In: Jens Allwood & Peter Gärdenfors (Eds.). 1999. Cognitive Semantics. John Benjamins Publ. Co. pp. 1-18. Semantics as Meaning Determination with Semantic-Epistemic Operations Jens Allwood Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University 1. Introduction This paper develops and summarizes an approach to semantics which has so far only been available in Swedish, cf. Allwood (1989). The approach is characterized by the fact that it is cognitive, dynamic and context-sensitive. Meaning and concepts are primarily taken to be cognitive phenomena and are studied in terms of operations on information rather than as static entities. The operations are context-sensitive, so that meaning is seen as determined by operations which are sensitive to and make use of linguistic and extralinguistic context. The 1989 paper also gives an analysis of the nature of meaning and of concepts and of the relation between that analysis and classical theories of meaning. Ways of determining concepts and meanings are discussed, and a number of conceptual or cognitive operations for doing this are proposed. There is also a discussion of the linguistic counterparts of these operations and of how they can be used to determine the meaning of linguistic expressions in context. Finally, the paper presents a number of examples of how different linguistic constructions can be analyzed. 2. Background The approach makes the following assumptions: i. All conventionalized linguistic expressions (morphemes, words, idioms, phrases etc.) are connected with “meaning potentials”, cf. Rommetveit (1974). A meaning potential is basically a person’s memory of the previous uses of a particular expression and can be seen as the union of all the information the person can associate with the expression. The semantic part of this information will include both what is sometimes called “encyclopedic” and “lexical” information concerning the phenomenon the expression refers to or is otherwise associated with. Philosophical arguments for this position can be found in Quine (1953), and more linguistically flavored arguments can be found in Haiman (1980) and Langacker (1987). ii. When used, a linguistic expression activates its meaning potential. The context- free meaning of a linguistic expression is seen as an activation potential, i.e. as a potential to activate (parts of) the meaning potential associated with a particular expression. iii. The actual meaning of the expression is determined through cognitive operations, the function of which is to achieve compatibility between the meaning potential of a particular expression, the meaning potential of other