Simple Sentence a simple sentence consists of just one independent clause: Mary had a little lamb. Compound Sentence

83. TYPES OF CONTEXT, TYPES OF MEANING AND LEXICAL- SEMANTIC VARIANTS OF THE WORD, SEMANTIC ASPECTS OF WORDS
Recall that this book started out from the observation that although the termslit-eral meaningandnon-literal meaningare extensively used in thesemanticsandpragmaticsliterature, usually there is no clear indication of what kinds of mean-ing aspects these two terms are actually assumed to pick out. Moreover, althoughthere seem to be some sort of standard characterisations for the two terms, theyare not used consistently with those characterisations and – what is worse –those characterisations can be shown to be inappropriate for the description ofthe phenomena the two terms are intuitively taken to pick out. Since, tradition-ally, the two terms were used to differentiatesemanticsandpragmaticsfrom oneanother, this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. Thus, in this chapter, I willturn to alternative characterisations ofliteral meaningandnon-literal meaning,before finally formulating my own (section 5.1). However, while my alternativecharacterisation ofliteral meaningandnon-literal meaningcaptures the kinds ofmeaning aspects these notions are usually taken to refer to, it does not allow thetwo terms to figure in the characterisation of the differentiation betweenseman-ticsandpragmaticseither. Thus, in section 5.2, I will turn back to another notiontraditionally used in that differentiation – that ofcontext-(in)dependence. Whilein section 5.2.1, I will offer a proposal concerning the particular type of contextu-al information made use of by the process offree enrichment, in section 5.2.2, Iwill defend a view of thesemantics/pragmaticsdistinction that actually does notmake crucial reference to the notion ofcontext-(in)dependence, but rather to thenature of the processes intuitively taken to belong to the individual systems.5.1 Towards an Alternative Characterisation of (Non-)LiteralMeaningWhen thinking aboutliteral(vs.non-literal meaning) in natural language, it isinteresting to look at an expression, which, supposedly and intuitively, expressesjust that ‘meaning’ as itsliteral meaning. Thus, Israel (2002) gives a short butrevealing survey of the development of the contribution made by the expressionliterallyto the meaning of utterances in which it occurs. Whereas in its earliestusages in English it did refer to the meaning or sense of expressions taken to be, insome sense, ‘basic’ (cf. 178), the conditions of usage forliterallywhere extendedover time.