Can I mean you?

Journal of Pragmatics 3 (1979) 467-472 Q North-Holland Publishing Company

ZEN0 VENDLER

This pa.per lops off a reputed branch of the meaning of meaning by showing that meaning never means referring.

r ofessor W.P. Alston (1964: 11) wonders about the inscription: “8. Keep off the grass. This means you”. And he says “Here it seems plausible to regard ‘this’ as referring to the sentence ‘Keep off the grass’. n--A L)UL it is clear that we are stat saying what the sentence means. An English-French phrase book would not contain the entry: Keep off the grass - VOUS.This is the use in which ‘mean’ means v;ry much the same as ‘refer’. It is more commonly used of people, as in Who do ycu mean?’ - ‘I mean Susie’. But, as in 8, it can be used of linguistic expressions” [ 11. I shall not discuss the very unlikely suggestion that a mere sentence, such as Keep) off the grass, ever refers to anything. What I do want to contest is the other claim, namely, that mean sometimes means the same as refer. On the contrary, I in such sentences as Tlzis want to maintain that the role of the verb mean, of linguistic meaning, i.e. means you and I mean S’us/e, can be explained in t the good old mean,, of G&e (11957). Thus I hope BOlop off a reputed ‘branch of the mean~g of meaning. My proposal may look counter-intuitive at first glance. This impression is bound to diminish, however, as we proceed to examine a few parallel cases [2] l

Come here! I mean fast. Ihe is big. I mean fat. Stand there! I mean in the corner. It is quite clear what happens in these cases. By adding the second sentence the

[l] Ibid. There is a similar passage in P.F. Strawson (1950: 328): “Mow as a matter of fact there is, in English, a %nse of the word ‘mean’ in which this word does approximate to “indic:ate, menition or refer to’; e.g. when somebody (unpleasantly) ~ys, ‘I mean you’; or when I point and sRy, ‘that is the one I mean” “. 121 Some lof these examples have been suggested to me by Mr. John Nahra. 467

speaker attempts to remove an ambiguity left over by the first. Tn doing so, how-

ever, he does not repeat those elements from the first sentence which are in no need of repair, Thus he does not say, although he could, things like Come here! f mean (come here) fast. She is big. I mean (she is) fat. Stand there! f rnt2an(stand there) in the comer. Mow consider the following: ter is cute. IImean Susie. e same recipe works here too. The redundant, but clearly synonymous, form of eaker says is as follows: ter is cute. 1 mean (your daughter,) Susie (js cute). Of course, in this case the second sentence is forthcoming unasked for. l3ut, obviously, it can be elicited by a question occasioned by an ambiguity arising from the fist cgntence, as in Alston’s case: “Who do you mean’?” - “I mean Susie”. Such questions are by no means restricted to those answeralble by a noun-phrase. Consider the following exchange: A: : I

mean, of course, through the window.

Or this one: A : 1le is just stupid. B: You mean uninformed? A

.

.

I

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.

Susie.

mean

first other

dumb. certainly describes

to in ~hara~~ter~~s

second on subject of the exchange in uttering Stdsie,

P&J dumb, Now would Al&on, or anybody, want to claim that as rne~n moans the same as R$TVin the first, it means the same as de&be in the second? Not at all; the verb mt?&m~r means what Grice says it means: it servesto introduce a fulllerand more appropriate expression of what the speaker intended to say to begin with And, naturally, in the course of expressing what he has to say, the speaker will refer and describe, identify and characterize, as the case may requirle.But these feats have nothing to do with the meaning of mean. Let us return to the original example: Keep off the grass.This means you. There are two additional features in this situation. The first one arises from the fact that here we are talking about an ‘impersonal’inscription; the ‘utterer’ is not specified. Therefore, the second sentence cannot begin with I or we. Instead it has t/t&. What is the referent of this? 4 think the best answer is: the preceding injunction. Not just a sentence, mind yc)u$but a ‘document’ as it were, which has its o\arn authority and illocutionary force. A similar use of this occurs in the folIowing context. Jones (reading from the Book oj?facts) says “‘NewYork City has 12 million inhabitants. This must mean the metropolitan area”. The referent of this seems to be the (impersonal) statistical item in that book. And what that item is s,upposedto mean is that the metropolitan area of New York City has 12 million inhabitants. The second feature is connected with the role ofyou. Weknow, of course, that imperative sentences have you in the deep structure (wherever that is). ‘Ihus the deep structure of the first sentence presumably contains YOU(keep of thegrass). If so, then what is the point of making that explicit in the second sentence? In the to remove ambiguity. Now previous cases the point of what followed mean Yet this puzzle has an easy there is no ambiguity here : you means you anyw solution. It can be gleaned by considering such parallel casesas She is fat. And I mean fat. They ought to fire all members of the board. And I mean *everyone of them. So it is a matter of emphasis: although the fast sentence is not ambiguous, the speaker adds the second to make everybody sure that he means what he says. In 1Gewof thlis,the analysis of that inscription goes as folIows: Keep1off the grass.This (injunction) means you (keep off the grass). An alleged branch of the meaning of mean has been chopped off; rnmn never means reftir A no mean gain in view of the proliferation of meaningshere and elsewhere. Morerover,the moral of the story is not exhausted yet. Havingrealized that not

