2. OVERLAP BETWEEN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS According to Saeed the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is useful, but when it comes down to details it is very difficult to tell the diffeence between speakers meaning and sentence meaning, the problem is how to distinguish speaker’s meaning from sentence meaning, that is what extra meaning is the speaker giving to a particular sentence that, of course already meant something to start with. Saeed links the semantics-pragmatics overlap to the concept of presupposition . The basic idea is that semantics deals with conventional meaning, those aspects of meaning that do not vary much from context to context while pragmatics deals with the individual, context dependent usage. According to Bennet the difference lays on concepts such as implicature and entailment .
3. Words, utterances, sentences, propositions and texts A word can be defined as a minimal permutable element. Words are separated by silence and by spaces in writing. We can also describe words as dictionary entries Levels of abstraction
9. Contextual meaning : the fact that meaning varies from context to context is one of the most evident problems in semantics. The context disambiguates the problematic interpretation of the words. There is no need to have an extensive variation of meanings, if their interpretation can be fixed by the context in which the word it uttered. Language, as a system of communication maximizes its resources in the most economic way.
