| The research on linguistic meaning is a topic for linguistics,philosophy,psychology, cognitive science,communication science and artificial intelligence.Linguistics is interested in sense relations,stated and implied meanings in language use.Philosophy is concerned with reference,truth and proposition in linguistic meaning.Psychology deals with attention,memory and intention in linguistic meaning.Cognitive science studies perception,interpretation and comprehension in linguistic communication. Communication science probes into information encoding,medium and noise in human communication.Artificial intelligence attempts to simulate human beings in object identification,linguistic communication and autonomous decision.Common to all these branches of research,there are three questions:what is meaning? "What is said" when a human produces a unit of language in communication? How do humans interpret and comprehend each other? The current research is an attempt to answer these questions with the focus on "what is said".The current research is targeted at defining "what is said" and the mechanism for its derivation.On the basis of this definition,categories of utterance meaning are to be made and related notions such as reference,intention,truth,proposition are expounded.The findings of the research are supposed to be applicable to machine translation,artificial intelligence,robot design,information control and public policy analysis.Research questions of the current project are:what is "what is said"? How to derive "what is said"? To answer the above two questions,it is also necessary to provide answers for the following questions:what is utterance? What is meaning? What is utterance meaning? What are the categories of utterance meaning? Said by what? What is the relation between "what is said" and truth? What is the relation between "what is said" and other traditional notions of meaning such as "sentence meaning", "conventional implicature","presupposition","generalised conversational implicature","particularised conversational implicature" and other implied meanings? Is the notion "what is said" theoretically necessary? Is the notion "what is said" theoretically necessary? The current theory is cognitively based,albeit there is philosophical reasoning not unlike the derivation of Grice's Cooperative Principle.Two cognitive theories are of vital importance for the current research:Shannon's communication theory and the modern neuron communication theory.Shannon's communication theory illustrates that all communications depend on code and a channel.Based on this theory,the code for human communication is physically defined and why reference occurs in the channel is explicated.The modern neuron communication theory illustrates the information transmission system in human beings from intention to configuration of human body organs.Based on this theory,meaning is defined for human communication.In light of modern cognitive theory represented by Shannon's communications system and the neural information transmission system,our research has proved the following: utterance is a physical public code in natural language or body language;meaning is human intention or neural signals;utterance meaning is something expressed by a bound proposition;the categories of utterance meaning are broadly "what is said" and "conversational implicatures";"what is said" is morphologically an utterance report to oneself or others,and its contents is equivalent to a bound proposition derived by binding the sentence type meaning with a spatio-temporal value;"what is said" is said by public codes in the context of communication;it is the bearer of truth,and it is communicative intention;in deriving "what is said" a spatio-temporal value is assigned to the sentence meaning;"what is said" has nothing to do with "conventional implicature" and "linguistic presupposition" which are inferences on sentence type meaning;"generalised conversational implicature" is a probability inference on "what is said" where the inference is triggered by one or more words in the original utterance;"particularised conversational implicature" is a logical computation where "what is said" is a premise or conclusion.This dissertation is divided into eight parts.Part one is an introduction of "what is said".Part two is literature review on "what is said".Part three is an analysis of the code for "what is said".Part four is exposition of notions related to "what is said". Part five is an investigation about "what is said" and other related meanings.Part six is an examination of"what is said" as an utterance report.Part seven is a definition of "what is said".Part eight is the conclusion. The introductory chapter initiates the notion of "what is said",analyses the significance of the research on the topic,presents the objectives of the research,lists the research questions,explains the research methodology,and describes the structure of the dissertation.Chapter Two is a literature review on "what is said".The concept "what is said" was attributable to Grice(1975) when he tried to categorise utterance signification. However,his theory is challenged on the ground that nothing may be said when a metaphorical sentence is produced by a speaker.Pragmatic Minimalism believes that "what is said" is a minimal proposition derived from the conventional meaning of a sentence plus saturation.However,Pragmatic Minimalism is challenged on the ground that saturation alone is not adequate to secure a complete and truth-evaluable proposition of "what is said".Semantic Minimalism believes that "what is said" is a plurality of speech acts which is not different from other pragmatic meanings. However,Semantic Minimalism is challenged on the ground that it does not have a clear definition of "what is said" whereas this very notion is of vital importance in everyday life.For instance,confirmation of"what is said" by a person at a law court will affect the fate of the relevant parties.Moderate Contextualism believes that "what is said" is a proposition derived from a sentence through the function of binding. However,Moderate Contextualism is challenged on the ground that binding seems pervasive.Radical Contextualism believes that "what is said" is a proposition derived from a sentence plus free enrichment in context.However,Radical Contextualism is challenged on the ground that a proposition enriched in a context might not be complete at all if any proposition expressed by a sentence is indeterminate. