Remarks on referential matrices

Sentences describe situations, and from the point of view of pragmatics, the situation described by a sentence depends in turn on the context of use, i.e. on the situation in which the sentence is uttered. In general, situations are abstract imaginary entitles, but some of them do actually hold; these are called facts. If a sentence A uttered in situation a describes a fact, that is, if the situation described by A actually holds in the real world, then A is said to be true . Hence there are at least two ways of defining the meaning of a sentence in pragmatics; first, the meaning of A could be that function from situations into {0, 1} which takes the value l for exactly those situations in which A is true; second, the meaning of A could be that function from situations into situations which, for an argument a, takes the value b exactly in the case when A, if uttered in situation a, describes situation b