Summary

Listeners and readers have the task of guessing what the sender of an utterance intends to communicate. As soon as a satisfactory guess has been made, the sender has succeeded in conveying the meaning. Pragmatics is about how we interpret utterances and produce interpretable utterances, either way taking account of context and background knowledge. Such interpretations are informed guesses. They can be mistaken. Explicature is the basic stage of pragmatic interpretation, involving disambiguation and working out what is being referred to. Referring and understanding other people’s acts of reference usually require us to use and pragmatically interpret deictic words, ones that have meanings tied to the situation of utterance. A further stage of pragmatic elaboration yields implicatures, guesses as to what the point of an utterance is.

Semantics is the study of context-independent knowledge that users of a language have of word and sentence meaning. The meanings of constructions are compositionally assembled out of the meanings of smaller units, and what comes into the scope of which operations can influence the meaning of a construction.

Semantics is descriptive, and not centrally concerned with how words came historically to have the meanings they do. Nor do semanticists aim to write encyclopedic summaries of all human knowledge. An explicated utterance (based on a declarative sentence) expresses a proposition, which can be true or false. The central kind of inference in semantics is entailment. Entailments are propositions guaranteed to be true when a given proposition is true, though we can, loosely, think of entailing as a connection between sentences.

The sense of a word determines what it denotes (how it relates to the world outside of language) and the entailment possibilities that the word gives to sentences.