"...Merleau-Ponty's first point is that words, even when they finally
achieve the ability to carry referential and, eventually, conceptual
levels of meaning, never completely lose that primitive, strictly
phonemic, level of "affective" meaning which is not translatable into
their conceptual definitions. There is, he argues, an affective
tonality, a mode of conveying meaning beneath the level of thought,
beneath the level of the words themselves , which is contained in the
words just insofar as they are patterned sounds, as just the sounds which
this particular historical language uniquely uses, and which are much
more like a melody--a "singing of the world"--than fully translatable,
conceptual thought. Merleau-Ponty is almost alone among philosophers of
language in his sensitivity to this level of meaning. It is a level of
affective communication which seems to belong to processes that, in
themselves, are nonverbal but are a necessary part of the formation and
production of words." --James M. Edie, 1973, Foreword to Merleau-Ponty's
Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language.
... any connection to Bahktin's ideas?
Angel
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Angel M.Y. Lin
Doctoral Candidate
Modern Language Centre
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
252 Bloor St. W., Toronto, ON M5S 1V6, Canada
E-Mail: MYLIN who-is-at OISE.ON.CA
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