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Meaning, Intention, And The Hearsay Rule., Paul F. Kirgis
Meaning, Intention, And The Hearsay Rule., Paul F. Kirgis
Faculty Law Review Articles
In this Article, I draw on insights from the linguistic discipline of pragmatics to offer another way to understand and apply the definition of hearsay in the Federal Rules of Evidence. Pragmatics is concerned with how we use language in real-world contexts to accomplish various objectives.' By identifying the conventions that govern language usage, pragmatics provides ways to analyze what a speaker means when he says something and how meaning is conveyed through language.5 Pragmatics thus has obvious utility for the study of hearsay.
The philosopher Paul Grice looms over the field of pragmatics. His theory of conversational implicature revolutionized …