Minding the Gap

I'm all for pragmatics. But I don't think it helps the cause to blur the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why. The basic reason is this. Even though, as people have been pointing out for some years now, the linguistic meaning of a given sentence generally underdetermines what a speaker means in uttering it, it does not follow that linguistic meaning is infected or infested by what some of these same people call 'pragmatic meaning'. There is no such thing as pragmatic meaning, at least nothing that is commensurate with linguistic meaning. There is what the sentence means and what the speaker means in uttering it. The semantic-pragmatic distinction is not fit to be blurred. What lies on either side of the distinction, the semantic and the pragmatic, may each be messy in various ways, but that doesn't blur the distinction itself. Taken as properties of sentences, semantic properties are on a par with syntactic and phonological properties: they are linguistic properties. Pragmatic properties, on the other hand, belong to acts of uttering sentences in the course of communicating. Sentences have the properties they have independently of anybody's act of uttering them. Speakers' intentions do not endow them with new semantic properties (here I mean sentence types, not tokens). Acts of uttering sentence types (producing sentence tokens) have pragmatic properties. The fact that a given sentence means what it does entails nothing about what a speaker means in uttering it. A speaker could mean precisely 28 / KENT BACH what it means, no more and no less, but nothing about its meaning guarantees this. The speaker might mean something else, something more, or nothing at all. In what follows I will sketch a picture different aspects of which I have addressed in more detail in other places. In those places I have used illustrative examples and discussed alternative approaches to specific issues. 1 Here I will simply state my position and summarize the arguments for it. This will make the presentation more abstract (and dogmatic) but also more compact, so that the picture can be viewed more clearly as a whole. 2 Why There is a Gap There are many phenomena that are thought to show that the semantic-pragmatic distinction is blurry, arbitrary, or even nonexistent. Here I will not review these phenomena or rebut these arguments but will instead suggest that …