English 421
Semantics and Pragmatics
Session Two Notes
Goals/Objectives:
1) To examine an example that illustrates the difference betwen semantics and pragmatics
2) To gain an understanding of some of the key terminology used in the study of semantics and pragmatics
Questions/Main Ideas
(Please write these down as
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you think of them)
English, like all other languages, enables people who know the language to convey meanings
Semantics and Pragmatics are the two main branches of the linguistic study of meaning
Semantics can be thought of as the “toolkit” for meaning knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of
the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence
meanings
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Pragmatics is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful communication
It is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into
account contexts of use
Here’s an illustration of the difference between semantics and pragmatics:
Ex. 1: “Hold out your arm. That’s it.”
What information is encoded in this illustration?
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Language is for communicating about the world outside of language
English expressions like arm and your arm and hold out are linked to things, activities and so on
A general-purpose technical term that is used frequently in linguistics is denote
It labels the connections between meaningful items of language and aspects of the world – real or
imagined – that language users talk and write about
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hold out your arm denotes a situation that the speaker wants
hold out denotes an action
arm denotes a part of a person
your arm denotes ‘the arm of the person being spoken to’ etc.
An expression is any meaningful language unit or sequence of meaningful units, from a sentence
down: a clause, a phrase, a word, or meaningful part of a word (morpheme)
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That’s it at the end of Ex. 1 is an expression which can mean “OK (that is correct)” or “There is no
more to say.”
But that and it both denote something separately
That denotes something that is obvious to whomever is being addressed – perhaps the act of holding
out an arm
Or that could denote the arm itself
Or some other thing seen or heard in the surroundings
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The word it usually denotes something that has recently been spoken about: the arm or the act of
holding it out, for example
Without knowing the context in which Ex. 1 occurred, its meaning cannot confidently be explained
more than this
In other words, denotation has its limits
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This quotation, in fact, is from the first Harry Potter book
It is spoken to Harry by Mr. Ollivander, a supplier of fine wands
In the book it comes just after Mr. Ollivander, taking out a tape measure, has asked Harry, “Which
is your wand arm?”
The contextual information makes it pretty certain that your arm denotes Harry’s wand arm
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So Harry guesses Mr. Ollivander wants him to raise his right arm, since he is right-handed
Mr. Ollivander then begins to measure Harry for a wand
This makes it easy in reading the story to understand that Harry complied with the request to hold
out his right arm and “That’s it” was said to acknowledge that Harry had done what Mr. O had
wanted
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This acknowledgement can be unpacked as follows:
That denotes Harry’s act done in response to the request – an obvious, visible movement of his arm
– enabling Mr. O to use the measuring tape on Harry’s arm
it denotes the previous specification of what Harry was asked to do, the act of holding out his arm
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Pragmatics, then, can be seen as being concerned with choices among semantic possibilities, and
how language users, taking account of context and using their general knowledge, build
interpretations on the semantic foundation
Let’s take another look at the semantic information and pragmatic considerations in the
interpretation of this fairly simple example
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Semantics:
Arm – “upper limb” or “horizontal side bar on some type of chair”
Pragmatics:
Mr. O’s earlier question was about wand weilding, so arm is most likely “upper limb”
Semantics:
Your arm – “left upper limb” or “right upper limb”
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Pragmatics:
Preferred hand is probably the one for wands and Harry is right-handed
Semantics:
Hold out – “extend” or “refuse to capitulate”
Pragmatics:
Mr. O has a tape measure out and measuring Harry’s arm will require access to his arm, so Mr. O
wants him to extend his right upper limb
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Semantics:
that – denotes something obvious in the situation
Pragmatics:
If Harry has just complied and moved his arm outwards, that would be a noticeable event, so the
word probably denotes that act
Semantics:
It – “equates to” – usually denotes something previously mentioned
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Pragmatics:
It would fit the context if Mr. O now means that Harry’s act with his right arm is what was wanted,
so the word it probably recalls the previous specification; and Mr. O is acknowledging Harry’s
compliance
This view of thinking about communication that was introduced by the philosopher H. P. Grice in
the 1960s and 1970s and is now widely accepted in the study of pragmatics
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According to this view, human communication with language is not like pressing buttons on a
remote control and thereby affecting circuits in a TV set
Instead, it requires active collaboration on the part of any person the message is directed to:
The addressee, either a reader (like in our example) or a listener, like Harry listening to Mr. O
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The addressee has the task of trying to guess what the sender (the writer or the speaker) intends to
convey
As soon as the sender’s intention has been recognized, that’s it – the message has been
communicated
The sender’s task is to judge what needs to be written or said to enable the addressee to recognize
what the sender wants to communicate
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Some consequences of this:
There are different ways of communicating the same message (and the same string of words can
convey different messages) because it depends on what, in the context at the time, will enable the
addressee to recognize the sender’s intention.
