Language and Meaning

Betty Birner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351374040
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Sémantique linguistique

Language and Meaning provides a clear, accessible and unique perspective on the philosophical and linguistic question of what it means to mean. Looking at relationships such as those between literal and non-literal meanings, linguistic form and meaning, and language and thought, this volume tackles the issues involved in what we mean and how we convey it. Divided into five easy-to-read chapters, it features:

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• Broad coverage of semantic, pragmatic and philosophical approaches, providing the reader with a balanced and comprehensive overview of the topic;

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• Frequent examples to demonstrate how meaning is perceived and manipulated in everyday discourse, including the importance of context, scientific studies of human language, and theories of pragmatics;

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• Topics of debate and key points of current theories, including references to ongoing controversies in the field;

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• Annotated further reading, allowing students to explore topics in more detail.

Aimed at undergraduate students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, this book is essential reading for those studying this topic for the first time.

Chapter 1
Introduction

What is meaning? That sounds like a fairly philosophical question, and it is; but it’s also a linguistic one. We say that life has meaning, but we also say that words have meaning. Is it the same kind of meaning? This book is about the second type of meaning – the meanings of words and sentences. So it won’t help you understand the meaning of life (sorry), but it will help you understand the meaning of the word life, and what happens when two or more people attempt to communicate linguistically.

When we talk to another person, we think of our words as conveying meaning – but a little thought might convince you that this isn’t what happens at all. In the most literal sense, when I speak to you, nothing leaves my head and enters yours; nothing is really ‘conveyed’ except for sound waves. So what is this ‘meaning’ that we feel we’re somehow giving to the other person, and how does it get to them? Human relationships are so fundamentally grounded in language and communication that it’s worth considering exactly what meaning is and how it works – as well as what sometimes causes it to go wrong.

In this book, we’ll consider what it means to mean. In this first chapter, we’ll consider the surprisingly large number of things that the word mean can mean. We’ll look at the difference between linguistic and non-linguistic meaning, and at the difference between the literal meanings of words and sentences and how these can be used to ‘mean’ a much greater range of things. We’ll look more broadly at the field of linguistics, the scientific study of human language, and what it can tell us about how linguistic form and meaning are related. In Chapter 2, we’ll look at the philosophy of language: the relationship between language and thought, the location and types of meaning, and the relationship between meaning and truth. In Chapter 3, we’ll consider the literal meanings of words and sentences, what it really means to know the meaning of a word, how meanings can be represented, and how simple meanings are built up into more complex meanings. In Chapter 4, we’ll dig more deeply into the question of how speakers use these literal meanings to convey their intended meanings, which can sometimes be quite different from what they’ve literally said. We’ll see how theories of pragmatics can help to explain how hearers infer what speakers intended, even if what they’ve literally said seems quite different. At the same time, we’ll see how this process of inference leaves the door open for these inferences to be mistaken, resulting in miscommunication and misunderstanding: Sometimes our hearer just doesn’t get our meaning at all. Chapter 5 will summarize the previous chapters and wrap up.

What does it mean to mean?

To dive right into the deep end of the pool, let’s start with the meaning of meaning. The first thing to notice is that there’s obviously a difference between the word meaning and what it, well, means – or, to put it another way, what we use it to refer to. (Throughout this book, I’ll use italics for linguistic items like words, so that it’s clear when we’re talking about a word vs. when we’re using it – what’s known as the ‘use’ vs. ‘mention’ distinction.)

The verb mean and the related noun meaning, as it turns out, have a surprisingly large number of meanings. Consider the sentences in (1):

• (1)
  1. What is the meaning of life?
  2. I didn’t mean to hurt you.
  3. Those dark clouds mean rain is coming.
  4. Dissimilar means ‘not alike’.
  5. By home, I mean my parents’ house, not my college dorm.
  6. When I kicked you under the table, I meant that you should stop talking about politics.
  7. Those sirens mean a tornado has been sighted.
  8. I mean to go to England before I die.

