How People use Words to Make Meanings
Jak lidé používají slova k vyjádření významů
Year: 2010
Authors: Patrick Hanks

Abstract (English):
The title of the present paper, “How people use words to making meanings”, carries with it a number of theoretical assumptions, some of which are more controversial than others. It is, I suppose, uncontroversial that language, used fully and meaningfully, is a uniquely human phenomenon, and that the communications and thought processes of other animals, even chimpanzees, are different in kind from human language. It is people who use words. Language does not exist in a vacuum: it exists in the brains and the interactions of humans. Humans are social animals, and language is the instrument of their sociability, as well as the vehicle of their thought processes.
Equally uncontroversial is the assumption that language is composed of words, put together into some sort of structure, which has persistent attributes. By a “persistent attribute” I mean features like the rank scale of grammar – discourse (document or conversation), paragraph, sentence, clause, phrase or group, word, morpheme). Such structures are not the exclusive property of language, for they also govern other forms of human behaviour such as games and music. Syntax is not an exclusively linguistic phenomenon, but language is the most salient, the most prototypical example of rule-governed behaviour.
At the heart of this view of language lie words. Words are central to the activity of making meanings. Each content word in a language, like a great international airport, represents a place where things come together, meet, and go off in different directions—a huge set of interchange points with various sorts of connections: internal connections to beliefs in the mind of the speaker, interpersonal connections to the beliefs of other users of the same language, intralingual connections to other words in the same language, and putative connections to objects in the world.
Associated with this account of words is the assumption that each word has a meaning. This, however, is an assumption that I will question in the course of this paper.
Another assumption implicit in the title is that meanings are events—events that are for the most part only momentary, transitory, evanescent. A speaker makes a meaning—billions of people do it every minute of every day—but the next moment the meaning is gone: lost for ever, unless some assiduous Boswell, parliamentary reporter, law clerk, or linguist happens to have transcribed the utterance of the speaker and thus preserved it for posterity. Most meaningful spoken interactions are as evanescent as the mutual sniffing of dogs—or the passing of passengers through an airport. The notion that meanings are events is, nevertheless, one that I propose to defend, against the alternative
1
view that meanings are static abstract entities. It is a commonplace among philosophers of language that speaker’s meaning and hearer’s meaning are not necessarily identical, and the. As Wright (1976) put it:
“Speaker and hearer have only their mutual pragmatic satisfaction to rely on that they mean the same thing.”
The philosopher H. P. Grice (1957) regarded meanings as events, involving a particular kind of interaction between speaker and hearer—an interchange of beliefs. The core of Grice’s account of meaning is summarized by Bennett (1976) thus: If [an utterer] U does x, thereby meaning that P, he does it intending i. that some audience A should come to believe P
ii. that A should be aware of intention (i), and
iii. that the awareness mentioned in (ii) should be part of A’s reason for believing that P.
This account of meaning applies equally well to the interaction between writer and reader, with a displacement in time, which may be very large or quite small1.

Abstract (Czech):
Tento příspěvek je zvanou přednáškou na téma vztahu mezi slovy a významem. Autor zde představuje svoji metodu manuální analýzy jazykových pravidelností v korpusu. Popisuje zde, jakým způsobem analyzuje anglická sloevsa, aby získal přehled o významových změnách, které nastávají s výběrem různých slovesných doplnění, a nabádá lingvisty, aby při dokládání svých teorií o významu a používání slov nepoužívali introspekci, nýbrž korpus.