A non-issue of an important issue.

[Diego Quesada]

On Mon, 6 Jan 1997 Carl.Mills at UC.EDU wrote:


> Whenever anyone uses the word *meaning* in a serious linguistic
> discussion, I put my hand on my wallet.
        That is nothing but (formalist?) prejudice.

> Back in the 1930s, Ogden and Richards wrote an entire book called *The
> Meaning of Meaning* in which they concluded, if I remember correctly,
> that they thought maybe they didn't know.  In other words, the word
> *meaning* has a meaning that is both so broad and so vague as to render
> *meaning* well nigh empty of empirical content.
        You are right, back in the 1930s. But this is the 1990's!!!,
almost the 21st. C. A.D. Surely some progress must have been made during
these 60-70 years, don't you think? That *meaning* is not reducible to
something like:
                M = x + y/-r, etc.
does not mean that our intuition (as linguists and speakers) and common
sense cannot guide us when making analyses and claims about language.

> If we are going to use meaning to decide issues relating to syntax,
> including whether syntax exists, we need to agree on what we mean by
> *meaning*.
        Ubi supra. The fact that we talk about the meaning of a lexeme
that grammaticalizes or the meaning of a certain syntactic structure, etc.
etc. is enough proof that we know what we mean by meaning. I cannot
understand what the reason for complicating matters superfluously is. And
though nobody seemed interested in responding to this, in my view,
non-issue (maybe thereby showing that it is indeed a non-issue) I felt
that just for the record a reply was in order.

J. Diego Quesada
University of Toronto