Re: help! looking for a pdf book.

David Wright Sr. kirjoitti:

Rather there's an interrelationship between language and (the rest of) social reality.

I would only add the interrelationship with 'physical' reality also, otherwise I agree. 

I can subscribe to that too.

If I understand you correctly, you seem to be saying that the only 'meaning' lies with the hearer/reader.

That's surely one way of saying what I mean, but a particularly easy one to be misinterpreted.

I don't expect to find meaning in the recipient's "head" (brain, mind, whatever) any more than I expect to find it in the sender's "head". What's in the head(s) is derivative to the communication which starts with the sender communicating with herself (Lotman's JA-JA chain, which however is a structuralist version of Vygotsky's original, much more powerful idea).

For example. If I say to you, "The apple tasted good." then you can fairly safely assume that you understand what I meant, and if there is no further need to clarify, then that 'assumption' probably is accurate, even though, you have no idea of *exactly* what criteria I used to 'evaluate' the taste of eating apples. Your 'assumption' serves you.

But the mental "images" (for lack of a better word) *arise from* the signs and are supported, or not supported, by further signs--or the absence of them. I have no doubt that immediately before, during and just after any given utterance there's a hell-of-a-lot going on in any particular subject's brain, but what matters linguistically (or for that matter, semiotically) are the immediate and potential consequences of the linguistic act--the utterance.

I am being a bit simplistic (partly because of my linguistic handicap!), but this amounts to saying that Peircean semiotics actually reverses the classical order of events: there's no consciousness *before* its ability to express itself--on the contrary, the ability to express oneself gives rise to the consciousness and supports it thereafter. The only way of knowing (cognizing) is by way of communication, be it on the JA-ON or the JA-JA model.

However, If I say to you, "The novel was good",
....
question. "Which novel is that?". At which point, I might specify "Heinlein's _The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress_". 

You got to be kidding! :-)

--
.... Tommi Nieminen ... http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~toniemin/ ...
      O Gracious God! how far have we
    Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesy!
       -John Dryden-
.... tommi dot nieminen at campus dot jyvaskyla dot fi ...
.

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