Re: Help Constructing Fictional Cross-Religious Movement

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 22:13:27 GMT, Jonathan L Cunningham
<spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:43011112.45645708@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

> 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.

Ah, okay; no problem there.

[...]

> 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.

Connotation is important in word choice, though.

> 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.

I would put it a bit differently, I think. It seems to me
that the denotational meaning is the unmarked one, the one
least dependent on context.

Brian
.

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