Meaning and Expression: Marty and Grice on Intentional Semantics

Abstract

Paul Grice’s essay ‘Meaning’ — one of the fundamental works for semantics — was published in 1957. Almost fifty years before — in 1908 — Anton Marty’s book ‘Investigations into the foundation of general grammar and the philosophy of language’¹ was published. Reading the chapters ‘Preliminaries on meaning in general’² and ‘Supplementary Remarks on meaning in general’,³ one notices the strong similarities with the theory and terminology of Grice. In these chapters Marty is concerned with the question of the significance of so-called language devices (Sprachmittel). At first he deals with the problem of intentional and unintentional utterances of the inner life of the speaker. An instinctive cry of a person is a sign of his feeling pain and accordingly a statement signifies that the speaker holds a conviction. Consequently the meaning of linguistic expressions is related to the expression of the speaker’s psychological experiences. However, this is not the only relevant aspect of the meaning of the language device. Marty writes:

However, it is not just this way of ‘being a sign’, the expression of one’s psychological life, which is the exclusive and primary aim of intentional speech. What is rather intended is to influence or to control the unknown inner life of the hearer. Intentional speech is a special kind of action, which is essentially aimed at evoking certain psychological phenomena in the other person (U 284).⁴