The Multidimensionality of Meaning and Multidimensional Semantics

Many linguistic elements in natural languages don't contribute truth-conditional content, but language users know under what circumstances they can be felicitously used.These phenomena pose some non-trivial challenge for truth-conditional semantics and raise questions about the exact boundary between semantics and pragmatics.To cope with these phenomena, a multidimensional semantics has been put forth.The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptive meaning and expressive meaning are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment.Compared to traditional formal semantic theories, Multidimensional Semantics not only re-defines the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, bringing to light a variety of neglected phenomena that used to be assumed to fall into the pragmatic domain, but also provides a formal means to investigate the semantic nature of the evasive subjective meaning in natural languages.