The Utility of Meaning
What Words Mean and Why
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19972893 |
|---|---|
| Authors | N J Enfield (0000-0003-3891-6973, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2014 |
| Pages | 272 |
| Publication date | 2014-12-18 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | BOOK |
| Venue | The Utility of Meaning (SOURCE_BOOK) |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709831.001.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W4235436765 |
| Open Library | OL27517269M |
| ISBN | 9780198709831 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
This book uses semantic and pragmatic case studies to argue that the anthropocentric and culture-grounded nature of language is a product of its social utility. It brings together several key strands of research across disciplines ranging from semantics, pragmatics, and cognitive linguistics, to historical semantics, usage analysis, and the sociology of language. The book contains empirical studies in semantic fields including emotion terms, culinary terms, spatial verbs and prepositions, verbs of cutting and breaking, landscape terminology, serial verb constructions, honorific pronouns, and words that make fine distinctions in taste and flavour: these studies form the building blocks of a conceptual framework for understanding meaning in language. The framework confronts implications of the gap that exists between the private representation of language in the mind, on the one hand, and its public processes of usage, acquisition, and conventionalization in society, on the other. One implication is that words are 'tolerable friends': good enough for communication, but never necessarily understood in the same way by everyone. Another implication is that neither perceptual salience nor conceptual naturalness are enough to account for why words mean what they mean. The book argues that the goals and relevancies of human communication are what bridge the private/public gap in language usage, and thereby bridge the micro/macro gap in language history. To understand this, this book argues, we need to understand the ways in which linguistic meaning is layered, multiple, anthropocentric, cultural, distributed, and above all useful
Epistemology · Computer Science · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History of Emotions Research · Language and cultural evolution · Philosophy · Lao language · Meaning (Psychology) · Psycholinguistics · Semantics
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2024 (7) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |