Analyzing meaning An introduction to semantics and pragmatics Second corrected and slightly revised edition Paul R. Kroeger Textbooks in Language Sciences 5 language science press Textbooks in Language Sciences Editors: Stefan Müller, Martin Haspelmath Editorial Board: Claude Hagège, Marianne Mithun, Anatol Stefanowitsch, Foong Ha Yap In this series: 1. Müller, Stefan. Grammatical theory: From transformational grammar to constraint-based approaches. 2. Schäfer, Roland. Einführung in die grammatische Beschreibung des Deutschen. 3. Freitas, Maria João & Ana Lúcia Santos (eds.). Aquisição de língua materna e não materna: Questões gerais e dados do português. 4. Roussarie, Laurent. Sémantique formelle : Introduction à la grammaire de Montague. 5. Kroeger, Paul. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. ISSN: 2364-6209 Analyzing meaning An introduction to semantics and pragmatics Second corrected and slightly revised edition Paul R. Kroeger language science press Kroeger, Paul. 2019. Analyzing meaning: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Second corrected and slightly revised edition . (Textbooks in Language Sciences 5). Berlin: Language Science Press. This title can be downloaded at: http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/231 © 2019, Paul R. Kroeger Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (CC BY 4.0): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ISBN: 978-3-96110-136-8 (Digital) 978-3-96110-137-5 (Softcover) ISSN: 2364-6209 DOI:10.5281/zenodo.2538330 Source code available from www.github.com/langsci/231 Collaborative reading: paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci&id=231 Cover and concept of design: Ulrike Harbort Typesetting: Felix Kopecky, Paul Kroeger, Sebastian Nordhoff Proofreading: Aleksandrs Berdicevskis, Andreas Hölzl, Anne Kilgus, Bev Erasmus, Carla Parra, Catherine Rudin, Christian Döhler, David Lukeš, David Nash, Eitan Grossman, Eugen Costetchi, Guohua Zhang, Ikmi Nur Oktavianti, Jean Nitzke, Jeroen van de Weijer, José Poblete Bravo, Joseph De Veaugh, Lachlan Mackenzie, Luigi Talamo, Martin Haspelmath, Mike Aubrey, Monika Czerepowicka, Myke Brinkerhoff, Parviz Parsafar, Prisca Jerono, Ritesh Kumar, Sandra Auderset, Torgrim Solstad, Vadim Kimmelman, Vasiliki Foufi Fonts: Linux Libertine, Arimo, DejaVu Sans Mono, AR PL UMing Typesetting software: XƎL A TEX Language Science Press Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin, Germany langsci-press.org Storage and cataloguing done by FU Berlin Contents Preface xi Abbreviations xiii I Foundational concepts 1 1 The meaning of meaning 3 1.1 Semantics and pragmatics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.2 Three “levels” of meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.3 Relation between form and meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 1.4 What does mean mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1.5 Saying, meaning, and doing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 1.6 “More lies ahead” (a roadmap) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 2 Referring, denoting, and expressing 15 2.1 Talking about the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.2 Denotational semantics vs. cognitive semantics . . . . . . . . . 16 2.3 Types of referring expressions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 2.4 Sense vs. denotation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 2.5 Ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.6 Expressive meaning: Ouch and oops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 2.6.1 Independence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.6.2 Nondisplaceability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.6.3 Immunity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 2.6.4 Scalability and repeatability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2.6.5 Descriptive ineffability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 2.6.6 Case study: Expressive uses of diminutives . . . . . . . . 29 2.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 3 Truth and inference 35 3.1 Truth as a guide to sentence meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Contents 3.2 Analytic sentences, synthetic sentences, and contradictions . . . 36 3.3 Meaning relations between propositions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 3.4 Presupposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 3.4.1 How to identify a presupposition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 3.4.2 Accommodation: a repair strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 3.4.3 Pragmatic vs. semantic aspects of presupposition . . . . 45 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 4 The logic of truth 53 4.1 What logic can do for you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 4.2 Valid patterns of inference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 4.3 Propositional logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.3.1 Propositional operators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 4.3.2 Meaning relations and rules of inference . . . . . . . . . 62 4.4 Predicate logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 4.4.1 Quantifiers (an introduction) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 4.4.2 Scope ambiguities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 II Word meanings 77 5 Word senses 79 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 5.2 Word meanings as construals of external reality . . . . . . . . . 79 5.3 Lexical ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 5.3.1 Ambiguity, vagueness, and indeterminacy . . . . . . . . 80 5.3.2 Distinguishing ambiguity from vagueness and indeter- minacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 5.3.3 Polysemy vs. homonymy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 5.3.4 One sense at a time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 5.3.5 Disambiguation in context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5.4 Context-dependent extensions of meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 5.4.1 Figurative senses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 5.4.2 How figurative senses become established . . . . . . . . 99 5.5 “Facets” of meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 5.