Borg Emma. Pursuing Meaning

Oxford University Press, 2012. — 156 p. — ISBN: 978–0–19–958837–4.This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In particular, this book attempts a defence of what is commonly known as ‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive semantics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, wants to offer a pretty minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmatics. Specifically, it holds that while context can affect literal semantic content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked) context-sensitive expressions (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers), this is pretty much the limit of pragmatic input to semantic content.1 On all other occasions where context of utterance appears to affect content the minimalist claims that what it affects is not literal, semantic content but what the speaker conveys by the use of this literal content—it affects what a speaker says not what a sentence means. So minimalists are fond of making claims along the following lines: the sentence ‘Snow is white’ means that snow is white, the sentence ‘Ted is ready’ expresses the proposition that Ted is ready, and the sentence ‘there is nothing to eat’ is true if there is nothing to eat. For the minimalist, then, the semantic content of these sentences is not (as some theorists contend) a pragmatically enriched content such as snow is white in some contextually determined respect, or Ted is ready to play football, or there is nothing appropriate to eat in the kitchen. Though a speaker may convey a more complex content such as one of these, this is held to be a feature of pragmatic speaker meaning not semantic sentence meaning.Surveying the Terrain
Minimal Semantics and Psychological Evidence
Propositionalism and Some Problem Cases
Intention-Sensitive Expressions
The Ontological Argument Against Minimal Word Meanings
The Methodological Argument Against Minimal Word Meanings