From: dalmatia@eburg.com
Date: Wed Mar 18 1998 - 10:22:13 EST
Peter Phillips wrote:
>
> But...before this thread is closed down can I have my twopennath?
>
> Indeed semantic domains do not have hard edges - your examples show the possibility of a (reading) community > developing its own sociolinguistic semantic domain. However, you cannot go on and say that the locus for > meaning is not in the words. The locus of meaning, as cognitive linguistics seems to show IS precisely in > the words as ciphers for the semantic domain - almost similar to Plato and his Ideas. Without the words > there would be no semantic domain. The word anchors the meaning of the semantic domain and eventually even > the most erudite teenage rebel will find it hard to wrench a word too far from that domain. If that is not > the case then the only possibility for communication is a basic assumption that we are members of the same > community. This assumption has to be taken at so basic a level that it would seem to point to a correlation > between word and meaning rather than to convention about certain ciphers referring to certain things whereas > in !
another community it could refer to something else entirely.
>
> Probably that made no sense at all - if so, just delete it and be done!
Hi Pete ~
Makes a lot of sense to me ~ So much so that I am sitting here
wondering how we talk to each other at all, let alone how WELL wo do
so. So I just said a prayer of thanksgiving for the Mari's of this
world... Those who have mastered the technical vocabulary and are
gracious enough to speak plainly to us about it...
George Blaisdell
George Blaisdell
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