Statement Of The Speaker's Image

The research on sentence meaning is generally interested with that on proposition meaning, in other words, on the recognition of proposition meaning. The dissertation begins with the historical development of the question, analyzes different academic views of traditional logic, analytic philosophy, philosophy of ordinary language analysis and speech act theory, demonstrates that a proposition is a semantic entity with different modal expressions and communicative attitudes, and that a sentence (precisely speaking, an utterance) meaning consists of a subjective part (speaker's intention) and an objective part (proposition). The dissertation has disclosed a speaker's meaning in the relevant utterances in perspective of cognitive science. The author has found out different three types of cognitive predicates concerning sense, knowledge, concept and their related utterances. In the chapter of intention, the another explores speaker's attitude and inference methods. The author introduces the relevance theory of D.Sper-ber & D.Wilson,applied in interrogative sentences,pointing out that although relevance theory is incomplete, it is an effective theory for the study of speaker's attitude. The research has revealed that a speaker's meaning is the core of the subjective meaning; in disclosing a speaker s meaning, we can see a speaker s image, in other words, the research in the speaker's meaning is the research in the speaker per se.