14 July 2009
Meaning and the Unexpected
Posted by bsypniewski under: foundations .
Meaning and the UnexpectedThis paper, delivered at the 2007 Ars Grammatica conference held at Minsk State Linguistic University, furthers some work that I presented at a workshop at the 2006 LACUS conference at the University of Toronto. Saussure’s brief description of meaning is generally accepted as the way that we “decode” language. This paper presents reasons why we should question Saussure’s description. The ‘unexpected’ material, referred to in the title, comes from various sources that are not traditionally used in linguistic analysis. The sortes Virgilianae, a form of fortune telling from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, used texts from the Roman poet Virgil which were selected at random (by opening a book and blindly pointing to a verse) as the basis of the fortune telling. In effect, the process created a “new meaning” by placing a text with an “old meaning” into a new context. There was also another use for Virgil along these lines. A type of poetry, called cento, developed in which lines from Virgil were extracted from the original text and then reassembled into new non-Virgilian poems with “new” non-Virgilian meanings.
The paper also examines consciously construsted “words” from the DADAist, surrealist, and similar art movements of the early 20th century. “Words” were constructed which the artists wanted to have NO meaning while still being able to be used for communicative purposes. One of the versions of the origin of the word DADA itself bears striking similarity to the sortes mentioned above.
In short, the Saussurian view of meaning is, at best, inadequate to explain what people do when they communicate. This paper shows that meaning can be constructed and that words can be INTENDED to have NO meaning at all.
Sypniewski, Bernard. 2008. Meaning and the Unexpected. Ars Grammatica conference, Minsk State Linguistic University, Minsk, Belarus Click here for the PDF: mu.pdf