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The shift in focus yields a kind of turn which can be labelled 'pragmatic'4 (understanding the term as a referring to giving pride of place to the practical5): the turn from studying language as a system of signifiers associated with their respective signifieds to studying it as a tool for interaction.
Two senses of 'semantics' I think that it is of crucial importance to point out immediately that the term semantics is used to cover what are in fact two different enterprises, only one of which is directly relevant for linguistics and philosophy.
The term covers themes pertaining to two essentially distinct realms: the realm of language and the realm of the links between language and things in the world.
This move instantiated an undesirable ambiguity of the term meaning - we should now rather speak about meaningL, which is, in accordance with common sense, a matter of language alone, and about meaningW which is, in accordance with Frege, a matter of relating words to things5.
A question of the form 'What is an F?' can be answered only by recourse to a further term: 'An F is a G.'
An expression does have an inherent structure in that it consists of words and letters but this is not the structure held in mind by those who use the term structure to make sense of semantics.
Notes 1. A less ambiguous way to call this approach would be to use the term nomenclatural, employed by Peregrin (forthcoming b), but here we want to stress the roots of this approach, which are connected with understanding language as arising out of a process of semiosis.
Whereas a singular term purports to name an entity, abstract or concrete, a general term does not; but a general term is true of an entity, or of each of many, or of none.
The class of all entities of which a general term is true is called the extension of the term.
Now paralleling the contrast between the meaning of a singular term and the entity named, we must distinguish equally between the meaning of a general term and its extension.