SENTENCE MEANING AND UTTERANCE MEANING

Sentence Meaning and Utterance Meaning

Sentence Meaning and Utterance Meaning

Type Meaning

Type meaning is also called sentence meaning because it is attached to the sentence at the level of words. Every sentence has a type meaning in virtue of being a member of the group of possible sentences. It is also thought that type meaning correlates with semantic competence. That is, type meaning consists of what you understand when you are a competent speaker of the language.

Many times this information in the sentence type isn't sufficient to determine the content expressed in a token of the same type (contextual information is needed). That is, sometimes knowing the type meaning isn't enough to know what someone was saying on a particular occasion of use. For example, look at sentence #3 above. Without knowing to whom the pronoun “he” is referring, we cannot know whether the sentence is true or false, which indicates that we have not grasped the proposition expressed by the utterance.

That is, the information provided by the sentence meaning is often ambiguous. Because the utterance is semantically ambiguous at the type level, we can generate more than one possible interpretations of it at the token level. We can represent the sentence meanings of the 3 sentences above as follows:

Token Meaning

A sentence with a certain TYPE meaning has the ability to generate several different TOKEN meanings and SPEAKER meanings. For example, the sentences above can have the following TOKEN meanings. Contextual information is needed to distinguish among different possible interpretations.

Speaker Meaning

The notion of speaker meaning was derived in order to account for the intuition that we sometimes express thoughts that are not directly expressed in the sentence meaning but which the audience must derive in order for us to consider the speech act successful. Indirect speech acts are a good example of speech acts that seem to require an additional SPEAKER MEANING. For example, consider a situation in which the speaker asks someone if they could please pass the salt. Suppose that the person answered “Yes” and then went on talking without passing the salt. Most people would agree that the speech act was unsuccessful, because part of the speech act consisted of making the request captured in a proposition such as “Please pass the salt.” However, the sentence or type meaning clearly does not express that request.

Since the cognitive content requesting salt is clearly a part of the speech act, we need some way of incorporating it into our vocabulary. Searle and others suggest doing so using the notion of speaker meaning. To derive the speaker meaning of an utterance one usually has to use even more contextual information. The indirect speech act explained above is so conventionalized that one might argue that the intended request is expressed in the utterance meaning. However, additional or indirect content is expressed by (or at least associate with) many non conventionalized speech acts. Suppose that a speaker uttered sentence #1, Karen went to the bank today ...