‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, as Wittgenstein notoriously puts it in the Tractatus. My interest in this paper is not so much to discuss that assertion itself, as to wonder what to make of the notion of language having limits at all. What sense can we make of the expression ‘limits of language’? And this question might itself divide into at least two sub-questions, namely: (1) what kind of limits does language have (assuming it has any)? and (2) does language even have limits?

It might seem at first as though language must have limits, and that those limits must be where it abuts onto ‘the world’. Language ‘over here’, or so the thought would go, is separated from, but in some relation to, the world ‘over there’. That relation would be essentially, if we are to follow the tradition, the relation of reference, or at least possible reference. On this view the world, which intuitively existed long before language, sits there waiting, as it were, for language to arrive on the scene and to refer to it. In referring (or at least in successfully referring), language both recognises its limits and transgresses them, in the sense at least that it points beyond those limits (maybe even puts out ‘feelers’) to reality or the world beyond. On this simple but powerful view of language, reality, whether construed as empirical, as in Locke, or of some higher order, as in Plato, not only comes first in the relationship, but ‘wears the trousers’, as J. L. Austin might have said.