The Social Foundations of Meaning

Savigny, Eike v.

An empirical case study is used here to analyze linguistic meaning as it is embedded in complex social behavior. The whole of a natural signalling system - its nonlinguistic conventions, pragmatics and semantics - is considered. Three sections analyze: the relevant conventional facts; conventional utterance meaning in terms of conventional facts; and, finally, sentence meaning in terms of conventional utterance meaning. Linguistic meaning is seen to be derived from meaningful social behavior rather than from goal-directed behavior of individuals. A number of new results on pragmatic and semantic meaning are reached.

Details

Published by: Springer

Publication Date: 2011-12-10

Format: Paperback

ISBN-13: 9783642734663

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-73464-9

Dimensions: 229cm x152cm

Pages: 151