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The Basis of Semantic Structure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Michael Beebe
Michael Beebe
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

The Concept of the whole utterance, we are inclined to to believe, is basic in meaning-theory. But any theory which locates a conceptual base must show how items in the super-structure relate to that base, and so for theories of meaning. There are units of meaning both larger and smaller than whole utterances: narrative, in which several whole utterances follow one another in some organized fashion, seems relatively unproblematic, but the relations of meaningful parts of utterances to the utterances themselves remains unclear. Grice's theory of meaning secures the logical priority of whole utterances, and in addition, lends itself to an attractive and theoretically fruitful view of the relations between whole utterances and their meaningful parts; or so I shall try to demonstrate.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 15 , Issue 4 , December 1976 , pp. 624 - 641
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1976

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References

1 Grice, H.P., “Meaning”, Philosophical Review, 66 (1957), 377–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar“Utterer's Meaning and Intentions”, Philosophical Review, 78 (1969), 147–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar"Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning”, Foundations of Language, 4 (1968), 1–18Google Scholar.

2 For examples of this, see Grice, H.P., “Utterer's Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and World-Meaning”, Foundations of Language, 4 (1968), 1–18Google Scholar see Ziff, Paul, Semantic Analysis, Cornell University Press-see especially p. 15Google Scholar for a clear statement of the recurrence thesis; and see Quine, W.V., Word and Object, The M.I.T. Press, Sections 3 and 4Google Scholar.

3 Grice attempts the move from wholes to parts in “Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning, and Word-Meaning”.

4 Bennett, J.F., “The Meaning-Nominalist Strategy”, Foundations of Language, 10 (1973), 141–68Google Scholar.

5 P.F. Strawson, “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts”, reprinted in P. F. Strawson, Logico-Linguistic Papers, Methuen, pp. 149–69.

6 Schiffer, Stephen, Meaning, Oxford University Press; see pp. 36–42Google Scholar.

7 Bennett devised this useful bit of technical terminology (Bennett, J. F.. “The Meaning'Nominalist Strategy”, Foundations of Language. 10 (1973). 141–68)Google Scholar.

8 Lewis, David. Convention, Harvard University Press, 1969Google Scholar.

9 For criticisms of Lewis's theory, see Burge, Tyler, “On Knowledge and Convention”, Philosophical Review, 84 (1975), 249–55CrossRefGoogle ScholarJamieson, D.. “David Lewis on Convention”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1975), 73–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bennett, J.F., Linguistic Behavior, Cambridge University Press, 1976,Google Scholar forthcoming.

10 Donnellan, Keith, “Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again”. Philosophical Review, 77 (1968), 203–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 I owe particular thanks to Rosemary Carter and Jonathan Bennett for their generous help and encouragement; and I would also like to thank the referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.