Introducing English Linguistics

KEY TERMS
CHAPTER PREVIEW

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In July of 2005, John Roberts was nominated to be a justice on the
Supreme Court of the United States. Newspaper accounts of the nomina-
tion described Roberts as being a “strict constructionist”: someone who
applies a literal interpretation to the language of the United States
Constitution. Commenting on this description of Roberts, the noted liter-
ary and legal theorist Stanley Fish (2005) argued that Roberts was not real-
ly a proponent of “strict constructionism” but of “textualism,” the belief
that interpretation involves “sticking to the meanings that are encoded in
the texts and not going beyond them.” To illustrate the limitation of this
view of interpretation, Fish notes that if a wife asks her husband Why don’t
we go to the movies tonight?
The answer to that question depends on the history of the marriage, the
kind of relationship they have, the kind of person the husband thinks
the wife is. The words themselves will not produce a fixed account of
their meaning 
[emphasis added].
What Fish is arguing in this statement is that communication does not
exist in a vacuum: to engage in a conversation, for instance, we do not
simply decode the meanings of the words that people speak but draw
upon the larger social context in which the conversation takes place. To
understand the larger point that Fish is making, it is first of all necessary
to distinguish grammatical meaning from pragmatic meaning.
In his description of the sentence Why don’t we go to the movies? Stanley Fish
is distinguishing meaning at two levels. On one level, how we interpret
the sentence is determined by the meaning of the individual words that
it contains. To make sense of this sentence, we need to know, for instance,
what words such as go and movies mean; that we refers outside the text to
the speaker and addressee; that the indicates that a specific movie is being
referred to; and so forth. At this level, we are within grammar studying
what is known as semantics: how words have individual meaning (lexical