Other types of meaning

Not all meaning conveys propositional content, i.e. information or an opinion about the state of the world. For example, when Kermit the Frog uttered the immortal words: ‘Good grief! The comedian’s a bear!’ his opening exclamation ‘Good grief!’ conveyed no meaning which can be expressed in terms of truth conditions, but rather an expressive (or affective) meaning, indicating his feelings about the event he is reporting.

Arguably, most if not all utterances carry an element of expressive meaning, which is not always easy to disentangle from the propositional meaning. ‘He’s running for President’, for example, looks like a statement, but uttered with a rising tone at the end and perhaps a stress on the final word, it might convey incredulity or disbelief on the part of the speaker (‘He’s running for PRESIDENT?!’).

Another kind of meaning is what many linguists call phatic communion, which encompasses those seemingly meaningless pleasantries which in many societies are important ways of signalling shared membership of a community. When someone asks ‘How are you?’ in most cases he/she is not looking for a detailed account of your current state of health: it’s simply a social ritual designed to show that you matter as a human being.