Semantics studies meaning determined by language conventions—what is literally said; pragmatics studies meaning determined by context, speaker intentions, and reasoning—what is implicated or meant. Yet the boundary is contested. Context influences truth-conditions (indexicals); pragmatic principles (relevance, informativeness) influence interpretation; figurative meaning blurs the line. Resolving the boundary matters for semantic theory: is pragmatic reasoning part of meaning-determination or separate?
Study cases where pragmatic and semantic contributions are hard to untangle: scalar implicatures ('Some students passed' implicates not all—semantic or pragmatic?), presupposition, and non-literal language. Use concrete examples to test where the boundary lies.
Pragmatics is just context—pragmatics studies how context and speaker intentions affect meaning; the mechanisms are non-trivial. The pragmatics-semantics boundary is sharp and pre-theoretic—it's a theoretical boundary that different theories place differently.
You already know Gricean implicature: when a speaker's utterance is true but misleadingly incomplete, the listener infers additional meaning from the norms of cooperative conversation. If asked "Can you pass the salt?" and you reply "Yes," you have answered the semantic question (you are physically capable) but violated conversational norms by failing to cooperate. The pragmatic meaning — *pass the salt* — is derived not from the words alone but from context plus the assumption that speakers are being cooperative. Pragmatics studies this kind of derived, speaker-dependent meaning. Semantics studies the literal, context-independent meaning fixed by linguistic convention. The question is: where exactly does one end and the other begin?
The boundary looks clear in Grice's original framing: semantics gives you "what is said" (the truth-conditional content), and pragmatics adds implicature (what is communicated beyond what is said). But the boundary dissolves under pressure. Consider indexicals — words like "I," "here," "now," and "she." Their semantic values shift with context: "I am hungry" is true when a hungry speaker says it and false when they are not. Context is doing semantic work here, not merely adding implicature. Indexical-dependent truth conditions are not a stable semantics-fixed core with pragmatic additions — context is baked into the semantics itself, which already complicates the clean separation.
Scalar implicatures press the boundary even harder. If a listener knows the full scale ("some, most, all"), then "Some students passed the exam" implicates "Not all students passed." This feels pragmatic — it is derived by the Gricean maxim of quantity ("be as informative as required"). But the inference is so automatic and so systematically tied to the word "some" that some theorists argue it is part of the semantic content of "some" itself, not a late-arriving pragmatic inference. Whether scalar meanings are semantically encoded or pragmatically derived is a central empirical dispute in current semantics, with experimental and cross-linguistic evidence on both sides.
The deepest challenge comes from contextualists, who argue that pragmatic processes routinely affect truth conditions — not just what is implied but what is literally said. "It's raining" seems true only relative to a location, but no location is linguistically expressed. "John is ready" requires a complement (ready *for what?*) that is contextually supplied but not semantically present. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore resist this: the semantic content of a sentence is determined by its grammatical features and the values of its explicit indexicals, and the rest is pragmatics. Contextualists counter that minimalist semantic contents are often too thin to be the genuine objects of assertion and belief. The debate is not merely terminological — it concerns what grammatical structure encodes, how interpretation works, and what the proper targets of semantic theory are. The answer shapes how we understand meaning, communication, and the relationship between language and mind.
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