SEMANTICS AND TEXT MEANING: RETROSPECTS AND PROSPECTS
ROBERT DE BEAUGRANDE · Journal of Semantics · 1986
The activity of “doing semantics” is a specialized mode of being meaningful. The relation between that mode and the general mode of ordinary discourse should be clarified within a framework that integrates past trends in semantic modelling with each other and with possible future ones. This paper proposes to view language as a complex system of control levels with characteristic distributions of determinacy. Here, meaning is described as a processing event whose structure is formed by the maintenance of control and the limiting of indeterminacy. Known properties of complex physical and biological systems offer some clues about how such operations might occur.