meaningincluding

Meaningincluding is a neologism used in linguistic and philosophical discussions to denote the idea that the semantic content associated with a linguistic unit includes, or is enriched by, additional related meanings beyond its core proposition. The term is formed by combining meaning and including to emphasize the inclusion of surrounding semantic material such as implicatures, presuppositions, idiomatic readings, or contextual enrichments. It is not part of standard semantics but appears in informal discourse and some preprints as a way to discuss how meaning can expand with context.

In practice, meaningincluding serves as a heuristic rather than a fixed formal operator. Some theorists imagine a meaningincluding operator M applied to a proposition p, yielding M(p) = p plus auxiliary content c arising from pragmatics, culture, and discourse context. There is no universally accepted formalization, and the concept is used to highlight that utterances do not have a single fixed meaning.

Examples help illustrate the idea. The sentence "It's raining" has the literal content that it is raining, but in many contexts it meaningincludes a presupposition that the speaker expects a discussion about weather or plans affected by rain, and a pragmatic invitation to respond. The idiom "kick the bucket" meaningincludes the figurative reading of dying rather than the literal act of kicking a bucket.

Relation to other notions: meaningincluding intersects with implicature, presupposition, entailment, and context-dependence. Critics argue that inventing new terms can obscure rather than clarify, and that existing frameworks already account for meaning enrichment without introducing new operators.

See also: semantics, pragmatics, implicature, presupposition, context-dependence.