An approach to natural-language semantics built upon the ontological framework of situation theory (Barwise and Perry 1983). The theory is built on the notion of situations, which are parts of the world—either concrete or abstract—that the speaker or listener individuates or discriminates. Situation semantics attempts to capture the meaning of an utterance by constructing formal relations between the utterance situation (the situation that the actual utterance is made in), the discourse situation, the wider embedding situation (consisting of elements of the world in which the discourse takes place), and resource situations (for example, situations in another time and place referred to by the utterance).