The active participation of the addressee sometimes allows a lot to be communicated with just a
little having been said or written
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Mistakes are possible. In face-to-face interactions the speaker can monitor the listener’s (or
listeners’) reactions – whether these are grins or scowls, or spoken responses, or actions like Harry
obediently holding out his proper wand arm – to judge whether or not the sending intention has been
correctly guessed, and can then say more to cancel misunderstandings and further guide the
addressee towards what is intended
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Competent users of a language generally employ such knowledge without giving thought to the
details of what is going on
Semantics and pragmatics, then, try to bring to consciousness knowledge and skills that are most of
the time deployed automatically
Utterances are the raw data of linguistics
Each utterance is held to be unique, having been produced by a particular sender in a specific
situation
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Linguists use the term ‘utterance’ to cover not only spoken utterances but also individual stretches
of written language up to the sentence level, done by a particular person at a particular time
Because they are tied to a sender and a time, utterances can never be repeated
Ex. 2: “Not so loud.”
Can you think of (at least) two instances where you might want to use this utterance?
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Because the two instances differ in time or were not made by the same person, etc., they are
considered to be different utterances
Even when someone is held to have said or written “the same thing twice,” as in the case of people
who “repeat themselves” or someone who repeats what someone else has said, there is going to be
more than one utterance constituting the repetition
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The abstract linguistic object on which an utterance is based is a sentence
Thus, we can talk of repetition when two or more utterances are based on the same sentence
The essential difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract and are not
tied to contexts, whereas utterances are identified by their context
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This can also be seen as the main way of distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics
If you are dealing with the meaning and there is no context to consider, then you are doing
semantics
But if there is a context to be brought into consideration, then you are engaged in pragmatics
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Another way to think of it:
Semantics is the study of word meaning and sentence meaning
Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning
The interpretation of a linguistic example can further be discussed in terms of three distinguishable
stages
The first stage is a semantic one
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The literal meaning
The literal meaning of a sentence is based on just the semantic information that you have from your
knowledge of English
In other words, it is the information that is available without wondering who might say or write the
words, or when or where they were said
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An explicature is a basic interpretation of an utterance, using contextual information and world
knowledge to work out what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous
expressions
In working out an implicature, we go further and ask what is hinted at by an utterance in its
particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is, about the relationships between the interlocutors,
etc.
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Each stage is built on the previous one
Thus, we need to understand each of the three levels:
The literal meaning – the semantics of words, phrases, and sentences in the abstract
Explicature – the pragmatics of reference and disambiguation
Implicature – the pragmatics of hints and relationships
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Sender’s meaning is the meaning that the speaker or writer intended to convey by means of an
utterance
Sender’s meaning is something that addressees are continually having to make informed guesses
about
Addressees can give indications, in their own next utterance, of their interpretation (or by
performing other actions, like Harry extending his arm)
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Sender’s meanings are the communicative goals of senders and the interpretational targets for
addressees
Sender’s thoughts are private, but utterances are publically observable
Typed or written utterances can be studied on paper or on the screens of digital devices
Spoken utterances can be recorded and played back
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Other people who were present when an utterance was produced can be asked what they heard or
saw being written
We cannot be sure that sender meaning always coincides with addressee interpretations, so there is a
dilemma over what to regard as the meaning of an utterance
Is it the sender meaning or the interpretation that is made from the utterance, in context, by the
addressee?
