English Semantics

Just as conventional signals like the blowing of a whistle can have different meanings in different situations, so different pieces of language can have different meanings in different contexts. Let’s illustrate with three fictitious events: A beggar who has not eaten all day says “I’m hungry”; a child who hopes to put off going to bed announces “I’m hungry”; a young man who hopes to get better acquainted with one of his co-workers and intends to ask her to have dinner with him begins with the statement “I’m hungry.” The three events obviously have something in common and yet, just as obviously, they are different: they indicate different intentions and are liable to be interpreted differently because the situations and the participants are different. Each of the three speech events illustrated above is a different utterance, and we write an utterance with quotation marks: “I’m hungry.” Each utterance contains the same sentence, which we write with italics: I’m hungry. An utterance is an act of speech or writing; it is a specific event, at a particular time and place and involving at least one person, the one who produces the utterance, but usually more than one person. An utterance happens just once; a spoken utterance happens and then, unless it is recorded electronically, it ceases to exist; a written utterance is intended to last—for a short time in the case of a shopping list, for instance, or much longer, as in the case of a book.

A sentence, on the other hand, is not an event; it is a construction of words (in English or whatever language) in a particular sequence which is meaningful (in that language). In our illustration each of the three utterances contains the meaning of the sentence, and each utterance has an extra meaning or meanings because of the circumstances in which it occurs. The meaning of a sentence is determined by the language, something known to all people who have learned to use that language. It is the meanings of the individual words and the meaning of the syntactic construction in which they occur. The meaning of an utterance is the meaning of the sentence plus the meanings of the circumstances: the time and place, the people involved, their backgrounds, their relationship to one another, and what they know about one another. All these circumstances we can call the physical-social context of an utterance.