Fictive interaction and the nature of linguistic meaning (original) (raw)
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This chapter examines a phenomenon characterized in Pascual 2002 as fictive interaction (FI): signifying states and attitudes by the enactment of an invented verbal interaction. The phenomenon is examined as a representational strategy in meaning construction at two levels of linguistic manifestation: discourse and syntax. Data include examples of utterances that function metonymically at the syntactic level, as well as four examples of FI in discourse, among them Fauconnier & Turner’s “Debate with Kant” example. The four discourse examples are claimed to each exemplify one of four general types of semiotic blends. While I argue that analysis in terms of semiotic integration of mental spaces can account for examples at the discourse level, I propose to view examples at the syntactic level in terms of an invented communicative scenario evoked by an embedded dramatized enunciation which can be characterized as either generic or ascribed to a particular person. Keywords: fictive interaction, meaning construction, enunciation, conceptual integration, mental spaces, blending, semiotic base space, representation, virtuality, dramatization, construal, fictive motion, intersubjectivity, pragmatics
Speaker’s Referent and Semantic Referent in Interpretive Interaction
2020
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxiv2.05 In this paper I argue that the notions of speaker’s reference and semantic reference—used by Kripke in order to counter the contentious consequences of Donnellan’s distinction between the referential use and the attributive use of definite descriptions—do not have any application in the interpretive interaction between speaker and hearer. Hearers are always concerned with speaker’s reference. Either, in cases of cooperation, as presented as such by the speaker or, in cases of conflict, as perceived as such by the hearer. Any claim as to semantic reference is irrelevant for the purposes of communication and conversation. To the extent that the purpose of semantic theory is to account for linguistic communication, there is no reason to take definite descriptions to have semantic reference.
On “Interactional Semantics” and Problems of Meaning
Human Studies, 2011
This article is a comment on papers being published in this special issue concerned with interactional semantics. As these papers are concerned with abstractions, formulations, generalizations, and other uses of categorizations whereby participants' everyday understandings and interpretations come to the foreground of analysis, I explore the wider issue with which the papers wrestle. That issue is whether problems of meaning-related to subjectivity, intersubjectivity, mutual comprehension, and the like-are pervasive in interaction, or are limited and situational. I examine problems of meaning through the lenses of social theory and ethnomethodology, and take the position that analytic preoccupation with interpretation should be one that follows participants' own orientations to problems of meaning. This is different from but related to what each author argues in his own paper. Keywords Verstehen Á Mutual understanding Á Interpretation Á Semantics Á Ethnomethodology Á Conversation analysis Á Social theory This special issue takes up a provocative topic-the problem of ''semantics in interaction''. The papers are concerned with abstractions, formulations, generalizations, and other uses of categorizations whereby participants' everyday understandings and interpretations come to the foreground of analysis. The papers merit inspection in their own right, and in my brief comment I cannot do justice to each of them; rather I wish to explore the wider issue with which they wrestle. That issue-''semantics in interaction''-consists in whether the so-called problem of meaning is a pervasive one for participants in interaction or whether it is a more limited
The Communicative Mind. A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and Meaning Construction
Advancing a research approach to meaning construction connecting linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, neurophenomenology, cognitive science and semiotics, The Communicative Mind presents an interdisciplinary exploration of the various ways in which the intersubjectivity of communicating interactants manifests itself in language. The book supports its view of the mind as highly conditioned by the domain of interpersonal communication by an extensive range of empirical linguistic data from fiction, poetry and everyday discourse. Among recent theoretical advances in what Brandt refers to as the cognitive humanities is Fauconnier and Turner’s theory of conceptual integration which, offering a bridge between pragmatics and semantics, has proved widely influential in Cognitive Poetics and Linguistics. With its constructive criticism of Fauconnier and Turner’s "general mechanism" hypothesis, according to which "blending" can explain everything from the origin of l...
From cognitive-functional linguistics to dialogic syntax
Cognitive Linguistics, 2014
ABSTRACT Dialogic syntax investigates the linguistic, cognitive, and interactional processes involved when language users reproduce selected aspects of a prior utterance, and when recipients respond to the parallelisms and resonances that result, drawing inferences for situated meaning. The phenomenon typically arises when a language user constructs an utterance modeled in part on the utterance of a prior speaker or author. The result is resonance, defined as the catalytic activation of affinities across utterances. This paper presents the concept of dialogic syntax and outlines some directions of current research on dialogic resonance, as represented in this Special Issue.
Collapsing the Wave Function of Meaning: The Epistemological Matrix of Talk-in-Interaction
A Legacy of Living Systems: Gregory Bateson as a Precursor to Biosemiotics, 2012
Devoted to an explication of how interacting agents mutually and micro-temporally provide for each other the grounds for immediate next action in the seemingly transparent give-and-take of ordinary conversation, empirical findings from the disciplines of Interaction Analysis suggest that " language " as it is actually realized in naturally occurring, everyday talk-in-interaction, may derive its semiotic efficacy more from the active co-participation of situated speakers in creating contexts of relevancy, constraint and possibility for each other's immediate next reshaping of the cybernetic surround than it does from the computational recombination of referential tokens within the bounds of some predetermined, category-structuring syntax. The twin purposes of this article are to: (1) to serve as an introduction to some of the basic principles, methodologies and research data of Interaction Analysis, and (2) to attempt to situate such research and its findings within the broader study of meaning-making among living agents that is the goal of a Gregory Bateson-inspired biosemiotics. Here I hope to show how the former can well illuminate latter's efforts to explicate the principles whereby not only our human social worlds – but our very biological world itself – comes into being not as a " pre-given " in the furniture of the universe, but as a locally organized, massively co-constructed, participant-fashioned accomplishment in that universe instead.