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We cannot know exactly what either of these is
However, as language users, we gain experience as both senders and addressees and develop
intuitions about the meaning an utterance is likely to carry in a given context
So utterance meaning is a necessary fiction that linguists doing semantics and pragmatics have to
work with
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It is the meaning – explicature and implicature – that an utterance would likely be understood as
conveying when interpreted by people who know the language, are aware of the context, and have
whatever background knowledge the sender could reasonably presume to be available to the
addressee(s)
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Ordinary language users have readily accessible intuitions about sentences
Among other items of information that people proficient in English can easily come to realize on the
basis of their knowledge of the language is that many sentences have two (or more) meanings
In other words, many utterances have ambiguous meaning
Ex. 3: He is a conductor
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Interestingly, ordinary language users’ access to the meaning of words is less direct
The meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the meanings sentences in which it appears
Of course, people know the meanings of words in their language in the sense that they know how to
use the words, but this knowledge is not immediately available in the form of reliable intuitions
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Ask non-linguists whether finish means the same as stop and they might well answer “yes”
They would be at least partly wrong
Ex. 4a: Mavis stopped writing the assignment yesterday, but she hasn’t finished writing it yet
Ex. 4b: *Mavis finished writing the assignment yesterday, but she hasn’t stopped writing it yet
(notice the *)
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Expressions – sentences, words, and so forth – in a language are said to denote aspects of the world
The denotation of an expression is whatever it denotes
For many words, the denotation is a big class of things
The noun arm denotes all the upper limbs there are on the world’s people, monkeys, and apes
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If expressions did not have denotations, languages would hardly be of much use
It is the fact that they allow us to communicate about the world that makes them (almost)
indispensible
Because languages have useful links to the world, there is a temptation to think that the meaning of
a word (or other kind of expression) simply is its denotation
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You would stand a good chance, for example, of elucidating the meaning to someone who did not
know the body part meaning of arm by saying the word each time you point to that person’s arms,
one at a time, and wave one of your own arms then the other
In early childhood our first words are probably learned by such a process of live demonstration and
pointing, known as ostension
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It is not plausible as a general approach to meaning, however, because:
It ignores the fact that after early childhood we usually use language, not ostension, to explain the
meanings of words
When people really do resort to ostension for explaining meanings, their accompanying utterances
may be carrying a lot of the burden (“chartreuse is this color” while pointing)
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There are all kinds of abstract, dubiously existent, and relational denotations that cannot
conveniently be shown (memory, absence, sasquatch, that instead of that)
There are two general ways to overcome this problem
Formal semantics uses systems of formal logic to set out descriptions of meaning and theories of
how the meanings of different sorts of expressions are constructed from the meanings of smaller
expressions
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Thus, count nouns, like tree, may be said to denote sets of things
Property words, like purple, also denote sets (sets of things that have the property in question)
Singular names denote individuals
Mass nouns, like honey, denote substances
Spatial relation words, like in, denote pairs of things that have the spatial relation between them
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In the other approach, the central concept is sense – those aspects of the meaning of an expression
that give it the denotation is has
Differences in sense therefore make for differences in denotation
That is why the term sense is used of clearly distinct meanings that an expression has
(the different senses of “conductor” for example)
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Some linguists have tried to state “recipes” for the denotations of words
One way of doing it is in terms of sense relations, which are semantic relationships between the
senses of expressions
Ex. 5a: an arm is a limb
Ex. 5b: an arm is an upper limb
Ex. 5c: a leg is a limb
Ex. 5d: a leg is a lower limb
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This harmonizes well with the fact that we often resort to using language to explain language
meaning
Reference is what speakers or writers do when they use expressions to pick out for their audience
particular people (“my sister”) or things (“the flagpole”) or times (“2013”) or places (“the Doré”) or
events (“her birthday party”) or ideas (“the plan we were told about”)
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The examples in brackets are known as referring expressions
The relevant entities outside of language are called the referents of the referring expressions
Reference is a pragmatic act performed by senders and interpreted at the explicature stage
Reference has to be done and interpreted with regard to context
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Deictic expressions are words, phrases and features of grammar that have to be interpreted in
relation to the situation in which they are uttered, such as me (the sender of the message) or here
(the place where the sender is)
Deixis is pervasive in languages, probably because, in indicating “when,” “where,” “who,” “what,”
and so on, it is very useful to start with the coordinates of the situation of utterance
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Our semantic knowledge of the meaning of deictic expressions guides us on how, pragmatically, to
interpret them in context
As always in pragmatics, the interpretations will be guesses rather than certainties
Summary/Minute Paper: