[Corpora-List] Meaning (was: Bootcamp: 'Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R'--re Louw's endorsement)

[Mike Maxwell]

If I may, I'd like to return to something Wolfgang Teubert wrote 
(realizing that not everyone on this list agrees with it):

> Language is symbolic. A sign is what has been negotiated between sign
> users. The meaning of a sign is not my (non-symbolic) experience of
> it. Meanings are not in the head, as Hilary Putnam never got tired of
> repeating. The meaning of a sign is the way in which the members of a
> discourse community are using it. It is what happens in the symbolic
> interactions between people, not in their minds.

The debate between whether meaning is in the head or "in the community"/ 
in usage (as exemplified by a corpus) strikes me as somewhat analogous 
to what Douglas Hofstadter said in his book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an 
Eternal Golden Braid".  It's been twenty-odd years since I read that, 
but I'll try to paraphrase.  He asked whether the meaning was _in_ a 
particular "text" (used in a broad sense to including things like a DNA 
sequence), or in the combination of the text and the reader (e.g. DNA, 
RNA, the ribosomes and amino acids etc.)  His point, if I understood it, 
was that meaning could not be encoded by a text alone, but only by the 
combination of text and reader.

Coming back to linguistics, I would have thought that meaning was not 
inherent in any corpus, nor in some community's use of language, but 
could only be understood (bad term, but I can't think of another) with 
reference to the individual minds of the people using that language-- 
including the situations where there's only one native speaker of a 
language left, or there are no native speakers left and we're trying to 
understand what Aristotle or Cicero said.

Of course, it's possible I misunderstand what Wolfgang (and Putnam) mean 
when they say "Meanings are not in the head."  In which case, we'll have 
to negotiate :-)
-- 
    Mike Maxwell
    "We signify something too narrow when we say:
    Man is a grammatical animal. For although there
    is no animal except man with a knowledge of grammar,
    yet not every man has a knowledge of grammar."
    --Martianus Capella, "The Seven Liberal Arts"

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