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part 3- 20. Pragmatics and Semantics, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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20. Pragmatics and Semantics
FRANOIS RECANATI
Subject
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
Key
-Topics
Topics
semantics
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00022.x
Around the middle of the twentieth century, there were two opposing camps within the analytic
philosophy of language. The first camp - IDEAL LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY, as it was then called - was
that of the pioneers: Frege, Russell, Carnap, Tarski, etc. They were, first and foremost, logicians
studying formal languages and, through them, ÑlanguageÒ in general. They were not originally
concerned with natural language, which they thought defective in various ways;
1
yet in the 1960s,
some of their disciples established the relevance of their methods to the detailed study of natural
language (Montague 1974, Davidson 1984). Their efforts gave rise to contemporary FORMAL
SEMANTICS, a very active discipline developed jointly by logicians, philosophers, and grammarians.
The other camp was that of so-called ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHERS, who thought important
features of natural language were not revealed but hidden by the logical approach initiated by Frege
and Russell. They advocated a more descriptive approach and emphasized the pragmatic nature of
natural language as opposed to, say, the formal language of Principia Mathematica. Their own work
2
gave rise to contemporary pragmatics, a discipline which, like formal semantics, has been developed
successfully within linguistics over the past 40 years.
Central in the ideal language tradition had been the equation of, or at least the close connection
between, the meaning of a sentence and its truth conditions. This truth-conditional approach to
meaning is perpetuated to a large extent in contemporary formal semantics. On this approach a
language is viewed as a system of rules or conventions, in virtue of which (i) certain assemblages of
symbols count as well-formed sentences, and (ii) sentences have meanings which are determined by
the meanings of their parts and the way they are put together. Meaning itself is patterned after
reference. The meaning of a simple symbol is the conventional assignment of a worldly entity to that
symbol: for example, names are assigned objects, monadic predicates are assigned properties or sets
of objects, etc. The meaning of a sentence, determined by the meanings of its constituents and the
way they are put together, is equated with its truth conditions. For example, the subject-predicate
construction is associated with a semantic rule for determining the truth conditions of a subject-
predicate sentence on the basis of the meaning assigned to the subject and that assigned to the
predicate. On this picture, knowing a language is like knowing a theory by means of which one can
deductively establish the truth conditions of any sentence of that language.
This truth-conditional approach to meaning is something that ordinary language philosophers found
quite unpalatable. According to them, reference and truth cannot be ascribed to linguistic expressions
in abstraction from their use. In vacuo, words do not refer and sentences do not have truth
conditions. Words-world relations are established through, and are indissociable from, the use of
language. It is therefore misleading to construe the meaning of a word as some worldly entity that it
represents or, more generally, as its truth-conditional contribution. The meaning of a word, insofar as
there is such a thing, should rather be equated with its use-potential or its use-conditions. In any
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case, what must be studied primarily is speech: the activity of saying things. Then we will be in a
position to understand language, the instrument we use in speech. Austin's theory of speech acts and
Grice's theory of speaker's meaning were both meant to provide the foundation for a theory of
language, or at least for a theory of linguistic meaning.
Despite the early antagonism I have just described, semantics (the formal study of meaning and truth
conditions) and pragmatics (the study of language in use) are now conceived of as complementary
disciplines, shedding light on different aspects of language. The heated arguments between ideal
language philosophers and ordinary language philosophers are almost forgotten. Almost, but not
totally: as we shall see, the ongoing debate about the best delimitation of the respective territories of
semantics and pragmatics betrays the persistence of two recognizable currents or approaches within
contemporary theorizing.
1 Abstracting Semantics from Pragmatics: the Carnapian
1 Abstracting Semantics from Pragmatics: the Carnapian Approach
Approach
The semantics/pragmatics distinction was first explicitly introduced by philosophers in the ideal
language tradition. According to Charles Morris, who was influenced by Peirce, the basic ÑsemioticÒ
relation is triadic: a linguistic expression is used to communicate something to someone. Within that
complex relation several dimensions can be isolated:
In terms of the three correlates (sign vehicle, designatum, interpreter) of the triadic
relation of semiosis, a number of other dyadic relations may be abstracted for study.
One may study the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable.
