A purely referential account of meaning, according to which the meaning of a natural kind term is nothing other than its bearer, would predict that the first of these utterances is trivial, the second and third meaningless,[18] and that the fourth attributes inconsistent beliefs to Fred.
Nor does it seem possible to dispute that in his case the less contains the greater not for the commoner reason that a great deal of his verse is careless, trivial, or inharmonious, but because his authentic utterance is restricted to a narrow range and his fertility too often takes the form of self-imitation.
In the following rather trivial example, the tone units reveal how the potential ambiguity of the utterance can be resolved by the distribution of the unit of information.
The semantic content of John's utterance above, for example, is something like the proposition "Rain is occurring," a relatively trivial proposition, that will be true if it is raining anywhere on earth (or perhaps, anywhere in the universe).
To use a trivial sort of example, consider the sentence (M) The number of Martian moons is 2. According to Yablo, typical utterances of sentences like (M) are analogous to ordinary instances of figurative speech, e.g., sentences like (A) The average mum has 2.4 children.
Candidates' gaffes (utterances in which speakers unintentionally display their true feelings, as opposed to the self-representations that they feel they must make on the campaign trail) are neither irrelevant nor trivial.
These are modern utterances.
The staggeringly trivial and contentless remarks of Eichmann at his trial and before his execution ought to frighten us, says Merton, because they are the utterance of the void: the speech of a man accustomed to power without the need to communicate or learn or imagine anything.
Some of Gillett's utterances were puzzling.
