the study of meaning in human language — how words, phrases, and sentences map to referents, truth conditions, and intentions
formal approaches (Montague grammar, type-theoretic semantics) reduce natural language to predicate logic. distributional approaches (word2vec, transformers) reduce meaning to position in vector space.
in the cybergraph: meaning is position in focus space. a word's semantics is the set of cyberlinks connecting it to other particles — its neighborhood defines its meaning. synonyms cluster (high mutual $\pi$ flow), antonyms repel (low connectivity). polysemy resolves by springs detecting tension when neighborhoods pull in incompatible directions.
the cybergraph unifies both traditions: formal structure from the link topology, distributional meaning from focus proximity.