ON LITERALITY AND LITERAL SENSE

The paper is devoted to some problems concerning the juxtaposition of literal and nonliteral sense. The author shows how the distinction developed in pragmatics and discusses different stances on how the notion 'literal' should be understood and what kinds of difficulties arise because of them. Traditionally, the literal meaning was connected with the linguistic system, yet many new pragmatic theories questioned this view, suggesting that the traditional concept of literal meaning should be replaced by alternative concepts of the basic sense of an utterance, e.g. salient meaning.