This paper characterizes key semantics issues in shaping cognitive radio behavior to realize social contracts and business logic via cognitive radio behavioral semantics, with an immediate need for IEEE P1900.5 policy languages. The paper shows the current lack of consensus on the scope and needs of policy languages, tracing roots to differences among regulatory, financial, business, and technical domains. Cognitive linguistics, an emerging theory of human language acquisition and use shows why this is the case and may assist in formulating a semantic signal processing language (SSPL) that addresses the diverse needs of the regulators, network operators, and software developers for cognitive radio. This investigation underscores shortfalls of ontology alone in expressing behavioral semantics needed for cognitive radio to evolve from dynamic spectrum to self-aware, user-aware policy-astute distributed agent behaviors.