The Speaker-Hearer Scheme of Communication

Abstract

In Part I and II, I have dealt with a conception of meaning and communication in which semantics is taken to be a description of the core of meaning in language, a core that is assumed to have a logically primary function in relation to the use of language in communication. The parameters one varies in the study of meaning are determined by linguistic techniques of analysis, and meaning is constructed as a property of sentences. In this way of thinking, the interest in communication stems from the fact that semantic methods have certain conspicuous limitations when applied to ordinary language. The most prominent feature of language that exhibits these limitations is, of course, indexicality. The path one takes out of this dilemma, the path that leads to a particular notion of language use and a particular notion of pragmatics, is to claim that the semantic techniques have a perfectly general application to a limited dimension of meaning: the semantic dimension of sentence-meaning. Pragmatics becomes a supplementary discipline which studies language use as an external property of language. Pragmatics becomes a study of language in a wider setting, involving speakers, hearers, contexts, and so forth. In this wider setting, sentence-meaning is conceived of as one component within a logically secondary dimension of meaning, the dimension of speaker-meaning.