Journal of Semantics 1983 Volume 2 Issue 1

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JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS

Volume 2 1983

Reprinted with the permission of the original publisher by

Periodicals Service Company Germantown, NY 2005

Printed on acid-free paper. This reprint was reproduced from the best original edition copy available. NOTE TO THE REPRINT EDITION: In some cases full page advertisements which do not add to the scholarly value of this volume have been omitted. As a result, some reprinted volumes may have irregular pagination.

JOURNAL OF

SEMANTICS VOL. II - 1983

JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR THE INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDY OF THE SEMANTICS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE

MANAGING EDITOR:

Pieter A.M. Seuren (Nijmegen University)

EDITORIAL BOARD:

Peter Bosch (Nijmegen University) Leo G.M. Noordman (Nijmegen University)

RFV1EW EDITOR

Rob A. van der Sandt (Nijmegen University)

CONSULTING EDITORS: J. Allwood (Univ. Goteborg). M. Arbib (U Mass. Amhcrsl). Th. T Ballmer (Ruhr Univ. Bochum). R. Bansch (Amsterdam Univ.), J. van Bcnthcm (Groningen Univ.). H.M. Clark (Stanford Univ.). O. Fauconnier (Univ. de Vincennes). P. Gochct (Univ. de Liege). F. Hcny (Groningen Univ.). J. Miritikka (Florida State Univ.). G. Huppcnbrouwers (Nijmegen Univ.), St. Isard (Sussex Univ.). Ph. Johnson-Laird (Sussex Univ.). A. Kasher (Tel Aviv Univ.). L. Kecnan (UCLA). S. Kuno (Harvard Univ.). W. Levclt (Max Planck Iiuu. Nijmegen).

ADDRESS:

J. Lyons (Sussex Univ.), W. Marslen-Wilson (Max Planck Inst. Nijmegen). J. McCawley (Univ. Chicago). B. Richards (Edinburgh Univ.), H. Ricser (Univ. Bielefeld). R. Rommetveit (Oslo Univ.), H. Schnelle (Ruhr Univ. Bochum), J. Searle (Univ. Cal. Berkeley). R. Stalnaker (Cornell Univ.). A. von Stechow (Univ. Konstanz). G. Sundholm (Nijmegen Univ.). Ch. Travis (Tilburg Univ.), B. Van Fraassen (Princeton Univ.). Z. Vendler (UCSD), Y. Wilks (Essex Univ.), D. Wilson (UCL).

Journal of Semantics, Nijmegen Institute of Semantics, P.O. Box 1454, NL-65OI BL Nijmegen, Holland

Published by the N.I.S. Foundation, Nijmegen Institute of Semantics. P.O. Box 1454, NI.-6501 BL Nijmegen, Holland

ISSN 0167- 5133 by the N.I.S. Foundation

Printed in the Netherlands

Review article page Pieter A.M. Seuren J.D. McCawley, Thirty Million Theories of Grammar

325

Book reviews Roland R. Hausser & Claudia Gerstner Benoit de Cornuiier, Meaning Detachment D.E. Over Brian Loar, Mind and Meaning Han Reichgelt Th.W. Simon & R.J. Scholes (eds.) Language, Mind, and Brain Pieter A.M. Seuren John Dinsmore, The Inheritance of Presupposition Herman Wekker Chr.J. Pountain, Structures and Transformations. The Romance Verb.

350 347 352 356 343

Ton Weyters

Gillian Brown & George Yule, Discourse Analysis Publications received

354 359

JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS CONTENTS VOLUME H (1983)

Articles page Thomas Ballmer Semantic structures of texts and discourses Janet Mueller Bing Contrastive stress, contrastive intonation, and contrastive meaning Dwight Bolinger Where does intonation belong? Arda Denkel The meaning of an utterance Jurgen Esser Tone units in functional sentence perspective Carlos Gussenhoven A three-dimensional scaling of nine English tones Roland R. Hausser On vagueness Daniel Hirst Interpreting intonation: a modular approach D. Robert Ladd Even, focus, and normal stress Willem J.M. Levelt & Anne Cutler Prosodic marking in speech repair D.E. Over Constructivity and relational belief Ragnar Rommetveit In search of a truly interdisciplinary semantics. A sermon on hopes of salvation from hereditary sins A.J. Sanford, S. Garrod, A. Lucas,, R. Henderson Pronouns without explicit antecedents? Peter Sgall On the notion of the meaning of the sentence Nigel Shadbolt Processing reference L.A. Zadeh A fuzzy-set-theoretic approach to the compositionality of meaningful propositions, dispositions, and canonical forms

221 141 101 29 121 183 273 171 157 205 p. 184) maintains:

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT are bound to 'dawn' when such familiar states of affairs are attended to within domains representing new combinations of referential alternatives. Higher-order, more abstract, aspects are thus generated by metaphorical extension of experiential-behavioural categorizations when a word such as, e.g., "heavy", initially meaningful only within the referential domain of material objects, is used to establish joint attention on entities such as work, duty etc. in expressions like "heavy work", "heavy duty", etc. A pervading feature of infant-adult interaction is, of course, the over-all pattern of dependency. The adult partner - not the child is the one who is supposed to know what talked-about states of affairs are as well as what words 'mean'. This implies, in the terminology of William James, a sustained asymmetry: The child is trading on adult truths, but not vice versa. However, as Newson maintains (1978: 36):

And joint attention on the same object is initially contingent upon the adult's sensitivity with respect to the child's temporary engagement and focus of attention. The mother, for instance, will on the basis of the child's gaze and grasping movements 'know' what the child is aiming at here and now and monitor her move accordingly. There is thus from the very beginning of communicative interaction a naive, reciprocal, commitment to a temporarily shared social world and a definite inbuilt circularity. This is, I believe, also a significant though often largely ignored social-interactional feature of adult conversation: the speaker monitors what he is saying in accordance with what he assumes to be the listener's outlook and background information whereas the latter makes sense of what he is hearing by adopting the speaker's perspective. But what is actually meant, then? What is being jointly attended to at any particular stage of a given dialogue? The peculiar circularity inherent in acts of speech implies by no means, of course, that both participants assume equal or joint responsibility for what is being referred to or meant by what is said. Understanding and misunderstanding in ordinary discourse among equals, is, by definition, a directional affair, and vicious circularity is prohibited by virtue of our intuitive mastery of dialogue roles. A state of intersubjectivity is attained at a given stage of dyadic interaction if, and only if, some particular aspect A\ of the talked-about state of affairs S is brought into focus by one participant and, as a consequence, jointly attended to by both of them. States of intersubjectivity are, when so defined, contingent upon the dyadic constellation of speakers' privilege and listeners' commitment: The speaker has the privilege to determine what is being referred 12

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"It is [...] only because mothers impute meaning to 'behaviours' elicited from the infants that these eventually do come to constitute meaningful actions as far as the child is concerned."

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS to or meant, whereas the listener is committed to make sense of what is said by adopting the perspective of the speaker. Contextual specification of meaning - and hence: criteria concerning verification is in principle determined by the 'seller1, i.e., by the participant responsible for referring to or 'meaning' something.

