Page 68 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

45 What Is Universal Pragmatics?

of its meaning which is either conveyed by its explicitly per-
formative prefix, if it has one, or might have been so conveyed
by the use of such an expression.” “®
This argument neglects, however, the fact that force is some-
thing which, in a specific sense, belongs only to utterances and
not to sentences. Thus one might first hit upon the idea of re-
serving “‘force’’ for the meaning content that accrues to the sen-
tence through its being uttered, that is, embedded in structures of
speech. We can certainly distinguish the phenomenon of meaning
that comes about through the employment of a sentence in an
utterance from mere sentence meaning. We can speak in a prag-
matic sense of the meaning of an utterance, as we do in a linguistic
sense of the meaning of a sentence. Thus Alston has taken the
fact that the same speech acts can be performed with different
sentences as a reason for granting pragmatic meaning a certain
priority over linguistic meaning. In accordance with a consistent
use theory of meaning, he suggests that sentence (and word)
meanings are a function of the meaning of-the speech acts in
which they are principally used.”7 The difficulty with this pro-
posal is that it does not adequately take into account the relative
independence of sentence meanings in relation to the contingent
changes of meaning that a sentence can undergo when used in
different contexts. Moreover, the meaning of a sentence is ap-
parently less dependent on the intention of the speaker than is
the meaning of an utterance.
Even if a sentence is very often used with different intentions
and in a context that pragmatically shifts meaning, its linguistic
meaning does not have to change. Thus, for example, when cer-
tain social roles prescribe that commands be uttered in the form
of requests, the pragmatic meaning of the utterance (as a com-
mand) in no way alters the linguistic meaning of the sentence
uttered (as a request). This is an additional reason for singling
out the standard conditions under which the pragmatic meaning
of an explicit speech action coincides with the linguistic meaning
of the sentences employed in it. Precisely in the case of an explicit
speech act in standard form, however, the categorial difference
between the meaning of expressions originally used in proposi-
tional sentences and the meaning of illocutionary forces (as well