Sentence Meaning vs. Speaker Meaning
Pattern
Sentence meaning ≠ speaker meaning — pragmatic gap
Definition
The distinction between what a sentence means by its linguistic conventions (sentence meaning) and what a speaker intends to communicate by using it in a particular context (speaker meaning). The gap between these is where pragmatics operates.
Examples
Example 1
'Can you pass the salt?' — sentence meaning: a question about the hearer's ability to pass salt. Speaker meaning: a request to pass the salt. The speaker meaning has nothing to do with ability.
AI Detection Note
AI tends to conflate sentence meaning and speaker meaning, treating language as if it always means what it literally says. This produces text that is semantically transparent but pragmatically flat — missing the layers of indirectness that characterize human communication.
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