I have elsewhere (Rommetveit, 1980c) indicated how perfectly or partially shared social realities are generated in encounters between different 'private worlds', when for instance the incidental passer-by tells his wife what he "saw" on his Saturday morning walk or when he and Mr. Smith's prying neighbour engage in conversation about one and the same state of affairs as viewed from entirely different positions. The passer-by may in both cases start talking about Mr. Smith's mowing of the lawn within a frame of alternatives such as, e.g., the filth in the slum district, people sobering up after last night's booze, keeping Scarsdale nice and clean, etc., and the potential goodcitizenship aspect may thus in each case temporarily be brought .into focus of joint attention. The Scarsdale establishment's outlook on gardening and the good life is indeed also part of the prying neighbour's repertory of available perspectives, and his restricted 'field of vision' is hence very likely temporarily expanded so as to include a hitherto entirely disregarded aspect as a possibility. What has been taken for granted by the passer-by, however, is most likely rejected immediately afterwards as a false presupposition by the pryer. A temporary state of intersubjectivity is thus attained in both cases, but is transformed into a state of perfectly shared social reality only in the conversation between the passer-by and his wife. Dyadic states of intersubjectivity are thus by definition directional 3S, vol. 2, no. 1

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This basic principle of our trade on one another's truths, it seems, can be traced back to the emerging mastery of turn-taking in preiinguistic dyadic coordination of attention: The listener has, in a way, to follow the speaker's 'line of regard', in order to attend to the talkedabout state of affairs within the temporarily appropriate and intersubjectively valid domain of referential alternatives. And such truly dyadic social-interactional features of discourse cannot be captured by simple conduit paradigms of information transmission. Nor can they be accounted for in terms of e.g.: "[...] a speaker's assumptions as to what is in his addressee's consciousness at the time of speech" (Chafe, 197*: 111), or "[...] the mental models of the current conversation that the speaker and the listener maintain" (Johnson-Laird, 1980: 106). The temporary commitment to a shared social world can only be accounted for. in terms of the inbuilt circularity of full-fledged acts of speech and the complementarity of speaker's privilege and listener's obligation. As ; Deutsch and Pechmann conclude from careful experimental investigations of the development of referring expressions (1981: 165): "One must regard the dyad of participants as the elementary and basic unit of analysis".

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT and asymmetric in the sense that one person understands something whereas the other is understood. Some aspect Aj of a given state of affairs S constitutes, at a given stage of dyadic interaction, a perfectly shared social reality, however, if and only if both participants take it for granted at that stage that S is A-t and each of them assumes the other to hold that belief. And this, very likely, is what happens with the 'good-citizenship1 aspect of Mr. Smith's mowing of the lawn in the conversation • between the passer-by and his wife. The 1latter is, prior to their conversation, in a state of. 'agnostic innocence with respect to what is going on in Mr. Smith's garden. The husband's presupposition, accordingly, in the absence of competing referential alternatives, becomes his wife's socially contingent belief and hence a perfectly shared social reality.

As Dowty (1979: 385)- maintains: "[...] many speakers' successful use of a word is parasitic on the knowledge of other 'experts' in the speech community who do have the appropriate knowledge." Unequal distribution of knowledge, power and prestige thus very often makes for unilateral dyadic communication control in the sense that one person's knowledge and perspective are endorsed by both conversation partners as a basis for making sense of what is said. Such asymmetry is also characteristic of scientific discourse when notions from some prestigious academic field are being assimilated into a -neighbouring, less prestigious but equally ambitious, field of enquiry. Psycholinguists talking and writing about "deep sentence structure" have indeed for decades, though with decreasing faith, held presumedly expert linguists responsible for what is ultimately meant by that expression. 'Literally literal' meanings of words and expressions, moreover, exist within our- highly literate societies in the form of standards of correctness provided by continually updated public encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The layman's uncertainty with respect to what is meant can hence often apparently be resolved by recourse to professional or scientific expertise, i.e. by confidence in an institutionalized 'collective wisdom'. Popper's 'world of objective knowledge' is thus in some very significant sense a social reality (Popper, 1971). It provides culturally shared standards of correctness which, by means of institutionalized hierarchies of knowledge and prestige, penetrate into everyday discourse JS, vol. 2, no. 1


Our trade on one another's truths is symmetric only under the ideal condition of perfect interchangeability of dialogue roles. The intuitively mastered capacity to switch role is a basic social-interactional feature of adult communicative competence, but real-life conversations are necessarily very often constrained by unequal distribution of knowledge, power and prestige. It is thus by no means unwise for a one year old girl to watch her mother's face and subsequent response in order to explore what is meant by her own utterance. Nor is it entirely absurd for me to engage in similar behaviour when trying to explain to an expert car mechanic what seems to be wrong with my car.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS in the form of systematic asymmetries in our trading on one another's truths. c. On meaning potentials of words in a pluralistic and emotively loaded social world.

But the rich varieties1 of human experience, our options with respect to modes of •'understanding,: and the actual, compartmentalization of human knowledge and skills are also reflected in our shared cultural heritage of 'objective knowledge1. The most striking 'objective' feature of that heritage is indeed its pluralistic character. And, as Goodman (1978: 4) remarks: "Many different world-versions are of independent interest and importance, without any requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base". Heisenberg's statement that natural language is the ultimate base of any understanding is a warning to monistically inclined semanticists, and in particular to those seeking ontologic'al peace of mind by endorsing any one particular such world version as the reality. Scientifically defined terms may indeed appear attractive as potential Archimedian points in semantic analysis of ordinary language. We may for instance disambiguate a word such as "human" by defining it in terms of zoological taxonomy and even conceive of1 the resulting invariant and 'literal' meaning as a 'semantic marker in systematic mapping of a whole set of related words. This may indeed seem plausible "[...] after three hundred years of science and criticism of religion [...}' (Habermas, 1970: 137). But it will not prevent people engaged in conversations or preaching from exploiting entirely different meaning potentials of the word such as those revealed in the contrasts "human"/ "divine", "human"/"saintly", etc. Nor will our recourse to zoological taxonomy guarantee referential consensus if, on some other planet, we should happen to encounter living beings transcending the referential domain of familiar earthly variants (see Rommetveit, 1979b: 153). 3S, vol. 2, no. 1

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Dependency on such standards of correctness is at a maximum within semantic domains in which the vernacular is being infiltrated by novel scientific, technological and professional terms. The latter transcend lay knowledge embedded in natural language in the sense that they serve to resolve ambiguities and polysemies inherent in the vernacular. Different subsenses of everyday words are constantly being developed within internally consistent scientific, technological and professional terminologies which - while rooted in everyday, natural language branch off into separate and specialized 'expert languages' with their anchorage in particular forms of institutionalized scientific, technological or professional practice. Highly specialized dictionaries are accordingly also contained within Popper'^ world 3, i.e., in "[...] the world of logical contents of books, libraries, computer memories, and suchlike [...}' (Popper, 1971: 74).

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT And truly novel aspects of "human" such as those 'dawning' in Man-Computer-comparisons can hardly be captured by the zoologically disambiguated term at all.

Indeterminacy does not imply chaos, however, and orderly negotiability and contextual specification of meaning is indeed contingent upon some semantic invariance and faith in a shared experiential world. Systematic variance with respect to what is meant by what is said, for instance, may be investigated in the form of different contextually appropriate specifications of general drafts of contracts concerning categorization and attribution across variant dyadic states of shared social reality. Meaning potentials of words and expressions, it seems, reflect at a very abstract level some minimal commonality with respect to experientially founded perceptives on and categorization of our pluralistic world, and they may also serve to bring into focus of joint attention only vaguely apprehended, yet unequivocally emotively loaded, states of affairs. Our pluralistic social world is also endowed with value. The 'dawning' of aspects of it when, e.g., a word such as "democracy" is understood against the background of "dictatorship" within certain types of interactional settings, for instance, is by no means devoid of human affect. On the contrary: Content words like "democracy", "intelligent", "crime", etc. appear in ordinary, everyday discourse indeed very often to bring into joint focus of attention only vaguely apprehended, yet fairly unequivocally emotively loaded, aspects of our partially shared social world. Such dispositional properties of content words suffered a strange fate within American psychological and linguistic semantics twenty years ago. They were made the very focus of systematic search for autonomous word meaning in Osgood's psychological enquiries into 'the affective meaning system' (Osgood, 1962), but deliberately excluded in semantic analysis inspired by Chomsky's initial version of syntactic 16

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What Heisenberg maintains is that full determinacy of sense can only be achieved within closed conceptual systems, and that the indeterminacy and openness of natural language are essential in order to 'touch' a multifaceted and only partially known reality. A fully determined, zoologically defined, term "human" is thus perfectly adequate within a narrowly defined domain of scientific discourse, yet blatantly inadequate as a base for human self-understanding across different 'world-versions'. The word "human" in ordinary English, on the other hand, entails zoological classification as only one - though admittedly very important - component within its rich and only partially determined meaning potential. And - as Baker and Hacker (1980: 376) remark - "[...] determinacy of sense is the impossibility of vagueness [...]". This possibility of vagueness is the price we pay for semantic openness and creativity. We cannot attain closure in our scientific account of natural language semantics without prejudging a pluralistic and only partially known reality.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS theory under stipulated conditions of the idealized speaker-listener in a perfectly homogeneous speech community. Ordinary language was thus investigated at the level of word semantics by neo-behaviourist psychologists as 'pure affect' and - simultaneously - within Cartesian linguistics as 'pure reason'.

