UNIDAD 3: The Scope of Meaning: external context

Linguistic expressions can only occur in particular contexts, it is thus important to

study what role does context play in the determination of meaning.
This chapter considers one essential type of context: the external (AKA real-world
context) to which linguistic expressions refer. We begin discussing the distinction
between what a word inherently means, and what it can be used to mean in a
particular context (this distinction is often not self-evident).
We distinguish the type of tasks a hearer must perform to correctly understand a
linguistic expression in its context.
We begin the treatment of external context by considering the relation between
sense and reference.
We discuss and reject a possible distinction between knowledge of a word’s inherent
meaning (dictionary knowledge) and knowledge of facts about the world’s external
context (encyclopaedic knowledge).
3.1 MEANING AND CONTEXT
For the purposes of deciding what a piece of language means, no utterance can be
viewed as a self-standing whole.
Words only exist within particular contexts, and we need to take these contexts into
account. One of the main questions any theory of meaning has to answer is:

 How much of the total effect of an expression is to be attributed to its

meaning, and how much to the context in which it occurs?
(1) a. Denise´s teacher got burnt
(1) b. Denise´s brioche got burnt.
The possessive morpheme expresses two quite different relationships in each
sentence:
- In (1a) it denotes a relationship like that of the verb teach to its object: (1a)
means “the person who teaches Denise got burnt”.

- In (1b), on the other hand, it denotes a relationship of ownership and

possession: Denise´s brioche got burnt means “the brioche belonging to Denise
got burnt”.
But does this difference result from a difference in the meaning of the possessive
case, or it is product of the context in which it is used?
To many linguists, it would seem wrong to claim that the English possessive
morpheme –s has two different meanings in (1a) and (1b). Instead, these linguists
would claim that we should analyse its meaning in abstract terms, as denoting a
general relation of dependence between two nouns and leave the details of this
relation to context.
In order to interpret an expression correctly, it would seem that a hearer must
perform a number of related tasks.
- i.e. All golfers need to find some good clubs.
How many different inferences and other tasks must a hearer perform to understand
this expression? (disambiguation, quantity assignment, referents, etc.)
TIME FOR SOME PRACTICE!
Describe the decisions the hearer has to make about the interpretation of the
following utterances in order to understand the speaker’s likely meaning:
- Customers are informed that the shop will be closing in fifteen minutes.
- Could you pass the chilli sauce?
- No one’s going to the bar tonight.
- I’m sorry to bother you.
- What are you doing here?
- Will you ever grow up?
- I can’t believe you called me that.
SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS
Semantics is not the only field interested in phenomena like these: the sub-discipline
of linguistic called pragmatics, which concerns the use of language in real contexts,
also studies them.
Semantics and pragmatics are closely related. Pragmatics cannot study language
use without a prior conception of meaning: without knowing what words mean, one
cannot decide how speakers modify and manipulate these meanings in actual
situations of language use.
Similarly, semantics cannot arrive at any description of what words mean without
looking at the ways they are used in different contexts. Pragmatics and semantics
exist in a close symbiosis.
3.2 EXTERNAL CONTEXT: SENSE AND REFERENCE
The most basic type of context is the extralinguistic context of reference, which
concerns the entities which an expression is about.
Reference is one of the fundamental concepts of the study of meaning. However, for
a long time the distinction was not explicitly drawn between an expression’s referent
(the object to which it refers) and its sense (its general meaning, abstracted from its
use to refer).
Frege (1848 - 1925) first saw the significance of this distinction and elaborated the
distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung).
3.2.1 THE FREGEAN DISTINCTION
Frege had no single term for “meaning”, in the sense of the knowledge needed to
understand a word (Dummet 2001:12). Instead, he distinguished three aspects of a
word’s total semantic effect:
- Its “force”, which covered whether it was a statement or a question (he seems
not to have considered other categories like commands).

- Its “tone” or “colouring”, which refers to differences of register and connotation

(eg: difference between the verbs die, be deceased, and pass away).

- And its sense.

