The heterogeneity of procedural meaning

• Substantive (content) words do not encode a concept as their standing meaning.
• Diagnostics for distinguishing procedural from conceptual meaning are explored.
• Procedural encoding has become a very heterogeneous category.
• Broadly construed, procedural encoding activates cognitive structures/processes.
• Different categories of procedural meaning have to be distinguished.

The distinction in relevance theory between two kinds of encoded meaning, conceptual and procedural, has evolved so that more and more components of encoded meaning, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are now taken to be procedural (non-conceptual). I trace these developments and assess the extent to which these diverse elements share properties that distinguish them from concept-expressing words. While the notion of procedural encoding has lost some of its original distinctiveness, it may make sense to think of all encoded meaning as procedural (including the meaning of concept-expressing words), but this necessitates the drawing of new clarifying distinctions among kinds of procedural meaning.