Such a partitioning of ordinary language into pure reason and pure affect is symptomatic of the multi- rather than interdisciplinary nature of semantic studies developing out of neo-behaviourist theories of verbal communication on the one hand and structural linguistics on the other. Both traditions stipulated invariance of (respectively emotive and cognitive) word meaning across contexts. The Cartesian rationalists would claim, for instance, that the sentence "My spinster aunt is an infant" should require a longer chain of processing than, e.g., "My spinster aunt is a waitress": The initial, literal 'reading' of "infant" would in the former sentence have to be cognized and rejected in order for some secondary, parasitic 'reading' to be assigned to the word. And the 'psychological reality' of such hypothesized steps of semantic inference was indeed, at the peak of Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistics, investigated in exploratory reaction time experiments. Those studies appeared to yield no support whatsoever for the rationalist hypotheses. They were hence hardly carried beyond the pilot stage, and were never published. This is regrettable. An unequivocal disconfirmation might otherwise have prevented empirically minded psycholinguists from being seduced by essentially the same kind of stipulation of 'indirect' semantic inference from some invariant literal base within fashionable variants of speech act theory. But what is the alternative to such models at the level of word semantics? How can we account for systematic variance in what is meant by the word "infant" across different contexts, for instance, without falling back upon the conduit metaphor of verbal communication and stipulation of invariant literal meaning? Our cryptic excerpts from works of Wittgenstein, 3ames and Heisenberg suggest that one hope of salvation from such hereditary sins 3S, vol. 2, no. 1

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Consider, for example, the word "infant" in the utterance "My spinster aunt is an infant" (Katz and Fodor, 1963: 200). Neo-behaviourists would approach such an utterance in terms of social influence processes and hypothesize that the listener, when comprehending what is1 meant by it, will move the aunt towards some other (more 'weak , 'passive', and 'bad') location within his 'affective meaning space'. Cartesian linguists, on the other hand, would argue that the speaker in such a case is engaged in a contradiction because the age range of spinsters and that of infants (by virtue of what invariably is meant by the words "spinster" and "infant") do not overlap at all. The sentence is accordingly semantically anomalous, they would claim.

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT

Let us now, inspired by Wittgenstein's, James's, and Heisenberg's words of wisdom, return to the word "infant" and consider its meaning potential and what may be made known by it in particular interactional settings. Consider, first, an oral examination in which a student is supposed to reveal what she/he has learned during an introductory course in developmental psychology. The examiner may on such an occasion initiate the discourse by a request such as: (i) Now, let us hear what you have learned about infants. Imagine, next, a nomination meeting. The participants are engaged in a discussion about possible candidates for some political office, one of whom happens to be the unmarried aunt of one of them. The latter, being definitely against her candidacy, may then say: (ii) My spinster aunt is an infant. Consider, finally, another somewhat heated debate. The sustained topic of discourse is on this occasion a novel school programme, and the two persons discussing it seem to disagree sharply with respect to its potential merits. One of them has just pointed out its many weaknesses and imperfections, and the other responds in defence of the reform: (iii) But remember, it's still an infant! The operative world knowledge required in order to understand what is meant by the word on these three different occasions, let us assume, 18

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resides in the prospect of a consistently constructivistic and pluralistic approach to linguistically mediated meaning. Meaning potentials of content words may thus be systematically explored in terms of 'operative world knowledge', as active categorization and making sense of talked-about states of affairs under conditions of reciprocal commitments to a temporarily shared experiential reality. Contextual specification of what is meant on any particular occasion, moreover, may hopefully in part be accounted for in terms of our orderly trade on one another's truths in accordance with intuitively mastered dialogue roles. One and the same content word, we shall expect, will thus bring into focus of joint attention different aspects of our multifaceted social world depending upon what at the moment of utterance is taken for granted by both conversation partners as their perfectly shared social reality. Its meaning potential may indeed be defined in terms of the (nonfinite) set of potential aspects of states of affairs it can serve to bring into joint focus of attention. Content words enter the child's communicative transactions at a stage when turntaking and other contractual aspects of 'secondary intersubjectivity' are already mastered, and contextual specification of what is meant by them is indeed from the very beginning attained by dyadic control of jointly adopted emotivereferential perspectives (Wertsch, 1979).

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS is culturally shared lay knowledge of infancy. Its meaning potential entails accordingly, as dispositional properties, categorization of (A) early stage of life, (B) immaturity, (C) dependency, and (D) capacity for further growth and development. And different aspects of the talkedabout state of affairs will be brought into joint focus of attention in each of the three settings, we shall expect, depending upon the dyadic state of social reality and pre-established range of referential alternatives the moment the word "infant" is said and understood. The examiner's use of the word when introducing a sustained topic in the oral examination setting, it may be claimed, falls within its "proper" or "primary" referential use, and the student may very likely

NOMINATION MEETING Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011

/C/7\D\

ORAL EXAMINATION

SCHOOL REFORM DEBATE

R Meaning potential and what is made known: A: Early stages of life B: Immature C. Dependent D: In process of growth

Referential alternatives (R) and aspects of S brought into focus: Early/late stage of life: Size, small/big Immature/mature: Shape, ellipsis/circle Dependent/independent: Colour, hatched/white.

Fig. 2. An exploration of the meaning potential of "infant" in terms of what is made Imown by the word and which aspects are brought into joint focus of attention in three different contexts. JS, vol. 2, no. 1

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RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT

What is taken for granted by the participants in the nomination meeting, on the other hand, is that (1) candidates are to be talked about as politicians and (2) the 'spinster aunt' is an adult person, eligible for political office as far as age is concerned. What in other contexts may be made known about, e.g., stage of life and process of growth by the word "infant" is thus totally irrelevant to the purpose of the discourse. Components (A) and (D) of its meaning potential are "over-ruled" (Rommetveit, 197*: 111) by reciprocally and firmly held presuppositions, and the jointly-attended-to attributes of proposed candidates, let us assume, are characteristics such as political experience and capacity to make judgements of one's own versus • compliance and dependency. What is brought into the focus of joint attention by "infanf when said about the speaker's aunt is thus her political (B) immaturity and (C) dependency upon other people (middle left cell of Fig. 2). And these emotively negatively loaded aspects 'dawn' spontaneously out of the perfectly shared social reality and taken-for-granted range of referential alternatives at the moment the word is uttered, not via complex chains of inference such as those hypothesized by sophisticated speech act theories. The two persons arguing for and against the speech act school programme, finally, are concerned with its weaknesses and merits relative to those of familiar rigidly institutionalized educational practices. They have already agreed, let us assume, that both novel and established educational systems are dependent upon financial support, talented teachers, etc. in order to succeed, and even the person arguing warmly 20

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start out telling about, e.g., the duration of human infancy. She or he is in that case probably painfully aware of the existence of standards of correctness in the introductory textbook. A reasonable examiner will not fail the student, though, solely on the ground that she or he does not remember the exact textbook definition of infancy in terms of weeks of chronological age. The student may in fact do fairly well by keeping in mind general lexical explanations of "infant" such as "a very young child, baby" (Webster New World Dictionary of the American Language, 1964). This is merely what ordinary adult Englishspeaking people know, yet sufficient for the student in order to understand (with an acceptable margin of error) which age category is being referred to and what the examiner's question is about. The early stage of life aspect (area A in the upper left cell of Fig. 2), one may argue, may hence perhaps be conceived of as a hard core of 'literal' (or: primary referential) meaning. But other aspects of infancy such as (B) immaturity, (C) dependency and (D) 'in process of growth' are clearly entailed within the proposed topic as well, and these will indeed also in turn be carefully attended to by the student, who understands the examiner's request and has learned what she or he is supposed to know about infants. The student has indeed been invited to pursue the entire meaning potential of the everyday English word infant in terms of a particular scientifically elaborated expansion of lay knowledge.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS for the reform project has to admit that it is in its present form far from perfect. The word "infant" in the utterance "But remember, it's still an infant!", however, reminds the opponent of this particular programme's (A) early stage of (institutional) life, (B) immaturity, and (D) ongoing process of growth (bottom left cell in Fig. 2). It serves hence in this particular setting as a word of praise, bringing into joint focus of attention aspects of the controversial educational programme which set it favourably apart from all other relevant alternatives by virtue of its possibility of further development toward perfection. What is meant by "infant" when said about the spinster aunt or the new school programme, respectively accordingly appears at first glance contradictory. What remains invariant, we may ask, in a word which in one case is used derogatively and in another case as a word of praise?