only people, but such impersonal items as imseriptions and statistical data can mean things in the non-natural sense, it is tempting to push on along these lines with the hope of reaching the privileged domti of linguistic meaning: what sentences and words mean. What we saw up to this point may be summarized as follows. In the context S. And 1 mean S’. tie verb mean introduces a more explicit version, S’, of the speaker’s original utterance, S. More explicit, in the sent of better conveying his original intention imperfectly encoded in S. The fact that S’ is usually produced in a shorter version has no significance: redundant elements are: usually omitted. In the context S. This means S’. the situation is strictly analogous, but with this difference: the subject of FIZ~YIIT does not refer to the speaker(s) or writer(s), but rather to the product of their speech act. But then, as before, S’ clarifies what the users of S (whoever they may be, the Parks Department or a bunch of statisticians) intended to convey by using S in that speech act. The shift from agent to product should not detain us here, since it is a very common move, well understood by lingifts study~g ~~rurnen~l constructions. Think of the ‘transfiormation’ from

to

eneral’s order . . . stopped the attack. Then it i; not surprising to see that, say, the Parks Department’s injunction means what the Parks Department meant by that injunction. Anyway, the process of abstraction is on its way. That injunction means timelessly what the Parks Department meant at the time of issuing the injunction. Yet it remains iheir injunction, not something unanchoreld in history. The next step in the process of abstraction weighs the anchor: (‘II&eGerman sentence) ‘%hnee ist Weiss’means snow is white. (The word) ‘tintinnabulation’ means the tinkling of bells. ow there is no particular act by virtue of which that German sentence, or that English word, came to mean what it does. What happens here is the result of a further shift: as in the previous case the product of a speech act replaced the agent as the subject of meaning, here the standard instrument of performing a kind of places the product. Roughly speaking, &knee &t we& means snow is ch as for Germans the standard way of expre&.g that snow is white te utterEt?ce of Schnee ist weis. Similarly, tinfinnabulutionmeans of bells, sinc:e the En peakers who use t word do so in order to the tinkling of bells. second kind of sh iisnot peculiar to mean-

2. Vendler / Can I mean you?

471

ing either. Consider: Putting up the red flag stops the race. The red flag stops the race. Thus; we have shown the continuity olf meannn from I mean Susie to Tintinnabulcrtion means the tipeklingofbells, AII interesting consequence follows. As Susie is used and not mentioned in the first sentence, so the tink&zg qf b&v is used and not mentioned in the second either. Therefore (contrary to G-ice’s remarks (1957: 378)) it is misleadling to write: ‘Tintinnabulat:ion’ means ‘(the) tinkling of bells’.

“Weiss’means ‘white’. This Aax*”

pcan VUIX

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morehayzs, a p 1Y1 18.

but what the inv!erted commas do in writing, such markers as the word, the phrrrse and the sentence do in speech. E.g., what we express in the written sentence ‘Porcupine’ is longer than ‘snake’. we can express ;ri,the spoken utterance The word porcupine is longer than the word snake. If we apply the same method to some of the previo~~scontexts of mean, the result is falsity : Your daughter is pretty. I mean the word Susie. Keep out! mis means the word you. The German sentence Schnee ist Weissmeans the English sentence snow is white. The word tintinnabulation means the phrase the tinkling oCbells. The word weiss means the word white. What is true, however, is that, for instance, the word Weissmeans the same thing as the word white or the word tintinnabukztion means the same thing as the phrase the tiding ofbleZZs.In this sense, and this sense only, are such sentences as Weiiis’ means) ‘white’, acceptable. But, as we know, being informed that X means the same as Y may leave

2. verpdler / Can B TmWl you?

472

us utterly ignorant of what X means. The Huqarian

word fit means the same as the Hurq@an word szui&i. Now do you know what fit means‘?

A&on, Wiiam P. 1964. Philasophy of language. Englewood Cliffs, ML: Prentice-Hall. G&e, H.P, 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66: 373-388. Strawson, P.F. 1956. On referring. Mind 59: 328-344.

Zen0 Vetdier Born 1921, Devecser,

Dwem:

S.T.L. (Cani aastricht, The Netherlands); Ph.D. (Harvard University). University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, City Ifniversity of New York, ry, and Rice University. Present poMmz: Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla CA 92037, W S.A. Related works: Linguistics in philosophy (Cornell U.P., 1968), and Hes Cogitans (Cornell 10731 I? D., r71.ce/. V.S