Meaning vs. Use

Meaning is the specific contribution a morpheme makes to the interpretation of any utterance: the invariable element, its entailments. Use is the interpretation a morpheme receives in a specific context: its entailments together with its potential implicatures. Distinguishing the two keeps the analyst from mistaking a context-driven interpretation for the morpheme's own contribution.

Take escape in the bear escaped from the zoo. The word entails that something moved location; one cannot use escape without something having moved, so if the sentence is true the bear must now be elsewhere. That is part of the word's meaning.

Distinguishing a Use From the Meaning

Some uses of escape carry a further inference of moving quickly away, but this does not always hold. It is a genuine inference that sometimes arises, not an invalid one; the task is to identify which contexts trigger it. In "The bear was too fast for the zookeepers. He escaped from the zoo," escape is read as quick movement. In "The bear's cage was not shut properly. Even though he was an old bear and he moved slowly, he escaped from the zoo," that inference is absent. Because the quick-movement inference can be removed, it is not entailed by escape; the word is compatible with it, and may even prompt it in some contexts, but does not necessarily carry it.

The Past Tense as a Test Case

The past-tense morpheme illustrates the same point at the level of functional meaning. Normally the bear escaped from the zoo locates the event before the moment of speaking. But in "If the bear escaped from the zoo, we would have heard reports about it," the addition of if changes things: the sentence is counterfactual and implies the bear did not escape. This counterfactual use of the past tense appears across many languages.

Two options follow. One can revise the meaning of the past tense so that its single contribution accounts for both the ordinary and the counterfactual uses, perhaps by telling a story about how embedding the past tense in a conditional yields the counterfactual reading. Or one can posit two distinct -ed morphemes that happen to sound alike, an unattractive option here precisely because the same pattern recurs cross-linguistically. Either way, the working method is the same: take a use, then ask how the proposed meaning of the morpheme accounts for it.