Three stages of interpretation

The essential difference between sentences and utterances is that sentences are abstract, not tied to contexts, whereas utterances are identified by their contexts. This is also the main way of distinguishing between semantics and pragmatics. If you are dealing with meaning and there is no context to consider, then you are doing semantics, but if there is a context to be brought into consideration, then you are engaged in pragmatics. Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning. Semantics is the study of sentence meaning and word meaning.

To illustrate this, the interpretation of (1.3) will be discussed in terms of three distinguishable stages. The first stage is a semantic one: literal meaning. The others are two kinds of pragmatic interpretation: explicature and implicature

The literal meaning of a sentence is based on just the semantic information that you have from your knowledge of English. Among the things that people who know English should be able to explain about the meaning of (1.3) are the following: something salient (That) is equated, at an earlier time (was is a past tense form), to either the final (last) or the most recent (last) bus. That meaning is available without wondering who might say or write the words, when or where. No consideration of context is involved.

An explicature is a basic interpretation of an utterance, using contextual information and world knowledge to work out what is being referred to and which way to understand ambiguous expressions, such as the word last. Two possible contexts for using an utterance based on the sentence in (1.3) will be considered. They lead to different explicatures.

Firstly, Ann sends a text message to Bess: “missed 10 pm bus” and Bess responds “That was the last bus”. In this situation, Bess’s reply can probably be interpreted as meaning ‘that was the final bus on tonight’s schedule going to where I know you were intending to travel’.

Secondly, Charley says to the driver of a bus about to pull out of a busy terminus: “Some of these buses go via Portobello; is this one of them?”

The driver’s hurried reply is “That was the last bus”, probably interpretable as ‘The previous bus that departed from here was one of those that goes via Portobello’.

These explicatures of utterances go beyond the literal meaning of the sentence That was the last bus. They are interpretations based on the linguistic context (Ann’s and Charley’s utterances respectively) and the non-linguistic context (it is late at night in Ann’s case; Charley and the bus driver can both see bus after bus departing). Background knowledge comes in too (buses generally stop running at some late hour; Bess knows where Ann was going and takes it that Ann knows that she knows). Since context has to be considered, this is pragmatics. Context facilitates disambiguation (between the ‘final’ and ‘previous’ meanings of last) and helps establish what things are referred to when the second individual in each scenario uses the expressions “That” and “the last bus”. As with other pragmatic interpretations, there are uncertainties over explicature, which is why I used the word probably in both of the previous paragraphs.

In working out an implicature, we go further and ask what is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is. We would have to know more about the kind of relationship that Ann and Bess have, and about Charley and the look on the driver’s face, but if we had been participants in these exchanges we would have been able to judge fairly confidently whether Bess’s reply conveyed sympathy or a reprimand or an invitation to spend the night at her place, and whether the driver meant to convey annoyance or apology by his response to Charley. Fairly obviously, the bus driver’s answer can be taken as an implicit ‘No’ in answer to Charley’s question. These are inferences derived by trying to understand, in the light of contextual and background information, the point of a sender producing utterances that, in context, are likely to have particular explicatures. We cannot forget about the literal meaning of the sentence in (1.3) because literal meaning is the foundation for explicature, on which implicatures are based, but it is important to note that it cannot be claimed that the sentence That was the last bus generally means ‘Spend the night at my place’ or ‘No’.

Each stage is built on the previous one and we need to develop theories of all three: literal meaning – the semantics of sentences in the abstract; explicature – the pragmatics of reference and disambiguation; and implicature – the pragmatics of hints.