Speaker Meaning
My daughter: Can you please show me the way?
Me: Yes, I can.
The theory being used here is speaker meaning. The above conversation happened at home between two family members: my daughter and I. There isn’t any grammatical error in my reply to my daughter’s request, but, nevertheless, the reply is incorrect. My daughter who wants to be shown the way- on how to go about it- by me, doesn’t look up to my (her father’s ) ability in showing the way, rather, the actual act of showing the way to do it. The explicit incorrectness of my answer is that it’s a reply to the meaning of the sentence of my daughter’s statement and not to the purpose that triggered the question.
In the above conversation, my daughter wanted me show to cook an exotic meal. She could have asked because she had no idea on how to go about it. Thus she could have asked because she relied on me on how to do it (Wayne). Therefore, from that viewpoint, my answer was wrong because her expectations wasn’t about my ability to show, rather, if I was in a position to solve what triggered the question, the do it. However, she’s is a teacher, she is a reputed cook and before she took the teaching job she was a chief chef at a high-class hotel. In my answer above, I could have replied her from that perception and still be correct (John). I could also have replied her knowing that since she was a cook with a high reputation, she knew how to cook (“the way”). From that perspective, I could have assumed that she was testing me. Thus, I assumed that she was measuring my ability to do it, “the way.” Similarly, in my reply, when I answered her question, I displayed my proficiency in preparing the thing, “the way.” I also had an insight that if my answer was “no, I can’t” she could have gone ahead and shown me.
Conversely, we have never ever prepared the exotic meal, which triggered the question that she asked me whether I could show her the way. Despite that fact that she was a chief chef at a high-class hotel, it doesn’t offer menus of such a meal. Assuming that she had never learnt how to prepare the meal,”the way”, despite her wide exposure to cooking; then my answer was incorrect.
In conclusion, the context under which the conversation takes place greatly determines its outcome (William). There are conversations that are made either because the one asking is unaware of the answer and those that are made because the one asking is testing the adeptness of the one being asked; when replying with an awareness of the latter perspective; then the answer is based on the structural meaning of the statement’s sentence.

Work cited
John, Searle R. Expression and meaning: studies in the theory of speech acts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Wayne, Davis. Meaning, exprresion, and thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
—. Speaker meaning. June 1992. 28 November 2011 <http://www.jstor.org/pss/25001472>.
William, Lycan G. Philosophy of language: a contemporary introduction. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008.