Sentence examples for meaning from high-quality English sources.

• Most phonemes have no meaning.

• But in other theories of meaning, the order of metaphysical determination is reversed.

• Meaning is so much better than nothing, in that it defines “nothing” as everything that meaning is not.

• Therefore, textual meaning is not identical to the authorial meaning.”

• It takes secondary meaning to apply both before and after sentence meaning.

• The word has a pleasant meaning if he likes them, an unpleasant meaning if he doesn’t.

• On some readings of “differ in meaning”, any big difference in theory generates a difference in meaning.

• If meaning is conventional, then the evolution of meaning becomes an instance of the evolution of conventions.

Use meaning in a sentence.

• In the realm of philosophy of language, theories of sentence meaning depend on how word meaning is understood.

• While much of the discussion about primary and secondary meaning is centered on words, there are significant implications for sentence meaning.

• If the primary meaning is inappropriate in a given context, then one moves to a secondary meaning, an extension of the primary meaning.

• (For more details about how Grice thought that sentence-meaning could be explained in terms of speaker-meaning, see the discussion of resultant procedures in the entry on Paul Grice.)

• Both versions of meaning normativism, however, claim that the following is both necessary, and essential to, an expression e’s having meaning (for a speaker, or group of speakers, S at a time t):

• If the meaning of a name is generated from the metalinguistic meaning of the constituent proper nominal, then names will accordingly have a metalinguistic meaning (most likely in the form of a rule of use).

• The term ‘default meaning’ is used in a variety of ways in the literature, including statistically common interpretation, predictable meaning, salient meaning, or automatically retrieved meaning.

• The flaw consists in conflating the metaphysics of meaning — the study of what constitutes the meaning of an utterance — and the epistemology of meaning — the study of how the hearer interprets the meaning of an utterance.

meaning sentence examples

• Among them are natural meaning, as in smoke means fire or those spots mean measles; conventional meaning, as in a red traffic light means stop or the skull and crossbones means danger; and intentional meaning, as in John means well or Frank means business.

• First, he refines the analyses of utterer’s meaning and sentence meaning, primarily in the 1968 article, “Utterer’s Meaning, Sentence Meaning, and Word Meaning,” and the 1969 article, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intentions.”

• The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according to Levinson, of a level of encoded meaning (sentence-meaning) and a level of inferential meaning (speaker’s or utterance-(token)-meaning), must be supplemented by a third intermediate layer of utterance-type-meaning which is not based “on direct computations on speaker-intentions but rather on general expectations about how language is normally used” (p. 22).

• One needs to add the assumption that the function from the determinants of meaning to the meanings themselves is one-to-one (that is, not only does any change to a word's meaning require some change in the determinants of its meaning, but also that any change to the determinants of a word's meaning must produce a change to its meaning), and doing that will probably require something more like a “direct” argument, since it is unlikely that one could argue that the function from use to meaning had to be one-to-one without some sort of substantial account of how use determined meaning.