Meaning, literal and otherwise.
9 topics · 18 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
What our language habits reveal
Steven Pinker (TED) · 2007
Argues that indirect speech is a rational solution to social uncertainty: an unstated request preserves plausible deniability and so protects the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
How to Do Things with Words
J. L. Austin · 1962
Argues that many utterances do not describe the world but perform an action in saying them, such as promising or naming a ship, and that these…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Structure of a Semantic Theory
Katz & Fodor · 1963
Proposes representing a word's meaning as a bundle of semantic markers that a formal projection rule combines to predict a sentence's meaning and to…
+12 more at this level
12 of 18 works
Steven Pinker (TED)
Argues that indirect speech is a rational solution to social uncertainty: an unstated request preserves plausible deniability and so protects the relationship if it is refused.
link checked 17 Sept 2026J. L. Austin
Argues that many utterances do not describe the world but perform an action in saying them, such as promising or naming a ship, and that these performatives should be judged as successful or unsuccessful rather than true or false.
Stephen C. Levinson
Argues that person, place and time deixis are best analysed together as a single system for anchoring an utterance to its speaker, surveying how far idealised deictic categories break down against usage across languages.
Jenny Arendholz
Analyses real message-board exchanges to argue that what counts as appropriate or rude online is negotiated locally by a community rather than fixed by a universal politeness norm.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Paul R. Kroeger
Introduces semantics and pragmatics as a single toolkit — truth conditions, reference, implicature and speech acts — for working out what a sentence means and what a speaker means by it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Katz & Fodor
Proposes representing a word's meaning as a bundle of semantic markers that a formal projection rule combines to predict a sentence's meaning and to flag which readings of an ambiguous sentence make sense together.
Keith Donnellan
Distinguishes two uses of a definite description — picking out whoever fits it, versus picking out one specific individual the speaker has in mind — arguing reference is not fixed by the description's content alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Montague
Argues that English can be given a systematic, compositional semantics as rigorous as a formal logical language, by treating meaning as a function built up in step with syntax.
Robin Lakoff
Argues that politeness follows its own rules of pragmatic competence, running alongside and sometimes overriding clarity, which is why an indirect sentence can be the more appropriate thing to say.
Lauri Karttunen
Argues that whether a presupposition survives being embedded under negation, a conditional or a modal depends on the properties of the embedding predicate itself, not on the presupposition alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert Stalnaker
Argues that presupposition is a property of speakers and contexts rather than of sentences, defined as what a speaker takes to be common ground with an audience at the moment of speaking.
Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson
Argues ordinary conversation follows a small set of turn-allocation rules, operating locally turn by turn, that explain how speaker change happens with minimal gap or overlap without anyone directing it.