Theories of meaning, reference, and pragmatics including speech acts and conversational implicature.
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- What is semantics?
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The study of meaning in language, including how words and sentences relate to the world.- What is pragmatics?
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The study of how context affects the interpretation and use of language.- What does it mean for a word to have reference?
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The word picks out or denotes a particular thing or set of things in the world.- What is the sense of a word or expression?
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Its meaning or the way it is understood, distinct from what it refers to.- What are truth conditions?
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The circumstances under which a sentence is true or false.- What does it mean to say meaning is extensional?
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The meaning depends only on what the expression refers to, not on how it is described.- What does it mean to say meaning is intensional?
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The meaning depends on the sense or description, so co-referential terms can differ in meaning.- What is a speech act?
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An utterance that performs an action, such as promising, commanding, or declaring.- What is the locutionary act?
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The act of producing sounds and words that form a grammatical utterance with semantic meaning.- What is the illocutionary act?
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The act performed in saying something, such as asserting, requesting, or promising.- What is the perlocutionary act?
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The effect or consequence produced in the hearer by uttering something.- What is a performative utterance?
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An utterance that performs an action rather than simply stating a fact.- What is a constative utterance?
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An utterance that makes a claim about the world and is true or false.- Why did Austin's performative/constative distinction eventually break down?
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Performatives can be true or false too, and constatives perform actions such as asserting.- What are Searle's five main types of speech acts?
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Representatives (asserting), directives (commanding), commissives (promising), expressives (thanking), and declarations (firing).
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