Sense and referent are not on equal footing in Frege’s theory of meaning. For him,
sense determines reference. It is the sense of an expression which allows us to
know what it refers to. For example: if I know what the word amber can refer to, this
is because I have a conception of its sense which allows me to pick out real
examples of amber when I am confronted with them.
Thus, for Frege it is not just an arbitrary fact that words have the denotations
(classes of referent) they have. A word only refers in virtue of its sense. Senses,
not referents, form part of our thoughts. The only access we have to actual
referents is via the senses of the words which refer to them, and these senses are
the forms in which they come before understanding.
Some expressions (square circle, six-foot high, midget, etc.) clearly have sense, but
lack reference: For Frege, sense, not reference, is the essential part of meaning.
SENSE AND PSYCHOLOGY
Sense should not be identified simply with the pre-theoretical term meaning. Most
linguists are used to thinking about meanings psychologically (as, in other words,
private mental entities).
One of the cornerstones of Frege’s whole approach to philosophy was the rejection
of the interpretation of the meaning of a linguistic expression as a subjective private
psychological entity of any sort whatsoever.
Fregean sense is thus not to be confused with the subjective, individual ideas or
mental images which an earlier philosophical tradition derived from Aristotle and
Locke, and many people today think of as constituting the meanings of lexical items.
The sense of an expression is a part of a thought; and thoughts, for Frege, are not
subjective entities which vary from one individual to another. Instead, thoughts
are objective but intangible entities, and it is this objective character which
guarantees that people may talk about the same thing, i.e., that they may
communicate.
Thus, while we often informally say that two people have different concepts of
something (honesty, a good time, etc), this sort of move is incompatible with the
Fregean theory of sense. Senses (objective, shared, non-private modes of
presentation) do not differ from one person to another.
3.2.2 THE SENSE/REFERENCE DISTINCTION AND LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTION
For the purposes of linguistic description, the Fregean theory of sense and reference
needs considerable development.
3.2.2.1 REFERENCE, SPEAKERS AND HEARERS
Sense seems clearly to be a property of linguistic expressions: it is words and
sentences which have senses. Even though we grasp senses with our minds, the
question of what sense a given expression possesses is not, for Frege, under the
speaker’s control.
Reference, however, is quite different. Unlike sense, reference is under the
speaker’s control. It is not words which refer, but speakers. Searle (1969:82) gives
the following two necessary conditions for accomplishing an act of reference:
1. There must exist one and only one object to which the speaker’s utterance of
the expression applies.

2. The hearer must be given sufficient means to identify the object from the
speaker’s utterance of the expression.
Since the hearer can be given any number of means to identify the intended object,
the reference of a term in a particular context depends on the speaker (and also of
course, if it is successful, on the hearer), not on the term itself. Codes are perhaps
the most obvious example of the fact that it is the speaker, not the expression itself,
which refers.
- A code is a speech-style in which speaker and hearer have agreed to
reassign conventional referents (and senses).
Imagine a kitchen in which rubbish was placed in a plastic bag hanging on hooks
behind the door of a cupboard under the sink. We can easily imagine that this might
be referred to as the bin, even though the sense of the noun bin is in no way simply
that of a plastic bag. (Of course, if the sense of bin is “receptacle of any kind of
rubbish”, then bin will be used here in a way compatible with its sense.)
The variability of reference is even more deep-seated in language than these
examples suggest. If we reflect on real discourse, which along with “literal” uses of
language also contains metaphors, ironical statements, exaggerations and many
other types of non-standard reference, it will soon become obvious that the
referential scope of words is extremely large.
Given the right conditions, any word can be used to refer to any referent.
This poses a considerable challenge to the theory of sense. If a word’s reference is
determined by its sense, then the range of reference that any word may have is
extremely wide. As a result, the characterisation of sense will have to be broad
enough to accommodate all the referential possibilities.
If a given word can refer to any referent, we need to distinguish its typical, expected
referents from its atypical, unexpected ones. More importantly, we need to
distinguish between successful and correct acts of reference.
- If an act of reference is successful, it succeeds in identifying the referent to the
hearer.

- If an act of reference is correct, it refers to the referent in a way which conforms

to an assumed standard.
To take up the example of the bin, if I say the bin is under the sink, then I may well
successfully refer to the rubbish-bag in which I expect the hearer to put their rubbish;
but I do not correctly refer to it, on our usual understanding of the sense of the word
bin.
3.2.2.2 THE LIMITS OF SENSE AND REFERENCE
A linguistic expression refers if it picks out an entity or set of entities in some world
(either the real world, or some possible imagined world).
Whether or not a linguistic expression refers will depend on the context in which is
used. Consider the sentence Marion is a professional harpist. The first noun phrase,
Marion, identifies a particular individual as the entity about whom the information is
given.
The second noun phrase, however, a professional harpist would usually be said not
to refer in this context. It does not pick out a particular entity or set of entities as its
object; a professional harpist has a predicative function.
Many lexical categories are typically non-referential. Verbs, for example, are typically
predicative: the inherent role of a verb is to give information about some already
identified entity, rather than to refer to that entity directly.
Nevertheless, it will often be useful to think of verbs as referring to actions, and of
sentences as referring to situations.
It is also important to note that reference is usually accomplished at the phrasal,
not the lexical, level. Thus, in English, it is noun phrases which refer and not the
individual nouns which make them up.
- An heir to a Danish steel fortune must leave behind his quiet life in Stockholm.
It is the noun phrases (An heir to a Danish steel fortune, a Danish steel fortune, his
quiet life in Stockholm, and Stockholm) which accomplish the identification of
particular entities in the world.
Heir, fortune and life do not themselves identify any single entities about which
information could be given. However, in other contexts, they can certainly refer. For
example, life in life is eventful is part of a noun phrase referring to an entity, life.
Predication shows that reference is not always a relevant aspect of the meaning of a
linguistic term. As a result, the question of whether a given noun phrase refers may
sometimes be ambiguous.
While some expressions clearly refer and others clearly do not, there is a range of
intermediate cases in which an expression may or may not be referring. For
example:
(11)
a) If you see the man with the green hat, tell him…
b) If you see a man with a green hat, tell him…
Referential: I have such a man in mind, and if you see him.
Non-referential: I don’t have any particular man in mind, so if you see one…
3.2.3 DEIXIS
Certain types of expressions, called deictic or indexical expressions, are defined
as those which make reference to some aspect of the context of an utterance
as an essential part of their meaning. Examples would be the English words here
and there.
Deictic expressions have the peculiarity that their reference is relative to the
situation in which they are used: what they mean cannot be given any general
description other than describing a procedure for isolating the intended referent.
(12)
- This is my old chess coach.
The meaning of this in (12), for example, cannot be described except by saying that
it refers to some entity in the speaker’s context of utterance (probably a person, but
also perhaps an electronic chess board, a computer, or an introductory book about
chess).
Different sorts of deixis have been observed cross-linguistically. These include the
following:
- Person deixis, by which speaker (I), hearer (you) and other entities relevant to
the discourse (he/she/it/they) are referred to.
- Temporal deixis (now, then, tomorrow).

