For instance, the English word "warm" denotes the property of having high temperature.
The main task of formal semantics is to reverse engineer the computational system which assigns denotations to expressions of natural languages.
Depending on one's particular theory of semantics, denotations may be identified either with terms' extensions, intensions, or other structures such as context change potentials.
[2][3][4][5] When uttered in discourse, expressions may convey other associations which are not computed by the grammar and thus are not part of its denotation.
[6] Philosophers Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell have also made influential contributions to this subject.
[9] According to this theory, the speaker's action of identifying a person, place, or thing is called referring.