Linguistics An Essential Introduction

In Chapter 8, we looked at the propositional meaning of sentences — the state-of-affairs that must hold in a possible world in order for the sentence to be true. We have also seen that the meaning of sentences extends beyond the propositions they communicate directly — it also includes presuppositions and entailments. But these additional aspects of meaning are still propositional — they have truth values that can be determined independently of any particular context.

There is another kind of meaning that can be communicated by uttering a sentence. Look at the following dialogue:

Aylin did not say anything about the book being long, but nevertheless, Zoe’s response does not sound weird. This is because it is well known that Stephen King tends to write lengthy novels, and thus it is a reasonable assumption that this is true of his latest novel, too; this would explain why it is taking Aylin so long to read it. However, there is no logical relation between the propositions (a) ‘I need a long time to read this book’ or (b) ‘This book was written by Stephen King’ and the proposition (c) ‘This book is long’. We cannot construct a truth table, because whether (a) or (b) are true or not, (c) could be true or false in either case — it could take Aylin long to take a short book, for example, because the language is complex, or because the topic does not interest her, or because she does not have a lot of time for reading.

In using language, we nevertheless make such assumptions, and much of the time, we are right in doing so. Such assumptions are called implicatures – they are implied by a sentence, but only in a specific context and taking into account other aspects of the situation. To distinguish this type of meaning from propositional meaning, it is referred to, broadly, as Speaker meaning. The field of study concerned with this type of meaning is called pragmatics. We will discuss a special kind of implicature, so-called conversational implicatures, in Section 9.2.

The propostional model is insufficient in other ways. Recall the different sentence types discussed in Section 7.7, as illustrated in (2)

Example (2a) has truth conditions — it is true if the person called Aylin performed the action of submitting, if the thing she submitted was an essay, if that essay belonged to her, and if all this happened on a Wednesday. But what are the truth conditions for (2b) and (2c)? Simply put, they do not have any truth conditions. The reason for this is that they do not make statements about the world, that we could compare to the actual state of affairs to decide whether they are true or false.

Making statements is only one thing we can intend do with an utterance. Other intentions include asking about the state of the world (as in 2b) or presenting a course of action (as in 2c). The intention that is conveyed by an utterance is called its illocutionary force. The illocutionary forces of the utterances above are, in that order, ‘describing’, ‘requesting information’, and ‘requesting action’. This illocutionary force is normally indicated by the sentence type — declarative sentences are normally used to describe, interrogative sentences are used to request information, and imperative sentences are used to request actions. If language users use sentences in this way, we call the result a direct Speech act. We will discuss the idea of illocutionary force and Speech acts in more detail in Section 9.2.

However — and this is where Speaker meaning comes in again — language users are more creative than that: they use each of these sentence types for other purposes, too. For example, the declarative sentence in (3a) and the interrogative sentence in (3b) can be used with the illocutionary force ‘requesting action’:

In such cases, language users may use other devices to signal illocutionary force (for example, the word please), but this is optional. Such uses of sentences with an illocutionary force other than that which they normally have are referred to as indirect Speech acts. Indirect Speech acts will be discussed in Section 9.4.