Philosophy of language

At the outset an addition to the requirements of a formal system
Interfaces to other Formal Systems
This in particular means that Formal Systems cater to the needs of non specialists in one area to have a reasonable understanding of another. The system enables mapping of domain specific terms and so on.

With the usual caveats we take a look at Philosophy of language. This is more an attempt at structuring available information and if it interests you further please take a look at umpteen sources. My recommendations for a beginning would be
1. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2.1 An organised body of knowledge
Philosophers have relied on others like linguists , grammarians and lately the so called cognitive scientists for organising the knowledge base. The knowledge base is the set of all past, present and future utterances - written or spoken in all languages. The organisation comes mostly from linguists and grammarians ( the latter are sometimes considered as linguists).
An example of how other sources of knowledge are also used.
"Scientists also made advances in describing cognitive functions like speech production and comprehension as natural phenomena, including the discovery of Broca's area and Wernicke's area, two neural centers of linguistic activity, in the 1860s and 70s. "
Lately linguists also use Corpora or a body of selected writings or speech for study and analysis. We also bear in mind that Philosophy traditionally has been more in the nature of an enquiry into areas not amenable to empirical verification and at the largest level of abstraction bordering on speculation, generally using or refining knowledge gained by other specialists to further the enquiry. Some of the early philosophers (and some even in this century )were men of many parts and a simple categorization would not be appropriate.

2.2 Domain specific terms and semantics
denotation:-
Object that a word refers to.e.g The word 'crow' refers to the bird crow.

connotation:-
Other objects or feelings/thought that a word evokes. 'crow ' evokes an eeky feeling and one of unpleasant noise as in crowing

Ambiguity:
Same word having distinctly different meanings. Bank can be the bank of America or the bank of Nile (river). Also referred to as polysemy.

vagueness:
Loosely there is no polysemy but the same word used for distinct members of same general category(or in my opinion underspecification). For example horse can be 'mare' (female horse) or stallion (male horse). Another example flying in the literature 'bald' .How many hairs counts for bald?

context:
"A context is a location--time, place, and possible world--where a sentence is said. It has countless features, determined by the character of the location"-Lewis

Referential Theories of Meaning:
A word denotes something by standing for it . nouns-objects.verbs-acts. The word 'crow' stands for the bird crow. 'play' denotes an act of playing.

Logical Positivists:
View language as meaningful only if it is logical. Any thing that cannot be expressed in logic to them was meaningless. They concluded that logical proofs were true in virtue of internal relations among their propositions, not by virtue of any actual facts about the world.

sense/intension:
One aspect of semantics the other being reference. Crudely one of a potential set of meanings.

reference/extension:
One aspect of semantics the other being sense. The same as denotation once sense is fixed.

singular definite descriptions:
Complex expressions that purport to single out a particular referent by description, for example, "the President of the USA," "the tallest person in this room right now."

Syntax:
The rules and structures governing the recombination of words and phrases into sentences.

Tarski's Theory of Truth:
expresses truth in terms of syntax and set theory.

Tarski's Theory of Truth:Object language:
Language that is target for analysis.

Tarski's Theory of Truth:Meta language :
is the language that we use to study object language.

Tarski's Theory of Truth:
"A sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects and false otherwise."

Empirical reductionism:
The view that each sentence or expression could be assigned its own distinctive slice of empirical content from our experience.

Illocutionary intentions:
Those intentions whose success is entirely a matter of getting a hearer's recognition of the actual intention itself are called illocutionary intentions. In discourse theory.

Perlocutionary intention:
those intentions whose success is entirely a matter of getting the hearer to do something (above and beyond understanding the semantic content of what is said) are called perlocutionary intention. In discourse theory.

Conventional implicatures:
are those assigned to utterances based on the conventional meanings of the words used, though not in the ways familiar from ordinary logical entailments. For instance: 'Alice is a Britney spears fan, but she doesn't stay in the U.S.' implies the idea that fans should stay in the U.S. in view of the word 'but' .

2.3 Procedures for working with/on knowledge:
Formal logic, First order logic, modal logic are the standard tools for semantics and reasoning. More of this in next post on 'Analytical Philosophy'.

2.4 A set of needs the system addresses:
These are all on the basis of a little thought as to potential users and their needs. Available only here.
potential customers and needs
1.All Formal communication speakers/writers
a.constitutional and legal domain. constitution in written form is a formal communication as are all laws.need-no ambiguity. no underspecification. context identified.
b.All corporate systems,policies,and other communications. Needs as in a.
c.Individuals needing to communicate. Needs as in a.
d.All situations needing the use of FormalSytems
sports,institutions,standards..

2.5 A set of goals the system aims to meet:
Some questions may or may not be there in other places.
what is the nature and use of language?
Is brevity or verbosity the charachteristic of languages?
Is language the "medium of conceptualization" ?
what is word meaning?
Does meaning depend on use?
Do words stand for sets of sense impressions.?
What is the sentence meaning?
Is language adequate to represent all conceptualizations, feelings and everything in the mind?
What is the relation of word and sentence meaning?
What are necessary and sufficient conditions for meaning?
should connotation be or denotation be considered the word meaning?
how is language used ?
for what purposes is language used?
If connotation is also included in word/sentence meaning how many interpretations and correct one?
What are the benefits , if any of connotation included meaning , in formal Systems e.g context packed-forest representation?
translatability of one utterance to another?
what presuppositions exist in conversations?
...

2.6 Limitations of the system
referential Theories of Meaning:
fail to explain the possibility of non-referring terms and negative existential sentences.
All existing theories of meaning use Formal Logic for semantics and implicitly remove connotative meaning. More of this in next post 'Analytical Philosophy'

2.7 Interfaces to Other Formal Systems
As of now it appears informal with philosophers participating in other endeavours and the other way round.

Remarks:
1.The role of domain information in Word Sense Disambiguation is known to natural language processing community. Context as given above enables a generalisation. Perhaps one could view disambiguation as locating the word in context space of which domain is one dimension.

2. Vagueness or Underspecification as I would prefer to call it seems to pervade all phrase categories or the whole language itself ( Any given language - We are referring to natural languages ) But this so called vagueness doesn't seem to bother most people. As I said before 'bald' as an example of vague word is quite frequent in philosophers discussions. But I am yet to hear such a complaint or characterization in common discourse.

3. The semantics as developed till now in the philosophical literature appears to be based on the denotative meaning only. If natural language processing by computers is a goal this restricts the domain of application.