This work is intended to help interpretation and translation teachers place more
precisely before their students a text in the speech situation, a conditio sine qua
non in order to disentangle sense from the web of linguistic meanings. It is a
truism that no utterancel can be correctly interpreted in a vacuum, as a specimen
of a language, rather than as an act of speech, i.e. as a specific use of language
in a given situation. In specialised literature the crucial distinction is ever more
often made between linguistic meaning and extra-linguistic sense - the latter
understood, precisely, as the substantive communicative content of a message,
what the speaker means to say with what he says: the Paris school's vouloir
dire. This sense may be defined, grosso nzodo, as the vector resulting from the
linguistic meaning of the message and the sender's communicative intention
within the specific speech situation. Of these three factors, the first is the only
relatively non-controversial one; the second is already more complex (what about
the unconscious intention? and what about the lapsus linguae, the betrayal of
conscious intention?); while the third encompasses everything besides the
utterance itself, including, at times, the sender's very intention. In order to name
it, the term usually resorted to is that jack-of-all-trades "context", which, to
boot, also covers the purely linguistic surroundings. So if the conceptual and
terminological distinction between meaning and sense is already established
(though, unfortunately, not enough), there still prevails in literature an
indiscriminate use of "context" and "situation".
