Meaning and context
For the purposes of deciding what a piece of language means, no utterance can be considered as a self-standing whole: words only exist within particular contexts, and we will not be able to achieve an adequate description of meaning if we don’t take these contexts into account. Indeed, one of the main questions which any theory of meaning has to answer concerns the scope of an expression’s meaning: how much of the total effect of an expression is to be attributed to its meaning, and how much to the context in which it occurs? For example, consider the meaning of the English possessive morpheme (-s) in (1a) and (1b):
The possessive morpheme expresses two quite different relationships in each sentence: in (1a) it denotes a relationship like that of the verb teach to its object: (1a) means ‘the person who teaches Denise got burnt’. In (1b), on the other hand, it denotes a relation of ownership or possession: Denise’s brioche got burnt means ‘the brioche belonging to Denise got burnt’. But does this difference result from a difference in the meaning of the possessive case, or is it a product of the context in which it is used? To many linguists, it would seem wrong to claim that the English possessive morpheme -s has two different meanings in (1a) and (1b). Instead, these linguists would claim, we should analyse its meaning in abstract terms, as denoting a quite general relation of dependence between two nouns, and leave the details of this relation in a given context to be sup plied through the application of our real-world knowledge about the things being referred to. We know that people’s relationships with teachers are different from their relationships with food. As a result, the possessive case in the context of a word like teacher receives a quite different interpretation from the one it has in the context of a word like brioche, even though the general, abstract meaning of the possessive – marking an (unspecified) dependence between the two nouns – is the same in each case. The fact that the exact details of this general, unspecified meaning may be vague, and in any case are open to various interpretations, does not detract from the intuition that it is the same meaning present in both cases.
In this chapter, we will consider the external or real-world context to which linguistic expressions refer. Our understanding of expressions’ meaning is often closely related to our knowledge of this context. The next chapter discusses the interpersonal context of linguistic action in which any utterance is placed. In order to interpret an expression correctly, it would seem that a hearer must perform a number of related tasks which involve these two different types of context. For example, consider someone interested in learning to play golf, who receives the advice All golfers need to find some good clubs. In order to understand what the speaker means, the hearer must:
1. Disambiguate the noun club, which can mean both ‘implement used to hit golf ball’ and ‘association in charge of a golf course’. Given the context, which interpretation is intended?
2. Assign referents to the noun phrases all golfers and good clubs: who does the speaker mean by golfers? What, for them, is a good club?
3. Determine the quantity referred to by some: roughly how many clubs does the speaker count as some, as opposed to lots?
4. Realize that the expression is intended as part of the context of advice, and is an instruction to find good clubs, not an assertion about a universal obligation falling on all golfers: this realization concerns the illocutionary force of the utterance.
5. As a result of (4), extract the implication that since all golfers need to find some good clubs, the hearer must also try to find some.
QUESTION Is there anything else which the hearer must realize in order to interpret the statement properly? How separate are the tasks in (1)–(5)?
In cases like this, the hearer makes the important interpretative decisions quite automatically. In fact, it is rather artificial even to differentiate the five different elements above: all that is required, you might think, is for the hearer to realize how, holistically, to take the instruction. Nevertheless, each item of the list expresses aspects of utterance interpretation which can be observed separately. The question of the interrelations between these different types of interpretative task will be important throughout this and the next chapter.
QUESTION Describe the decisions the hearer has to make about the interpretation of the following utterances in order to understand the speaker’s likely meaning:
Semantics is not the only fi eld interested in phenomena like these: the subdiscipline of linguistics called pragmatics (Greek praxis, ‘action’), which concerns the use of language in real contexts, also studies them. Semantics and pragmatics are closely related. Pragmatics cannot study language use without a prior conception of meaning: without knowing what words mean, one cannot decide how speakers modify and manipulate these meanings in actual situations of language use. Similarly, semantics cannot arrive at any description of what words mean without looking at the ways they are used in different contexts. This interrelation between meaning and use means that pragmatics and semantics exist in a close symbiosis.
