meantintended

Meantintended is a term used in linguistics and discourse studies to describe the relationship between two aspects of an utterance: what a speaker “meant” to convey in terms of semantic content, and the speaker’s broader communicative aim or “intended” outcome, such as persuading, informing, or eliciting a specific action. The word functions as a portmanteau of meant and intended, created to highlight potential divergence between the literal meaning and the speaker’s goal.

In usage, meantintended serves as a heuristic rather than a formal category. It appears in analyses of indirect speech, sarcasm, and indirect requests, where listeners derive meaning that may differ from the literal content but aligns with the speaker’s intended effect. For example, uttering “It’s cold in here” can have the meantintended function of prompting someone to close a window, even though the sentence states a simple observation about temperature.

The concept relates to speech act theory, implicature, and the distinction between semantic content and illocutionary force. It emphasizes pragmatic interpretation: listeners must consider not only what is said but what the speaker intended to achieve, which can differ from the surface meaning.

Critiques note that meantintended overlaps with existing distinctions like speaker meaning and illocutionary intent, and that the term is informal and not widely standardized. Nevertheless, it can aid analytical clarity when discussing how meaning and intention interact in communication.