The Social Foundations of Meaning

An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior. The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered. Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning. Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals. A number of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached.

Contents: Introductory Summary.- Conventional Meaning: The Pretheoretical Intuition.- Compliance with Rules.- A Case for Utterance Meaning: NIVEAU zero.- Conventional Utterance Meaning.- Against Intentionalism.- The Same Case for Sentence Meaning: NIVEAU.- Some Results for Sentence Meaning.- Epilogue.- Appendix I: Complete Description of NIVEAU zero.- Appendix II: Complete Description of NIVEAU.- Bibliography.- Subject Index.