The Utility of Meaning

Zusatztext 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. Informationen zum Autor N. J. Enfield is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He has carried out extensive field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos, with a focus on language, culture, cognition, and social interaction. His books include Ethnosyntax (OUP 2002), Linguistic Epidemiology (Routledge 2003), A Grammar of Lao (Mouton de Gruyter 2007), The Anatomy of Meaning (CUP 2009), Relationship Thinking (OUP 2013), and The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology (with P Kockelman and J Sidnell, 2014). He has published over 100 academic articles and reviews. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis Conventions for linguistic examples List of figures and tables Preface 1: Introduction 2: Meanings are layered 3: Meanings are multiple 4: Meanings are anthropocentric 5: Meanings are cultural 6: Meanings are distributed 7: Conclusion: Meanings are useful References Index ...

Auteur
N. J. Enfield is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney. He has carried out extensive field work in mainland Southeast Asia, especially Laos, with a focus on language, culture, cognition, and social interaction. His books include Ethnosyntax (OUP 2002), Linguistic Epidemiology (Routledge 2003), A Grammar of Lao (Mouton de Gruyter 2007), The Anatomy of Meaning (CUP 2009), Relationship Thinking (OUP 2013), and The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology (with P Kockelman and J Sidnell, 2014). He has published over 100 academic articles and reviews.

Texte du rabat

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.

Contenu

• Conventions for linguistic examples

• List of figures and tables

• Preface

• 1: Introduction

• 2: Meanings are layered

• 3: Meanings are multiple

• 4: Meanings are anthropocentric

• 5: Meanings are cultural

• 6: Meanings are distributed

• 7: Conclusion: Meanings are useful

• References

• Index