Semantics and Pragmatics: Where Does Meaning Live?
The standard introductory distinction: semantics is what a sentence means; pragmatics is what a speaker means by saying it.
“I’m cold” means there is a person and they are experiencing low temperature. Pragmatically, in the right context, it means please close the window or please turn off the fan. Same sentence, different act.
This distinction is useful for teaching. But from a cognitive semantics perspective — the approach I worked with in HSL4370 at IIT Jodhpur — it’s a pedagogical convenience, not a real boundary. The two are endpoints of a spectrum, and most communication lives in the middle.
Sense vs. Reference
Frege’s distinction: sense is intrinsic meaning independent of the world; reference is how an expression links to other things — objects, ideas, other expressions.
In practice, we switch between these constantly and unconsciously. When I say “the morning star” vs. “the evening star,” the sense differs but the reference is identical (both are Venus). When I say “that person” while pointing, the reference is entirely context-dependent and the sense does almost no work at all.
The fluency with which we navigate this collapse suggests the distinction isn’t cognitively fundamental — it’s an analytical tool.
The Antinomy Problem
“This sentence is false.”
If true, it’s false. If false, it’s true. Classical semantics breaks. The point isn’t the paradox itself — it’s what it reveals: language is not a closed logical system. Meaning is not computable from structure alone. Something outside the sentence always has to complete it.
Gricean Maxims: The Rules We Break Meaningfully
Grice’s four maxims of cooperative conversation:
- Quality — say what you believe to be true
- Quantity — say exactly as much as needed, no more
- Relevance — respond to what’s being asked
- Manner — be clear and orderly
The key insight is not the maxims themselves, but what happens when they’re violated. Violations are not failures — they are communicative acts. Irony violates Quality intentionally; the listener infers that the speaker knows this and must mean something other than what was said. Implicature is the meaning generated by the gap between what’s said and what the maxims would predict.
This is where semantics (the sentence content) and pragmatics (the inferred intent) become inseparable. The hearer’s interpretation is not additional to the meaning — it is the meaning.
Empty Signifiers
Words have no intrinsic connection to what they name. “Apple” has no apple-ness. The connection is entirely conventional — community-constructed and maintained by use.
This is well-established (Saussure). What’s more interesting is what happens when communities diverge in their use, or when use evolves faster than convention can track.
“Mid” and Semantic Inflation
“Mid” — current Gen-Z slang for mediocre — is a live case study. Its literal semantic content is neutral: middling, average. Its pragmatic use is negative: that thing is not worth your time.
But because “mid” functions as a polite-but-cutting dismissal, it’s also being progressively inflated. Something once “bad” gets called “mid” as a softening. Something once “mid” now needs a new word. The pragmatic use is overtaking and hollowing out the literal meaning. Semantic drift in real time.
Semantic Infiltration
More politically charged: “pro-life” vs. “pro-choice” in the abortion debate.
“Pro-life” is a successful piece of semantic infiltration. By naming one side “pro-life,” the other side is implicitly cast as “anti-life” — before the argument has begun. Pro-choice advocates who engage with the term on its own ground have already conceded rhetorical territory.
Similarly, “woke” and “liberal” have been so thoroughly weaponized that their original neutral/positive meanings are now inaccessible in certain contexts. The words arrive pre-loaded.
This is not merely rhetorical — it’s epistemically significant. The vocabulary we use to think with shapes what we can think. Controlling the semantics of key terms is a form of cognitive control.
Memes as the Pragmatics/Semantics Boundary
Memes are an interesting edge case. A meme has a semantic component (the image, the text, the established “format”) and a pragmatic component (what this particular deployment means in this context, to this audience, right now).
The semantic payload is thin — the image itself is often meaningless without context. The pragmatic payload is enormous — a single meme deployment can communicate irony, solidarity, criticism, affection, or all four simultaneously, in a way that a literal sentence cannot.
They’re also public secrets in a Lefebvrian sense: in-group communication that operates in public, legible to some and not others.
The Conclusion
Does that mean there is a difference between semantics and pragmatics and also no difference at all?
Yes and yes.
The antinomy is the point. Cognitive semantics doesn’t resolve the distinction — it shows why the resolution isn’t the goal. The boundary is load-bearing for pedagogy; it collapses under actual use. Both things are true simultaneously, which is, recursively, a demonstration of pragmatic meaning overriding semantic content.
Full essay available here.