Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to give an analysis of the french demonstrative adjective ce and the definite article le. It combines research on the historical foundations of the theory of meaning and on more recent theories. ;The title refers to the main thesis: a distinction should be made between significance, linguistic meaning, and sense, which is linguistic meaning combined with general strategies for interpretation. The historical part shows, a.o., that it is sense that Frege was writing about, not linguistic meaning. This is shown to be particularly evident in his writings on demonstratives. ;The significance of le and ce is conceived as it has been described by the French linguist G. Kleiber. Le urges the hearer to identify the referent using the descriptive content of the noun phrase that follows it, ce urges him to identify the referent via an element that is present in its context of utterance. ;This idea is combined with the first thesis, and it is then shown that referent identification already uses the interpretation strategies that lead to sense . This means, a.o., that the identification of the referent of a definite description is not a question of evaluating its content with respect to a possible world. ;The interpretation strategies are shown to be not the cognitive automatisms that are proposed in Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, but rather the generalised implicatures of Grice and Levinson . ;In the last chapter, it is shown how the strategies of interpretation combine with the linguistic meaning of the noun phrases to lead to the identification of their referent or antecedent. It is further shown that if one wants to get a realistic interpretation, one should abandon the idea of de re propositions