This relation will be called the semantical dimension of semiosis È. The study of this
dimension will be called semantics. Or the subject of study may be the relation of signs
to interpreters. This relation will be called the pragmatical dimension of semiosis, È
and the study of this dimension will be named pragmatics È The formal relation of
signs to one another È will be called the syntactical dimension of semiosis, È and the
study of this dimension will be named syntactics.
(Morris 1938: 6Ï7)
Carnap took up Morris's distinction and introduced an order among the three disciplines, based on
their degree of abstractness. In semantics we abstract away from more aspects of language than we
do in pragmatics, and in syntax we abstract away from more aspects than in semantics:
If in an investigation explicit reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more
general terms, to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics È.
If we abstract from the user of the language and analyze only the expressions and their
designata, we are in the field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the
designata also and analyze only the relations between the expressions, we are in
(logical) syntax.
(Carnap 1942: 9)
In the theorist's reconstruction of the phenomenon, we start with the most abstract layer (syntax) and
enrich it progressively, moving from syntax to semantics and from semantics to pragmatics. Syntax
provides the input to semantics, which provides the input to pragmatics.
In what sense is it possible to separate the relation between words and the world from the use of
words? There is no doubt that the relations between words and the world hold only in virtue of the
use which is made of the words in the relevant speech community: meaning supervenes on use.
3
That
is something the logical empiricists fully admitted. Still, a distinction must be made between two
things: the conventional relations between words and what they mean, and the pragmatic basis
pragmatic basis for
those relations. Though they are rooted in, and emerge from, the use of words in actual speech
situations, the conventional relations between words and what they mean can be studied in
pragmatic basis
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abstraction from use. Such an abstract study constitutes semantics. The study of the pragmatic basis
pragmatic basis
of semantics is a different study, one which belongs to pragmatics or (as Kaplan puts it)
M
ETASEMANTICS
:
pragmatic basis
The fact that a word or phrase has a certain meaning clearly belongs to semantics. On
the other hand, a claim about the basis for ascribing a certain meaning to a word or
phrase does not belong to semantics È. Perhaps, because it relates to how the language
is used, it should be categorized as part of È pragmatics È, or perhaps, because it is a
fact about semantics, as part of È Metasemantics.
(Kaplan 1989b: 574)
In the same Carnapian spirit Stalnaker distinguishes between D
ESCRIPTIVE
semantics and F
OUNDATIONAL
semantics:
ÑDescriptive semanticsÒ È says what the semantics for the language is, without saying
what it is about the practice of using that language that explains why that semantics is
the right one. A descriptive-semantic theory assigns semantic values to the expressions
of the language, and explains how the semantic values of the complex expressions are a
function of the semantic values of their parts È. Foundational semantics [says] what the
facts are that give expressions their semantic values, or more generally, È what makes
it the case that the language spoken by a particular individual or community has a
particular descriptive semantics.
(Stalnaker 1997: 535)
4
The uses of linguistic forms on which their semantics depends, and which therefore constitute the
pragmatic basis for their semantics, are their past
past uses: what an expression means at time t in a given
community depends upon the history of its uses before t in the community. But of course, pragmatics
is not merely concerned with past uses. Beside the past uses of words (and constructions) that
determine the conventional meaning of a given sentence, there is another type of use that is of
primary concern to pragmatics: the current use of the sentence by the speaker who actually utters it.
That use cannot affect what the sentence conventionally means, but it determines another form of
meaning which clearly falls within the province of pragmatics: what the speaker
past
the speaker means when he says
what he says, in the context at hand. That is something that can and should be separated from the
(conventional) meaning of the sentence. To determine Ñwhat the speaker meansÒ is to answer
questions such as: Was John's utterance intended as a piece of advice or as a threat? By saying that it
was late, did Mary mean that I should have left earlier? Like the pragmatic basis of semantics,
dimensions of language use such as illocutionary force (Austin, Searle) and conversational implicature
(Grice) can be dealt with in pragmatics without interfering with the properly semantic study of the
relations between words and their designata. So the story goes.
the speaker
There are two major difficulties with this approach to the semantics/pragmatics distinction - the
Carnapian approach, as I will henceforth call it. The first one is due to the fact that the conventional
meaning of linguistic forms is not exhausted by their relation to designata. Some linguistic forms (e.g.