What happens at the nomination meeting and in the school reform debate, I shall argue, is that somewhat different abstract and emotively loaded aspects of infancy entailed within the word's meaning potential are spontaneously brought into focus of joint attention in discourse aibout "non-infants". The difference with respect to emotive contagion in the two settings, moreover, is systematic, linguistically mediated, and founded in widely shared attitudes towards infancy in our otherwise JS, vol. 2, no. 1

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My tentative answer to this question is as follows: The identity of "infant" qua word and systematic categorization, reflects culturally shared knowledge of, and attitudes towards, infancy, embedded in the mastery of that particular word by the ordinary speaker of English. Yet it hardly reflects anything in terms of the identity of what is 'literally' meant or referred to. The capacity to identify the sound sequence "infant" in English as 'the same word' across different contexts is a metalinguistic ability and no prerequisite for the mastery of the world knowledge embedded in the word. The latter may remain entirely unreflective, whereas the level of meta-linguistic reflection varies and is contingent upon, in particular, the exposure to written language (see Linell 1982). Volosinov (1973: 103) maintains: "Only the current of verbal intercourse endows a word with the light of meaning." And the 'primary referential meaning' (A) early stage of life, which is depicted as a topological core of the meaning potential of "infant" in the upper left cell of Fig. 2, it turns out, is not 'illuminated' at all when "the current of verbal intercourse endows the word with the light of meaning" at the nomination meeting (middle left cell of Fig. 2). The Latin origin of the word, moreover, the adjective "infans" ("not speaking"), is hardly any more immediately logically bound to early stage of life than, e.g., the English adjectives "immature" or "dependent", and reference to a particular age category is thus apparently historically a relatively recently developed component of its meaning potential. On what grounds, then, are we justified in conceiving of component (A) as an invariant 'literal' core?

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT pluralistic social world. Ordinary people do indeed love (their own) infants, yet feel repelled when encountering adults remaining infantile after completion of growth. The immaturity aspect of infancy is accordingly emotively ambiguous: it acquires saliency as an undesirable property when attributed to adult politicians in conjunction with dependency, yet is spontaneously attended to as a desirable possibility of change toward perfection when attributed to an imperfect reform project within a referential frame of petrified educational practises. "Infant" can thus be replaced by a clearly derogative adjective "infantile" only in the spinster-aunt setting.

The reason for this is simple, though largely ignored in orthodox linguistic and psycholinguistic semantic analyses: Expansion of the shared social reality in actual human discourse is not attained by transmission of invariant propositional contents of 'full lexical items' (Chomsky, 1972: 101) via some magical conduit, but proceeds in an orderly fashion out of already established states of perfectly shared social reality and jointly attended-to referential alternatives at the moment of speech. Distinctions such as Given vs New information are hence by no means narrowly defined syntactic notions, as Clark (1977: 412) maintains, but crucial semiotic distinctions in a systematic analysis of already presupposed and irrelevant versus contextually realized components of meaning potentials of single words and expressions. The left hand cells of Fig. 2 may thus in view of our preceding analysis be read as depicting only those meaning potentials of "infant" which are actually realized in the three different settings. What is made known about the spinster aunt is according to such an analysis her political immaturity and dependency. What is asserted about the controversial school programme is early stage of institutional life, immaturity, and process of growth (potentially: toward perfection). Such topological maps are useful when we want to visualize how only particular subsets of a word's meaning potential are realized in particular interactional settings. I have already suggested, however, that immaturity attributed to entities without any prospect of further growth differs from that of entities undergoing growth and development. 22

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The word "infant" in "My spinster aunt is an infant!" and "But remember, it's still an infant!" constitutes in both cases the intonation centre of the utterance and hence its 'focus' as opposed to 'presupposition'; it is 'New' rather than 'Given' information (Chomsky, 1972: 100; Clark, 1977: *12). What is made known by the word, moreover, is simply what is asserted by it, provided that it is understood within the shared frame of alternatives proposed by the speaker and the latter's credibility remains unquestioned. Predication, however, is a semiotic rather than a narrowly defined linguistic affair (Weinreich, 1963: 18). And what is predicated by means of the word "infant" of the candidate for political office and the novel educational programme are indeed very different things.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS It is therefore misleading, it seems, to portray (B) immature and (D) in process of growth as autonomous and disjoint potentials. Any topological representation of meaning potentials in terms of a finite set of discrete components, we have to admit, entails some arbitrariness due to the residual indeterminacy of sense and the analyst's predicament as a participant observer of operative lay knowledge. It is thus a challenging, though ultimately impossible, task to try to capture all major potentials of the word 'infant" in one single topological map such as the one in the upper left ceil of Fig. 2.

The component "in process of growth" is represented indirectly, as variation with respect to size, and is hence not attended to within the referential domain of the nomination meeting. Potential development towards perfection is portrayed in terms of the possibility of change of shape and/or colour during expansion of size and acquires therefore saliency only within the referential domains of the oral examination and the school reform debate (arrows from small, hatched ellipsis to big white circle and big, hatched circle, respectively). The perceptual analogues in Fig. 2 serve thus as a necessary supplement and corrective to topological models of contextual specification of word meaning. They indicate how different abstract aspects of infancy are spontaneously brought into the joint focus of attention by the word "infani!' under different conditions of pre-established shared social reality and jointly attended-to referential alternatives. 5. Epilogue The preceding semantic analysis was inspired by the central texts of this sermon and has been carried out in the hope of paving the way toward a constructive alternative to current multi-disciplinary semantics. The latter, I have argued, is pervaded by misguided conduit metaphors of human communication and the hereditary sin of transplanting hypothetical constructs from models of language qua idealized system as intervening variables into theoretical accounts of discourse among mortal men. The somewhat detailed explication of what may be meant and understood by the word" infant11 in different contexts 3S, vol. 2, no. 1

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The actual 'dawning' of novel aspects of a shared social reality during discourse can hardly be visualized by such maps, but some dynamic features of orderly contextual specification of word meaning may possibly be illuminated by recourse to perceptual analogues. The right hand cells of Fig. 2 may thus be read as a schematic representation of the jointly attended-to referential domains in the settings of the oral examination, the nomination meeting, and the school reform debate respectively. The aspects portrayed in terms of perceptual analogues are early versus late stage of life (size: small versas big), immature versus mature (shape: 'imperfect' ellipsis versus 'perfect' circle), and dependent versus independent (colour: hatched versus white).

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT illustrates, in comparison, a dynamic and constructivistic approach to linguistically mediated meaning. It is dynamic in the sense that the word's meaning potential is explored in terms of a set of dispositional properties, i.e., as a potential for bringing into joint focus of attention particular aspects of a pluralistic social world, including only vaguely apprehended yet unequivocally emotively loaded aspects. And the approach is constructivistic because world knowledge embedded in our mastery of ordinary language is conceived of as operative knowledge, i.e. in terms of our capacity to categorize and attribute meaning to talked-about states of affairs.

