Social interactions pervade every aspect of our lives and, thus, understanding their underlying cognitive mechanisms and brain basis is a major aim for cognitive neuroscience. Historically, the dominant approach within the social neuroscience sub-field has been to identify discrete systems that are tuned for processing information of a social nature. Recently, there has been growing interest in whether understanding the role of more general cognitive mechanisms can open up new perspectives and research questions in social neuroscientific research. This thesis adopts one such generalist approach and seeks to evaluate whether studying social cognition from a general semantics perspective can provide clues about its neurocognitive bases. In this view, social cognition is underpinned by (i) a system that represents conceptual knowledge and (ii) a control system that enables the task-appropriate use of this knowledge. Accordingly, the current work investigates the contribution of these two systems to social information processing. Chapter 2 synthesises evidence in favour of the proposal that social semantic content, or socialness, makes unique contributions to conceptual representation, and highlights methodological issues, including the heterogeneity and inconsistency of the definitions used to quantify this construct. To address this limitation, Chapter 3 employs a novel and inclusive definition to collect the largest set of socialness ratings available to date, encompassing norms for over 8,000 individual concepts. Using these norms, the relationship between socialness and (i) other established semantic dimensions and (ii) behavioural indices of lexical-semantic processing are assessed. The results support the proposal that socialness is a distinct and behaviourally-relevant aspect of conceptual representation. Chapter 4 reports a set of meta-analyses of functional neuroimaging data spanning 499 experiments and over 12,000 participants. It directly tests the prediction that social and semantic cognition rely on shared neural correlates, focusing on the semantic control network. The results show that a diverse range of social tasks, probing either mental state inference, trait inference, empathy or moral reasoning, reliably recruit brain regions that are sensitive to increased semantic control demands, and particularly the left inferior frontal gyrus. These findings are consistent with the proposal that social cognition is regulated, at least in part, by mechanisms for the controlled retrieval and selection of task-appropriate conceptual knowledge. Chapter 5 explores the functional organisation of the left inferior frontal gyrus by means of a large-scale bimodal and data-driven analysis of its functional connectivity patterns. The results are indicative of gradual variation in function across two principal spatial dimensions, and suggest that this region makes dissociable contributions to both social and non-social tasks, by virtue of differential affiliations with distinct large-scale functional networks. Our findings further suggest that the left inferior frontal gyrus acts as an interface between domain-general control and semantic systems, and this might make it ideally suited for implementing control processes on conceptual representations. In summary, this body of work provides novel insights into the neurocognitive basis of social cognition, demonstrating the utility of studying social information processing through a general semantics lens.