In (1a), the speaker is talking about philosophical meaning, which can be very roughly paraphrased as ‘purpose’. In (1b), mean could be paraphrased as ‘intend’ – and the extent to which these first two senses of the word mean are related is a complicated matter: Purpose in some uses can mean intent (as in, e.g., my purpose in going to the store), but not everyone asking about life’s meaning is asking whether there’s an intent behind it. And in (1c), it’s quite clear that we’ve left intent behind: Clouds do not intend to tell us that rain is coming. In (1d), the word dissimilar has a fixed meaning that is not dependent on the intent of the person using it; I can’t use the word to mean whatever I want. On the other hand, as seen in (1e), I can use home to mean my choice of a limited number of places. In (1f), we get even more intentionality and more freedom, and a less fixed meaning: Kicking my companion under the table can mean quite a range of things in various contexts, limited only by my expectation that the person being kicked will get the message. And what about (1g)? The sirens don’t intend to convey anything, so in that sense this sort of meaning is like that in (1c); on the other hand, they’re a conventional symbol we’ve all agreed on, so in that sense it’s like (1d); but then again, by using this siren on this occasion, somebody intends to indicate the sighting of a tornado, so in that sense it’s like (1f). And, finally, in (1h) – a use that appears in some but not all dialects of English – we’ve abandoned all conventionality; here the meaning is purely an intent, with no sense of one thing standing for another.

In short, we use the word meaning for everything from intention-free indication, as in (1c), to indication-free intention, as in (1h), with quite a range in between – in addition to philosophical uses like (1a) and totally distinct uses to mean things like ‘cruel’ or ‘stingy’ (as in Scrooge was a mean man, which is ambiguous between those two senses).

Setting aside the philosophical sense of mean and its use as an adjective to mean ‘cruel’ or ‘stingy’, we can distinguish two broad categories of meaning based on the degree of intention involved, which philosopher H.P. Grice called ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning. Natural meaning is the sort of meaning we see in sentences like Those clouds mean rain or Smoke means fire or That chill in the air means winter is coming. The relation is a natural one, which is to say that nobody intended it to be that way; it just is. There is no intention involved.

Non-natural meaning, on the other hand, is at least to some extent intentional. Somebody has decided that one thing will mean, or indicate, or stand for, another. For example, a red light means ‘stop’ – but there’s nothing natural about that meaning. It’s almost hard to imagine because we’re so used to this correlation between ‘red’ and ‘stop’, but we could perfectly well have decided as a society that green would mean ‘stop’ and red would mean ‘go’. The meaning is a non-natural one, which in turn means that it’s intentional: Someone, or some group, intends for this correlation to exist.

So which category does language fall into? You may find it counterintuitive, but linguistic meaning is non-natural. There’s no automatic, natural relationship between the word song and the type of melodic arrangement it stands for, or between the word dog and the type of canine entity it stands for. After all, dog doesn’t mean the same thing in French, Urdu, Chinese, or Swahili, all of which have their own words for dogs. The use of the word dog for this creature is simply a convention that English speakers have tacitly agreed to. The relationship between most words and what they stand for is arbitrary – there’s no reason the word chair couldn’t have ended up meaning ‘canine creature’ – but it’s conventional, meaning everybody who speaks English has in some sense agreed to use that word for that meaning.

Within non-natural meaning, then, we have linguistic meaning and non-linguistic meaning (like the fact that a red light means that you must stop your car). This book is concerned with linguistic meaning – which, as we’ll see, is also subject to various degrees of intentionality, but it’s clear that most linguistic meaning is non-natural in that the words and phrases involved bear no automatic relationship to what they stand for.

The one exception is onomatopoeic language, which bears some natural relation to what it represents in that the word ‘sounds like’ its meaning. Many words for animal sounds (such as cheep, hiss, or meow) are thought to be onomatopoeic, as are words for sounds like crash or bang. However, even these words differ from language to language; a rooster that says cock-a-doodle-doo in English says kukareku in Russian. So even here, the relationship between the word and its meaning is partly arbitrary and thus non-natural.

Semantic vs. pragmatic meaning: the role of context

We’ve talked about linguistic meaning as being non-natural and thus being subject to some degree of intentionality: That is, when we speak, we intend that our hearer will understand us to have intended to convey a particular meaning. This ‘intention for our hearer to understand our intention’ is a crucial aspect of language. It also, of course, leads us down a philosophical rabbit hole, because for language to work, our hearer has to recognize that we intend for them to understand our intention to convey meaning, and we have to intend for them to recognize it, and they have to recognize that we intend that, etc. And yes, it can make your head spin. But there’s also a difference between my intention that they recognize the conventional meaning of what I’ve said and my intention that they recognize what I meant right now by saying it in this particular context. Confused? Consider these examples:

• (2)
  1. Dissimilar means ‘not alike’. (=(1d))
  2. When I said The pizza is cold, I meant my slice, not yours.

