The Utility of Meaning
What Words Mean and Why
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 18 December 2014
- ISBN 9780198709831
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages218 pages
- Size 240x162x18 mm
- Weight 482 g
- Language English
- Illustrations 40 illustrations 0
Categories
Short description:
This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life, and explores relations between language, communication, culture, and mind. It contains extensive data from the author's fieldwork on language and culture in Laos.
MoreLong description:
This book argues that the complex, anthropocentric, and often culture-specific meanings of words have been shaped directly by their history of 'utility' for communication in social life. N. J. Enfield draws on semantic and pragmatic case studies from his extensive fieldwork in Laos to investigate a range of semantic fields including emotion terms, culinary terms, landscape terminology, and honorific pronouns, among many others. These studies form the building blocks of a conceptual framework for understanding meaning in language. The book argues that the goals and relevancies of human communication are what bridge the gap between the private representation of language in the mind and its public processes of usage, acquisition, and conventionalization in society. Professor Enfield argues that in order to understand this process, we first need to understand the ways in which linguistic meaning is layered, multiple, anthropocentric, cultural, distributed, and above all, useful.
This wide-ranging account brings together several key strands of research across disciplines including semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and sociology of language, and provides a rich account of what linguistic meaning is like and why.
a new and different approach, one that connects a wide range of discipline areas and offers an account of linguistic meaning that is like no other ... those who love language and who love playing with words and their meanings will surely relish this book.
Table of Contents:
Conventions for linguistic examples
List of figures and tables
Preface
Introduction
Meanings are layered
Meanings are multiple
Meanings are anthropocentric
Meanings are cultural
Meanings are distributed
Conclusion: Meanings are useful
References
Index
