Absolute meaning

May I ask for your views on the CONTEXT ISSUE in thread "Spray"?

The specific contextual examples I offered could probably be picked apart. But does their possible inadequacy change the validity of the point: there is no such thing as a sentence that has an absolute meaning, unaffected by context?

Oh, I forgot to give my opinion. Context probably affects the meaning of almost all sentences.



And this thread should probably just zip right over to Linguistics Discussion.

Hello davkett, Mister Micawber.
I'm interested in these kinds of questions, in a way, so please let me cut into the line.

I've just read through the [Spray] thread. The first thing I thought was this kind of verb phrases, that is [spray the wall with paint], has a specific difficulty in the first place. (Umm.. doesn't it..?)

(1) We can spray the wall with paint, endlessly, repeatedly.
(2)We can spray the wall with paint, in some temporal interval.

... We should give different interpretations to them.

A little bit specific verb phrase, but I'd classify it into usual activity verb.
And I'd pose the question as ... does the context provide some [endpoint] of activity?
Of any sort of endpoint, temporal, quantificational, etc.
And I take a position that a sentence has, independent of its context, a meaning, in principle.

It's a rather rough sketch.
I'm looking forward to hearing other members' views.

Hi everyone. I'm afraid what I wrote is obscure. Just a few more words.
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I think this kind of verb phrases, [spray the wall with paint], is a little bit specific.
(1) We can spray the wall with paint, endlessly.
(2) We can spray the wall with paint, in some temporal interval.
..... We should give different interpretations to them.
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By this I meant roughly the following:

[1] We can [walk] endlessly, but we cannot [walk a mile] endlessly.
[2] We can [eat apples] endlessly, but we cannot [eat an apple] endlessly.
[3] We can [spray the wall with paint] endlessly, but we cannot [paint some definite pictute] endlessly.
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On the other hand:

[4] We [walked a mile] in an hour.
[5] (?) We [walked] in an hour. (One possible interpretation is: it took us an hour before we began to walk.)

We [ate an apple] in a minute.
[7] (?) We [ate apples] in a minute.

We [sprayed the wall with paint] in an hour.

As to the verb phrase [spray the wall with paint], there're easily available two reading: activity one and accomplishment one. (When I made a previous post I had in mind roughly such a thing.)

As an afterthought.

On Google there is currently a link entitled "Why Oprah Won't Help Obama". I took this to mean "Why Oprah is declining to help Obama", but when you read the article you realise what was meant was "Why Oprah's help won't do Obama any good".