Open Access

Renate Pasch, Wolfgang Motsch

• What the speaker means in uttering a linguistic expression of a certain language in an actual communicative context can be described as the meaning of that expression in the given context plus its function with respect to an intended reaction of the hearer to whom the utterance is addressed. In our approach we refer to these aspects of the interpretation of linguistic utterances with utterance meaning and communicative (interactional) function of the utterance respectively. Together they are called the communicative sense of an utterance. The latter concept is analyzed in detail. It presupposes a proper concept of action of a speaker and assumptions on the general relations between meaning of linguistic expressions and intentions of the speaker as fundamental components of the concept “action of a speaker”. The linguistic expression pertaining to an utterance may be a sentence or a more complex linguistic structure, i.e. a text. A text is considered as a structure of illocutions, i.e. of elementary actions of a speaker. The communicative sense of a structure of illocutions is understood as the result of an interaction of the communicative sense of the single illocutions, constituting that structure.