Coda

Abstract

One kind of meaning is constituted by what we need to grasp about usage in order to be competent participants in the linguistic practices of a community. What we need to grasp first and foremost is how those with whom we communicate normally expect us to understand them, and how those interlocutors assume we are normally to be understood. I’ve argued that we should think of this sort of meaning as a population-level, process-like phenomenon. It’s population-level since what needs to be grasped is determined by a rough equilibrium of assumptions across speakers: the competent speaker needs to track certain bits of ...