Formal Semantics or Dual Pragmatics

The purpose of this paper is to see how each of these two schools studies meaning. Semantics, as we all know, is concerned with the literal meaning of a lexical item and a sentence and the relations pertaining among them. Driven more use-invariantly, formal semantics (FS) studies language “in terms of the formal features of linguistic expression…”, as Borg, on whom this study has relied largely, says, “independently, to some extent at least, of the use to which the language is being put”, Borg 15. It inspects literal meaning in the sense that it overlooks such semantic properties as metaphor and irony… which are “often held to occur post-semantically,” Borg 18, once the literal meaning is settled. So, to look at the meaning of a sentence formally is to view its words through their formal properties as we view their phonetic features and their syntactic or logical combination into a sentence. Thus, meaning is not affected by context.