The demise of a unique concept of literal meaning

Abstract

Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, noncompositional, context-dependent, and cancelable. I argue that the requirements made on literal meaning conflict with each other (e.g., coded vs. truth condtional; figurative vs. coded; inferred vs. literal). I then propose to replace the one concept of literal meaning with three concepts of minimal meanings. Each, I argue, reflects a different respect in which a meaning can be minimal. A meaning can be minimal because it is coded, compositional, and contextinvariant—the linguistic meaning. A meaning can be minimal because psycholinguistically it is the one foremost on our mind—Giora’s (Giora, Rachel, 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 183–206.) salient meaning. And a meaning can be minimal because it is the privileged interactional interpretation communicated, namely what the speaker is seen as bound by, what constitutes her relevant contribution to the discourse (Ariel, Mira, 2002. Privileged interactional interpretations. Journal of Pragmatics, in press). # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.