Three levels of meaning

Abstract

Introduction Many a student must have sighed when faced with what might seem the almost medieval casuistry of many of the distinctions in John Lyons' (1977) two-volume handbook, Semantics . Ambiguities and unclarities of every kind in our frail metalanguage for semantic analysis are there laid out for all to see; a formidable reef of difficult distinctions - types and tokens, acts and products, uses and mentions, originals and replicas, ambiguities of level, etc. - upon which we are all guaranteed sooner or later to founder. Introducing the type/token distinction in a straightforward manner, he goes on to tease us by showing how identifying different tokens of the same type can require a complex measure of similarity or identity of type, and then, having raised our anxieties, announces that it would be ‘unnecessarily pedantic’ to identify each such distinction (1977: 13–16). One such distinction Lyons alludes to throughout the volumes may look particularly pedantic, the distinction between utterance-types and utterance-tokens, coming on top, as it does, of the distinctions between system-sentences and text-sentences, sentence-types and sentence-tokens, utterance-acts and -signals and so on. He himself seems to hint (1977: 570ff.) that the distinction may not be of any great utility (since utterancetokens are rarely constrained to type, and such types could in any case be given formal definition, for example, in terms of sentence-types or forms). In this chapter I want to suggest that this distinction between utterance-type meaning and utterance-token meaning, or something rather like it, may indeed prove to be an important division in levels of meaning.

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