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Convener: Małgorzata Fabiszak
From a semiotic point of view, an autonomistic theory of semantics seems appropriate, if we want to understand, among other things, why conceptual structure is not simply content (compact and cultural); why language is neither pure concept nor pure content; why we can know what language refers to and what it does not refer to; why there is meaning outside language; and why expressed meaning can mean 'something else' than what it shows us that it means.
Brandt, Per Aage.1995:162
The study of language has always been a study of meaning.
In the last century both language and meaning have been a focus of investigations
within different fields: philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, psychology and
others. The belief underlying this seminar is that for an interaction between
the disciplines to be possible there must be a general representational level,
a tertium comparationis, that would make a translation
from one domain to another possible. Another related question is: Do these theoretical
concepts proposed by philosophy, semiotics or linguistics find any support in
psycholinguistic experiments?
Contributions from researchers working in any of these or related disciplines
are kindly invited, in particular
. empirical studies developing a bridge theory between raw data and their implication
for linguistic theory,
. cognitive semiotics analyses contributing to text analysis, including literary
text analysis,
. philosophical investigations conducive to language theory.
Anonymous abstracts of 300-500 words stating the aim of
the study, the methodology and the expected results and stressing clearly its
relationship to language and meaning are expected by February
10th 2005 (originally, January 15th). Please send them as attachments
to an email message stating the identity of the author to fagosia@ifa.amu.edu.pl
The abstracts will be reviewed by two international anonymous reviewers.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 10th
2005 (originally, February 20th).
Due to a significant interest in the workshop and several
requests the
deadline for abstracts has been extended to February 10th 2005. The notification
of acceptance will be sent by March 10th 2005.
Dear PLM - ALM session Participants
and Discussants,
As I suggested when closing the session, I'm sending you my afterthoughts connected
with the presentations and the discussion on language and meaning. If you remember
the plenary by Vickie Bergvall on gender, there was much talk on the mis-representation,
misquoting and simplification of gender (or in fact any topic) - related research
in the media. As I have really condensed (not reduced, I hope) your presentation
to just a few words, some of them already including my comment, please have
a look at what's there to correct me if I distorted your meaning too heavily.
If anyone feels like making further comments you're welcome, in fact encouraged to do so.
I will soon be sending you information on the post-session volume, which I hope will be published in PeterLang as in one of the series edited by Prof. Jacek Fisiak.
I include two attachments:
1. PLM_seminar_2005
- on what we did and did not do.
2. What is scientific endeavour?
(isn't my spelling in the document name just stunning<;) - on what we were
doing.
Hope to hear from you,
Gosia Fabiszak
Last updated: 28 April 2005.