Boys Will be Boys: ‘Radical Semantics’ vs. ‘Radical Pragmatics‘

Abstract

Colloquial ‘tautologies’ such as War is war or A promise is a promise have often been adduced in support of a ‘Gricean’ account of language use. The present article shows, however, that ‘tautological constructions’ are partly conventional and language-specific, and that each such construction has a specific meaning which cannot be fully predicted in terms of any universal pragmatic maxims. It is argued that the attitudinal meanings conveyed by various tautological constructions and by similar linguistic devices should be stated in rigorous and yet self-explanatory semantic formulae. ‘Radical pragmatics’ is rejected as a blind alley, and an integrated approach to language structure and language use is proposed, based on a coherent semantic theory which is capable of representing ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ aspects of meaning in a unified framework.

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