Meaning, reference and context

Three questions about meaning

A word has a conventional range of uses within a linguistic community; a particular use may refer to a particular person, thing, event or class; and an utterance can convey more than its words conventionally encode. These are related but different questions. The sense of a word is not identical to the object picked out on one occasion. The same designation can be applied to different people across centuries; two descriptions can also identify the same individual while presenting that individual differently.

Semantics studies conventional meaning and the contribution of linguistic structure. Pragmatics studies meaning in a communicative setting: who uses an expression, to whom, for what purpose and against what shared background. The boundary is debated, so label the observation rather than assuming every interpretation belongs wholly to one side. A translation should preserve distinctions that matter for the passage instead of forcing a single English gloss on every token.

A text is a situated use

A pronoun is interpreted relative to an utterance and its discourse; a pronoun inside a quotation can take the quoted speaker as its centre. A title can have a conventional sense while its referent changes across dated documents. Record the form, grammatical analysis and proposed referent separately, and cite the passage that supports the link. If damage obscures the antecedent, preserve that uncertainty.

In an ancient corpus, the original communicative setting is usually only partly recoverable. Oracc identifies royal inscriptions as formal, genre-bound statements of kings’ achievements and ideology. Their surviving objects and conventions are the evidence available to us. Claims about audience, intention and shared knowledge remain historical interpretations.

Practice

Take a cited noun or pronoun from an edited text. Write the dictionary lemma and candidate sense, then name its referent in that passage, then note any further implication you infer. Mark which answers come from morphology, which from the surrounding text and which remain uncertain. Repeat the exercise with another occurrence of the same lemma.