语用学于语义学区别 以哲学为基础

1.Where do you think meaning comes from?

During the first half of the twentieth century,philosophy of language was concerned less with language use than with meanings of linguistic expressions.Indeed, meanings were abstracted from the linguistic items that have them,and(indicative) sentences were often equated with statements, which in turn were equated with proposition.From the point of semantics and pragmatics,there are two types of meanings--literal meaning and speaker’s meaning.What a sentence literally m eans is determined by the rules of the language--those rules that the semanticist attempts to capture.But speaker’s meaning is a matter of intentions:what someone means is what he overtly intends to get across through his utterances.Meaning comes in many varieties. Some of these varieties are said to belong to the field of semantics,others to the field of pragmatics.

2.What are the similarities and differences between semantics and pragmatics? How are the two related to each other?

Similarities:

1.They are two aspects of linguistics.

2.Both Semantics and Pragmatics are closely related to meaning.Semantics refers to the meaning of words and sentences.While, Pragmatics deals with the meaning of utterances.

3.They two are successional process of interpretation:pragmatic interpretation (such as the working out of Gricean implicatures )is claimed to commence only after the semantic interpretation of a given sentence has been worked out.

4.Both Semantics and Pragmatics are related to signs. They have different

focuses:Semantics is concerned with the relation between signs and objects.

Pragmatics takes the relation between signs and their interpreters as its subject matter. Differences:

There are different approaches to find out how semantics and pragmatics can be distinguished.

According to Bach these are the three most decisive ones:

A.Truth-conditional vs. non-truth-conditional meaning

This approach, named Carnapian approach by Recanati, distinguishes semantics and pragmatics in the following way. Semantics is said to be concerned with truth-conditional meaning (/words-world relations (Recanati)), pragmatics with non-truth-conditional meaning. In short: pragmatics= meaning– truth conditions

B. Conversational vs. non-conversational meaning

At this approach, semantics studies the conventional aspects of meaning and pragmatics those of non-conventional meaning. Therefore a semantic interpretation cannot be cancelled, but a pragmatic interpretation can .

C. Context independence vs. context dependence

At this approach, semantics is concerned with linguistic phenomena that are insensitive to context and pragmatics with those that are. But according to Bach content also varies with context in semantics. (e.g. deictics, demonstratives). He distinguishes between two types of context:

Narrow context: contextual information relevant to the determination of the content of