Asymmetries in dyadic control of what is meant and negotiable ambiguities of meaning in everyday discourse mirror unequal distribution of knowledge and different conditions of life within society at large. Consider, for instance, a word such as "work", or "labour", in the mouth of an unskilled worker and the ears of a white-collar intellectual in a conversation between them about political issues. What is meant by "labour" may in that particular case be strongly flavoured by real life experiences of toil, unemployment, and strikes. What is understood by the worker's conversation partner, however, is necessarily constrained by the fact that the latter - even though politically sophisticated and thoroughly reflective about intricate relationships between labour, production, and capital - has no life experiences from the world of manual labour whatsoever. The vagueness of the word "labour" in everyday English implies that it entails within its meaning potential both the unskilled worker's and the 'egghead's' private political worlds as possible and legitimate domains for contextual specification. Its residual indeterminacy of sense is in this situation in fact 1a prerequisite for mutual understanding because it allows for 'the same only partially determined state of affairs to be jointly attended to in a conversation across the boundaries of different private worlds. Both partners agree, for instance, that by "labour" they mean something distinctively different from (and possibly: 2H

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This does not imply that we disregard the very important function of identifying reference of content words in ordinary discourse: words like "work" and "infant" and expressions such as "mowing the lawn" are of course often used to refer to relatively well defined classes of activities, beings, and events. Mastery of identifying reference is indeed essential in verbal communication, yet entails as such hardly more than culturally appropriate labelling of objects, events and states of affairs. Referential consensus serves thus at times as the essentialninimum of shared semantic competence in communication across divisions of linguistic labour, as when for instance an expert car mechanic succeeds in getting the object he wants by uttering the word "carburettor" in a request addressed to a mechanically nearly totally ignorant shop attendant. The latter's contribution to the transaction requires, as a minimum, hardly more than a capacity to read labels and print tags.

INTERDISCIPLINARY SEMANTICS 'opposite to') "leisure". Some intersubjectivity is accordingly attained immediately, even though at a rather shallow 'level of intension1 (Naess, 1953).

Institute of Psychology, University of Oslo, Boks 1094, Blindern, Oslo 3, Norway

Note This paper has appeared in an earlier version in Cai Svensson (ed.): Om Kommunikation, 1 (SIC, 3 = Studies in Communication, Vol. 3), University of Linkoping, Sweden, pp. 1-36.

References Allwood, 3. (1981). On. the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. In W. Klein and W. Levelt, Eds., Crossing the Boundaries in Linguistics. Dordrecht, Reidel. Apel, K.O. (1968). Szientifik, Hermeneutik, Ideologie-Kritik: Entwurf einer Wissenschaftslehre in erkenntnis-anthropologischen Sicht. Man and the World, 1, 37-68. Baker, G.P., and Hacker, P.M.S. (1980). Wittgenstein, Meaning and Understanding. Oxford, Blackwell. Bates, E. (1976). Language and Context. The Acquisition of Pragmatics. New York, Academic Press. J5, vol. 2, no. 1

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The inherent vagueness of the word in conjunction with commitments and privileges involved in the interchangeability of intuitively mastered dialogue roles, however, makes it also possible for them to transcend their pre-established private worlds: the two of them will take turns as speaker and listener, and the 'egghead' is committed to try to adopt the perspectives of the worker when making sense of what the latter says about labour and vice versa. If each of them sincerely attempts to adopt the attitude of his conversation partner and neither insists on having his own initial contextual specification endorsed as the 'basic', 'most down-to-earth 1 or 'literal' meaning (Goffman, 1976: 303), they may indeed both expand their repertories of possible perspectives on the talked-about state of affairs. In the words of our central texts: They can be certain to touch reality, and novel aspects of a pluralistic, partially shared, and only fragmentarily known reality may under optimal conditions dawn in them out of their trade on one another's truths.

RAGNAR ROMMETVEIT Bateson, G. (1973). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Suffolk. Palladin. Blakar, R.M., and Rommetveit, R. (1979). Utterances in vacuo and in contexts. In R. Rommetveit and R.M. Blakar, Eds., Studies of Language, Thought and Verbal Communication. London, Academic Press. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkte. Leipzig, Duncker und Humbolt. Bruner, J. (1981). The social context of language acquisition. Language &. Communication, 1, 155-178. Chafe, W.L. (1974). Language and consciousness. Language, 50, 111-133.

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Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of a Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press. Chomsky, N. (1972). Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar. The Hague, Mouton. Chomsky, N. (1980). Discussion, in M. Piatteli-Palminary, Ed., Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Clark, H.H. (1977). Bridging. In P.N. Johnson-Laird and P.C. Wason, Eds., Thinking. Readings in Cognitive Science. Cambridge,Cambridge University Press. Deutsch, W. (1976). Sprachliche Redundanz und Objektidentifikation. Marburg, Lahn. Deutsch, W. and Pechmann, T. (1982). Social interaction and the development of referring expressions. Cognition, 11, 159-184. Dowty, D.R. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht, Reidel. Eckblad, G. (1981). Scheme Theory. A Conceptual Framework for Cognitive-Motivational Processes. London, Academic Press. Ginsberg, A. (1954). Hypothetical constructs and intervening variables. Psychological Review, 61, 119-131. Goffman, E. (1976). Replies and responses. Language in Society, 5. 257313. Goodman, N. (1978). Ways of Worldmaking. Hassocks, Harvester Press. Habermas, J. (1970). Toward a theory of communicative competence, in P.E. Dreitzel, Ed., Patterns of Communicative Behavior. Recent Sociology, 2. London, McMillan. Halliday, M. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic. The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London, Edward Arnold. Heisenberg, W. (1965). The role of modern physics in the present development of human thinking. In F.T. Severin, Ed., Humanistic Viewpoints in Psychology. New York, McGraw-Hill. James, W. (1962). Pragmatism's conception of truth. In W. Barrett and H.D. Aiken, Eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. New York, Random House. Johnson-Laird, P. (1980). Mental models in cognitive science. Cognitive Science, 4, 71-75. Katz, J.J., and Fodor, J.A. (1963). The structure of semantic theory. Language, 39, 170-210.

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Linell, P. (1982). The Written Language Bias in Linguistics.( = Studies in Communication 2), Dept. of Communication, Linkoping University. Lock, A., Ed. (1978). Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language. London, Academic Press. Love, N. (1981). Making sense of Chomsky's revolution. Languages Communication, 1, 275-287. Lyons, 3. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. McCawley, 3. (1974). Interview, in H. Parret, Ed., Discussing Language. The Hague, Mouton. Mead, G.H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Menzel, H. (1978). Meaning - Who needs it? In M. Brenner, P. Marsh and M. Brenner, Eds., The Social Context of Methods. London, Croom-Helm. Naess, A. (1953). Interpretation and Preciseness. Oslo, Jacob Dybwad. Naess, A. (1982). Pluralism in cultural anthropology. In I. Gullvag and 3. Wetlesen, Eds., In Sceptical Wonder. Inquiries into the Philosophy of Ame Naess on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday. Oslo, Universitetsforlaget. Newson, 3. (1978). Dialogue and Development. In A. Lock, ed., Action, Gesture and Symbol: The Emergence of Language. London, Academic PressOlson, D. (1970). Language and thought. Aspects of a cognitive theory of semantics. Psychological Review, 47, 257-281. Osgood, C.E. (1962). Studies on the generality of affective meaning systems. American Psychologist, 7, 10-28. Popper, K.R. (1971). Objective Knowledge. An Evolutionary Approach. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Putnam, H. (1978). Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Reddy, M. (1979). The conduit metaphor - a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In A. Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rommetveit, R. (1955). Model construction in psychology: In defence of "surplus meanings" of psychological concepts. Acta Psychologica. 11, 335-345. Rommetveit, R. (1974). On Message Structure. London, Wiley. Rommetveit, R. (1979a). Language games, syntactic structures, and hermeneutics. In R. Rommetveit and R.M. Blakar, Eds., Studies of Language, Thought and Verbal Communication. London, Academic Press. Rommetveit, R. (1979b). On negative rationalism in scholarly studies of verbal communication and dynamic residuals in the construction of human intersubjectivity. In R. Rommetveit and R.M. Blakar, Eds., Studies of Language, Thought, and Verbal Communication. London, Academic Press. Rommetveit, R. (1980). On meanings of acts and what is meant and made known by what is said in a pluralistic social world.

