Recharacterizing Speaker and Semantic Meaning

: Exploring an alternate account of utterance meaning by dividing content and context, as informed by evaluation of the standard Gricean account of meaning

Abstract

This paper will first explain the standard Gricean account, with how it defines speaker-meaning and sentence-meaning. It will then provide an evaluation in terms of the typical problems faced by the account and show how it is unable to circumvent those issues in a satisfactory manner. It would discuss the short-comings of the account, and in doing so highlight what has to be changed.

From this, it would move to discuss a division between content-meaning and context-meaning as a method of handling such problems. It will define each type of meaning, as well as how they interact with one another. It will then return to the problems of speaker-meaning prior and show how this division allows us to avoid the problems entirely.

With that in place, it will show progressively how we might ground sentence-meaning in experience, and in doing so argue that such a method provides compositionality and the requisite ability to handle content-meaning and context-meaning simultaneously. It will raise the problems of sentence-meaning faced by the Gricean account, and show how it can overcome then as well.

Date of Award	8 May 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Samir Okasha (Supervisor) & Anthony J Everett (Supervisor)