Context as an Explanatory Concept in Semantic Theory

The notion of context unavoidably plays a role in theories of meaning. In the "folk linguistics" that we all learn along with the difference between adverbs and adjectives, prefixes and suffixes, it is a commonplace, for example, that context can influence the meanings of pronouns. In the sentence 'John just sold his car' the context lets us know that it is John's car that was sold—that the pronoun 'his' means the same as 'John's'. Similarly, context explains the difference in meaning between separate occurrences of lexically ambiguous words like 'bank'. 'Mary had a picnic on the bank and then went back to work at the bank' is understandable because the context tells us which of its two meanings 'bank' has in each occurrence. Even when the ambiguities are not lexical or conventional, as with the use of novel metaphors, it is context, we readily acknowledge, which provides the additional information the audience needs to determine the speaker's meaning. 'Clinton is having trouble getting his herd into the corral' could convey a very definite meaning in a suitable context, e.g., one that made it clear that what Clinton was trying to do was to get the Democrats in Congress to support a particular piece of legislation. Of course, things are not always as simple as these examples might suggest. In the sentence 'Tom was angry because John just sold his car,' 'his' could refer to either Tom or John, and a larger context would have to be consulted to determine what was meant—just how much larger is not clear. If context lets us know that Mary, the one who was sitting on the bank, was King Kong's bigger sister, and that she was taking a lunch break from destroying the buildings along the river, the meanings of the two occurrences of 'bank' could have to be reversed. A similar uncertainty is apparent with Clinton and his "herd"; what constitutes a "suitable" context for a clear understanding of the metaphor? To answer that question we would need to know not just that context influences what the sentence means; we would also need to know how it does it. The same applies to the other examples. Thus the "folk semantics" of context is just a starting point for a detailed investigation of what turns out to be a complex aspect of linguistic meaning. Philosophical accounts of meaning develop out of and extend (and in turn, influence) commonsense views of meaning; but they find the notion of context equally indispensable. John Stuart Mill' work provides a telling example. His classic analysis of the name relation in his System of Logic1 begins by dividing referring terms into a series of exhaustive