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In M. Brenner, Ed., The Structure of Action. Oxford, Blackwell. Rommetveit, R. (1982). Language acquisition as increasing linguistic structuring of experience and symbolic behavior control. In J.V. Wertsch, Ed., Culture, Communication and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives. New York, Cambridge University Press Searle, J.R. (1974). On Speech Acts. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., and Bierwisch, M. (1980). Introduction. In J.R. Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, Eds., Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht, Reidel. Uhlenbeck, E.M. (1978). On the disctinction between linguistics and pragmatics. In D. Gerver and H.W. Sinaikp, Eds., Language, Interpretation and Communication. New York, Plenum Press. Volosinov, V.N. (1973). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York, Seminar Press. Vygotsky, L.S. (1981). The development of higher forms of attention in childhood. In J.V. Wertsch, Ed., The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. New York, E.M. Sharpe, Inc. Weinreich, U. (1963). On the semantic structure of language. In J.H. Greenberg, Ed., Universals of language. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press. Wellek, R. (1966). From the point of view of literary criticism. In T.A. Sebeok, Ed., Style in Language. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press. Wertsch, J.V. (1979). From social interaction to higher psychological processes: A clarification and application of Vygotsky's theory. Human Development, 22, 1-22. Wertsch, J.V., Ed., (1981). The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. New York, M.E. Sharpe, Inc. Wittgenstein, L. (1968). Philosophical Investigations. (Edited by G.E.Anscombe). Oxford, Blackwell.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE

Arda Denkel

Abstract

Suggesting that utterance meaning is the most central concept of meaning would not be an overstatement. It is this concept which constitutes the principal target of elucidation: even where analysis does not start from it, it leads to it. Under the guidance of Grice, the communication theorist's strategy has been to offer an analysis of the speaker's meaning, then in terms of this, to account for the meaning of an utterance, and then to extend the analysis to cover conventional and structured utterances (i.e., sentences), finally deriving an explanation of what it is for the units composing these structures (i.e., words) to mean. I shall here attempt to give a sketch of the second step, assuming the correctness and plausibility of an analysis which constitutes the first step. 1

In determining the meaning of an utterance we must avoid two extreme interpretations, both of which, although in opposite ways, render meaning arbitrary. The first of these interpretations manifests itself in the attempt to account for the meaning of an utterance strictly in terms of the speaker's intentions. The other interpretation, though rarely advocated, is a possible alternative to the first: the meaning JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 29-39

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The first target of the paper is to demonstrate that the Cricean explanation of the concept of an utterance's occasion meaning by proposing an equivalence between what a speaker means by X on an occasion and what X means on the same occasion cannot be correct. An outlineaccount of utterance meaning that carefully avoids explaining this concept purely in terms of the speaker's intentions or purely in terms of the hearer's understanding is then developed. It is concluded that what determines the meaning of an utterance (as well as that which a speaker can mean by the same utterance) is above all an objective connection of natural or conventional character between an aspect of the utterance and the state, attitude or fact about which something is meant by the speaker using the utterance.

ARDA DENKEL of an utterance issued on an occasion will be presented as, and equated with, whatever the audience understands by it. Potentially, both interpretations lead to the undesirable consequence of fully relativizing the meaning of an utterance. If an utterance-type had no fixed meaning^), then it would be unclear how it could function in communication, and since it would thus diverge from our common understanding of meaning, it would not explain this concept. Of course, it is not to be denied that there is a sense in which, given certain limitations, the same item may be issued as utterance and be understood as possessing different meanings on the different occasions it is used. However, the limits of this need clarification, in that it should not be possible for anything to mean anything.

It is possible to defend the equivalence suggested by Grice by declaring that in the above types of cases, just as we can, according to the analysis, state that the speaker meant something (by something seemingly unrelated, or by overriding the literal meaning of the utterance), his utterance, too, did mean what was intended by him, and if there is an inclination to say the contrary, this is because we think the audience, under such circumstances, could not possibly grasp the speaker's meaning. But so much the worse for the audience: we can, and should, represent it either as having failed to understand both the speaker and the utterance or as having misunderstood them. 5 The adoption of this defense would render Grice's position indistinguishable from the first of the two extreme interpretations we noted above. On such a view anything could be meant by anything, and anything could thus mean anything: a Humpty Dumpty conception of meaning.* That the actual Gricean conception of or committed to this extreme position is there is a certain restriction, implicit in made explicit by others. 7 This restriction 30

meaning is not reducible clear from the fact that Grice's own writings, but limits the range of things JS, vol. 2, no. 1


Grice's analysis of meaning, which asserts the equivalence of the meaning of an utterance produced on an occasion with what the speaker meant, by that utterance on the same occasion,2 has been accused, by some, of leading to the undesirable arbitrariness noted above. Ziff, for instance, has given examples where, clearly, the utterance used on the occasion cannot be said to possess meaning in any possible sense of the word, but yet the speaker fulfils the requirements, set by Grice, for having meant something by it. 3 Therefore, if these examples are correct, it has been shown that according to Grice's theory an utterance which is devoid of meaning or relevance is to be (falsely) said to mean something. Besides, Searle introduced a parallel case* which aims to show that if an utterance possesses a meaning conventionally, then even if a speaker had all the necessary intentions which, according to Grice's account, would entitle him to a certain meaning, this utterance could not be said to mean something unrelated to the meaning it is said to possess conventionally.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE which by using a particular utterance a speaker can be said to mean. Thus, preserving the equivalence (on an occasion) between the speaker's meaning and the utterance meaning, Grice's theory implies that it is not true that, given this utterance, anything could be meant by it.

Given this restriction, the Ziff and Searle counter-examples are easily eliminated. 1 0 Clearly, given the utterance and the particular circumstances set by these authors, the speakers could not believe q, or could not believe it rationally, and therefore could not intend to induce the desired effect by these utterances. However, I believe it can be shown that eliminating these counter-examples will not fully rescue the Gricean conception of utterance-meaning. Now, how does the restriction allow the blocking of the cases in question? The fact that, in these cases, the utterance cannot gain an anomalous occasion meaning (and thus either bears no meaning or bears the unintended meaning it conventionally possesses) is accounted for in terms of showing that, here, the speaker could not mean the thing in' question by the utterance. So whatever restriction can be said successfully to protect against reduction to an absurd Humpty Dumpty theory, is in fact the speaker's meaning. Nevertheless, it is clear from the restriction itself that it cannot equally protect the meaning of an utterance against other similar counter-examples. The reason is that it is possible and commonplace to believe something false, and that the speaker can be no exception to this. We may therefore think of cases in which the speaker believes that q, and is, from his point of view, justified in doing so, but yet unbeknownst to him q happens to be false. If our suspicion is justified, some cases of this sort, which are easy to devise, should involve a speaker uttering X who could be said to mean r by it, but where the X uttered is either meaningless, or means something different from r. The following examples of speaker's meaning are recast with the proviso that the speaker's belief q is false:

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This restriction comes in the following way. On Grice's scheme, a speaker can be said to mean r by X, 8 only if, among other things, by using X, the speaker intends to induce the belief r in the audience.9 But such an intention presupposes the belief (t) that using X on the relevant occasion will be somehow effective in inducing r in the audience. Unless a speaker possesses such a belief he cannot intend the above. Now, how is t grounded? Believing t in turn presupposes that the speaker believes (q) that the audience possesses a belief (p) connecting the utterance used (X) with the effect intended to be induced by it (i.e., the belief r)» Moreover, for the speaker to intend to induce r in the audience, and not just want it (maybe irrationally), his belief q must be possessed rationally. The possession of q irrationally will not justify the claim that the speaker has this intention. Therefore, unless the speaker believes q, and does so rationally, he cannot intend to induce r by X.

ARDA DENKEL A. A rich landowner has heard rumours that there may be gold on his land which is out in the province. He hires a geologist to inspect the area and asks him to bring a sample if he discovers a mine. In the field, the geologist observes that there is no trace of gold but that instead the land is rich in pyrites which is valueless but looks like gold to the unfamiliar eye. The geologist has heard that the landowner already owns several gold mines, and thinks that he should know the difference between pyrites and gold. In fact, however, these mines are all coal mines and the landowner has never even seen gold ore. The geologist comes back to town, and leaves a chunk of pyrites on the landowner's desk, meaning by this that his land is valueless.

