Summary |
The linguistic meaning of an expression is what fully competent speakers have a grasp of. It's a standing, context-invariant property belonging to an expression-type that makes it possible to use it to perform linguistic acts, e. g. to say things. Linguistic meaning, derivative semantic properties (e. g. semantic content) and linguistic acts are the proper domain of semantics. The term 'speaker meaning' is used in at least two different senses. In the dominant Gricean sense talk of speaker meaning is talk of what the speaker intentionally communicates (e. g. 'S meant that p'). The speaker might say something and mean the same thing or say something, but mean something else. The latter sorts of cases include conversational implicatures. A similar distinction was drawn by Kripke between semantic reference and speaker reference. Speaker meaning and speaker reference belong to pragmatics. Note that it's a complete accident of English that the same word can be used to talk about a linguistic property and a speaker's act. This is not the case in most other languages. In German the contrast is between 'bedeutung' vs. 'meinen', and in many other languages to talk of speaker meaning you have to use locutions that translate as 'S had in mind' or 'S wanted to say'. There are also two other uses of 'speaker meaning'. It is sometimes used to talk about what an expression means in a speaker's idiolect (Kripkenstein used 'In the past, I meant plus with '+'' in this sense). On another use it is used to talk about what an expression means on an occasion of use (e. g. what is sometimes called utterance meaning). When Searle uses 'speaker meaning' he has this in mind. Davidson called this 'first meaning' instead. However,many question whether we need to postulate utterance meaning at all, whether there's any explanatory work for it to do. However, even if we do, it would be best to avoid calling it speaker meaning. |