Language

How do words get their meaning?

Comments

Well, there's a panel of very wise elders who meet in an oaken room in their black robes and officially confer meaning on words. At least, that's the idea you'd get the way some people talk about "correct" meanings, as they bemoan the fact that most people nowadays use the "wrong" ones. Linguists find this funny, because really words mean what people use them to mean. The linguistic-correctness freak wrongly takes the meaning-makers to be fussy usage manuals and outdated dictionaries, when the real tribunal is ordinary use. So "meat" comes to mean edible flesh rather than food in general not because of a dictionary change but because of a shift in ordinary usage. Dictionaries respond to changes in usage; they don't mandate them.

How exactly does ordinary use manage to create linguistic meaning? The philosopher Paul Grice developed a very influential answer to this question. His idea is that the fundamental kind of "meaning" isn't linguistic meaning, but communicative meaning. A person can "mean something" in the sense of trying to get a message across to another---they can wink, ring a bell, or, of course, use language, with the open intent of getting some message across. Grice suggested that what gives words meaning is that they become standardized, in the community, as tools for getting certain sorts of messages across. What they mean is a matter of what messages they standardly help to convey. And this is a question of how words are actually used rather than how they are defined in reference books. This all seems very insightful and important.

But maybe the linguistic-correctness freak isn't quite as badly mistaken as he's made out to be. There certainly is a sizeable linguistic community whose members treat dictionaries and usage manuals as norms to be lived up to (whether or not they capture ordinary usage). By these language users' own lights, they speak incorrectly when the "experts" say so; they hold themselves to the experts' rules. With respect to this community, it may well be plausible to say that their words literally mean what the usage mavens deem them to mean. Does this mean that Grice is wrong about them? Maybe so. And not just about the linguistically correct. If the idea becomes common that General Relativity is the claim that "everything is relative", people will use the term to convey messages about everything being relative. But surely this would be a widespread mistake about what "General Relativity" means; it wouldn't become correct. So perhaps Grice's theory needs supplementation to accommodate cases in which language users defer to experts to settle literal meaning.

Read another response by Mark Crimmins

Read another response about Language