WHEN LINGUISTS examine the languageprocessing activities of scholars who prefer to call themselves "humanists," the chief product they find is almost inevitably a concordance, that is, an alphabetized list of character strings, merely the outside of language. From the linguists' point of view, the interior is separated from those character strings by what they call duality of patterning. But it is in the interior that the theoretically rich and intellectually satisfying problems, for both humanists and linguists, are to be found. Computational linguistics has plunged into the interior. Syntax lies there, and has been explored rather thoroughly. The key to the next door is semantics, but if that key is to work we must know in advance something of the treasure some fundamental theoretical problems in les sciences de l'homme that lies behind the door. We start with a consideration of the nature of computational linguistics followed by a consideration of how to formulate problems in the analysis of literary texts so that the techniques can be fruitfully employed. After that can come a review of current work in semantics and discourse analysis and in speech understanding. In conclusion a brief sketch can show how that work might be used in starting a long-term Shakespeare project.