System meaning vs. discourse meaning

The word meaning is an element of colloquial language and, as such, is multiply polysemous. In linguistics, different kinds of meaning are distinguished. They need different and well-defined terms. Here a distinction will be drawn between the significatum and the sense. Both are meanings of an expression used in an utterance in human communication. is such an expression.

A hearer who receives as a message and possesses the knowledge of a member of the speech community of American English understands that the speaker encourages him to tell him an aforementioned story. Call this the sense of . It might also be called the message content. The question of how the hearer arrives at this understanding is partly a psycholinguistic question which may be left alone here. The purely linguistic approach to this problem distinguishes to phases in the construction of meaning:

In the first phase of the interpretation of a linguistic expression, the linguist constructs that meaning which the elements and the rules of the language system render possible. For , this is something like the following:

P1: There is a story S in the universe of discourse.
P2: You do not tell / are not telling me S.
There is some reason R for P2.
The referent for R is not known.
I hand the turn over to you with the expectation that you take up at the point where I left of.

This is the meaning that the system of the language allows the linguist to construct.¹. It could be called the system meaning of an expression. It is what has been called significatum (French signifé) since Saussure 1916. To repeat, this is the meaning that one arrives at by applying the rules of the English language system, including the semantic subsystem, to the expression units and their combination.

In the second phase of the interpretation of such an expression, the linguist applies more rules, principles and conventions of the speech community which do not belong to the language system. This speech community has a discourse convention which is roughly as follows:

Assume a significatum (of the kind explicated for ) where the speaker indicates that he does not know the reason R why the hearer does not do P2. Take this as a rhetorical question. Then the speaker (is not asking you to name R; instead, he) is implying that there is no such R. Given this, by implicature he is asking you to do P2.

This is what may be called the sense of an utterance. It could also be called the discourse meaning. The consequence of this distinction for linguistic methodology is the following: Signs as elements of a language system have a significatum. For purposes of analyzing the grammatical structure of an expression, one works with the significatum. In order to understand the sense of a message, this does not suffice. Instead, one applies a set of conventions outside the language system to construct it.

Coding

In actual linguistic communication, an utterance conveys a message in dependence on the linguistic context, the speech situation, the shared experience of the communication partners and their knowledge of the world. As long as mutual understanding arises, the question of which part of the content transmitted was coded by the signs constituting the message and which part was contributed by those environmental factors does not arise for the interlocutors. It is a question the linguist poses because its answer forms the core of a description of the language system. Describing all the above-mentioned pragmatic factors which contribute to form the sense of an actual message would be a limitless and unfeasible enterprise. Describing the language system is a huge, but solvable task.

This is the search for the significatum (de Saussure's signifié) of the linguistic sign. To identify it, the linguist strips the actual utterance of all those environmental components, isolating what Lyons (1977: 29-31) calls a ‘system sentence’. The system sentence is, to be sure, a linguistic construct, but one necessary for methodological reasons.

Imagine a situation in which is used as a true question, with the speaker pointing to an object he does not recognize.

Then the sense of the expression this in might be taken to be “the object I am pointing to”. Now imagine a speech situation in which the speaker reacts with to an utterance just voiced by his interlocutor.

Then the sense of the expression this in might be taken to be “the proposition just proposed by you”. Depending on such external factors, the expression this may acquire countless different senses. Stripping the utterances of their conditions of use, what remains is the significatum of this, something like ‘the intended referent is in my proximity’. This is what is coded by this; and it applies to both and , while the more specific rest of the paraphrases given for the two uses is contributed by factors outside the language system.

In principle, the significatum of a linguistic sign is the greatest common denominator of all of its uses. However, this needs some qualification in the case of polysemy.

¹ Some properties of the preceding informal semantic representation may be less than obvious. For instance, is an interrogative sentence which is generally assumed to code a question. The above is a somewhat differentiated approach to such constructions.