Semantics is the study of meaning. More specifically, semantics is concerned with the systematic assignment of meanings to the simple and complex expressions of a language. The best way to understand the field of semantics is to appreciate its development through the twentieth century. In what follows, that development is described. As will be seen, advances in semantics have been intimately tied to developments in logic and philosophical logic.

Though there were certainly important theories, or proto-theories, of the meanings of linguistics expressions prior to the seminal work of the mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, in explaining what semantics is it is reasonable to begin with Frege's mature work. For Frege's work so altered the way language, meaning and logic are thought about that it is only a slight exaggeration to say that work prior to Frege has been rendered more or less irrelevant to how these things...