The Body in Language - Couverture souple

Ruthrof, Horst

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0304705802 ISBN 13 : 9780304705801

Editeur : Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd., 1999

Synopsis

The primary object of this book is to introduce an alternative approach - heterosemiotic semantics - to the typical ways in which meaning has been theorized. The author attempts to show that any semantics contains unacknowledged political and ideological motivations and convictions. Empiricist assumptions of meaning, as a linkage between language and world, and formal assumptions of meaning, as ruled by definitions, are rejected. Instead, the book offers a semiotic picture in which non-verbal and verbal signs are combined to constitute the world by way of interpretive acts. In such a semantics, metaphor plays a central role because it brings to the surface the intersemiotic and heterosemiotic labour which we perform in the processes of making meaning.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

This book opposes the position that meanings can be explained by way of intralinguistic relations, as in structural linguistics and its successors, and rejects definitional descriptions of meaning as well as naturalistic accounts. The idea that we are able to live by strings of mere signifiers is shown to rest on a misconception. Ruthrof also attempts an explanation of why arguments grounded in a post-Saussurean view of language, as for instance certain feminist theories, find it so difficult to show how precisely the body can be reclaimed as an integral part of linguistic signs. In reinstating the body in language, Ruthrof draws on Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, as well as on the writings of Helen Keller.

Biographie de l'auteur

Horst Ruthrof is Emeritus Professor of English and Philosophy at Murdoch University, Western Australia, and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.'

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
• Date d'édition: 1999
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0304705802
• ISBN 13: 9780304705801
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible