2.1: Talking about the world
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In this chapter and the next we will think about how speakers use language to talk about the world. Referring to a particular individual, e.g. by using expressions such as Abraham Lincoln or my father, is one important way in which we talk about the world. Another important way is to describe situations in the world, i.e., to claim that a certain state of affairs exists. These claims are judged to be true if our description matches the actual state of the world, and false otherwise. For example, if I were to say It is raining at a time and place where no rain is falling, I would be making a false statement.
We will focus on truth in the next chapter, but in this chapter our primary focus is on issues relating to reference. We begin in §2.2 with a very brief description of two ways of studying linguistic meaning. One of these looks primarily at how a speaker’s words are related to the thoughts or concepts he is trying to express. The other approach looks primarily at how a speaker’s words are related to the situation in the world that he is trying to describe. This second approach will be assumed in most of this book.
In §2.3 we will think about what it means to “refer” to things in the world, and discuss various kinds of expressions that speakers can use to refer to things. In §2.4 we will see that we cannot account for meaning, or even reference, by looking only at reference. To preview that discussion, we might begin with the observation that people talk about the “meaning” of words in two different ways, as illustrated in (1). In (1a), the word meant is used to specify the reference of a phrase when it was used on a particular occasion, whereas in (1b-c), the word means is used to specify the kind of meaning that we might look up in a dictionary.
(1) a. When Jones said that he was meeting “a close friend” for dinner, he meant his lawyer.
b. Salamat means ‘thank you’ in Tagalog.
c. Usufruct means ‘the right of one individual to use and enjoy the property of another.’1
We will introduce the term sense for the kind of meaning illustrated in (1b-c), the kind of meaning that we might look up in a dictionary. One crucial difference between sense and reference is that reference depends on the specific context in which a word or phrase is used, whereas sense does not depend on context in this way.
In §2.5 we discuss various types of ambiguity, that is, ways in which a word, phrase or sentence can have more than one sense. The existence of ambiguity is an important fact about all human languages, and accounting for ambiguity is an important goal in semantic analysis.
In §2.6 we discuss a kind of meaning that does not seem to involve either reference to the world, or objective claims about the world. Expressive meaning (e.g. the meanings of words like ouch and oops) reflects the speaker’s feelings or attitudes at the time of speaking. We will list a number of ways in which expressive meaning is different from “normal” descriptive meaning