C. A customer at a bookstore has now been reading a spy thriller for some time. In the novel, the principal character often uses the sentence 'I could use it for heating' as a code word for 'This is a success'. At some stage, someone approaches politely, and asks him whether he likes the book. Our customer, having seen the author's photo on the back flap, concludes on the basis of the resemblance between this person and the picture, that this must be the author. To show his appreciation, he uses the spy's words: 'I could use it for heating1. In fact, the person he is talking to is not the author but the shopkeeper. We have here three cases in which the speakers can be said to mean what they intend by the utterances they use. The utterancetypes with respect to their particular tokens used in A, B, and C, are, in that same order, non-conventional, non-linguistic conventional and linguistic. The speakers can properly-be said to mean what they intend, since they all possess the belief q, enabling them to intend this. Furthermore, from their point of view there is nothing 'unjustified' in their believing q: anyone in their position would normally believe it. However, in A, B, and C, the hearers will understand the utterances produced differently from the way intended by the relevant speakers: in A, under the circumstances and contrary to the geologist's expectations, his leaving the chunk of pyrites will be understood to the effect that there is gold in the landowner's field, since the chunk does look like gold and the geologist was asked to bring a sample if he discovers a mine. In B, under the specified circumstances people will not understand the sign made as 'All is going perfectly well1. Rather, they will think the contrary. In C, the reader's statement will not be taken as expressing appreciation: it will be understood 'literally'. Now, in none of these cases can the audience be represented as having misunderstood the utterance. It won't do to say that in A, B, and C the 32

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B. A foreign head of state who has come on an official visit wishes to salute the welcoming crowds and to do this with the 'thumbs up' sign he was newly taught especially for the occasion. The sign, in any form, does not exist in his own culture. Unfortunately, though, the foreign head of state has mistakenly learned the sign upside down.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE hearers concerned understood the relevant utterances differently from what the relevant speakers meant by these, and that therefore they misunderstood both the speakers and the utterances. Maybe they can be said to have misunderstood the speakers, but they did not misunderstand the utterances. First of all, in these cases no mistake or failure can be attributed to the audience's reasoning or background information, and furthermore, if there is a mistake involved, it is to be seen in the speaker's being under the impression that the relevant belief p exists. Secondly, not only is it that the relevant utterances have been understood as they were intended by the relevant speakers, given the circumstances they were not understandable that way. Nobody, in these cases, in the shoes of the audience (including the speaker himself) could understand the utterance in the way intended by the speaker, since what is missing is a belief connecting (an aspect of) the utterance with the belief intended to be induced.

The question arises here of what determines an utterance's occasion meaning. Given a speaker's occasion meaning (r), and given the fact that the equivalence between speaker's meaning and utterance meaning does not hold on every occasion, we may conclude that determining the conditions ensuring the equivalence will amount to determining the conditions on the fulfilment of which the utterance will mean r, i.e., will amount to determining the occasion meaning of the utterance. We may therefore ask whether an utterance's occasion meaning is determined by the truth of q, i.e., by the audience's possessing a belief p connecting this utterance with the belief r intended to be induced JS, vol. 2, no. 1

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We have before us a case in which a speaker issues the utterance X meaning z by it, while on the same occasion the audience A understands r by X. Moreover.it is clear,that A.does not misunderstand X. The question is as to what X meant on this, occasion. My argument is as follows: if someone understands X as r and his understanding is not mistaken (i.e., is correct), then X there meant r, at least as one of its meanings. If, under these circumstances we insist that X meant z, or that It.had z as one of.its meanings, then, first, it would follow that this meaning is not only not known, but also unknowable. But what communicative function can one assign to the concept of 'unknowable meaning'? Secondly, it would also follow that X meant z is asserted solely on the basis of the fact that S intended (etc.) z by X, in turn yielding the thesis that the meaning of an utterance is determined freely by the intentions of the producer of this utterance. The latter is tantamount to the rejection of the restriction and entails the Humpty Dumpty theory of meaning. I conclude that on this occasion X meant r. It follows that in certain cases such as A, B, and C where the speaker's belief q is false, we obtain a genuine counter-example to the equivalence, proposed by Grice, between the speaker's meaning and the utterance's meaning on the same occasion. Therefore, the concept of an utterance's occasion11 meaning cannot be explained solely in terms of the speaker's meaning.

ARDA DENKEL by the speaker. Is an utterance's occasion meaning determined by the audience's possessing the equipment necessary for enabling him to connect this utterance with the thought intended to be communicated by the speaker? If this were the case, there would be little room left for any audience's failure to understand or even to misunderstand an utterance. Any theory implying this view would make the concept of utterance meaning too much dependent on the understanding of the audience, committing itself to something close to the second extreme interpretation of meaning.

It may further be shown that the truth of q is not sufficient for the equivalence to hold, for we may get situations in which q is true and yet the equivalence does not hold. There will be cases of 'deviant' communication where the speaker believes q on the basis of a misinformation, while q nevertheless happens to be true, since the audience happens to believe p on the basis of a similar misinformation (or a delusion, etc). Suppose S, who does not speak French, was misled into believing that 'Zut alors' means 'Pass the butter'. Suppose further as, vol. 2, no. 1


I will try to show that in fact the truth of the speaker's belief q is not a condition for the equivalence of the speaker's meaning and the utterance's meaning on the same occasion. It is just that in the examples considered, the falsity of q and the non-equivalence cooccurred, since both were determined by a more fundamental condition. Before exploring this fundamental condition, let us see that the truth of q is not necessary for the holding of the equivalence: it is not the case that the equivalence holds only if the belief q is true. To see this i t is enough to rearrange the above situations A, B, and C in such a way that the speaker's belief q will be false, not because the speaker is misinformed, but because the audience fails to possess p, while his possessing i t would be 'normal'. For example, reconsider A with the change that the landowner does indeed own other gold mines, but unbeknownst to the peole around him is still unable to distinguish real gold from pyrites. Can we, under these circumstances, say that the leaving of the chunk does not mean that the land is valueless? It seems not, because here we can't use our argument of the last section since the landowner failed to understand somthing he normally should understand. Similarly, given B, suppose the head of state made the 'thumbs up' sign the right way round but some people in the crowd, although brought up in this culture, do not know the sign: are we to say that for them the sign does not mean anything? No. The correct explanation is that they fail to understand the meaning of the sign. Suppose that in C the man asking the question was, in fact, the author, but having written, in the meantime, several other thrillers with many different spy tricks, had forgotten all about the details of the code he had invented for the book. Are we to say that on this occasion the utterance does not mean that the author's work was very well written? Again, I think, there will be a justified inclination to say that the utterance does mean that.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE that in France, as soon as the occasion arose, S asked for the butter this way and got the response he expected: his interlocutor, who was not a French speaker, by sheer coincidence shared the same illusion (or he was a perverse Frenchman with the delusion that this expression is used in asking butter).

How is the truth of s determined? What are the sorts of circumstance that render a speaker's expectations and beliefs that the audience he is in contact with possesses a belief p reasonable? If, as has been explained above, s determines the meaning of X (as utterance), on the occasion of X's use, then a satisfactory answer to this question will give us an approximation to what may be called an account of the occasion meaning of an utterance. Towards such an approximation, we may suggest the following. For it to be reasonable at all to think that someone else possesses a belief p connecting X and r, there must first be an objective connection between the fact, event, etc. that constitutes X and the fact, event, etc., which makes r true. It is such a connection that enables the possession of p, and unless such a connection exists and is (in principle) empirically available, it is not reasonable to expect the possession of p by someone else, since without such an objective connection there will be no empirical rationalization of how p can be possessed by more than one person, and thus no satisfactory explanation of how one person can reasonably expect that someone else, too, possesses p. By 'objective connection1 we may understand the publicly observable co-occurrence of any two facts, events, etc., in such a way that the thought of one can be associated with the thought of the other, 1 2 Here, the notion of being publicly observable is to be taken only 'in principle', so that forming a belief of type p should not necessarily require the relevant person's direct exposure to the objective connection which causes p, for a person may pick up such a belief in a culture where other individuals have formed p by direct observation, and have preserved it in this culture. An objective connection may take the form of a natural connection which is made of two facts, events or objects related to each other causally, factually or historically: smoke and fire, the Colosseum and Rome, Cleopatra and Egypt are thus JS, vol. 2, no. 1

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If it is not the truth or the falsity of the speaker's belief q that determines the meaning of the utterance, then what is it? The answer, very roughly, is in terms of the grounds on which the belief q is formed. The speaker believes q on the basis of believing (s) that under the circumstances it is reasonable to expect that the audience possesses the belief p. As uttered by the speaker X means r if and only if s is true, regardless of whether q is true. In fact, on simple reflection it will become clear that all the cases above, where we accept that the utterance meant the relevant r, were cases where the relevant s was true, and that the cases where the utterance failed to mean the relevant r were cases where the relevant s was false.

