meaningliteral

Meaningliteral is a term used in linguistics and cognitive science to describe an approach that interprets utterances by their literal semantic content, setting aside nonliteral interpretations such as metaphor, irony, or pragmatic implicature. The name combines “meaning” and “literal,” and the concept has appeared in scholarly discussions since the early 2010s, though its exact usage varies among authors.

In a meaningliteral analysis, a sentence is mapped to a truth-conditional proposition based on the conventional meanings of its words and the syntactic structure, without inferring additional layers of meaning from context, world knowledge, or speaker intent. This emphasizes the explicit, compositional semantics of the utterance. For example, a sentence like “It’s raining cats and dogs” would be treated as a literal claim about cats and dogs, rather than as an idiom for heavy rain, highlighting the framework’s limitations in handling figurative language.

Applications of meaningliteral appear in theoretical semantics, formal modeling, and certain natural language processing tasks where researchers want to isolate literal meaning from pragmatics. It can serve as a baseline or contrastive framework when evaluating systems that attempt to recognize figurative language or contextual nuance.

Critics argue that meaningliteral oversimplifies communication, neglects pragmatics and world knowledge, and can be impractical for real-world language understanding where interpretation relies on context and cultural conventions. See also literal meaning, figurative language, pragmatics, semantics.