Levels of meaning
The distinction between word meaning and sentence meaning, then, defines a basic contrast between lexical and phrasal semantics. Another important contrast is the one between sentence meaning as just described and utterance meaning. We can defi ne sentence meaning as the compositional meaning of the sentence as constructed out of the meanings of its individual component lexemes. But the meaning of a sentence as built up out of its component parts is often quite different from the meaning it actually has in a particular context. In everyday talk we regularly use words and expressions ironically, metaphorically, insincerely, and in other ‘non-literal’ ways. Whether there is any principled theoretical difference between these non-literal ways of talking and the literal ones, and, if so, what it is, is an important question which we will discuss in Chapter 7; for the moment, we can simply recognize that there are many uses in which words seem to acquire a strongly different meaning from the one they normally have. Suppose that while cooking Peter has just spilled a large quantity of spaghetti carbonara all over the kitchen floor. Hearing the commotion, Brenda comes into the kitchen, sees what has happened, and utters (33)
It is clear that Brenda doesn’t literally mean that Peter is a tidy cook, but that she is speaking ironically. What she actually means is the opposite of (33): Brenda is drawing attention to the fact that Peter has precisely not been a tidy cook. In cases like this, we say that there is a difference between sentence meaning and utterance meaning. The sentence meaning of (33) is the literal, compositional meaning as built up from the meanings of the individual words of the sentence. If we did not speak English, we could discover the sentence meaning of (33) by finding out what its translation was in our own language. The utterance meaning, by contrast, is the meaning which the words have on a particular occasion of use in the particular context in which they occur. (Utterance meaning is sometimes referred to in other books as speaker meaning. But since the role of the hearer is just as important as that of the speaker, the more neutral term utterance meaning is preferred here.) The utterance meaning is the one which is picked up in the conversation. In reply to (33), Peter might well say (34):
But if Brenda’s comment in (33) was meant literally, the reply in (34) would be very strange: people do not usually have to apologise for being tidy. What (34) shows is that it is the utterance meaning, not the sentence meaning of (33) to which Peter is reacting: given the situation, Brenda is clearly not congratulating him on his tidiness as a cook, and it is the utterance meaning which forms the basis for the continuation of the conversation.
The distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning is also linked to the difference between semantics and pragmatics. For those linguists who accept such a division, semantics is taken to study sentence meaning, whereas pragmatics studies utterance meaning and other principles of language use. The job of semantics is to study the basic, literal meanings of words as considered principally as parts of a language system, whereas pragmatics concentrates on the ways in which these basic meanings are used in practice, including such topics as the ways in which different expressions are assigned referents in different contexts, and the differing (ironic, metaphorical, etc.) uses to which language is put. As we have already seen, a division between semantics and pragmatics is by no means universally accepted in linguistics. Many ‘pragmatic’ topics are of central importance to the study of meaning, and in this book we will not recognize any absolute distinction between the two domains.
