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statements seem to me extremely important. They show how the pragmatic dimension is strictly interrelated with a truth conditional semantics of nonindexical expressions. Morris was indeed a pioneer when he approached in pragmatic terms even the venerable distinction between analytical and synthetic sentences. The notion of analyticity is the stronger argument a truth-conditional semantics can use in order to assert its own independence from the so-called world knowledge, background knowledge, encyclopedical information, contexts, circumstances, and so on. A truth-conditional semantics that opposes a pure dictionary or lexical knowledge to any other kind of acquired competence can assume that "pragmatics has as its topic those aspects of the meaning of utterances which cannot be accounted for by straightforward reference to the truth conditions of the sentences uttered" (Gazdar 1979:2). |
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The weakness of such a distinction is splendidly demonstrated by Quine in his essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951): analytical truths, as well as synthetic ones, depend on a system of cultural assumptions, that is, they represent the more resistantbut by no means eternalcore of a system of social expectations. It is interesting to remark how the same claim is made, in other words, on the page of Foundations I have just quoted. |
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Theory (i). The entire section 2 of this paper will suggest in which sense a theory. of meaning cannot avoid the pragmatic dimension. |
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1.2.2. Pragmatics between Signification and Communication |
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Pragmatics, too, takes for granted a lot of elements that, even though concerning the relation between signs and their utterers or interpreters, and even though being highly relevant for the process of communication, depend on a previous semantic rule. Take the two sentences analyzed by Gazdar (1979:3): |
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(5) Tom's doggie killed Jane's bunny. |
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(6) Tom's dog killed Jane's rabbit. |
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The ideal speaker-hearer of English will infer that the author of (5) is either a child or someone who pretends to be a child, but such inference is independent of the circumstances of the utterance. Notwithstanding this, any semantic theory which claims to be in the position of taking into account the difference between (5) and (6) can do so only if it is able to list, among its semantic paraphernalia, also markers that in some |
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