1.5: Saying, meaning, and doing

The Teochew question in (2) illustrates how a single sentence can be used to express two or more different utterance meanings, depending on the context. In one context the sentence is used to greet someone, while in another context the same sentence is used to request information. So this example demonstrates that a single sentence can be used to perform two or more different speech acts, i.e., things that people do by speaking.

In order to fully understand a given utterance, the addressee (= hearer) must try to answer three fundamental questions:

1. What did the speaker say? i.e., what is the semantic content of the sentence? (The philosopher Paul Grice used the term “What is said” as a way of referring to semantic content or sentence meaning.)
2. What did the speaker intend to communicate? (Grice used the term implicature for intended but unspoken meaning, i.e., aspects of utterance meaning which are not part of the sentence meaning.)
3. What is the speaker trying to do? i.e., what speech act is being performed?

In this book we attempt to lay a foundation for investigating these three questions about meaning. We will return to the analysis of speech acts in Chapter 10; but for a brief example of why this is an important facet of the study of meaning, consider the word please in examples (3a–b).

(3) a. Please pass me the salt.
b. Can you please pass me the salt?

What does please mean? It does not seem to have any real semantic content, i.e., does not contribute to the sentence meaning; but it makes an important contribution to the utterance meaning, in fact, two important contributions. First, it identifies the speech act which is performed by the utterances in which it occurs, indicating that they are requests. The word please does not occur naturally in other kinds of speech acts. Second, this word is a marker of politeness; so it indicates something about the manner in which the speech act is performed, including the kind of social relationship which the speaker wishes to maintain with the hearer. So we see that we cannot understand the meaning of please without referring to the speech act being performed.

The claim that the word please does not contribute to sentence meaning is supported by the observation that misusing the word does not affect the truth of a sentence. We said that it normally occurs only in requests. If we insert the word into other kinds of speech acts, e.g. It seems to be raining, please, the result is odd; but if the basic statement is true, adding please does not make it false. Rather, the use of please in this context is simply inappropriate (unless there is some contextual factor which makes it possible to interpret the sentence as a request)

The examples in (3) also illustrate an important aspect of how form and meaning are related with respect to speech acts. We will refer to the utterance in (3a) as a direct request, because the grammatical form (imperative) matches the intended speech act (request); so the utterance meaning is essentially the same as the sentence meaning. We will refer to the utterance in (3b) as an indirect request, because the grammatical form (interrogative) does not match the intended speech act (request); the utterance meaning must be understood by pragmatic inference.