Two Dimensions Of Meaning
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Two Dimensions of Meaning
The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print, and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature, and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy, and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture, and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible.
Two-dimensional Semantics
Author: Tatjana Scheffler
language: en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Release Date: 2013-01-30
This book argues that in order to account for the compositional behavior of many near-synonymous items, semantic analyses need to pay close attention to at least two semantic dimensions: standard assertions and conventional implicatures, which express additional side comments. The discussed phenomena are clausal adjuncts and complements in German. The new analysis of ‘weil’ and ‘denn’ (‘because’) shows that both contribute the same semantic operator, but one as an assertion, the other as a conventional implicature. This explains why only ‘denn’ can have speech-act modifying uses. This novel two-dimensional analysis is extended to other sentence adjuncts such as regular vs. relevance conditionals, although-clauses, and sentence adverbs. Further, the book investigates certain complement clauses. It analyzes sliftings as evidential-like parentheticals which contribute their meaning on the conventional implicature dimension. In contrast, German embedded verb-second clauses are shown to be truly embedded and analyzed as operating in the assertion dimension. The verb-second syntax is shown to contribute an additional epistemic component on the conventional implicature dimension.
Pathways to the Origin and Evolution of Meanings in the Universe
Author: Alexei A. Sharov
language: en
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Release Date: 2024-02-28
Pathways to the Origin and Evolition of Meanings in the Universe The book explains why meaning is a part of the universe populated by life, and how organisms generate meanings and then use them for creative transformation of the environment and themselves. This book focuses on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of biology, semiotics, philosophy, ethology, information theory, and the theory of evolution. Such a broad approach provides a rich context for the study of organisms and other semiotic agents in their environments. This methodology can be applied to robotics and artificial intelligence for developing robust, adaptable learning devices. In this book, leading interdisciplinary scholars reveal their vision on how to integrate natural sciences with semiotics, a theory of meaning-making and signification. Developments in biology indicate that the capacity to create and understand signs is not limited to humans or vertebrate animals, but exists in all living organisms - the fact that inspired the integration of biology and semiotics into biosemiotics. The authors discuss the nature of semiotic agents (organisms and other autonomous goal-directed units), meaning, signs, information, memory, evolution, and consciousness. Also discussed are issues including the origin of life, potential meaning and its actualization, top-down causality in physics and biology, capacity of organisms to encode their functions, the strategy of organisms to combine homeostasis with direct adaptation to new life-cycle phases or new environments, multi-level memory systems, increase of freedom via enabling constraints, creative modeling in evolution and learning, communication in animals and humans, the origin and function of language, and the distribution and transfer of life in space. This is the first book on biosemiotics in its global conceptual and spatial scope. Biosemiotics is presented using the language of natural sciences, which supports the scientific grounding of semiotic terms. Finally, the cosmic dimension of life and meaning-making leads to a reconsideration of ethical principles and ecological mentality here on earth and in space exploration. Audience Theoretical biologists, ethologists, astrobiologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, phenomenologists, semioticians, biosemioticians, molecular biologists, linguists, system scientists and engineers.