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way describe the status (be it age, sex, or social role) of the ideal utterer of a given lexical item.
We should conceive of two different pragmatic approaches: a pragmatics of signification (how to represent in a semantic system pragmatic phenomena) and a pragmatics of communication (how to analyze pragmatic phenomena that take place in the course of a communicative process). Such phenomena as textual co-reference, topic, text coherence, reference to a set of knowledge idiolectally posited by a text as referring to a fictional world, conversational implicature, and many other phenomena concern an actual process of communication and cannot be foreseen by any system of signification. Other phenomena, such as presupposition, prediction of ordinary contexts, rules for felicity conditions, and so on, can, as we shall see, be considered by the study of a coded system of signification, to describe which both the semantical and the pragmatical approaches are strictly and inextricably interrelated.
2. Semantics Marching toward Pragmatics
The most interesting instances of semantic research, in the last decade, are represented by the theories that attempt to design an encyclopedia-like model for the representation of meaning. These attempts are opposed, not only to a purely dictionary-like model, but also to the identification of the scope of semantics with the scope of a truth-conditional semantics. It is evident that all these attempts cannot be implemented only by introducing into the framework of a semantic theory a great deal of idealized pragmatic phenomena.
Levinson (1983) says that pragmatics had been practiced until 1955 without being so named. In general, as Morris first remarked (1938:5), a constant reference to interpreter and interpretation is common in the classical definitions of signs. Greek and Latin rhetoric, as well as the whole of the linguistic theory of Sophists, can be recognized as forms of discourse pragmatics. But even in the most abstract classical definitions of signification there are pragmatic elements: from Aristotle to Augustine, and ultra, every definition of the sign takes into account, not only the relation between expression and content, but also that between the expression and the mental reaction of the interpreter. Abelard carefully debates the problem of the disambiguation of meaning in given contexts, and the problem of the intention of the speaker is a common topic in the medieval theory of signs, from Augustine to Roger Bacon. Ockham provides puzzling remarks about the background knowledge of the interpreter of iconic signs (how can one recognize the iconicity of a statue

 
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