- Discourse deixis, which refers to other elements of the discourse in which the
deictic expression occurs (A: You stole the cash. B: That’s a lie).
All languages have at least two deictically contrastive demonstratives:
- The this demonstrative is usually called a proximal.
- The that demonstrative is called a distal.
3.3 DICTIONARY AND ENCYCLOPAEDIA
Many linguists have wanted to distinguish the knowledge that we have of a word’s
meaning (sense) from the knowledge we might have about its denotation (the set of
things it refers to).
This is a pretheoretically-intuitive distinction: all of us know many things about frogs,
but something seems wrong about regarding this information as part of the meaning
of frog (frogs as enchanted princes or frogs often offensively associated by English
speakers with French people…)
There are many English speakers who do not know these things about frogs, but
who can correctly refer to frogs. This contrasts with speakers of other languages, or
with learners of English who have not yet learned the word frog, who may know
these things about frogs, but do not yet know what the English word frog means.
It would seem, then, that there is a firm line between knowledge of a word’s meaning
and knowledge of the factual information about the word’s denotation.
3.3.1 KNOWLEDGE OF MEANING AND KNOWLEDGE OF FACTS
Dictionary vs. encyclopaedia aspects of meaning: the distinction between:
- The knowledge of a word’s meaning (dictionary knowledge), which would be
conceived of as something fairly concise, perhaps like a dictionary definition.
- Encyclopaedic knowledge of facts about the objects to which the word refers.
Dictionary knowledge is knowledge of the essential meaning of a word that all
speakers must possess, and which dictionaries must accurately represent.
Encyclopaedic knowledge, by contrast, is not essential to the meaning of the word
and will vary significantly from speaker to speaker.
Encyclopaedic knowledge is not linguistic in nature: it does not determine any of a
word’s linguistic behaviour. The question of which elements of this type of
information associated with a given word are relevant to any situation is decided by
general pragmatics principles.
Encyclopaedic knowledge seems to be quite independent of dictionary knowledge:
thus, I need not know anything about fairy tales or the Australian water-holding frog
in order to be able to use the word frog.
Furthermore, it has been assumed that such distinction must be psychologically
realistic. If all of the encyclopaedic information associated with a word were part of
its meaning, this would surely be too much for the brain to process.
3.3.2 PROBLEMS WITH THE DICTIONARY-ENCYCLOPAEDIA DISTINCTION
The dictionary-encyclopaedia distinction is not accepted by many linguists. This is
largely because the boundary between the two seems to be highly permeable, even
non-existent.
It is very hard to determine where information stops being part of a word’s dictionary
meaning and becomes part of the encyclopaedic knowledge we have of its
denotation.
TIME FOR SOME PRACTICE!
Which of the following pieces of information, for example, should be
considered dictionary information about the meaning of the word cow, and
which as facts about cows which form part of the encyclopaedic knowledge
we have about them?
They are mammals.
They moo.
They eat grass.
They are four-legged.
They have large eyes.
They live in fields and dairies.
They sometimes wear cowbells.
They are often farmed for their milk.
They have several stomachs.
Their young are called calves in English.
They incubate Mad Cow Disease for three to five years if infected.
They chew their food slowly.
For example, some people do not know that tomatoes are, strictly speaking, fruit and
not vegetables. Someone may say:
(20) Get me some tomatoes and other fruit.
Cognitive linguists, such as Langaker, claim that not all facets of our knowledge of an
entity have equal status: the multitude of specifications that figure in our
encyclopaedic conception of an entity forms a gradation in terms of centrality.
Some bits of information are central, and some are peripheral. But it is impossible to
choose a specific point along with this gradation to draw a line between central
(linguistic) information and the rest.
This sort of position has some significant methodological and theoretical
consequences: it problematises the notion of the meaning of a word.
Since any fact known about a referent may become linguistically significant, the
traditional linguistic semantic project of describing the lexical entry associated with
each lexeme becomes an unending task, each lexical entry being, in principle,
infinite.