Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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Natural Semantics The Polish linguist Anna
Wierzbickawas the originator of natural
semantics. She regarded language as a
tool to communicate meaning, and semantics as the study of meaning encoded in
language. To her, syntax is a piece of semantics. Corresponding to the three
types of tools employed by language to convey meaning (words, grammatical
constructions and illocutionary devices), linguistics can be divided into
lexical semantics, grammatical semantics and illocutionary semantics. To her
the division into syntax, semantics and pragmatics makes no sense because every
element and aspect of language carries meaning. Meaning is an individual's interpretation of the world. It is
subjective and depends on the social and cultural context. Therefore, semantics
encompasses lexicon, grammar and illocutionary structure. Wierzbickas project was to build semantics from elementary concepts. There exist
a broad variety of semantic differences among languages (even emotions seem to
be cultural artifacts), but she identified a few semantic primitives shared by
all languages. Such universal semantic primitives make up a semantic
meta-language that could be used to explicate all other concepts in all
languages. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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