How does the hearer know, for example, that green in green house has quite a different meaning from what it has in greenhouse? How does he recognize that there is an obvious typographical error in the sentence he will lead the book through? And what tells him that the sentences two cops dashed after him and a couple of policemen chased after him are substantially equivalent in meaning? The most useful theory which has been developed to date is that of Katz and Fodor (1963). and in general the exposition which follows is based upon their highly important insights.

In attempting to explain how the speaker of a language can produce and understand any of an infinite series of utterances, including those wholly novel to him, a linguistic theory must, of course, carefully distinguish between grammar and semantics. In general we may say that the grammar is designed to explain that part of the language which depends upon the relationship of classes of words to one another, even though a class may have only a single member. Thus grammar deals entirely with the linguistic context of words. The semantic analysis of a language, however, attempts to explain primarily the relationship of individual words and combinations of words to the nonlinguistic contexts of utterances--whether on the level of referential or emotive meanings.

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