Gordon, I think your interpretation of LSV's "meaning" is correct. The cultural and publicly shared meaning of a word is found in the dicitonary. Other "senses" of meaning are local.
Bill Blanton
________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Gordon Wells
Sent: Wed 7/27/2005 11:31 AM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: [xmca] RE: meaning and sense and has anyone any opinion
Ruqaiya, Michael, Mike and Others,
When I looked again at the message to which Ruqaiya replied as below, I realized it wasn't as clear as I had thought. But before I try to clarify my intended meaning, I want to suggest that there is perhaps an incommensurability at the heart of our problem in trying to decide the correct match between Vygotsky's 'meaning' and 'sense' and the comparable terms in SFL.
I think the problem is that Ruqaiya and Halliday, as linguists, treat 'meaning' as comprised of 'sense' and 'reference'.However, when Vygotsky contrasted 'meaning' and 'sense', he was making a psychological distinction rather than a linguistic one. Linguists typically deal with units such as word or clause in terms of their relationship to other units within the system of a language and to the entities, states, etc, in the world to which they may refer. On the other hand, although Vygotsky was discussing his chosen unit 'word', it seems to me that he was thinking of its contextualized utterance by a speaker in interaction with a discourse partner or with himself. If this is correct, the distinction he was making was between the 'meaning'of a word as it might appear in a dictionary and the personal 'sense' it has for the speaker, as a result of the contexts is which s/he has heard or used the word before, together with the affective overtones it carries with it.This is how I interpret the following quote from Thinking and Speech.
A word's sense is the aggregate of all the psychological facts that arise in our consciousness as a result of the word. Sense is a dynamic, fluid, and complex formation which has several zones that vary in their stability. . . . In different contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast, meaning is a comparatively fixed and stable point, one that remains constant with all the changes of the word's sense that are associated with its use in various contexts. . . . The actual meaning of a word is inconstant. In one operation the word emerges with one meaning; in another, another is acquired. (1987, p. 276)
My previous message was somewhat off topic. But Halliday's (1984) paper, "Language as Code and language as Behavior", suggests that there is some overlap between his distinction between dynamic and synoptic and distinctions that both Vygotsky and Bruner have made. As I understand it, "dynamic" applies to registers that are informal and related to ongoing activity, whereas "synoptic" applies to registers that formulate relationships between events and states of affais, as seen from "above", as it were. This is quite close to Bruner's distinction between "narrative" and "paradigmatic" modes of meaning. So it seems to me that Vygotsky's distinction between "everyday" and "scientific" concepts maps quite closely on to the two former distinctions.
But this is not the same issue as the distinction between meaning and sense. On that issue, I liked Michael's:
If I understand right, sense is tied to the relation of activity (something collectively motivated) and action (something individually realized). So sense arises from the dialectic relation of self and other, individual and collective. Some writers use the qualifier "personal" to situate "sense."
Perhaps that gives us an entry point to understanding meaning, as a generalized version of personal sense, that is, the possibilities of sense available at the collective level.
Gordon
Gordon hello
I am quite bemused by "dynamic/everyday/narrative v.
synoptic/scientific/paradigmatic modes of meaning-making." what do the
slashes indicate? Are they post-modenist or the conventional "or" sign. I
really do not find it easy to interpret the lexical items of the second set
in their present collocation.
At one stage I had thought the issue was the conceptualisation of meaning in
language or meaning construed by language, but I must6 have got it wrong.
H'm well -- perhaps its that I am just not used to "dynamic" discourse
online. I was even more lost with your comment which I quote below:
Similarly, Halliday's dynamic/ synoptic distinction might be equated with
narrative/syntagmatic - to some degree!!, while synoptic highlights
the paradigmatic relationship between alternative lexicogrammatical
realizations of the same event, with a focus on grammatical metaphor
through nominalization.
I most probably do not have anything very sensible from the points of view
of the direction of the present disdcourse on sense and meaning.
Ruqaiya
-- Gordon Wells Dept of Education, http://education.ucsc.edu/faculty/gwells UC Santa Cruz. gwells@ucsc.edu_______________________________________________ xmca mailing list xmca@weber.ucsd.edu http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
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