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 iv Contents 6 Lexical sense relations 107 6.1 Meaning relations between words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 6.2 Identifying sense relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 6.2.1 Synonyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 6.2.2 Antonyms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 6.2.3 Hyponymy and taxonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 6.2.4 Meronymy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 6.3 Defining words in terms of sense relations . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 6.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 7 Components of lexical meaning 119 7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 7.2 Lexical entailments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 7.3 Selectional restrictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 7.4 Componential analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 7.5 Verb meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 7.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 III Implicature 137 8 Grice’s theory of implicature 139 8.1 Sometimes we mean more than we say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 8.2 Conversational implicatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 8.3 Grice’s Maxims of Conversation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 8.4 Types of implicatures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 8.4.1 Generalized Conversational Implicature . . . . . . . . . 146 8.4.2 Conventional Implicature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148 8.5 Distinguishing features of conversational implicatures . . . . . 149 8.6 How to tell one kind of inference from another . . . . . . . . . . 151 8.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 9 Pragmatic inference after Grice 161 9.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 9.2 Meanings of English words vs. logical operators . . . . . . . . . 161 9.2.1 On the ambiguity of and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 9.2.2 On the ambiguity of or . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 9.3 Explicatures: bridging the gap between what is said vs. what is implicated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 v Contents 9.4 Implicatures and the semantics/pragmatics boundary . . . . . . 170 9.4.1 Why numeral words are special . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 9.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 10 Indirect speech acts 179 10.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 10.2 Performatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 10.3 Indirect speech acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 10.4 Indirect speech acts across languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 10.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192 11 Conventional implicature and use-conditional meaning 197 11.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 11.2 Distinguishing truth-conditional vs. use-conditional meaning 198 11.2.1 Diagnostic properties of conventional implicatures . . . 198 11.2.2 Speaker-oriented adverbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 11.3 Japanese honorifics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 11.4 Korean speech style markers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 11.5 Other ways of marking politeness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208 11.6 Discourse particles in German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 11.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 IV Compositional semantics 215 12 How meanings are composed 217 12.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 12.2 Two simple examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 12.3 Frege on compositionality and substitutivity . . . . . . . . . . . 220 12.4 Propositional attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 12.5 De dicto vs. de re ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 12.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 13 Modeling compositionality 229 13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 13.2 Why a model might be useful . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 13.3 Basic concepts in set theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 13.3.1 Relations and functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 13.3.2 Operations and relations on sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 vi Contents 13.4 Truth relative to a model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 13.5 Rules of interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242 13.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246 14 Quantifiers 253 14.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 14.2 Quantifiers as relations between sets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 14.3 Quantifiers in logical form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 14.4 Two types of quantifiers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 14.5 Scope ambiguities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 14.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 15 Intensional contexts 273 15.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 15.2 When substitutivity fails . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 15.3 Non-intersective adjectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 15.4 Other intensional contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 15.5 Subjunctive mood as a marker of intensionality . . . . . . . . . 285 15.6 Defining functions via lambda abstraction . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 15.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 V Modals, conditionals, and causation 291 16 Modality 293 16.1 Possibility and necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 16.2 The range of modal meanings: strength vs. type of modality . . 294 16.2.1 Are modals polysemous? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 16.3 Modality as quantification over possible worlds . . . . . . . . . 298 16.3.1 A simple quantificational analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 16.3.2 Kratzer’s analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302 16.4 Cross-linguistic variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 16.5 On the nature of epistemic modality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 16.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312 17 Evidentiality 317 17.1 Markers that indicate the speaker’s source of information . . . . 317 17.2 Some common types of evidential systems . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 17.3 Evidentiality and epistemic modality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 vii Contents 17.4 Distinguishing evidentiality from tense and modality . . . . . . 