Semantics & Pragmatics: What Is Said and What Is Meant

You ask a colleague whether the new hire is any good, and she answers: "Well, she's always on time." Nothing in that sentence says no. You understood no, instantly, and so did she, and if you challenged her she could say, truthfully, that she only mentioned punctuality.

Two systems are at work. One computes what the sentence means whoever says it, when, and to whom: that is semantics. The other works out what this speaker, here, is getting at by saying it: that is pragmatics. A graduate of this course sees both layers under every conversation, and can tell a literal falsehood from a lie, a hint from a promise, a rude request from a polite one in another language.

Compositionality: meaning is built from parts

You have never heard The purple elephant is next to the small square, and you understand it. That is only possible if the meaning of a whole sentence is computed from the meanings of its words and the way they are put together. This is the principle of compositionality, usually credited to Gottlob Frege, although scholars point out that he never stated it in this form. Richard Montague turned it into a working programme around 1970 by giving English sentences precise truth conditions, built step by step along their syntax.

The picture to carry is that words denote sets, and grammar combines the sets. Circle picks out the circles in a scene. Red picks out the red things. Red circle is the overlap. Every is a relation between two sets: every circle is red is true if the circles are inside the red things; some asks only that the sets overlap; no asks that they do not overlap; most asks that the overlap is bigger than the rest of the first set. Barwise and Cooper (1981) showed that this view of quantifiers is not a quirk of English, and that most cannot be expressed in ordinary first-order logic at all.

Without JavaScript: in a row of red circle, red square, blue circle, blue square, Some square is blue is true, Every circle is red is false (circle 3 is blue) and Most shapes are red is false (two of four is not most).

Compositionality has limits, and the interesting cases are the ones where it seems to break. In an idiom such as kick the bucket, the whole is stored as one unit. A red pen may write in blue, and red hair is not red like a fire engine, so adjectives shift with the noun they sit beside. Linguists keep the principle as the default and ask, case by case, which extra mechanisms (stored chunks, coercion, context) are needed.

Entailment: what a sentence commits you to

Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus (4.024): "To understand a proposition means to know what is the case, if it is true." That is the heart of truth-conditional semantics. If you know the conditions under which a sentence is true, you can say what follows from it. A sentence A entails B if B is true in every situation where A is true. All three students passed entails Some student passed, but not the reverse.

The tool below makes the situations literal. Three students either pass or fail, which gives 2×2×2 = 8 possible situations. Pick two sentences and see which situations make each true.

Without JavaScript: All passed is true in 1 of 8 situations and Some passed in 7, and the one is among the seven, so All entails Some. Some does not entail All.

Notice that Some passed often suggests that not all did. That is not an entailment, because a speaker can say "Some passed, in fact all of them did" without contradiction. It is an implicature, the subject of the next-but-one section.

Presupposition: what a sentence takes for granted

Mia stopped smoking says that she does not smoke now. It also takes for granted that she used to. The second is a presupposition, and it behaves differently from an entailment. Negate the sentence, Mia didn't stop smoking, turn it into a question, Did Mia stop smoking?, or tuck it under if, and the "she used to smoke" part stays. The entailment about now does not. This family-of-sentences test is how semanticists separate the two. The words that trigger presuppositions include stop, regret, the, possessives (Jo's sister) and clefts (It was Lena who broke the cup).

Without JavaScript: the presupposition (Mia used to smoke) survives not, a question and if. The entailment (Mia does not smoke now) does not.

The oldest puzzle is The king of France is bald, said when France has no king. Bertrand Russell (1905) said the sentence is simply false, because it asserts that exactly one king exists and is bald. Peter Strawson (1950) said it is neither true nor false, because the presupposition fails and the question of baldness does not arise. Semanticists still divide on this. What everyone agrees on is the practical side. Listeners usually do not object to a presupposition; they quietly accommodate it. If a stranger says "Sorry I'm late, my sister's car broke down," you add that she has a sister. This is why presuppositions carry persuasion: "When did you stop cheating?" smuggles in the cheating.

Projection is not absolute. If the presupposition has already been stated in the sentence, it disappears: If Mia used to smoke, she has stopped no longer commits the speaker to her smoking. The tool above shows this as the last option.

Implicature: Grice and the cooperative speaker

H. Paul Grice's 1967 William James lectures (published as "Logic and Conversation," 1975) started modern pragmatics. His idea: conversation is cooperative, and speakers and hearers both assume it. This Cooperative Principle unfolds into four groups of expectations:

Maxim	Expectation
Quantity	Say as much as needed, and no more
Quality	Say only what you believe to be true
Relation	Be relevant
Manner	Be clear: avoid obscurity and needless wordiness

The clever part is what happens when a speaker visibly breaks a maxim. The hearer assumes the speaker is still cooperating and looks for a reason. "She's always on time," in answer to "Is she any good?", is not relevant, unless the speaker has nothing better to say. That is the implicature. Grice listed tests: an implicature can be calculated from the maxims; it can be cancelled ("...but she's also brilliant"); and it hangs on what is said, not on the wording (a paraphrase carries it too).

Without JavaScript: answering "How was the lecture?" with "The room was warm" flouts Relation; "Ms Ruiz dresses well and arrives on time", as a reference letter, flouts Quantity; "What lovely weather!" in a storm flouts Quality; a long, formal description of someone's singing flouts Manner.

