Of words and uses 1

This paper is devoted to an investigation of one variant of the ‘use theory of meaning’. It explores the possibility of characterizing the use of a linguistic unit in terms of non‐linguistic facts regularly associated with utterances of the unit in question. It is argued that such regularities are associated with only a small sub‐set of English sentences, and then only when these sentences occur in ‘standard’ contexts. An attempt is then made to characterize the relevant sense of ‘standard‐ness’ in terms of the role of this concept in a theory of language. In the final section of the paper, some consideration is given to the problem of generalizing the theory to cover sentences which are not regularly associated with recurrent non‐linguistic features.