Semantics: a coursebook, second edition
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| UNIT 27 NON-LITERAL MEANING:
IDIOMS, METAPHOR, AND METONYMY Entry requirements There are no speci fic entry requirements for this unit, although you might want to review some previous topics that are relevant for the discussion to follow: the di fference between SPEAKER (UTTERANCE) MEANING and SENTENCE MEANING discussed in Units 1 and 25, the notion of CONTEXT in Unit 7, and also the notions of COMPOSITIONALITY in Unit 14 and ANOMALY in Unit 17. Introduction Now that you have completed the first twenty-six units of this book, you have acquired a solid introduction into most of the basic areas of traditional linguistic semantics. The first twenty units dealt primarily with what we have called ‘literal’ meaning, which evokes two main ideas: first, that the meanings of words and sentences are essentially independent of the context or occasion of use; and second, that the meaning of a composite expression is essentially compositional. As we described earlier in Unit 14, compositionality refers to the idea that a composite expression’s overall meaning is clearly a function of the literal meanings of the parts of which it is composed. Perhaps the epitome of this kind of study is represented by the use of logic and the concept of truth conditions and truth values to represent the literal meanings of the propositions expressed by sentences in human languages. The study of literal meaning is very important and has long been the main focus of linguistic semantics, going all the way back to the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. This is why so much attention was paid to it in this book. In Units 21–26 we began to expand the focus of our study of meaning somewhat beyond the classic issues of sense, reference, and logic by examining aspects of interpersonal meaning, such as speech acts and various kinds of inference, including conversational implicature. This sort of meaning goes beyond literal meaning and entailment relationships based on truth conditions, and involves aspects of the context of the utterance and intentions of the speaker. We have referred to this kind of meaning before as SPEAKER or UTTERANCE MEANING. In this unit we will turn our attention to semantic phenomena that evoke what has traditionally been called ‘ figurative’ or ‘non-literal’ meaning: in tải về 1.74 Mb. Chia sẻ với bạn bè của bạn:
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