ABSTRACT
We now return to where we began, to the language used in daily conversation with which we are most familiar. But in matters philosophical familiarity breeds misunderstanding. Having set forth the basic features of more primitive signs we should be in a better position now to isolate those features of linguistic signs which compare and contrast them to the lower-level signs of the previous two chapters. We begin in the first section by outlining some basic and much-discussed features of subject-predicate sentences, and then discuss expressions which are intermediate between them and signals. The next three sections focus on controversial topics in the philosophy of language: the relation between a sentence's subject term and its referent, the relation between the meaning of a sentence and both the truth and illocutionary force of an utterance of it, and the functions of the first and second person pronouns 'I' and 'you'. We shall see how the perspective offered by semiotic enables a clarification of problems in these three areas and indicates clues to their solution. Finally, in the last section we sketch some of the special features introduced when sentences occur within discourse contexts.