In (2a), the meaning of dissimilar is in some sense fixed; I can’t use this word to mean just any old thing. The meanings of words frequently change over the course of time, but I’m not free to use the word dissimilar to mean ‘therefore’ or ‘aardvark’ or ‘television’ – or, more accurately, I’m free to use it however I want, but unless I use it for the conventionally accepted meaning, I can’t reasonably expect that my hearer will understand what I meant. Most of the time, then, I can’t use a word or sentence to mean just any old thing. In some sense, of course, that’s not quite true (hence the hedge ‘most of the time’); you actually can use any utterance to mean anything. For example, you can arrange with your spouse before a party that if you say The dessert was delicious it will mean ‘I’m having a terrible time and I want to go home’. But in most situations the meaning of your utterance is constrained by its conventionally accepted meaning.

On the other hand, I do have a certain freedom within that conventionally accepted meaning. In (2b), the pizza means a certain slice of pizza that is salient in the context of utterance, and this opens up the possibility of misunderstanding. The utterance here suggests that there’s been just such a misunderstanding – that the hearer thought the speaker meant all of the pizza present in the context, whereas the speaker in (2b) is clarifying that they meant only their own slice. And of course if the speaker says The pizza is cold a week later, they will doubtless be talking about another pizza entirely, whereas the use of dissimilar a week from now will still mean ‘not alike’. For that matter, the word pizza used a week from now will still mean something like ‘an Italian pie made of a crust and toppings, typically including tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese’. But the specific pizza intended by the speaker will differ. That is, pizza will still mean what pizza always means; but what the speaker means by the pizza will be different. Thus, there’s a difference between word meaning (or sentence meaning) and speaker meaning: The meaning of the word pizza is more or less invariant, while the speaker’s meaning in using that word can vary from context to context.

Meaning that is more or less independent of context (as in the meaning of the word pizza) is called semantic meaning. Meaning that depends on the context is called pragmatic meaning – but be forewarned that this is a rough definition of this important distinction, and we’ll be talking about it in great length later on. For example, another way of framing the difference is to say that semantic meaning is truth-conditional and pragmatic meaning is non-truth-conditional. In most cases, the two distinctions overlap. Consider (3):

• (3) I’m cold.

The conventional, context-independent, semantic meaning of this sentence is (roughly) that the speaker is experiencing a sensation of the ambient temperature being uncomfortably low. This is what it means if uttered today, tomorrow, or next week – here, or in Antarctica, or in Florida – and by me, you, or the President of the U.S. If the speaker is in fact experiencing such a sensation, the sentence is literally true; if they are not, the sentence is literally false. That is to say, the conditions under which it is true – its truth-conditions – are the same regardless of context. This meaning is truth-conditional. (Of course, the person represented by I will vary by speaker; if (3) is uttered by the President of the U.S., that’s the person who must be cold in order for (3) to be true.)

On the other hand, the speaker could use this semantic meaning to convey any number of additional meanings, which they will count on the hearer to figure out in context. So the speaker in uttering (3) might mean ‘please bring me a blanket’ or ‘close the window’ or ‘turn off the air conditioner’ or ‘turn on the heat’ or ‘cuddle up closer’ or ‘I regret eating this ice cream’ or ‘your brother lied when he said the water in this lake was super-warm’ or any of a hundred other things, depending on who’s saying it to whom and under what conditions. All of these intended meanings are pragmatic, and they’re non-truth-conditional, which means that you couldn’t get away with saying (4):

• (4) When you said I’m cold just now, that was a lie; you’re not eating ice cream!

Because ‘I regret eating this ice cream’ isn’t part of the truth-conditional meaning of I’m cold, the fact that you’re not eating ice cream (much less regretting it) doesn’t mean you’ve said something untrue by saying I’m cold. Which is to say, you can use the sentence I’m cold to mean ‘I regret eating this ice cream’ in a certain context, but whether or not you regret eating ice cream never affects whether the sentence I’m cold is true or not; it doesn’t affect the truth-conditions of the sentence I’m cold.

Most of the time, ...