Two Dimensions of Meaning

The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral, literate, print and internet cultures, in language acquisition, pragmatics, dialogism, classification, the semantics of grammar, literature and, most centrally, metaphor and metonymy.

Autorentext

Andrew Goatly has had a long academic career in the UK, Rwanda, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where he remains an Honorary Professor at Lingnan University. His books include The Language of Metaphors (Routledge 1997, 2011), Critical Reading and Writing in the Digital Age (Routledge 2000, 2016), Washing the Brain (2007), Explorations in Stylistics (2008), and Meaning and Humour (2012). He is now semi-retired in Canterbury, Kent, UK, an active member of the Green Party, and a keen amateur singer.

Inhalt

0. Introduction: the similarity/contiguity distinction and an outline of the book.

1. The two dimensions: similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

2. The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

3. The Development of Language in two Dimensions of Meaning.

4. Corpus linguistics, collocation and lexical priming

5. The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative.

6. Nouns and noun phrases: the similarity dimension, classification, quantification and commodification.

7. Nouns and the similarity mode: classification, taxonomies, paradigms and measurement in science and mathematics.

8. Resisting noun-based classification and scientific universals in sociology, linguistics, philosophy and poetry

9. Process and interrelatedness in quantum physics and Blackfoot, a language without nouns.

10. Feyerabend and Conquest of abundance: abstraction versus the richness of being

11. Conclusion (1): Evaluating the two dimensions

12. Conclusion (2): interplay, synthesis, and the need for diverse metaphors

*Appendix1.* Metaphor themes associated with the canonical event schema: CHANGE IS MOVEMENT, ACTIVITY IS MOVEMENT FORWARDS etc.

*Appendix 2.* Lexical details of the EMOTION IS SENSE IMPRESSION nexus.