FOR A SEMANTIC-PRAGMATIC CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE

Semantics and pragmatics are distinct spheres in linguistics, but this does not mean that one or the other taken separately is good enough for language. One can and must analyze semantics and pragmatics in their own terms, for their functions are distinct. Meaning, issues like synonymous or the intelligibility of a phrase, in one side, and phenomena like context of use, discourse, speaker in the other side, are typical respectively of semantics and pragmatics. But in the language use they go together, sometimes they implicate one another. Understanding and interpreting someone's speech act, are the two sides of the same coin. They are necessary and complementary in order to mean something and to communicate. Language cannot be reduced to a mere instrument for the thought to represent reality. The linguistic turn made it evident that it is the language that permits thought. The pragmatic turn shows that it is the use, the context and the speakers that count. The propositional sentence requires elements that belong to the situation, so its true value depends upon information from the speech context. Language is constituted both by semantics and pragmatics aspects, and they depend one on the other. So those who argue in favor of semantics as the last and sufficient level, ignore the discourse, the result is a sterile formalism. Those who argue in favor of pragmatics, ignore that there is no speech act without meaning. In order to demonstrate this argument, the steps are: a no referential semantics, that is, reality is signified by language; that the true value semantics takes the speaker into consideration, and this overcomes the theses of knowledge as representation of reality; the trends on pragmatics analyze the relation between proposition and speech act, aspects of conversation, the distinction between sentence and its use, and the variability of the language games.