Semantic Pragmatics

Semantic pragmatics is the study of how context influences what proposition is expressed by a use of a sentence.

Deixis

The main item discussed under the heading of semantic pragmatics is how context determines the meaning of context-sensitive words. The obvious examples are 'I,' 'you,' 'we,' here,' 'there,' 'this,' 'that,' 'now,' 'later.'

Advocates of a propositional theory of meaning have a problem here. Ideational theories of meaning may have little problem with this—each person has his or her own idea of the meaning of 'I.'

Truth-condition theories can handle this in a straightforward manner:

'I am here now,' said by me, in this place, at this time is true if and only if I am in this place at this time.

One can just build the context into the truth condition. A similar trick works in the intensional case:

'I am here now' is true in every possible world at every context (Speaker S, Location L, Time T) such that the speaker of the context is at the location L at time T and is speaking a token of the sentence.

Both kinds of truth-condition theorists have, as I have done, tried to spell out what constitutes the context. That has traditionally been viewed as a part of the task of deictic theories. That is, part of what one wants to know is what it is about a situation that is linguistically (pragmatically) significant. In the intensional semantics case, one has a pseudomathemtical model of propositions, and you can't get that in a nontrivial sense without giving some structure to what is involved in the linguistic context.

Lycan, quite reasonably, believes that we can't have, and shouldn't expect to get, a complete analysis of what is linguistically relevant. He advocates just building in a total context. Thus, for example,

'I am here now' is true in context c if the speaker of the sentence in the context is at the location of the context at the time of the context.

The difference between that and the other versions is that one looks to particular deictic terms to determine what about the context is needed to interpret them. That may include a wide variety of items, and may even be itself context dependent. Lycan's notion of context will, of course, always work, but if something more specific will do, that in itself would be a worthwhile discovery about deixis.

There is a worse problem that infects simple versions of either theory: the context of an utterance need not be where it is or who the speaker and audience are. It is a context-dependent feature of use what counts as the relevant context.

Examples:

If two Australians are talking about friends in Australia, the location may be Australia even if they are in North Caroline.

'The biggest party of the year is always this Saturday' (because this is the last Saturday before classes) is relative to a University and its Academic Calendar.

Ambiguity

The context determines whether 'bank' in

He is standing by the bank.

refers to a riverbank or a financial institution or a snow bank or a piggy bank or the banked turn of a racetrack or maybe a luge or skeleton course, or blood bank, sperm bank.

That problem is a creature of darkness. It isn't really clear where the responsibility lies for ambiguity: one natural view is that, for example, there are at least eight different words that are all spelled 'bank,' and so a sentence, once one know what the sentence is, is free of that ambiguity. If that is right, the question of ambiguity goes to pragmatic pragmatics, since by the time one gets to deixis the ambiguity is already gone.

It is also terribly unclear what counts as ambiguity: perhaps every word has an ordinary and a sarcatic meaning, in which case the question of whether a use is sarcastic is one of ambiguity and hence, perhaps, of semantic pragmatics. That doesn't seem right, but it indicates that we don't have a way of demarcating semantic ambiguity. A Gricean could take advantage of that.

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Back to propositional theories. Kaplan distinguishes the "character" of a sentence from its "content." The character of a sentence is independent of particular contextual elements, and it is the character that is the propositional meaning. Thus, for example, the character of 'I' is, roughly, that it denotes the speaker. The content is not part of semantics but of pragmatics: given a context, you can determine who the speaker is, that is the content, on that occasion, of 'I.'

-- ShaughanLavine - 02 Mar 2006