Sunday 8 November 2015

The 'Meaning As Transcendent' Tradition: World-Oriented Vs Mind-Oriented Views

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 416-7): 
The modern split within the "transcendent" view is between what Barwise (1988:23) calls the world-oriented tradition and the mind-oriented tradition, which he interprets as public vs. private accounts of meaning… .  The world-oriented tradition [e.g. formal semantics] interprets meaning by reference to (models of) the world; for example, the meaning of a proper noun would be an individual in the world… . The mind-oriented tradition [e.g. cognitive semantics] interprets meaning by reference to the mind; typically semantics is interpreted as that part of the cognitive system that can be “verbalised”.