ABSTRACT
Speaker meaning is the most general kind of illocutionary act, the genus of which all other kinds of illocutionary acts are species. In Kaplan’s original theory, the content of a demonstrative on a given occasion was determined by an “associated demonstration” which was “typically, though not invariably, a presentation of a local object discriminated by a pointing”. For the Gricean, speaker meaning is defined wholly in terms of acting with certain audience-directed intentions. Kaplan came to appreciate the hopelessness of the idea of a demonstrative having its reference fixed by an accompanying demonstration and shifted to the view that the reference of a demonstrative, relative to a context, is determined by the speaker’s “directing” intention.
