Varieties of Tone: Frege, Dummett and the Shades of Meaning PDF
Preview Varieties of Tone: Frege, Dummett and the Shades of Meaning
Varieties of Tone This page intentionally left blank Varieties of Tone Frege, Dummett and the Shades of Meaning Richard D. Kortum East Tennessee State University, USA © Richard D. Kortum 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-26353-7 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-44259-1 ISBN 978-1-137-26354-4 (eBook) DOI10.1057/9781137263544 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Sir Michael Dummett, whose thoughts on language and meaning are in large part the foundation upon which this book is built, was as sharp, as deep, and as brilliant a philosopher as this or any age has seen. In the bustling streets beneath the ivory towers he stood out as an equally remarkable person. His was truly a good life, a model of the highest order of human excellence. To him I owe an emperor’s fortune. I revere him tremendously. I miss him terribly. With boundless affection I dedicate this book, To Michael A nobler knight shall England ne’er see shining. Sleep well, good Sir. Sleep well. This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments x i Introduction 1 Part I Historical Preliminaries 1.1 Historical Preliminaries 11 1.2 Frege’s Ingredients of Meaning 15 1.3 Theory of Meaning: Dummett’s Canonical Framework 2 2 Part II Varieties of Tone 2.1 Varieties of Tone 33 2.2 Frege’s Hints and Colors 40 2.3 Active vs. Passive Voice and Nominative–Dative Transformations 47 2.4 Onomatopeia, Assonance, and Alliteration 51 2.5 Dialect, Subject, and Style Labels 53 2.6 ‘Perspiration’ and ‘Sweat’ 65 2.7 ‘Dead’ and ‘Deceased’ 67 2.8 ‘Doggie’ and ‘Bunny’ 70 2.9 ‘Woman’ and ‘Lady’ and ‘Vous’ and ‘Tu’ 72 2.10 Poetic Language 75 2.11 The Adverbs ‘Still’, ‘Already’, and ‘Yet’ 82 2.12 Conjunctions and the Limits of Truth-Table Logic 87 2.13 Expressive Terms: Pejoratives and Honorifics 102 2.14 Evocatives: Profanity and Other Taboos 119 2.15 Funny Words: The Language of Humor 134 2.16 Interjections 143 2.17 Sentence Adverbs 149 2.18 Conducive Questions 165 2.19 Hyperonyms and Hyponyms 178 2.20 A Taxonomy of Tone 181 vii viii Contents Part III Tone and the Representational Character of Meaning 3.1 Tone and the Representational Character of Meaning 191 3.2 Shades of Sense 1 93 3.3 Towards a Comprehensive Formula 198 3.4 Theory of Meaning Revisited 222 Notes 233 Bibliography 2 43 Index 2 51 Preface And though she tried her best to help me, she could steal but she could not rob. John Lennon and Paul McCartney This book is about language. It is not about any particular language, like English or French or Mandarin Chinese, say, or Latin, or ancient Sumerian. It is about language in general – language p er se. More specifi- cally, this book is about meaning . Not the meaning of life, mind you. You can look for that in a Monty Python movie. No, this book is about some- thing rather more mundane. It’s about what makes a mark or a string of marks, or a particular utterance or string of uttered sounds, mean- ingful. That is to say, it’s about the concept of meaning as this applies to sentences, words, and other components of words and sentences – seemingly little things, like prefixes, suffixes, punctuation and intona- tion patterns, and stress, for example. These kinds of things belong to all languages. This book is also about the ways in which all these elements can be mixed together to form a whole, an entire system of meaningful sounds and marks, the rules of which enable us to form thoughts, to speak and to write these thoughts, and thus, ultimately, to communi- cate our thoughts back and forth with each other. Most particularly, this book is about what can informally be called the three basic ‘ingredients’ of meaning, nowadays known as sense , force , and tone . To be sure, these are not household terms. They’re theorists’ appellations. Even so, they’re simple enough to explain. This is mainly because they designate things about which every speaker already knows. This book, then, is about things that are, as a matter of actual practice, intimately familiar to each of us. It is about ordinary, everyday sorts of things – things that even young children know – like the difference in meaning between the words ‘and’ and ‘but’. Virtually every English speaker past the age of three or four knows how to use these two simple words. We instantly recognize the difference between the sentences ‘It is snowing and Billy is happy’ and ‘It is snowing, but Billy is happy’. And yet. When it comes to explaining exactly what it is that we all know so well – that which enables us to do what we do, which is speak the language – I suspect that most of us as experienced adults feel at a loss. ix
The list of books you might like
