Re: Help Constructing Fictional Cross-Religious Movement

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 14:53:58 -0400, "Brian M. Scott"
<b.scott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 17:37:17 GMT, Jonathan L Cunningham
><spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in

>[...]
>
>> Linguists separate out at least six different kinds of
>> "meaning" for words.
>
>That sounds more like philosophy than linguistics; what
>sorts of things do you have in mind?

The philosophy might be whether you accept the theory,
as a piece of linguistics, but it was presented "straight"
as "fact" in the same way that "there are five phyla" is
a fact: i.e. you can argue that there are seven phyla, not
five, but this is not usually considered to be philosophy.

I'd have to go and consult a textbook[*] for the complete
list (of six). And it might be more precise to use
"utterance" instead of "word", although I expect it would
be possible to contrive examples at the word level

Three of them are: denotational, connotational and pragmatic.

To illustrate just those three:
"Have you got a light?"
"Do you know what time it is?"
"Could you pass the salt?"
illustrate clearly the difference between denotational and
pragmatic meanings. For a married couple who first met
because she asked him "Have you got a light?" the connotational
meaning would be *very* different than for most people.

Obviously the other three seem less significant to me (or
I'd remember them better) - I'll now need to locate a list
of them for my own peace of mind. I think one of them is
particularly relevant to understanding poetry[**]: it has
something to do with tone or emotion (in a way which is
different from connotational) but that may be me
misremembering: I really need to go and look it up.

I can't remember whether something like sarcasm depended
on one of the types I can't recall, or whether that kind
of thing comes under pragmatism. It's not really a matter
of pragmatics if you insult someone with "you are *so*
clever".

[Interesting: I hadn't realised how much I'd forgotten. I
suspect, if I go and look it up, nowadays I'd come up with
my own list of aspects of meaning, which might be shorter.
Or possibly longer.]

>From a writing POV, the denotational/pragmatic distinction
is most significant (for writing humorous aliens and/or
silly robots). The too-literal bozo is a stock character
in some other kinds of fiction too.

For a robot, the distinction is between "do what I say"
and "do what I mean". So, in some sense, the pragmatic
meaning is primary, but intuitively, we tend to think of
the denotational meaning as the "real" one.

Jonathan

[*] Or ask one of my friends.
[**} That's one of the factoids floating around my
memory and was my own conclusion, not something that was in
my original source.

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