Meaning and interpretation

This paper addresses the question of the relationship between the meaning of linguistic elements as traditionally investigated by linguists and philosophers, and the interpretation of speech in conversation and discourse. Starting from Wittgenstein's concept of the meaning of words being a function of their use and of language as part of forms of life, it is argued that the meaning of many linguistic elements is ultimately sociocultural in nature and that language can therefore be viewed as a system of sociocultural knowledge. The discussion then turns to the situated interpretation of speech in conversation, which is achieved through the process of conversational inference. Meaning and interpretation are found to be linked in two ways: first, sociocultural background knowledge is crucial in many cases for the use of words and for the interpretation of speech through conversational inference, and second, words often function as contextualization cues which serve to create the context in which the utterance of which they are a part is to be interpreted. This account points toward the necessity of developing a holistic, pragmatically-based framework for linguistic theory and analysis.