The Social Foundations of Meaning

An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior.

The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered.

Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning.

Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals.

A number of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached.