Sentence Meaning and Speaker Meaning From Philosophical Perspective According to Lycan in Philisophy of Language

Abstract

This article aims at analyzing the sentence meaning and speaker meaning from philosophical perspectives based on Lycan‘s proposal in Philosophy of Language. So far, the analysis of sentence meaning and speaker meaning isUnder the heading of pragmatics only. The first part will deal with speaker meaning proposed by Lycan with some illustrations on daily communication. The second part deals with the sentence meaning as opposed to speaker meaning. Finally, it tries to see the link between speaker meaning in pragmatics and philosophy. In conclusion, both speaker meaning and sentence meaning are important in daily  communication. For the philosophers, in scientific writing, sentence is more important since everything should be literal/explicitly stated. In contrast, in oral communication, speaker meaning is more important since people do not say what they want to say.