Kitis on Meaning in Language

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 169-178
Author(s):  
David Holdcroft
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Linguistic Relations

As its title, Semantics: Meaning in Language, indicates the focus of this book is on context-less meaning (“narrow semantics”), for all that the intention is to throw light on issues of language use. Two main approaches are discussed in detail. The first has its origin in the philosophy of language, and is concerned with the extra-linguistic relations between units of language and items in the world; key concepts are reference, denotation and truth. The second originates in linguistics and concentrates on intra-linguistic relations such as antonymy and synonymy. However, at many points the question arises whether these approaches to narrow semantics need to be supplemented by pragmatics.

Preliminaries

Just Words ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 8-26
Author(s):  
Mary Kate McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
General Information ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Additional Information ◽  
Key Concepts

This chapter presents the material in the philosophy of language that is required to follow the arguments in the book. A general introduction to an intentionalist neo-Gricean framework for understanding language use is presented. General information about speech act theory and the felicity conditions for successful speech acts is covered. Since the book focuses on exercitive speech, that is, speech that enacts permissibility facts, additional information is given about exercitives and their felicity conditions. This chapter also clarifies some of the key concepts used throughout the book. The nature of enactment, different kinds of enactment, the important distinction between constituting and merely causing harm, and the nature of social norms are all presented.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatum Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Vienna Circle ◽  
Language Games ◽  
Complex Objects ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
The World ◽  
Complex Words

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher whose work, largely on the philosophy of language, had far-reaching implications for modernist intellectual history and for enduring scholarly debate. In Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] (1921), the only book-length work published in his lifetime, Wittgenstein examined logic and ethics, as well as the nature of language and the boundaries of sense. The work earned him significant recognition, particularly among the group of scientists and logicians of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s early understanding of language was based on its relationship with—and more specifically, representation of—meaning and reality. According to the Tractatus, every word is the name of an object and that object is the word’s meaning. He held that complex words and meanings could be condensed to absolutely simple elements with definite meanings. These "simple names" represented similarly fixed and permanent "simple objects," and thus there was for Wittgenstein an eternal world of objects, a fixed substance beneath the changing surface appearances of the world. In his posthumously published Philosophische Untersuchungen [Philosophical Investigations] (1953), Wittgenstein appeared to repudiate many of his prior claims. He placed new emphasis on the context in which words are used, referring to different contexts of language-use as "language games" that render his previous notions of simple and complex objects relative.

Die Idee einer Sprachhermeneutik

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 576-602
Author(s):  
Dimitri Ginev
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Inferential Semantics

Abstract Any conception in linguistics and linguistic philosophy that prioritizes the world-disclosing function over the world-representing function of language can be regarded as a kind of linguistic hermeneutics. The paper tries to specify this general thesis by picking up and analysing historical trends in the philosophy of language. It spells out the relationship between the situatedness of locutors in the medium of linguistic practices and the way in which they (through their speech acts) articulate this medium by actualizing possibilities for personal expressivity and interpersonal communication. It is argued that the starting point from the medium that always already transcends the particular speech acts offers an alternative to inferential semantics. From the perspective of linguistic hermeneutics, the world is disclosed and exposed to ongoing articulation in characteristic hermeneutic situations of language use. The concepts of linguistic medium and discursive articulation of the world are treated in terms of hermeneutic trans-subjectivity as enabling all forms of communicative intersubjectivity. If one ignores the fore-structuring role of the former, one would hypostatise the latter. With regard to this claim, the theory of formal pragmatics is critically discussed.

Lived Catholicity

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 149-163
Author(s):  
Jeffrey S. Kirch
Keyword(s):  
Pope Francis ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Church

Both Pope Francis and Robert Schreiter recognize that the world has been profoundly affected by conflict, globalization, and the breakdown of relationships on multiple levels. They also assert that the Church must address these situations. The ecclesiologies of both Schreiter and Francis offer effective tools for this work. This article will examine several key, shared concepts within their ecclesiologies. Specifically, their understandings of the missionary nature of the Church and their robust understanding of catholicity prove to be key concepts in the Church's response to a world marred by sin.