321 17.5 Two types of evidentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 17.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 18 Because 329 18.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 18.2 Because as a two-place operator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330 18.3 Use-conditional because . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 18.4 Structural issues: co-ordination vs. subordination . . . . . . . . 335 18.5 Two words for ‘because’ in German . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 18.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 19 Conditionals 347 19.1 Conditionals and modals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 19.2 Four uses of if . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 19.3 Degrees of hypotheticality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 19.4 English if vs. material implication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 357 19.5 If as a restrictor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359 19.6 Counterfactual conditionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 19.7 Speech Act conditionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 366 19.8 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 372 VI Tense & aspect 377 20 Aspect and Aktionsart 379 20.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 20.2 Situation type ( Aktionsart ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380 20.3 Time of speaking, time of situation, and “topic time” . . . . . . . 386 20.4 Grammatical Aspect (= “viewpoint aspect”) . . . . . . . . . . . . 388 20.4.1 Typology of grammatical aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 390 20.4.2 Imperfective aspect in Mandarin Chinese . . . . . . . . 391 20.4.3 Perfect and prospective aspects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 20.4.4 Minor aspect categories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 20.5 Interactions between situation type ( Aktionsart ) and grammati- cal aspect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 20.6 Aspectual sensitivity and coercion effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . 397 20.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400 viii Contents 21 Tense 405 21.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 21.2 Tense relates Topic Time to the Time of Utterance . . . . . . . . 406 21.3 Case study: English simple present tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408 21.4 Relative tense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 21.4.1 Complex (“absolute-relative”) tense marking . . . . . . . 415 21.4.2 Sequence of tenses in indirect speech . . . . . . . . . . . 416 21.5 Temporal remoteness markers (“metrical tense”) . . . . . . . . . 420 21.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423 22 Varieties of the perfect 427 22.1 Introduction: perfect vs. perfective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 427 22.2 Uses of the perfect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 428 22.3 Tense vs. aspect uses of English have + participle . . . . . . . . 430 22.3.1 The present perfect puzzle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 430 22.3.2 Distinguishing perfect aspect vs. relative tense . . . . . 432 22.4 Arguments for polysemous aspectual senses of the English perfect 434 22.5 Case study: Perfect aspect in Baraïn (Chadic) . . . . . . . . . . . 437 22.6 Case study: Experiential -guo in Mandarin . . . . . . . . . . . . 439 22.7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446 References 453 Index 475 Name index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 475 Language index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 ix Preface This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, includ- ing lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The approach is largely descriptive and non-formal, although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced under- graduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous course- work in linguistics, including at least a full semester of morpho-syntax and some familiarity with phonological concepts and terminology. It does not presuppose any previous background in formal logic or set theory. Semantics and pragmatics are both enormous fields, and an introduction to either can easily fill an entire semester (and typically does); so it is no easy matter to give a reasonable introduction to both fields in a single course. However, I believe there are good reasons to teach them together. In order to cover such a broad range of topics in relatively little space, I have not been able to provide as much depth as I would have liked in any of them. As the title indicates, this book is truly an introduction: it attempts to provide stu- dents with a solid foundation which will prepare them to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a refer- ence for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. (This has been a weak point in many descriptive grammars.) At several points I have also pointed out the relevance of the material being dis- cussed to practical applications such as translation and lexicography, but due to limitations of space this is not a major focus of attention. The book is organized into six Units: (I) Foundational concepts; (II) Word mean- ings; (III) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (IV) Compositional seman- tics; (V) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (VI) Tense & aspect. The sequence of chapters is important; in general, each chapter draws fairly heavily on pre- ceding chapters. The book is intended to be teachable in a typical one-semester course module. However, if the instructor needs to reduce the amount of material Preface to be covered, it would be possible to skip Chapters 6 (Lexical sense relations), 15 (Intensional contexts), 17 (Evidentiality), and/or 22 (Varieties of the perfect) without seriously affecting the students’ comprehension of the other chapters. Alternatively, one might skip the entire last section, on tense & aspect. Most of the chapters (after the first) include exercises which are labeled as being for “Discussion” or “Homework”, depending on how I have used them in my own teaching. (Of course other instructors are free to use them in any way that seems best to them.) A few chapters have only “Discussion exercises”, and two (Chapters 15 and 17) have no exercises at all in the current version of the book. Additional exercises