I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system's role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence's semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a detailed compositional-semantic theory based on the influential framework of Heim and Kratzer. This approach situates semantics within an independently motivated account of human cognitive architecture and reveals the semantics–pragmatics interface to be grounded in the underlying interface between modular and central systems.

中文翻译：

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没有语义内容的语义

我认为语义学是对集中不可访问且信息封装的输入输出系统的专有数据库的研究。该系统的作用是对说话者所说的部分和可废止的证据进行编码和解码。由于关于非语言上下文的信息因此超出了语义处理的范围，一个句子的语义价值不是它的内容，而是它可以用来说什么的部分和可废止的限制。我展示了如何基于 Heim 和 Kratzer 的有影响力的框架将这篇论文转化为详细的组合语义理论。这种方法将语义置于对人类认知架构的独立驱动的描述中，并揭示了基于模块化和中央系统之间的底层接口的语义-语用接口。