Flow

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Ohriner
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Rap Music ◽  
Music Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
South Bronx ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Voice Flow ◽  
Computational Music Analysis

Originating in dance parties in the South Bronx in the late 1970s, hip hop and rap music have become a dominant style of popular music in the United States and a force for activism all over the world. So, too, has scholarship on this music grown, yet much of this scholarship, employing methods drawn from sociology and literature, leaves unaddressed the expressive musical choices made by hip-hop artists. This book addresses flow, the rhythm of the rapping voice. Flow presents theoretical and analytical challenges not encountered elsewhere. It is rhythmic as other music is rhythmic. But it is also rhythmic as speech and poetry are rhythmic. Key concepts related to rhythm, such as meter, periodicity, patterning, and accent, are treated independently in scholarship of music, poetry, and speech. This book reconciles those approaches, theorizing flow by integrating the methods of computational music analysis and humanistic close reading. Through the analysis of large collections of verses, it addresses questions in the theories of rhythm, meter, and groove in the unique ecology of rap music. Specifically, the work of Eminem clarifies how flow relates to text, the work of Black Thought clarifies how flow relates to other instrumental streams, and the work of Talib Kweli clarifies how flow relates to rap’s persistent meter. Although the focus throughout is rap music, the methods introduced are appropriate for other genres mix voices and more rigid metric frameworks and further extends the valuable work on hip hop from other perspectives in recent years.

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

Vocational Development in Emerging Adulthood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael W. Pratt ◽  
M. Kyle Matsuba
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Emerging Adult ◽  
Vocational Development ◽  
Data Set ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts

Chapter 6 reviews research on the topic of vocational/occupational development in relation to the McAdams and Pals tripartite personality framework of traits, goals, and life stories. Distinctions between types of motivations for the work role (as a job, career, or calling) are particularly highlighted. The authors then turn to research from the Futures Study on work motivations and their links to personality traits, identity, generativity, and the life story, drawing on analyses and quotes from the data set. To illustrate the key concepts from this vocation chapter, the authors end with a case study on Charles Darwin’s pivotal turning point, his round-the-world voyage as naturalist for the HMS Beagle. Darwin was an emerging adult in his 20s at the time, and we highlight the role of this journey as a turning point in his adult vocational development.

The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Gilbert-Santamaria
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Spanish Literature ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Early Modern Spain ◽  
Shared Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
Alternative Modality ◽  
Sancho Panza

This book posits the Aristotelian-Ciceronian notion of perfect male friendship as an independent poetic force within the development of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through a re-examination of Spanish critic Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce’s notion of the “tale of two friends” tradition, the book shows how the poetics of friendship evolves in relation to other key concepts from the period—most notably exemplarity and imitatio—in a series of carefully selected examples from several important genres including the pastoral novel, the picaresque, and the Spanish comedia. Particular attention is given to the trajectory whereby the highly formalized narrativization of the traditional Aristotelian paradigm for friendship gives way to representations of personal intimacy grounded in a recognition of the idiosyncratic particularity of human experience in the world beyond the text. This alternative modality for representing friendship, which encompasses a variety of relationships beyond the Aristotelian paradigm—between women, erstwhile lovers, and pícaros, to take just three examples—reaches its fullest expression in the depiction of the evolving intimacy that grows up between the two unlikely companions, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, whose shared experiences provide the main focus for Cervantes’s most important work.

scholarly journals Human as a phenomenon of unity of corporeal and spiritual in various-system languages (based on the material of euphemisms in the English and Buryat languages)

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Oyuna Tsydendambaeva ◽  
Olga Dorzheeva
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
The Body ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Common

This article is dedicated to the examination of euphemisms in the various-system languages – English and Buryat that contain view of the world by a human, and the ways of their conceptualization. Euphemisms remain insufficiently studied. Whereupon, examination of linguistic expression of the key concepts of culture is among the paramount programs of modern linguistics, need for the linguoculturological approach towards analysis of euphemisms in the languages, viewing it in light of the current sociocultural transformations, which are refer to euphemisms and values reflected by them. The subject of this research is the euphemisms in the English and Buryat languages, representing the semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual”. The scientific novelty consists in introduction of the previously unexamined euphemism in Buryat language that comprise semiosphere “corporeal and spiritual” into the scientific discourse. The analysis of language material testifies to the fact that in various cultures the topic of intimacy and sex is euphemized differently. The lexis indicating the intimate parts of the body is vividly presented in the West, while in Buryat language – rather reserved. The author also determines the common, universal, and nationally marked components elucidating the linguistic worldview of different ethnoses and cultures.

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