1.2: Three “levels” of meaning

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In this book we will be interested in the meanings of three different types of linguistic units:

word meaning
sentence meaning
utterance meaning (also referred to as “speaker meaning”)

The first two units (words and sentences) are hopefully already familiar to the reader. In order to understand the third level, “utterance meaning”, we need to distinguish between sentences vs. utterances. A sentence is a linguistic expression, a well-formed string of words, while an utterance is a speech event by a particular speaker in a specific context. When a speaker uses a sentence in a specific context, he produces an utterance. As hinted in the preceding section, the term sentence meaning refers to the semantic content of the sentence: the meaning which derives from the words themselves, regardless of context.¹ The term utterance meaning refers to the semantic content plus any pragmatic meaning created by the specific way in which the sentence gets used. Cruse (2000: 27) defines utterance meaning as “the totality of what the speaker intends to convey by making an utterance.”

Kroeger (2005: 1) cites the following example of a simple question in Teochew (a Southern Min dialect of Chinese), whose interpretation depends heavily on context.

(2) a. Lɯ chyaʔ pa bɔy?
you eat full not.yet
‘Have you already eaten?’ (tones not indicated)

The literal meaning (i.e., sentence meaning) of the question is, “Have you already eaten or not?”, which sounds like a request for information. But its most common use is as a greeting. The normal way for one friend to greet another is to ask this question. (The expected reply is: “I have eaten,” even if this is not in fact true.) In this context, the utterance meaning is roughly equivalent to that of the English expressions hello or How do you do? In other contexts, however, the question could be used as a real request for information. For example, if a doctor wants to administer a certain medicine which cannot be taken on an empty stomach, he might well ask the patient “Have you eaten yet?” In this situation the sentence meaning and the utterance meaning would be essentially the same.

¹As we will see, this is an oversimplification, because certain aspects of sentence meaning do depend on context; see Chapter 9, §3 for discussion.