Speaker meaning is what a speaker intends to communicate by an utterance—distinct from sentence meaning, which is determined by language conventions. When I say 'That's brilliant!' about a student's obviously wrong answer, my speaker meaning is critical disapproval, though the sentence literally expresses approval. Speaker meaning explains irony, metaphor, indirect speech acts, and how context shapes interpretation.
Consider cases where speaker meaning diverges sharply from sentence meaning (irony, sarcasm, indirect requests) and ask what determines what the speaker means. Then investigate whether speaker meaning should be incorporated into semantic theories or kept separate.
Speaker meaning is just what I happen to be thinking—Grice argued it involves complex intentions about the hearer's recognition of one's intentions. Speaker meaning determines sentence meaning—most semanticists argue the reverse.
You've already studied Gricean conversational implicature — the mechanism by which speakers convey more than what their words literally say by exploiting cooperative principles. Speaker meaning is the broader concept that implicature is a special case of: the full content of what a speaker *intends to communicate* by an utterance, which can diverge substantially from what the sentence conventionally means. Understanding this distinction requires recognizing that there are two separate questions about any utterance — what does the sentence mean, and what did the speaker mean by it?
Sentence meaning (also called semantic meaning or literal meaning) is determined by linguistic conventions — the systematic rules of the language that assign content to words and grammatical structures. "It's cold in here" has a fixed semantic content: a statement about the temperature of the room. Speaker meaning is what the speaker intends to communicate by producing that sentence in a particular context. If I say "It's cold in here" while standing next to a window you left open, my speaker meaning is probably a request to close the window — not a meteorological report. The sentence means one thing; I mean something else. Both are real, and understanding the utterance requires tracking both.
Grice's great contribution was to explain speaker meaning *without* making it arbitrary or mysterious. Speaker meaning, he argued, involves a layered structure of intentions: the speaker intends to produce a certain effect in the hearer (say, belief or action); the speaker intends the hearer to *recognize* that intention; and the speaker intends the recognition itself to play a role in producing the effect. This is why speaker meaning isn't just "whatever I'm thinking" — it's a communicative act structured around mutual recognition. When I say something ironically, I mean the opposite of what the words say, but I rely on you recognizing that I intend you to recognize the irony. Strip away that layered intentionality, and irony collapses into sincere assertion.
The speaker meaning / sentence meaning distinction is central to explaining a wide range of phenomena: irony (speaker means the opposite of sentence meaning), metaphor ("You are the sunshine of my life" has sentence meaning about solar radiation; speaker meaning about emotional warmth), indirect speech acts ("Can you pass the salt?" is literally a yes/no question about ability; speaker meaning is a request), and conversational implicature (what is communicated beyond what is said, via the cooperative maxims). A key theoretical question divides the field: should these speaker-meaning phenomena be handled *within* semantic theory (expanding what sentences conventionally express) or *outside* it, in a separate pragmatic theory? Most contemporary approaches maintain the semantic/pragmatic distinction, treating sentence meaning as input and speaker meaning as pragmatic output — but the boundary remains contested, and how you draw it has consequences for almost every area of the philosophy of language.
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