ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on how the meaning and effect of utterances is decided in fields including media law and the law governing public order, where uses of language may, for example, be alleged to be offensive, threatening, defamatory, an incitement to racial or religious hatred, or a commercial misrepresentation. It also examines how courts often rely on a concept of 'ordinary meaning' in these circumstances, and shows how this notion offers only an unstable link between two different visions of how language works: one a model of negotiated interaction; the other concerned to regulate communicated effects. Defamation law protects people against untrue statements whose publication has caused or is likely to cause serious harm to their reputation. UK defamation law observes an often criticised single meaning rule, acknowledged by lawyers as being highly artificial, which requires that from the multiple, different shades of meaning likely to be derived by actual readers, one definitive meaning must be determined.