for many of the topics covered here can be found in Saeed (2009) and Kearns (2000). Preface to the second edition This revision corrects a substantial number of typos and other errors from the first edition, but covers the same basic material. Changes to the content have primarily been for clarification of the existing material, plus some minor changes to the homework exercises in chapters 3 and 16. No significant changes have been made in terms of theory or analysis. As with the first edition, this version is available for collaborative reading on the PaperHive platform (https://paperhive.org/documents/remote?type=langsci& id=231). Suggestions which will help to improve any aspect of the book will be most welcome. Special thanks are due to Hiroki Nomoto for his careful reading and helpful comments on the first edition. Thanks also to the many volunteers who helped with the initial proofreading of the first edition, and to my students who caught a number of errors that I had missed. Soli Deo Gloria References Kearns, Kate. 2000. Semantics (Modern Linguistics series). New York: St. Martin’s Press. Saeed, John. 2009. Semantics . 3rd edn. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. xii Abbreviations Abbreviations acc accusative aux auxiliary comp complementizer cond conditional conject conjecture cont continuous contr contrast cop copula cos Change of State dat dative decl declarative deic deictic dem demonstrative deon deontic det determiner dim diminutive dir direct evidence emph emphatic epis epistemic erg ergative excl exclusive exclam exclamation exis existential exper experiential aspect f feminine frus frustrative fut future gen genitive hon honorific imp imperative; impf imparfait (French) int intimate speech intr intransitive inan inanimate ind indicative ipfv imperfective lnk linker loc locative m masculine nec necessity neg negative nom nominative npst non-past obj object pejor pejorative pfv perfective pl plural pol polite poss possessive potent potentive pred predicative prf perfect prob probability prog progressive prtcl particle ps passé simple (French) pst past ptcp participle q question rel relativizer sbjv subjunctive sg singular stat stative subj subject tr transitive xiv Unit I Foundational concepts 1 The meaning of meaning 1.1 Semantics and pragmatics The American author Mark Twain is said to have described a certain person as “a good man in the worst sense of the word.” The humor of this remark lies partly in the unexpected use of the word good , with something close to the opposite of its normal meaning: Twain seems to be implying that this man is puritanical, self-righteous, judgmental, or perhaps hypocritical. Nevertheless, despite using the word in this unfamiliar way, Twain still manages to communicate at least the general nature of his intended message. Twain’s witticism is a slightly extreme example of something that speakers do on a regular basis: using old words with new meanings. It is interesting to compare this example with the following famous conversation from Through the Looking Glass , by Lewis Carroll: (1) [Humpty Dumpty speaking] “There’s glory for you!” “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ” “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.” Superficially, Humpty Dumpty’s comment seems similar to Mark Twain’s: both speakers use a particular word in a previously unknown way. The results, however, are strikingly different: Mark Twain successfully communicates (at least part of) his intended meaning, whereas Humpty Dumpty fails to communi- cate; throughout the ensuing conversation, Alice has to ask repeatedly what he means. 1 The meaning of meaning Humpty Dumpty’s claim to be the “master” of his words — to be able to use words with whatever meaning he chooses to assign them — is funny because it is absurd. If people really talked that way, communication would be impossible. Perhaps the most important fact about word meanings is that they must be shared by the speech community: speakers of a given language must agree, at least most of the time, about what each word means. Yet, while it is true that words must have agreed-upon meanings, Twain’s remark illustrates how word meanings can be stretched or extended in various novel ways, without loss of comprehension on the part of the hearer. The contrast between Mark Twain’s successful communication and Humpty Dumpty’s failure to communicate suggests that the conventions for extending meanings must also be shared by the speech community. In other words, there seem to be rules even for bending the rules. In this book we will be interested both in the rules for “normal” communication, and in the rules for bending the rules. The term semantics is often defined as the study of meaning. It might be more accurate to define it as the study of the relationship between linguistic form and meaning. This relationship is clearly rule-governed, just as other aspects of lin- guistic structure are. For example, no one believes that speakers memorize ev- ery possible sentence of a language; this cannot be the case, because new and unique sentences are produced every day, and are understood by people hearing them for the first time. Rather, language learners acquire a vocabulary (lexicon), together with a set of rules for combining vocabulary items into well-formed sentences (syntax). The same logic forces us to recognize that language learners must acquire not only the meanings of vocabulary items, but also a set of rules for interpreting the expressions that are formed when vocabulary items are com- bined. All of these components must be shared by the speech community in order for linguistic communication to be possible. When we study semantics, we are trying to understand this shared system of rules that allows hearers to correctly interpret what speakers intend to communicate. The study of meaning in human language is often partitioned into two ma- jor divisions, and in this context the term semantics is used to refer to one of these divisions. In this narrower sense, semantics is concerned with the inherent meaning of words and sentences as linguistic expressions, in and of themselves, while pragmatics is concerned with those aspects of meaning that depend on or derive from the way in which the words and sentences are used. In the above- mentioned quote attributed to Mark Twain, the basic or “default” meaning of good (the sense most likely to be listed in a dictionary) would be its semantic content. The negative meaning which Twain manages to convey is the result of pragmatic inferences triggered by the peculiar way in which he uses the word. 4