Understanding of the Utterance's Meaning

ⅠIntroduction of meaning

What is meaning? Meaning this word has been studied for thousands of years by philosophers, logicians and linguists. German famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein defined that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Katz’s theory proposed that meaning is compositional. The way words are combined into phrases and phrases into sentences determines the meaning of the sentences (Saeed, 1997:235). Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics suggested that the meaning involves describing mental representations. And G. Leech also gave us 7 types of meaning in his Semantics. Generally, there are two major branches in studying the meaning of language: semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning. To distinguish these two terms, we can interpret as following (Saeed, 1997:235):

Meaning described in relation to speakers =pragmatics

Meaning abstracted away from uses= semantics

From this, we know semantics only analyzes the expressions and there designate without considering the users, but pragmatics studied the meaning which dose relate to the speaker’s understanding and description of the real world, and that is to say context will influence the language meaning. On the other hand, according to Saeed (1997), the utterance is created by speaking (or writing) pieces of language and, on the contrary sentences are abstract grammatical elements obtained from utterances. This paper is going to focus on the understanding of the utterance’s meaning from the aspect of pragmatics that is context, just in order to show that the context plays an important role in comprehending the meaning.

Ⅱ Introduction of context

Pragmatics pays much attention to the research on what kind of the environment language is used in, from this point, the environment may means the context. And Based on Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, on one hand context refers to the words that come just before and after a word, phrase or statement and help you to understand its meaning, so intonation, grammar and the way of the combination of the words or sentences will affect the context, and we can say these three factors are all included in Linguistic Context. On the other hand context refers to the situation in which something happens and that helps you to understand it, and therefore, this is Non-linguistic Context which is divided into Context of Situation and Context of Background. See the following classification chart（Niu Qiang ,1999）.

This chart clearly show the classification of the context, but Zhu Fangcheng (2004:60) advocates that we can analyze the non-linguistic context from the following three parts: 1) the known information in a certain context 2) the time, the place, speaker’s gender、age、occupation and status 3) common social and cultural back

ground. However, to sum up this paper gives out three main factors to analyze the influence of context: 1) context of situation (including when, why, where), 2) context of background (including general knowledge and common culture), 3) speaker (gender, age, experience, education, status and occupation).

Ⅲ Analysis

This paper gets 14 tokens of “I am big” from the COCA and these 14 tokens some are from friction, some spoken, and some news too. Besides, the year of these tokens is from 1991 to 2006. To demonstrate the effect of the context, this paper only picks out three of them to see that under the effect of the context, and the meaning of the utterance “I am big” is distinct from each other.

【a】No.5: “I am big.”

Speaker: elephant; an animal, a cartoon figure in the Turtle Magazine for Preschool Kids

Context of situation: 1) in the forest 2) elephant wants to tell other animals although he is too big to do some things with them, he also can carry them if they are tired.

Context of background: 1) friction 2) one of elephant’s characteristics is “big” 3) this source is chosen from Turtle Magazine for Preschool Kids which is published in 1999.

From above analysis, we can learn that as these four animals (turtle, heron, frog, and elephant) all want to make friends with each other, they use their characteristics to attract others, and thus “I am big” here which is said by elephant, means the “I am large in size”, for we all know that elephant is big in its size, and here “I” refers to the elephant.

【b】No.3: “I am big.”

Speaker: Bill O'Reilly, male, 54 yeas old, columnist, television personality, talk radio personality.

Context of situation: he speaks this on NBC Dateline, and discusses his book "Who's Looking Out For You?" and his career and life.

Context of background: 1) spoken; 2) Bill O'Reilly is the host of the political commentary program The O'Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel, which is the most watched cable news television program on American television

If we do not know who Bill O'Reilly is and do not know now he was talking about his book, we may not know here “I am big” means that “I am an important person in media”, and certainly “I” here refers to Bill O'Reilly

【c】No. 8: “I am big.”

Speaker: Kadoh, a young boy, a figure of a children’s book.

Context of situation: 1) in the forest 2) in the dark evening 3) the two other boys with Kadoh complained that they should not take Kadoh, saying he is too weak and young,

Context of background: 1) friction; 2) this source is chosen from children’s book Indio which is written by Sherry Garland, published in 1995.

From 【c】 we know “I” here refers to Kadoh, and when he said this “ I am big” he actually wanted to say “ I am old enough”.

The above【a】, 【b】and 【c】are exemplified to prove although we see the same utterance “ I am big.”, it does not mean we shall get the same meaning. First, the word “I” refers different person, so the speaker influences the meaning. Secondly, the reason why the meaning of “big” is dissimilar, as it is said in different context of situation. Thirdly, from the above analysis, the context of background will also influence us to comprehend the meaning of “I am big.”

Ⅳ Conclusion

Since this paper holds that we can understand the meaning from the pragmatic view, it analyzes the utterance “I am big” which is chosen from COCA, trying to prove that the context has a big impact on the understanding of the meaning. However, the context can be divided into many types, according to other scholar’s view; this paper sums up the context into three main types. When comprehend one’s meaning, we shall take the speaker, context of situation, and context of background into consideration.

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