Hearer’s Meaning 2.0: a reply to Li and Xie (2025)

Abstract

In a recent Journal of Pragmatics paper, Li and Xie (2025) present a critique of Hansen and Terkourafi’s (2023) model of Hearer’s Meaning. The present paper replies to their critique. Unlike Li & Xie, who defend speaker intentions as ultimately determining meaning, we do not see such intentions as playing an independent role in utterance comprehension. Rather, considering intentions to be private mental states, we view hearer assumptions about the speaker’s intention as deriving from the six sources of meaning identified in our previous work, and therefore as theoretically redundant. We support our argument in three main ways. (1) Li & Xie do not present a viable alternative construal of the speaker’s intention that is not already covered in our model, and which could be accessed by the hearer directly so as to play an independent role in determining meaning. (2) Although the speaker’s utterance sets in motion processes of understanding, what proposition it ultimately expresses, and what action it ultimately performs, depend on the hearer’s interpretation and uptake. (3) Hearers routinely derive meaning from utterances produced without intention (by accident or by non-sentient entities). Acknowledging that closer attention to differences between hearer roles can usefully inform future elaboration of our model, we argue for the priority of Hearer’s Meaning in communication on the grounds that what determines meaning is not the speaker’s intention, but the inferences that a hearer draws from the speaker’s utterance. These, in a very real way, constitute the impact of the utterance on the world.