Nicht aus der Schweiz? Besuchen Sie lehmanns.de
The Utility of Meaning - N. J. Enfield

The Utility of Meaning

What Words Mean and Why

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
218 Seiten
2014
Oxford University Press (Verlag)
978-0-19-870983-1 (ISBN)
CHF 136,10 inkl. MwSt
  • Versand in 10-20 Tagen
  • Versandkostenfrei
  • Auch auf Rechnung
  • Artikel merken
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.
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.

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.

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag 1.1.2015
Zusatzinfo 40 illustrations
Verlagsort Oxford
Sprache englisch
Maße 162 x 240 mm
Gewicht 482 g
Themenwelt Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Sprachphilosophie
Geisteswissenschaften Psychologie Verhaltenstherapie
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie
ISBN-10 0-19-870983-8 / 0198709838
ISBN-13 978-0-19-870983-1 / 9780198709831
Zustand Neuware
Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt?
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
Macht und Legitimität politischer Sprache im Prozess der europäischen …

von Mariano Barbato

Buch | Softcover (2023)
Nomos (Verlag)
CHF 103,60
Wie die Menschheit zu ihrer größten Erfindung kam

von Guy Deutscher

Buch | Softcover (2022)
C.H.Beck (Verlag)
CHF 25,20