ARDA DENKEL naturally connected. However, an objective connection does not have to be natural. It may, for instance, belong to fiction. Hamlet and the skull will be viewed as so connected as long as the connection established in fiction is made publicly available. Very importantly, a conventional connection is objective in this sense, and in such a case the choice of the items connected may be arbitrary from the point of view of natural connection. However, given two conventionally connected items, the thought of one will lead to the thought of the other purely on the basis of this convention. A traffic sign and the taking of a turn, a linguistic utterance and a particular situation or state, a gesture and a particular response are thus conventionally connected.

To express this idea with greater precision let us introduce the notion of 'context of experience'. This is largely self-explanatory since we give that name to any context or medium that can be specified via a covering concept and within which a rational agent can have experiences having some consistency. Cultures will be among such media; physical/geographical environments, fields of occupation, hobbies, etc., will all thus qualify as contexts of experience. So defined, a context of experience will include all 'available' facts and events within its boundaries. By 'available1, we will understand not only 'tech36

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While an objective connection between what constitutes X and what makes r true is necessary for its being reasonable that someone else possesses p, it cannot be sufficient, for we may easily conceive of a situation, where, although there exists a relevant objective connection, the audience in question will be unlikely to have come across it. And thus, if it is not reasonable to think that the other person (the audience) is familiar with this objective connection, then it is not reasonable to expect that he possesses the relevant p. If, for instance, we let X stand for litmus turning red and r be that the relevant medium is acid, a person A who happens to be a butcher totally uninterested in chemistry will not be reasonably expected to possess the relevant belief p. What then characterizes the circumstances which involve a particular objective connection as circumstances in which it is reasonable to expect that the audience possesses the corresponding p? It seems it is the condition that the audience, as a normal and rational being, should be sufficiently exposed to the objective connection. Of course, the condition cannot be that the audience should have noticed the connection and have formed p: we have already seen that the actual possession of p is neither necessary nor sufficient for the Gricean equivalence to hold. All that is needed for a reasonable expectation that the audience possesses p is that he should have enjoyed the opportunity to notice the connection, regardless of whether he actually noticed it. We may therefore suggest that what makes the expectation that a person A possesses p reasonable is first that there is an objective connection of the relevant kind, and second, that A has been exposed to it.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE nically observable1, but moreover, being of such obvious character that any intelligent being operating in the context would be unlikely to miss it. We may now submit the following formulation:

Given this outline, two possible objections have to be answered: first, it may be said that this outline will make the occasion meaning of an utterance dependent on the audience present on the occasion. This would not be quite correct, since what, in this analysis, meaning is made dependent on is not the audience, but the circumstances surrounding the audience. This much dependence is implied by the truth of s, and I think is needed for blocking certain cases which may potentially lead to the Humpty Dumpty theory. Suppose someone had synthesized an alloy which on being rubbed a few times emits bright light. Supposing that the discovery was not made public, we should be able to disallow that the inventor's showing the (unrubbed) piece of metal would thereby mean something connected with light. Our requirement thus renders occasion meaning conditional on "the possibility of communication. However, it does not imply a dependence on the understanding or even on the beliefs of the audience. Owing to coincidences it is possible for a rational agent who spent part of his life in a particular context of experience to have failed to form the relevant belief p on a certain connection contained in that context. It is equally possible that, even if formed, the belief p may not be called up on the occasion of utterance. These, though, are not cases that will block the occasion meaning of the utterance, provided that the third thesis holds. The 'rearranged' examples at the beginning of this section support this point. A second difficulty may be said to arise in cases where there is more than one person in the audience. Suppose the speaker utters x in the presence of two hearers and means r by it. Now s is true of only one of these hearers. The question is whether X meant r 3S, vol. 2, no. 1

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m: If ...a., person A is familiar with the contexts of experience E, where a sub-context e of E contains an objective connection between the fact, event, etc., constituting X and the fact, event, etc., which makes r true, then it is reasonable to expect of A that he possesses the relevant belief p which connects X (or an aspect of it) and r (or p from which r follows logically), m brings out the belief s. If X, as uttered by the speaker, means r if and only if s is true of the audience, then X means r on the same occasion if and only if m is true. It then seems that we have justification in proposing the following as an elucidation of the notion of utterance meaning, without, of course, claiming it to be anything more than a rough outline: Given an occasion of X's utterance by a speaker, X means r if and only if there is an audience A who is familiar with contexts of experience E, and a subcontext e of E contains an objective connection between what constitutes X (or an aspect l of it) and what makes r true (or what makes p true from which r follows logically).

ARDA DENKEL

The non-Gricean conclusion that follows from the outline suggested is that a speaker who is said to mean something by the utterance he uses does not thereby give meaning to the utterance; rather he is able to mean by exploiting the already existing connections objectively linking what he uses as utterance with facts the obtaining of which will render what he means true.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Grice (1957); (1969); (1971). Grice (1957: 46); (1969: 150). Ziff (1971: 63). Searle (1969: 44). Patton & Stample (1969: lOff.). MacKay (1968); Dodgson (1936: 213-214). Schiffer (1972: 20); Donnellan (1968: 212). r stands for a thought (or: proposition). I shall be using "belief r" for the propositional attitude of believing that r is true. X, on the other hand, is any fact, event, object or sentence which is (or can be) used as utterance. 38

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on this occasion, and if so, whether the hearer who did not understand X failed to understand it. Take, for example, the rearranged version of B above, and suppose there were compatriots of the foreign head of state in the audience. The sign used does not exist in their cuiture and they have never come across it. Are we to say that because the rest of the crowd understood it, these foreigners failed to understand it? I think the only consistent way in which we can answer this, would be by asserting that the sign did not mean in their culture context. Accordingly, the outline proposed will have to be understood as applying to the occasion meaning of an utterance with reference to an experience context. This should be viewed as a desirable consequence, since what it implies involves the fact that individuals with common or similar backgrounds communicate more easily, efficiently, and in a richer way.But more importantly, it also implies that the communication of a particular thought r via a certain utterance X is possible only if both the speaker and the audience are familiar with the context of experience containing the relevant objective connection. So, given that the notion of context of experience can involve cultures, this last implication can be expressed in terms of the familiar fact that two people can communicate a thought r in the ordinary linguistic way by using a sentence X which means r only if both speak the language to which X belongs. In the case of natural languages the objective connection enabling a linguistic utterance to mean r is of conventional character and holds between the sentence X and what makes r true. A full description of this conventional connection will yield a description of the relevant language.

THE MEANING OF AN UTTERANCE

References

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-.

Denkel, A., 1980: On failure to refer. Mind 89. Dodgson, C.L., 1936: Through the looking-glass. In The Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. New York. Donnellan, K.5., 1968: Putting Humpty Dumpty together again. The Philosophical Review 77. Grice, H.P., 1957: Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66. Grice, H.P., 1969: Utterer's meaning and intentions. The Philosophical Review 78. Grice, H.P., 1971: Utterer's meaning, sentence meaning, and word meaning. In J. Searle (ed.), The Philosophy of Language. Oxford University Press. MacKay, A., 1968: Mr. Donnellan and Humpty Dumpty on referring. The Philosophical Review 77. Patton, I.,

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