The Domain of Pragmatics

1. Nonnatural Meaning
Meaning in pragmatics is far from a unitary notion.
Example:
a. That clap of thunder means rain is coming.
b. Supercilious means “arrogant and disdainful.”
The word means is being used differently in the example above. The meaning in example
(a) is called natural meaning, which is an indication that is independent of anybody’s intent.
The word superlicious is intended the meaning to be recognized by their interlocutor. This
meaning is nonnatural.
2. Sense and Reference
Example:
 Supercilious means “arrogant and disdainful.”
 When the judge asks the defendant to rise, she means you.
a. Sense is the sort of meaning that a dictionary would give for the word. The sense of the
word superlicious is what one must have acces to in order to answer the question “is this
person being superlicious?”
b. Reference is what particular entity is being picked out or referred to. The meaning in
question in example (b) on the other hand is a matter of the reference. Sense is a context-
independent, whereas determination of reference may require access to pragmatic
information.
3. Speaker Meaning Vs. Sentence Meaning
a. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of a sentence, derivable from the sense of its
words and the syntax that combines them.
b. Speaker meaning is the meaning that a speaker intends, which usually includes the
literal meaning of the sentence but may extend well beyond it.
Example:
I’m cold.
 The sentence meaning is straightforward: The speaker is cold.
 Speakers’ meaning could be any of a number things, like close the window, bring
me a blanket, or turn off the air conditioner.
c. Possible Worlds and Discourse Models
Linguistic communication is essentially collaborative in nature. The speaker’s goal is to
help the hearer develop an internal representation of the discourse that matches the
speaker’s, while the hearer’s goal is correspondingly to develop such a representation. This
representation is called a discourse model.
A possible world is some way the world could have been. A discourse model maps onto a
set of possible world (a set of worlds in which the information in the discourse model holds
true). It is important to realize that a discourse model does not necessarily represent reality.
Strictly speaking, it is impossible to know whether one’s discourse model truly reflects
reality, since our perceptions may be in error, as may our interpretations of those
perceptions. Thus, our discourse model reflects only our beliefs concerning the possible
world under discussion. A discourse model, then, is a mental model whose correlation with
reality can be believed in, but never definitively established.
d. Mutual Belief
As our discourse models are different from each other and because we can never check the
extent to which model can be agreed on, the best we can do is to operate on the assumption
that we share beliefs. However, the process will quickly become an infinte regress, with an
infinite number of increasingly embedded beliefs being necessary for even simple
utterances. The apparent impossibility of linguistic communication is resolved through a
number of co-presence heuristics.