Not everyone holds that four maxims are the right foundation. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance Theory (1986) reduces the machinery to one principle: hearers look for the interpretation that gives the most effect for the least effort. Stephen Levinson and Laurence Horn each proposed a different, smaller set of principles. Experimental pragmatics, from Ira Noveck's 2001 work on children and some to many later studies, tests the predictions: adults often add the "not all" meaning, children more rarely, and it takes extra time. A large rival question, still open, is how much of the "not all" is a quick default and how much is built on the spot.

Speech acts: saying is doing

John Austin gave lectures at Harvard in 1955, published after his death as How to Do Things with Words (1962). His starting point was that many sentences are not reports but deeds. "I promise to be there," "I name this ship," "I bet you five euros." To say them, in the right circumstances, is to do the thing. He split every utterance into the words and grammar (locution), what the speaker does with them, such as warn, request or promise (illocution), and what happens to the hearer (perlocution).

Deeds can fail in ways truths cannot. If a passer-by says "I now pronounce you married," nothing happens, because the speaker is not authorised. Austin called these failures infelicities; the conditions that make a deed work are its felicity conditions. John Searle (1969, 1976) sorted the force of utterances into five families: telling how things are (assertives), trying to get the hearer to do something (directives), committing the speaker (commissives), expressing a feeling (expressives) and changing the world by saying so (declarations).

Without JavaScript: "Can you pass the salt?" is grammatically a question and in force a directive (an indirect speech act). "I promise" is a commissive; "Congratulations!" an expressive; "You're fired" said by a manager, a declaration.

Indirect speech acts show why pragmatics matters. Can you pass the salt? is nearly never about ability. Answering "Yes" and doing nothing is a joke because the hearer understood perfectly well and chose to be literal. Studies of requests across languages (the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project of Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper, 1989) found that every language they examined has direct and indirect ways to ask, but the mix differs.

Politeness across cultures: the price of a request

Why does the same request come out in so many shapes? Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1978; book 1987) built on Erving Goffman's idea of face, a person's public self-image. Most acts, like requests or criticism, threaten someone's face. Speakers weigh the threat by three things: the social distance between them, the power of the hearer over the speaker, and how large an imposition the act is. Higher weight, more care. Their examples came from English, Tamil and Tzeltal, a Mayan language of Mexico. They claimed that the logic is universal, though what counts as a heavy imposition is not.

Without JavaScript: at weights of 3 to 7 the request is direct (English "Pass the salt"); at 12 to 15 it becomes elaborate ("Sorry to bother you, could you possibly pass the salt?"); from 16 up it is hinted, and at 20 or 21 it may not be made.

The critics have a strong point. Yoshiko Matsumoto (1988) and Sachiko Ide (1989) argued that in Japanese, honorifics are largely required by the social relation (wakimae, "discernment") and not chosen to save face, so the model cannot explain them. Gu Yueguo (1990) made a similar argument about Chinese, and Anna Wierzbicka argued that each culture has its own "cultural scripts" (for example, Anglo reluctance to give flat orders compared with the more direct styles of Polish or Russian). Many languages also build status into grammar: the T–V choice of French tu/vous, Spanish tú/usted and German du/Sie (Brown and Gilman 1960), Korean speech levels, and the Javanese levels ngoko and krama. A fair summary: face is a useful and widely cross-checked idea, and a universal formula is not.

What a graduate just sees

• The meaning of a sentence is computed from its parts and its tree; the meaning of an utterance is that, plus the occasion.
• "Every", "some", "most" and "no" are relations between sets, and you can check them against a picture.
• An entailment holds whatever the context; an implicature can be cancelled without contradiction.
• A presupposition survives negation and questions; if a sentence assumes something, argue with the assumption, not the sentence.
• Flouting a maxim is a signal, and the listener's job is to ask why.
• Saying can be doing, and a deed can fail because the wrong person said it.
• Politeness follows the weight of a request, and what counts as heavy differs by culture.

Where it shows up next

• Language Acquisition (36/27): children treat some more literally than adults do, and slowly learn who may say what to whom.
• Psycholinguistics & the Brain (36/28): how fast listeners add implicatures, and what happens to them in some brain injuries.
• Computational Linguistics (36/30): textual entailment tasks, question answering and why chatbots must learn presupposition and indirect requests.
• Philosophy of Language (36/07) and Logic & Argument (36/01): truth conditions, the Russell-Strawson dispute and the logic of "if".
• In the world: contracts and warnings (what counts as "said"), advertising ("up to 50% off"), customer service scripts, and diplomacy.

If you want to go deeper

• 📘 Textbook. Paul Kroeger, Analyzing Meaning (Language Science Press, free), and Betty Birner, Introduction to Pragmatics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). For formal semantics, Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer, Semantics in Generative Grammar (Blackwell, 1998). Check for newer editions.
• 📘 Gentler. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (2007), which has chapters on indirect speech and politeness; and H. P. Grice, "Logic and Conversation," the original and short.
• 🌐 Free text. The open textbook Essentials of Linguistics has chapters on semantics and pragmatics.
• 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 24.900 Introduction to Linguistics (Spring 2022) has a semantics block (lectures 17 to 21).