The Problems with Designing Linguistic Meanings

DOI

10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.65How to use a DOI?

Keywords

design; meaning; language; convention; coordination; function; subjectivity

Abstract

As any tool, language is created by people. Since any language which we know could be different (have different grammars, consist in different words and sounds etc.), it may be said to be designed in a certain way. Since meanings of linguistic expressions also might be different, they may be said to be designed in the past as well. But no one can design a meaning alone; this is normally a result of some collective efforts. The most popular explanation of how meanings are collectively designed by people refers to the notion of convention, but the idea of semantic convention encounters serious problems since meanings are essentially subjective and can be publicly learned neither by demonstration nor by description. As a result, the idea of semantics as conventionally designed by people looks contradictory.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alexey Chernyak
PY  - 2016/12
DA  - 2016/12
TI  - The Problems with Designing Linguistic Meanings
BT  - Proceedings of the 2016 3rd International Conference on Education, Language, Art and Inter-cultural Communication (ICELAIC 2016)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 253
EP  - 255
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.65
DO  - 10.2991/icelaic-16.2017.65
ID  - Chernyak2016/12
ER  -