Chapter 1 outlines the content of the remaining chapters and describes how the data are represented throughout the book.

Chapter 7 discusses affirmation, negation, yes/no (polar) questions, and answers in European and Brazilian Portuguese, paying special attention to the way in which each variety grammatically encodes these locutions in non-neutral contexts.

Chapter 6 discusses the distribution and interpretation of null objects and null possessors in European and Brazilian Portuguese.

Chapter 2 describes the feature composition of personal pronouns in European and Brazilian Portuguese, focusing on their similarities and differences with respect to each grammatical person.

Chapter 8 reviews the major syntactic similarities and differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese discussed in the previous chapters, showing how they are organically articulated.

Chapter 4 examines the distribution and interpretation of null subjects in European and Brazilian Portuguese.

This stage of the journey focuses on concepts as candidates for word meaning. It contains a discussion of several versions of the mentalistic/representational approach to word meaning, also assessing them for candidacy for a general theory of meaning in language that covers words, sentences, utterances, and discourses, pursued in the upcoming stages. It foregrounds the role of context in determining lexical content and the associated ‘food for thought’ questions.

This final brief stage of the journey invites reflection on the various seminal, ground-breaking ideas and approaches introduced in this journey and on how they can be woven into a ‘postively eclectic’ view of what meaning in language is – a unique view that each reader can develop for themselves with the help of this introduction to ideas and to ways of thinking. It also addresses the role of metasemantics and metapragmatics in posing ‘foundational questions’ about meaning. It concludes with a dicussion of the future of meaning, in the context of some ‘big questions’: constraints on processing information imposed by the human brain, the intelligence–consciousness interface, and, generally, how to comprehend the human take on the world – the human way of comprehending it and organizing and conveying information. In short, it puts the theories and approaches discussed in this journey under the net of our human meaning.

Stage 6 of the journey addresses various aspects of how information is conveyed and organized in a sentence, beginning with the stubborn problems that led to the development of dynamic semantics (‘donkey sentences’ and cross-sentential anaphora), through properties of expressions that are used to refer (descriptions, proper names, indexical expressions), to the organization of information (presuppositions and projective content, topic, focus, coherence). As such, it is a step to the next stage that concerns utterance meaning.