Friday, November 25, 2005
meaning
meaning: "In everyday speech we bandy the term 'meaning' around quite happily without giving it a lot of thought:
'...if you see what I mean.'
'...if you take my meaning.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I always say what I mean.'
''Cochon' means 'pig'.'
'I didn't really mean it.'
'I meant to write.'
'A green light means 'go''
'What is the meaning of life?'
'Health means everything.'
'His look was full of meaning
'What's the dictionary meaning of 'meaning'?'
That's fairly typical of the sort of things we might say. You can see from those that we don't even use the word 'meaning' with the same meaning every time. Some of the examples are taken from The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards (1923), in which they identified 16 different meanings of the word!
The last example, with its reference to 'dictionary meaning' suggests that there is some kind of 'correct' meaning of words. If two people disagree about what a word means, they might well settle their argument by referring to the dictionary.
However, when we stop for a while to consider just what we mean by meaning, things get pretty complicated pretty fast. A number of thought-provoking statements about the nature of meaning were made by the communication theorist David Berlo Berlo (1960):
Click on any of them for a discussion of what he 'means'."
'...if you see what I mean.'
'...if you take my meaning.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I always say what I mean.'
''Cochon' means 'pig'.'
'I didn't really mean it.'
'I meant to write.'
'A green light means 'go''
'What is the meaning of life?'
'Health means everything.'
'His look was full of meaning
'What's the dictionary meaning of 'meaning'?'
That's fairly typical of the sort of things we might say. You can see from those that we don't even use the word 'meaning' with the same meaning every time. Some of the examples are taken from The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards (1923), in which they identified 16 different meanings of the word!
The last example, with its reference to 'dictionary meaning' suggests that there is some kind of 'correct' meaning of words. If two people disagree about what a word means, they might well settle their argument by referring to the dictionary.
However, when we stop for a while to consider just what we mean by meaning, things get pretty complicated pretty fast. A number of thought-provoking statements about the nature of meaning were made by the communication theorist David Berlo Berlo (1960):
- Meanings are in people
- Communication does not consist of the transmission of meanings, but of the transmission of messages
- Meanings are not in the message; they are in the message-users
- Words do not mean at all; only people mean
- People can have similar meanings only to the extent that they have had, or can anticipate having, similar experiences
- Meanings are never fixed; as experience changes, so meanings change
- No two people can have exactly the same meaning for anything
Click on any of them for a discussion of what he 'means'."
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