'CHAPTER 1 0

The subjectivity of utterance

10.0 Introduction

Having looked at the notion of context in detail in the preceding chapter, we can now return to the question of speech acts and locutionary agency. We shall begin with reference - the rela­tion that holds between linguistic expressions and what they stand for in the world (or the universe of discourse) on particular occasions of utterance. We shall then take up a particular kind of reference, deixis, which depends crucially upon the time and place of utterance and upon the speaker's (more precisely, the locutionary agent's) and the addressee's roles in the utter­ance-act itself.

We shall then consider the grammatical categories of tense and aspect, neither of which is universal, but both of which, together or separately, are found in many unrelated languages throughout the world. As we shall see, tense, unlike aspect, is a referential (and more specifically deictic) category.

Another grammatical category that is closely connected with tense (and in some languages is found independently of tense) is mood. As the term 'mood' would suggest, there is a historical association between the grammatical category of mood, as this is traditionally defined, and what is referred to as modality in modern logic and formal semantics. There are, however, impor­tant differences between the way in which modality (and mood) are handled, typically, in present-day formal semantics and the way in which mood and modality have been described in traditional grammar. The account that I give of modality and mood in section 10.5 is intended to clarify the differences

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and to emphasize the continued validity of the more traditional view both of mood and of modality. I shall be drawing, once again, upon points made in Chapter 6.

In this final chapter I shall be dealing with topics that every­one would agree are crucial in the construction of a theory of natural-language meaning. But I shall be dealing with them from a point of view which is by no means universally accepted, especially in formal semantics. I shall be giving particular emphasis to what I am calling the subjectivity of utterance. What I mean by 'subjectivity' in this context was implicit in Chapters 8 and 9 and is made explicit in Chapter 10, especially in the concluding section.

10.1 Refer e n c e

Reference, as we have seen at various points in this book, is a context-dependent aspect of utterance-meaning: it is a relation that holds between speakers (more generally, locutionary agents) and what they are talking about on particular occasions. The referential range of referring expressions is fixed by their meaning in the language (i.e., by their sense and denotation). But their actual reference depends upon a variety of contextual factors.

One cannot generally determine the reference of an expres­sion, then, without regard to its context of utterance. What one can do within the restrictions of sentence-based semantics, is to establish the intension of the expression. As we saw in Chapter 7, standard model-theoretic semantics (of which Montague's system is a particular version) does in fact incorporate reference within sentence-meaning - by making the meaning of a sen­tence relative to an index (or point of reference), in which all the relevant contextual information is specified. But this does not affect the substance of what has been said here about refer­ence as a part of utterance-meaning. Standard model-theoretic semantics operates with an untraditional notion of the sentence and, consequently, with a different notion of sentence-meaning; and, as we saw in Chapter 7, it adopts a particular definition of 'intension'. We shall not be concerned with these differences of

10.1 Reference 295

definition and formalization in the present chapter. But we shall take up, at an intuitive and informal level, the notions of possible worlds and intensionality, which were introduced in Part 3 in connexion with Montague grammar.

Simple propositions are normally analysed by logicians into expressions of two kinds: names and predicates. Names serve to pick out - to refer to - entities (or sets of entities) in some poss­ible world about which statements are being made; predicates serve , to ascribe properties to single entities (or sets of entities) and to ascribe relations to ordered pairs, triples, etc. of entities (or sets). All this is formalized in standard predicate logic.

Names, in the everyday sense of the word 'name', are not the only kind of referring expressions. Moreover, from a semantic point of view, they are rather special, in that, of themselves and in languages such as English, they have no descriptive content. (The qualification "in languages such as English" is intended to indicate that natural languages may vary with respect to the way naming operates and is integrated with other cultural prac­tices and customs. Philosophical discussions of proper names rarely mention this possibility or its theoretical significance.) For example, 'Napoleon' is arbitrarily associated with indefi­nitely many entities (persons, animals, ships, etc.) which in prin­ciple have nothing in common. True, one of these entities - or some concept, or intension, associated with him - is, for histori­cal reasons, salient, in the cultures in which English is commonly used. (And some of the others have acquired their names as a consequence of this fact and of its actual or attributed signifi­cance in the light of the conventions that regulate the assignment of names in particular cultures.) This means that, in default of specific contextual information to the contrary, for most speak­ers of English the name 'Napoleon' will usually be taken to refer to this culturally salient entity. It also means that there will be a whole host of shared associations and connotations clustering around the name 'Napoleon', which go to make up what some philosophers refer to as the intension, or individual concept, "Napoleon". However, it does not mean that the name 'Napo­leon' as such has any descriptive content or sense.