This work investigates the fundamental boundary between semantics and pragmatics, questioning how linguistic meaning is divided between conventional code and contextual inference. Zoltán Gendler Szabó, a prominent philosopher of language, synthesizes decades of debate regarding the division of labor between literal sentence meaning and speaker-intended meaning. He evaluates various theoretical frameworks, including Gricean pragmatics and truth-conditional semantics, to determine where the lexicon ends and the context begins.

Experts recognize this text as a rigorous contribution to the philosophy of language, often utilized in graduate-level seminars. Readers frequently note the high level of technical density, requiring a strong background in formal logic and linguistic theory to fully grasp the arguments.