The Utility of Meaning: What Words Mean and why
- ISBN-10
- 0198709838
- ISBN-13
- 9780198709831
- Category
- Foreign Language Study
- Pages
- 200
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2015
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press, USA
- Author
- N. J. Enfield
Description
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.
Get the book
Similar books
-
The Utility of Meaning: What Words Mean and why
By N. J. EnfieldThis 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, ...
-
Design: A Very Short Introduction
By John HeskettThis book will transform the way you think about design by showing how integral it is to our daily lives, from the spoon we use to eat our breakfast cereal to the medical equipment used to save lives.
-
Measuring Utility: From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics
By Ivan MoscatiAs a result, from the very beginning there has been debates about the meaning of utility as well as how to measure it. This book is an innovative investigation of how these arguments changed over time.
-
The Utility of Force
By Rupert SmithDrawing on his vast experience as a commander during the first Gulf War, and in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Northern Ireland, General Rupert Smith gives us a probing analysis of modern war.
-
The IBNET Water Supply and Sanitation Blue Book 2014: The International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities Databook
By Caroline van den Berg, Alexander Danilenko, Berta MacheveOverall coverage has increased and piped water and wastewater services became accessible to more people. An increasing number of utilities now actively handle the water billing, collection, and water management through metering.
-
The Foundations of Expected Utility
By P.C. FishburnThis book offers a unified treatment of my research in the foundations of expected utility theory from around 1965 to 1980.
-
Valuing Health: Well-Being, Freedom, and Suffering
By Daniel M. HausmanBy acting previously on an interest in dance, regardless of whether it was then well-founded, Jill made the claim that dance is especially good for her come true. Although initially without justification (though not contrary to reason), ...
-
Handbook of Utility Theory: Volume 1: Principles
By Christian Seidl, Peter J. Hammond, Salvador Barbera4 Fuzzy Social Choice In this section I will consider Arrovian social choice theory when preferences are fuzzy . If you accept our assumption that individual preferences and value judgments are vague and consequently fuzzy , there does ...
-
Fair Value: The Meaning and Application of the Term Fair Valuation As Used by Utility Commissioners... - Primary Source Edition
By Harleigh Holroyd HartmanThis is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.
-
Decision Space: Multidimensional Utility Analysis
By Paul WeirichOn the other hand, Lopes (1988) points to its rejection of the definition of degrees of aversion to risk in terms of preferences between options. She notes that the French school treats risk as a consequence of an option involving ...