Page 53 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

30 Communication and Evolution of Society

sentences in their function of representing facts. The analysis is
directed above all to the logic of using predicates and those ex-
pressions that enable us to refer to objects. Naturally this part
of universal pragmatics is not the most important for a theory of
communication. The analysis of intentionality, the discussion of
avowals, and the debate on private speech, insofar as they clear
the way to a universal pragmatics of the expressive function of
utterances, are only beginnings.® Finally, speech-act theory pro-
vides a point of departure for the part of universal pragmatics
related to the interpersonal function of utterances.
{In reference to question 2,} one might see a further difficulty
with my proposal for conceptualizing universal pragmatics in the
fact that formal semantics does not fit well into the distinction
between a linguistic analysis concerned with sentences and a prag-
matic analysis concerned with utterances. There is a broad spec-
trum of different approaches to semantic theory. Linguistically
oriented theories of meaning® try to grasp systematically the
semantic content of linguistic expressions. In the framework of
transformational grammar, explanations of the surface structures
of sentences either start with semantic deep structures or rely on
semantic projections into syntactic structures. This approach leads
to an elementaristically constructed combinatory system of general
semantic markers. Lexical semantics proceeds in a similar man-
ner; it clarifies the meaning structures of a given lexicon by way
of a formal analysis of meaning relations. The weakness of these
linguistic approaches lies in the fact that they bring in the prag-
matic dimension of the use of sentences only in an ad hoc way.
The use theory of meaning developed from the work of Wittgen-
stein has shown, however, that the meaning of linguistic expres-
sions can be identified only with reference to situations of possible
employment.
For their part, pragmatic theories of semantics* are faced with
the difficulty of delimiting a linguistic expression’s typical situa-
tions of employment from contexts that happen by chance to have
additional meaning-generating power but do not affect the se-
mantic core of the linguistic expression. Reference semantics,®
whether framed as a theory of extensional or of intensional de-
notation, determines the meaning of an expression by the class