Keelefilosoofia raamat
sentence has more than one meaning, how does a hearer identify the correct
one upon hearing the sentence uttered?
Charles Morris (1938) divided linguistic study into syntax, semantics,
and pragmatics. Impressionistically put, the distinction was supposed to be
this: Syntax is the study of grammar, the study of which strings of words are
well-formed sentences of a given language and why. Semantics is the study
of meaning, construed primarily (though as we know not uncontroversially)
as a matter of the relations that linguistic expressions bear to the world in
virtue of which they are meaningful. In contrast, pragmatics studies the
uses of linguistic expressions in various social practices including, of course,
everyday conversation and communication, but not only those. On this
usage, Wittgenstein's view (chapter 6 above) can be put by saying that either
"semantics" is entirely misguided or it collapses into pragmatics.
138 Pragmatics and speech acts
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