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Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

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Abstract

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between (context-invariant) encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements (lexical and syntactic) which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference.

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  1. Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Robyn Carston

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Carston, R. Linguistic communication and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Synthese 165, 321–345 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-007-9191-8

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