Two dimensions of meaning : similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy, language, culture and ecology / Andrew Goatly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goatly, Andrew, 1950- author.

Series:

Routledge Studies in Linguistics

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Language and languages--Philosophy.

Language and languages.

Semantics.

Metonyms.

Metaphor.

Cognitive grammar.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (405 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, New York : Routledge, [2022]

Summary:

"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. The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language, cognition, culture, and ideology, and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism, biodiversity, and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive, and have therefore been contested in social science, philosophy and poetry, and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence, Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors, models, and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning, within the fields of cognitive semantics, pragmatics, metaphor and metonymy theory, critical discourse analysis, and the philosophy of language. Equally, the motivated and intelligent general reader, interested in language, philosophy, culture and ecology, should find the later chapters of the book fascinating, and the earlier technical chapters accessible"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

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

The two dimensions: similarity and contiguity in metaphor and metonymy

The prevalence of metaphor and metonymy and their interplay

The development of language in two dimensions of meaning

Corpus linguistics, collocation and lexical priming

The syntagmatic contiguity of metonymy in grammar and narrative

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

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

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

Resisting classification, and emphasizing process: GM Hopkins, Duns Scotus, Taoism, Buddhism

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

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

Conclusion (1): Evaluating the two dimensions

Conclusion (2): Interplay, synthesis, and the need for diverse metaphors

Appendix 1: 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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781003285977

100328597X

9781000600186

1000600181

9781000600247

1000600246

OCLC:

1341203919