Meaning in English
English uses the verb to mean to refer to a relationship involving at least one of three different types of thing: language, the world (including people, objects, and everything outside of ourselves) and our own minds or intentions. Here are five typical examples of mean in English which exemplify some of these relationships:
Sentence (5) distinguishes two possible places that the speaker could have been referring to by the name ‘Dublin’, and specifies that only one of them was intended. This, then, is a three-way relation between a piece of language, a mind and the world: the world is represented by the two places called Dublin, language by the sentence ‘Dublin has lots of attractions’, and mind by the speaker’s intention to refer to Dublin, Ireland. The second sentence is a relation between language and world, without any specific reference to people’s intentions. It says that the expression ‘the bridge’ refers to one particular structure – the Sydney Harbour Bridge – rather than any of the other bridges in Sydney. Even though it is obviously only through the action of speakers’ minds that bridge has this reference, there is no explicit mention of speakers’ minds in (6). In (7), there is no explicit reference to either people’s minds or to the world: the sentence reports an equivalence between two linguistic items, the word ‘stout’, according to (7), is simply equivalent in some way to the words ‘short and fat’. Sentence (8) refers to a mind–world relation: it is thus like sentence (5), except that there is no language: the speaker denies that the action of turning the music off was the result of any intention for the guests to leave.
Sentence (9) names a world–world relationship: the presence of one type of object in the world (trees) reveals the presence of another (water).
The fact that the same verb is used in English for these non-linguistic situations as well as the linguistic ones is noteworthy if we consider the discussion in 1.1. Thus, while sentences (5)–(7) refer to linguistic meaning, sentence (8) refers to communicated meaning, and sentence (9) refers to what we have called significance. In sentence (8) (spoken, say, at a party where it has got late and there are only a few guests left), the act of turning off the music could be interpreted as a sign of the end of the party: sentence (8) is a way of saying that the speaker did not intend this. And to say that ‘Trees mean water’ is to say that the presence of trees allows us to conclude that there must be water nearby (compare the examples of significance in the previous section). This is a conclusion we reach simply by virtue of what we know about trees and water, and without there being any communication as such.
In ordinary English, then, we use the same verb to refer both to the meanings expressed by language and to those which are communicated non-linguistically, as well as to those which emerge, without any communication, as a result of the inherent significance of the world and human behaviour. In a number of these situations, the idea of the intention of the communicator seems to be an important part of what is being talked about through the use of the verb mean. But meaning is not the only way in which situations like those in (5)–(6) can be described in English: a number of other possible modes of description are also available. To see this, let’s narrow the discussion down to one particular example of language – a piece which many people would think of as, simply, a mistake. Consider the following situation: Judy and Alastair are having a dinner party, and Alastair has gone out to buy a few extra plates and cups for the guests. Coming home, he says:
For most speakers of English, this would count as a mistake, since ‘cutlery’ refers not to cups and plates, but to knives, forks and spoons. But the fact that this is a mistake in no way diminishes the need for a principled, linguistic account of it: like other branches of linguistics, semantics describes language as it is actually used and the use of a mistake as our example here will allow the relevant issues to emerge particularly clearly.
How then can we describe what is happening in (10)? In context, we can imagine three replies which Judy might make, each of which considers Alastair’s ‘mistake’ from a different point of view:
In (11a) Judy uses the category of meaning to describe Alastair’s language, and says that Alastair did not actually mean ‘cutlery’: what he meant was ‘crockery’. In (11b) she talks about what Alastair ‘says’. Here, she could be described as talking not about language meaning, but language use: she notes that Alastair has used the term cutlery when the term crockery would be expected. In (11c), Judy simply denies what Alastair has said. In so doing, she can be described as applying the categories of truth and falsity to Alastair’s utterance: according to her, it is simply not true that Alastair bought cutlery, a fact which Alastair then admits.
Ordinary English, then, makes available at least three different ways of talking about language: meaning, use and truth. Each of these three categories of ordinary language description highlights a particular aspect of the occurrence. Description in terms of truth places the emphasis on the objective facts of the situation by concentrating on the relation between language and reality: does the language used correspond to the actual state of affairs? Description in terms of use makes no explicit reference to the facts, but limits itself to a consideration of equivalences between the piece of language in question and an assumed norm: Alastair said cutlery when, in the same circumstances, most people would have said crockery. Lastly, description in terms of meaning places the emphasis on the speaker’s intentions: for Judy to say that Alastair meant crockery is, in this context, the equivalent of saying that he intended to say crockery, and to note a discrepancy between this assumed intention and the actual words used.
As we will see in Section 1.6, each of these ordinary language modes of description has its own developed, theoretical analogue.