goodbye, or the imperative mood) have a ÑpragmaticÒ rather than a ÑsemanticÒ meaning: they have
use-conditions but do not ÑrepresentÒ anything and hence do not contribute to the utterance's truth
conditions. Because there are such expressions - and because arguably there are many of them and
every sentence contains at least one - we have to choose: either semantics is defined as the study of
conventional meaning, or it is defined as the study of words-world relations. We can't have it both
ways. If, sticking to Carnap's definition, we opt for the latter option, we shall have to acknowledge
that Ñsemantics,Ò in the sense of Carnap, does not provide a complete (descriptive) account of the
conventional significance of linguistic forms.
The second difficulty is more devastating. It was emphasized by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, a follower of
Carnap who wanted to apply his ideas to natural language. Carnap explicitly said he was dealing Ñonly
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with languages which contain no expressions dependent upon extra-linguistic factorsÒ (Carnap
1937:168). Bar-Hillel lamented that this Ñrestricts highly the immediate applicabilityÒ of Carnap's
views to natural languages since Ñthe overwhelming majority of the sentences in these languages are
indexical, i.e. dependent upon extra-linguistic factorsÒ (Bar-Hillel 1970: 123; see Levinson, this
volume for more on indexicality). In particular, Carnap's view that words-world relations can be
studied in abstraction from use is no longer tenable once we turn to indexical languages; for the
relations between words and their designata are mediated by the (current) context of use in such
languages.
The abstraction from the pragmatic context, which is precisely the step taken from
descriptive pragmatics to descriptive semantics, is legitimate only when the pragmatic
context is (more or less) irrelevant and defensible as a tentative step only when this
context can be assumed to be irrelevant.
(Bar-Hillel 1970: 70)
Since most natural language sentences are indexical, the abstraction is illegitimate. This leaves us
with a number of (more or less equivalent) options:
1 We can make the denotation relation irreducibly triadic. Instead of saying that words denote
things, we will say that they denote things Ñwith respect toÒ contexts of use.
2 We can maintain that the denotation relation is dyadic, but change the first relatum - the
denotans, as we might say - so that it is no longer an expression-type, but a particular
occurrence of an expression, i.e. an ordered pair consisting of an expression and a context of
use.
3 We can change the second relatum of the dyadic relation: instead of pairing expressions of
the language with worldly entities denoted by them, we can pair them with functions from
contexts to denotata.
Whichever option we choose - and, again, they amount to more or less the same thing - we are no
longer doing ÑsemanticsÒ in Carnap's restricted sense. Rather, we are doing pragmatics, since we take
account of the context of use. Formal work on the extension of the Tarskian truth-definition to
indexical languages has thus been called (FORMAL) PRAGMATICS, following Carnap's usage (Montague
1968). As Gazdar (1979: 2Ï3) pointed out, a drawback of that usage is that there no longer is a
contrast between ÑsemanticsÒ and Ñpragmatics,Ò as far as natural language is concerned: there is no
ÑsemanticsÒ for natural language (and for indexical languages more generally), but only two fields of
study: syntax and pragmatics.
2 Meaning and Speech Acts
Meaning and Speech Acts
Can we save the semantics/pragmatics distinction for natural language? At least we can try. Following
Jerrold Katz, we can give up Carnap's definition of semantics as the study of words-world relations,
and define it instead as the study of the conventional, linguistic meaning of expression-types.
ÑPragmatic phenomena,Ò Katz says, are Ñthose in which knowledge of the setting or context of an
utterance plays a role in how utterances are understoodÒ; in contrast, semantics deals with Ñwhat an
ideal speaker would know about the meaning of a sentence when no information is available about its
contextÒ (Katz 1977: 14). This view has been, and still is, very influential. Semantics thus understood
does not (fully) determine words-world relations, but it constrains them (Katz 1975: 115Ï16).
Because of indexicality and related phenomena, purely linguistic knowledge is insufficient to
determine the truth conditions of an utterance. That much is commonly accepted. What semantics
assigns to expression-types, independent of context, is not a fully-fledged content but a linguistic
meaning or CHARACTER that can be formally represented as a function from contexts to contents
(Kaplan 1989a, Stalnaker 1999, part 1). Thus the meaning of the pronoun I is the rule that, in context,
an occurrence of I refers to the producer of that occurrence.
