Communicative meaning

Question

It has been said that certain actions are intrinsically endowed with a communicative meaning (see below for a definition). Would you say that is true and can apply to certain sentences, utterances and expressions?

Definition (in the linguistic sense of the word): communicative meaning, i.e. the meaning of an utterance as a linguistic activity: e.g. requesting, ordering, asserting etc..

Rvw · Accepted Answer

I'm not clear about what you mean.  If you mean that a linguistic  activity has extra-verbal meaning derived from body language, context,  etc., I agree.

Roro · Answer

Hello Anon.
You have in mind Austin's speech act theory? on Performative Utterances.
{random quote from '*********** as a Performative Utterance'}
Austin introduces the concept of certain ways of talking that are not simply grammatical sentences, but are actual actions.

Davkett · Answer

There are many actions (maybe more of them than not) that are intrinsically endowed with communicative meaning. Aside from body language while speaking, there's behavior in general, and certainly all the creative arts.

I always liked the Sufi saying, 'One can't send a kiss by messenger.'

Rvw · Answer

If you have read Freud (or interpreted your own dreams), you know that every detail in a dream is symbolic and is indicative of mental processes. Perhaps every waking action, verbal and non-verbal, is equally symbolic and indicative of mental processes. Then there is an overwhelming flood of communication in every human exchange.

Davkett · Answer

Then there is an overwhelming flood of communication in every human exchange. - rvw

That's exactly what I think.

Roro · Answer

Hello there, hello anon.
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It has been said that certain actions [speech acts?] are intrinsically endowed with a communicative meaning. Would you say that is true and can apply to certain sentences, utterances and expressions?
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I'm still not sure about what you are really asking, but I think it's true. Let me quote from one of the most classic literatures, 'Language and Linguistics' by J. Lyons:
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?5.5 Sentence-meaning and utterance-meaning?

The first thing that must be done is to draw a distinction between the meaning of sentences and the meaning of utterances. Many linguists and logicians, who operate with a narrower interpretation of 'semantics' than is traditional in linguistics and has been adopted in this book, would say that, whereas sentence-meaning falls within the scope of semantics, the investigation of utterance-meaning is part of pragmatics.

?(There are) special kind of declaratives that the philosopher L. Austin called explicit performatives: i.e. sentences like

(3) I promise to pay you £5
(4) I name this ship the `Mary Jane'

whose primary function is not to describe some external and independent event, but to be a constitutive and effective component of the action in which they are embedded.?
(...Does this phrase concern your question, Anon??)

?5.6?(...) Furthermore, even though we may decide that there is more to meaning than can be captured in truth-conditional semantics, this does not of course alter the fact that the sense and denotation of lexemic and non-lexemic expressions can be formalized in terms of truth-conditions, due allowance being made for the indeterminacy of many lexemes. (...) Formal semantics has made precise much that was imprecisely expressed or simply taken for granted in more traditional approaches to the study of meaning. No less important, it is making a serious attempt to give content to what was stated rather programmatically at the beginning of an earlier section (5.4): the meaning of a sentence is the product of both lexical and grammatical meaning. It is doing so by trying to formulate precisely the way in which the two kinds of meaning interact.
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(The second half of the quote is added in order to reinforce my point of view. I'd like to note that Lyons was not sympathetic to formal semantics. In addition, this book was written in 1981, that is, when the effectivity of formal semantics in analysis of natural language was hardly accepted among linguists yet. I mean...well...um..)

MrPedantic · Answer

If we assume (with Roro) that the question relates only to speech acts, as opposed to e.g. abusive gestures, perhaps the speech acts we use when addressing animals might be worth considering.

For instance, if you found a stray dog in your garden, you might use utterance X to shoo it away.

Would such an utterance fall within Anon's area of enquiry?

MrP

Davkett · Answer

This is the original question at the top of the thread:

Would you say that is true and can apply to certain sentences, utterances and expressions?

Therefore I think the way humans talk to animals easily falls under Anon's question.

However, I thought Roro's point was more related to the difference between the meaning of a written sentence, within the sentence itself, and it's meaning when read in a more extended context of other sentences surrounding it. Or the difference in communicative meaning between a given written sentence, and that same sentence as an utterance.

Roro · Answer

Ah-huh. Seems like you are taking a wider,?semiotic?point of view, aren't you, MrP and davkett. I'm kinda interested in it, too, it's in a complementary relation with formal semantics, I think.

I'm hesitant to mix up those various kind of signs used in communication. There's a big difference, for example, between:
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?Ksksksks....?(Some make such a fricative sound when they call cats.)
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?Come here, Eejit, your dinner is ready!?
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As to the former, the sign has no structure, and we cannot distinguish the sign's?signifié?from?signifiant?(without help of other symbolic systems). (Just like a gesture.) (Although one may say that those two expressions have the same communicative meaning (signifié).)

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(Generally speaking formal semantics won't/cannot treat 'communicative meaning' (as far as I'm aware of), to its benefit. I always wanted to know, however, about Peirce's thought. I just took a look now and found it interesting, not outdated at all.)

Communicative meaning

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