Literal Meaning and Speaker Meaning

Core Idea

The literal meaning of a sentence is determined by convention and compositional rules, while speaker meaning is what the speaker intends to communicate. These can diverge: irony, metaphor, and indirect speech acts involve cases where speaker meaning differs from literal meaning.

Explainer

From your study of Grice's cooperative principle and maxims, you know that communication succeeds not just by encoding semantic content but by exploiting shared assumptions about how rational communicators behave. From your work on speaker meaning, you know Grice's account: speaker meaning is what the speaker intends the hearer to recognize as intended—it is the content of communicative intention, not the content encoded in the words. These two concepts—conventional sentence meaning and speaker communicative intention—can come apart, and understanding when and how they diverge is the core concern of this topic.

Literal meaning (also called sentence meaning or semantic content) is determined by two things: the meanings of the words, fixed by linguistic convention, and the compositional rules that determine how word meanings combine into sentence meanings. "The cat is on the mat" literally means whatever compositional semantics delivers from its components. This literal content belongs to the sentence as a type, not to any particular utterance—it is context-independent in the sense that it does not vary depending on who utters it or when. Speaker meaning, by contrast, is always the meaning of a token utterance by a particular speaker in a particular context with particular intentions.

The most illuminating cases are those where literal and speaker meaning maximally diverge. In irony, you say the opposite of what you mean: "Oh great, it's raining again" literally asserts that rain is good, but speaker meaning is irritation. In metaphor, you say something literally false but communicate something true: "She is a firework" is literally false (she is a person) but speaker meaning conveys that she is energetic and brilliant. In indirect speech acts, "Can you pass the salt?" is literally a question about physical ability but functions as a polite request. In all three cases, the hearer must go beyond literal meaning, using contextual knowledge and Gricean inference to recover what the speaker actually means.

The philosophical significance extends beyond cataloging figures of speech. The gap between literal and speaker meaning shows that language is not a simple encoding-decoding system. Successful communication depends on shared background knowledge, inferential capacity, and recognition of communicative intentions—none of which is stored in words. This means that understanding language requires understanding mindedness: you must model what the speaker intends. The distinction also has practical stakes in legal interpretation, contract law, and literary theory, where debates over whether to privilege literal meaning or speaker and author intent have no purely linguistic resolution.