But here's the rub; if I intend one thing by a word I have spoken or written, but someone else ether 'receives' no meaning, a different meaning or a multitude of meanings; then communication is not taking place. Take the word 'interpretation', since it is relevant, one person might intend 'disambiguation.' whilst another might intend substitution of : 'the real meaning' , the original (etymological) meaning or just their own idiosyncratic meaning. Whilst one might think this area would form a fundamental part of linguistics, my reading of popular books on the subject finds a frustrating lack of content.
Most books on linguistics tend to concentrate on logical semantics of sentence structure. The area that you're looking at is the pragmatics of meaning generation, which seeks to answer the question "how is communication even possible?" Much of this has historically fallen into philosophy rather than linguistics, primarily in "ordinary language philosophy" and hermeneutics. Some examples that I found useful: John Austin, "How to Do Things With Words", 1962. Paul Grice, "Studies in the Way of Words", 1989 W. Hollway, "Subjectivity and Method in Psychology", 1989 John Searle, "Speech Acts", 1969. Hope this helps, -- Lev Lafayette, mobile: 61 432 255 208 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt