Sinn und Bedeutung is an annual international conference that welcomes contributions from any subdiscipline investigating natural language meaning. It brings together perspectives from semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and related fields, with the shared aim of informing formal theories of natural language meaning.
The conference was established as the annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik. Its first edition took place in Tübingen in 1996 and was initiated by Arnim von Stechow and Sebastian Löbner. It grew out of an effort to strengthen scientific exchange among researchers in semantics and to provide the field with a shared forum for presenting and discussing new work.
Originally intended to connect the semantics community in Germany, Sinn und Bedeutung soon developed into a major European conference. In 2000, it was held outside Germany for the first time, in Amsterdam. Since then, the conference has been hosted annually by universities and research institutions across Europe.
The aim of Sinn und Bedeutung is to make new research visible, encourage dialogue between different theoretical approaches, and foster international collaboration. It provides a platform for both established scholars and early-career researchers to present their work, exchange ideas, and develop new perspectives together.
Current edition
Sinn und Bedeutung 31
Nantes University (September 1–4, 2026)