Semantic content and utterance context: a spectrum of approaches

Fisher, Sarah A. and Borg, Emma 2021. Semantic content and utterance context: a spectrum of approaches. Stalmaszczyk, Piotr, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of the Philosophy of Language, Vol. 2. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, pp. 174-193. (10.1017/9781108698283.010)

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Abstract

Of course, someone who points at a cow and says “That is a horse” might still, in some contexts, be judged to have made a perfectly acceptable contribution to the conversation, for instance, if they were making a joke, or using the term horse metaphorically or ironically. Yet this doesn’t seem to entail that the English word horse must literally mean something like ‘horse-or-cow’; rather, what it shows is that sometimes we use bits of language to convey things other than their literal meaning. It seems that we, as ordinary speakers, are sensitive to a difference between standing meaning and what we might call conveyed or communicated meaning. In philosophy of language, this has come to be understood as a difference between “semantic” meaning on the one hand, which picks out something like literal meaning, and “pragmatic” meaning on the other, which focuses on communicated, contextually derived meaning.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
ISBN:	9781108698283
Last Modified:	10 Dec 2024 16:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/172178

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