Abstract

Foundational theories of meaning, and the broader metasemantic projects they contribute to, promise to answer that seemingly simple yet intractable question of what meaning consists in and where it comes from. Naturally, they build upon expressions that we already know and recognize to develop their positions. This focus on language as we know it, however, leaves aside the no less significant matter of language in terms of possible expressions - the strange and distant expanses of language beyond our everyday stock of expressions. This work sets out to explore possibility in the context of the meaning of simple expressions. In the process, words, phrases, and sentences are thoroughly explicated as types of expressions before being leveraged to engineer unique and unusual possible words. These exotic possibilities are then confronted with two major positions on meaning in philosophy, introducing novel difficulties and suggesting the significance of this otherwise neglected perspective on language.