Meanings in context

Beyond the linguistic code

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single person in possession of a fine dictionary must be able to access the correct meaning of a piece of language. The previous sentence was intended to be ironic, but alas many people would not understand it as such. People place great reliance on dictionaries to decode language and expose its meanings. But how far will this actually get us in understanding the language people use? Let us work through some of the problems that one encounters. In doing so, we will simultaneously explore a number of jokes, not least because jokes often exploit the construction of meaning.

The assignment of sense

Polysemy, when a lexeme has multiple related senses, is a normal feature of many words (technical terms relating to pragmatics are emboldened and defined; they are also listed in the index). The English word set, for example, has 36 senses listed in the Collins Cobuild Dictionary of the English Language (1987), plus various usages in expressions. There is also the issue of homonymy, two or more different lexemes with the same form. For example, in the sentences Catch the ball and We’re going to the ball, the senses of ball are not the same. Note that when you read those sentences, you assign a sense that fi ts the understanding you construct in your head. People can, of course, exploit your assignment of sense. Consider this joke:

Here, the words twelve inches wide prime your mind to expect an answer relating to measurement (even if you had no knowledge of the notion of “inch”, you might well infer that it is the unit of measurement given that the number twelve is applied to the width of something). Indeed, A’s solution to the joke does relate to measurement: twelve inches on one scale of measurement are equivalent to a foot on another. However, this does not easily fi t the meaning speaker A is constructing. If twelve inches is the same as a foot, then why can it not be the width of a man’s head? The solution is in another meaning of foot, namely, the part of your leg below the ankle. And of course a head is not a foot. This joke exploits the polysemic word and the target’s assignment of sense; it is a pun. This joke is lost on people who are not familiar with imperial measurements. For them, the most readily accessible meaning of the word foot is likely to be that it is the part of the body below the ankle. The humour falls flat.

The assignment of structural meaning

Although certainly not as frequently an issue as sense assignment, there will be occasions when the structure of a sentence offers more than one meaning. A classic example, and one grammarians love poring over, is Can you see the man with the telescope? Is the question about seeing the man with the aid of a telescope (in which case, with the telescope is an (instrumental) adverbial working with the verb see), or about seeing the man who has a telescope (in which case, with the telescope is a prepositional phrase post-modifying the head noun man)? Consider this joke:

The joke exploits the two different ways in which you can parse the question. In one, drink is the main verb of the embedded noun clause a cat drink; in the other, drink is the head noun of the noun phrase and pre-modified by cat. However, part of the success of this joke, just as with the previous joke, relies on the target understanding the sentence in the first way, at least initially. That we are predisposed to do this is not surprising, because this interpretation fits a plausible, non-extraordinary scenario of one’s cat being dehydrated. In contrast, a “cat drink” as a kind of beverage is bizarre. The realization in one’s mind of the alternative reading is how the joke works. Incidentally, the joke is more likely to fall flat if it is spoken and heard rather than written and read. The different grammatical parsings would sound different: they have different prosodies (try saying them to get an idea of this).

The assignment of reference

In the previous examples, the words and structures flag potential meanings from which we can choose, a choice we make on the basis of how we understand the context. However, some linguistic expressions – notably, referring expressions – do not carry with them multiple senses from which we select, but rely to a greater extent on the target enriching their meaning with information drawn from the context. This is a matter of reference. Consider this joke:

[1.3]

A man and a friend are playing golf one day. One of the guys is about to chip onto the green when he sees a long funeral procession on the road next to the course. He stops in mid-swing, takes off his golf cap, closes his eyes, and bows down in prayer. His friend says: “Wow! That is the most thoughtful and touching thing I have ever seen. You are truly a kind man.”

The other man replies, “Yeah, well, we were married thirty-five years.”

Clearly, the success of the joke relies on one working out the referent (what is referred to) of the word we. Given the subsequent use of the word married, we work out that we refers to a married couple consisting of the man and his wife, for whom the funeral procession is being held. The realization that the man playing golf is the husband of the person whose funeral it is and that he is not part of the long funeral procession clashes with previous thoughts that this man is thoughtful or kind.

The assignment of utterance meaning

Having assigned relevant senses to words and worked out the relevant referents of referring expressions, you may think that we are home and dry. This is not the case, as the following joke illustrates:

[1.4]

I was coming back from Canada, driving through Customs, and the guy asked, “Do you have any firearms with you?” I said: “What do you need?”

What this joke illustrates is that the whole utterance Do you have any firearms with you? can have more than one meaning: is it an enquiry about whether the driver has fi rearms or a request for fi rearms? The difference between the two relates in part to understandings of what the speaker is trying to do, and what they are trying to do is a matter of speaker intention. Of course, the humour lies in the fact that the reader expects the former meaning, not least because they know that the driver is in Customs, a place commonly associated with searches for fi rearms and other dangerous weapons or devices, yet the person driving the car answers as if it were the latter.

Collectively, these different levels of meaning and assignment illustrate the fact that dictionaries do not get us very far in understanding the full meaning of language used in context. This is not to say that they are of no use. Indeed, they are useful in identifying a limited number of potential senses. But we still need to work out which sense is relevant, and much more besides. Speakers of utterances use language to flag potential meanings – that is, meanings which they think are likely to be understood in a particular context; while hearers infer potential meanings – that is, meanings which they think are likely to have been meant in a particular context. Meaning in interaction involves both speakers and hearers (we adopt the traditional labels “speaker” and “hearer” here; we explain their limitations). Interactional meaning is what the speaker means by an utterance and what the hearer understands by it (which could, of course, be two different things), and how these emerge and are shaped during interaction. We will have more to say about interactional meaning.

Jokes, as we saw, often exploit the fact that meanings cannot be straight forwardly decoded from words and structures. Many deploy a “garden path” tactic; that is to say, you are led into expecting one thing, only to find that it is another thing. That clash between what we expect and what we discover is the trigger for the potential humour. This is accounted for by an important theory in humour studies, namely, Incongruity theory, a theory that has evolved in various guises since Aristotle. Immanuel Kant, for example, comments: “Laughter is an affectation arising from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing” ([1790] 1951:172). More specifically, note that the jokes exploit interactional meaning: they exploit how understandings of the joke unfold in the interaction between not just the characters in the joke, but also the author of the joke and the reader. Clearly, the discourse situation – the configuration of discourse roles (e.g. authors, mouthpieces, addressees, overhearers.