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation of the entire dissertation.Combining Shannon's communication system with the theory of cognitive neuroscience,this chapter is targeted at three questions:what is utterance? What is meaning? What is utterance meaning? The chapter proves that public physical codes are "utterance"(in the traditional sense) which encompasses artificial signals and some natural signals on human beings,that "meaning" in communication is human intention or neural signals which may be represented as a proposition or a concept,and that the so-called "utterance meaning" is human intention or neural signals which may be represented as a proposition or a concept. Chapter Four is an exploration of notions related to "what is said".It is targeted at the following questions:What is the relation between "what is said" and truth? What is the relation between "what is said" and reference? What is the relation between "what is said" and intention? In this chapter,a concept is proved as a prototype with at least a label.Each concept has intension and extension.The intension can be viewed as an information set which contains designing features,logical features and encyclopaedic knowledge.The extension can be viewed as the domain of the set defined by a spatiotemporal variable.Reference is to locate an entity in the domain of the relevant concept labelled by the referential expression,which requires assignment of a value to the spatio-temporal variable first to define the domain of the concept.Truth is a quality of proposition.Truth evaluation is information retrieval and computation. Intentions are always about an object.Informative intention and communicative intention are normally coded.The act of utterance encodes informative intention, whereas the utterance itself encodes communicative intention.Chapter Five is an exposition of "what is said" and other meanings in semantic and pragmatic analysis.It is targeted at the following questions:What are the categories of utterance meaning? What is "what is said"? What is the relation between "what is said" and other traditional notions of meaning such as "sentence meaning","conventional implicature" and the like? In this chapter,it is demonstrated that sentence meaning remains invariant before its use in a context."What is said" is proved to be a proposition enriched by assigning or updating spatio-temporal values to the constituent concepts of the proposition expressed by a sentence.Morphologically, "what is said" may assume the same form as that of the sentence.Entailment and linguistic presupposition are inferences on sentence meaning,which has nothing to do with "what is said".Generalised and particularised conversational implicatures are logical computation based on "what is said".Pragmatic presupposition is an accommodation of the speaker on the part of the hearer,which can be seen as an intermediate process of cognitive binding.Likewise,explicature and impliciture are all products in the process of cognitive binding.Strictly speaking,they are not "what is said".Chapter Six is an investigation of "what is said" as an utterance report.It is targeted at the following questions:said by what? What is the relation between "what is said" and truth? What is the relation between "what is said" and other implied meanings? In this chapter,it is demonstrated that "what is said" is an utterance report in sociology which is distinct from but related to the semantic notion of "what is said".The sociological notion of "what is said" is composed of a description of the original speaker,a description of the original act of utterance and the report proper.The report proper can be the semantic notion of "what is said",entailment,linguistic presupposition,conversational implicature,or a mixture of some or all of them.The truth of the sociological "what is said" is affected by the semantic "what is said",by the soundness of logical computation on the part of the reporter,and by whether the reporter projects himself into the report.In everyday life,the sociological "what is said" will incur responsibilities as it is an interpretation of the original utterance for most of the time.Chapter Seven is a definition of"what is said" and the mechanism for its derivation.It is targeted at the following questions:what is "what is said"? Is the notion "what is said" theoretically necessary? Is the notion "what is said" theoretically sufficient? In this chapter,it is demonstrated that "what is said" is an utterance report to oneself or others.The content of "what is said" is a bound proposition derived by binding the decoded expression type meaning(of both natural and body languages) with a spatiotemporal value.This cognitive notion of "what is said" meets both necessity and sufficiency conditions.On the one hand,the theoretical notions of "truth","logic" and "implied meanings" presuppose the existence of the notion of "what is said".On the other hand,the existence of "what is said" assures the existence of the theoretical notion of "utterance report".The conclusion is an echo to the introduction.It explains "what is said" by Mr Bush's words,the truth evaluation of "what is said" by Mr Bush and responsibilities of news reports where "what is said" assumes the form of an utterance report to others.The following points are original in this writing:definition of utterance,definition of meaning,definition of utterance meaning,definition of sentence meaning,definition of "what is said",definition of conversational implicatures,definition of conventional implicature,definition of presupposition,definition of accommodation,definition of concept,definition of type and token,definition of cognitive binding,definition of reference,definition of proposition,definition of truth,definition of human communication system,definition of the medium for analysing human mind, definition of the medium for analysing human speech and text,definition of principles for object identification,definition of the mechanism for interpreting metaphorical language,definition of epistemic standards,definition of reference in psychological world,definition of Twin Earth,and exposition of metaphorical interpretation.
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