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Insofar as their character or linguistic meaning can be described as a rule of use, indexical
expressions are not as different as we may have thought from those expressions whose meaning is
purely Ñpragmatic.Ò What is the meaning of, say, the imperative mood? Arguably, the sentences ÑYou
will go to the store tomorrow at 8,Ò ÑWill you go to the store tomorrow at 8?Ò, and ÑGo to the store
tomorrow at 8Ò all have the same descriptive content. The difference between them is pragmatic: it
relates to the type of illocutionary act performed by the utterance. Thus the imperative mood
indicates that the speaker, in uttering the sentence, performs an illocutionary act of a DIRECTIVE type.
To account for this non-truth-conditional indication we can posit a rule to the effect that the
imperative mood is to be used only if one is performing a directive type of illocutionary act. This rule
gives conditions of
use for the imperative mood. By virtue of this rule, a particular token of the
imperative mood in an utterance u ÑindicatesÒ that a directive type of speech act is being performed
by u. This reflexive indication conveyed by the token follows from the conditions of use which govern
the type. The same sort of USE-CONDITIONAL analysis can be provided for, for example, discourse
particles such as well, still, after all, anyway, therefore, alas, oh, and so forth, whose meaning is
pragmatic rather than truth-conditional (see Blakemore, this volume).
conditions of
conditions of use
use
There still is a difference between indexical expressions and fully pragmatic expressions such as the
imperative mood. In both cases the meaning of the expression-type is best construed as a rule of use.
Thus I is to be used to refer to the speaker, just as the imperative mood is to be used to perform a
certain type of speech act. By virtue of the rule in question, a use u of I reflexively indicates that it
refers to the speaker of u, just as a use u of the imperative mood indicates that the utterer of u is
performing a directive type of speech act. But in the case of I the token does not merely convey that
reflexive indication: it also contributes its referent to the utterance's truth-conditional content. In
contrast, the imperative mood does not contribute to the truth-conditional (or, more generally,
descriptive) content of the utterances in which it occurs. In general, pragmatic expressions do not
contribute to the determination of the content of the utterance, but to the determination of its force
or of other aspects of utterance meaning external to descriptive content.
It turns out that there are (at least) three different types of expression. Some expressions have a
purely denotative meaning: their meaning is a worldly entity that they denote. For example, square
denotes the property of being square. Other expressions, such as the imperative mood, have a purely
pragmatic meaning. They have conditions of use but make no contribution to content. Finally, there
are expressions which, like indexicals, have conditions of use but contribute to truth conditions
nevertheless. (The expression-type has conditions of use; the expression-token contributes to truth
conditions.)
This diversity can be overcome and some unification achieved. First, we can generalize the
content/character distinction even to non-indexical expressions like square. We can say that every
linguistic expression is endowed with a character that contextually determines its content. Non-
indexical expressions will be handled as a particular case: the case in which the character is ÑstableÒ
and determines the same content in every context. Second, every expression, whether or not it
contributes to truth-conditional content, can be construed as doing basically the same thing -
namely, helping the hearer to understand which speech act is performed by an utterance of the
sentence. A speech act typically consists of two major components: a content and a force (Searle
1969; see also Sadock, this volume). Some elements in the sentence indicate the force of the speech
act which the sentence can be used to perform, while other elements give indications concerning the
content of the speech act. Unification of the two sorts of elements is therefore achieved by equating
the meaning of a sentence with its speech act potential.
On the view we end up with - the speech-act theoretic view - semantics deals with the conventional
meaning of expressions, the conventional meaning of expressions is their contribution to the
meaning of the sentences in which they occur, and the meaning of sentences is their speech act
potential. Pragmatics studies speech acts, and semantics maps sentences onto the type of speech act
they are designed to perform. It follows that there are two basic disciplines in the study of language:
syntax and pragmatics. Semantics connects them by assigning speech act potentials to well-formed
sentences, hence it presupposes both syntax and pragmatics. In contrast to the Carnapian view,
according to which semantics presupposes only syntax, on the speech-act theoretic view semantics is
not autonomous with respect to pragmatics:
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