"First, in inner speech, we find a predominance of the word’s sense over its meaning. Paulhan significantly advanced the psychological analysis of speech by introducing the distinction between a word’s sense and meaning. 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. Meaning is only one of these zones of the sense that the word acquires in the context of speech. It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. 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. Change in the word’s sense is a basic factor in the semantic analysis of speech. The actual meaning of the word is inconstant. In one operation, the word emerges with one meaning; in another, another is acquired. The dynamic nature of meaning leads us to Paulhan’s problem, to the problem of the relationship between meaning and sense. Isolated in the lexicon, the word has only one meaning. However, this meaning is nothing more than a potential that can only be realized in living speech, and in living speech meaning is only a cornerstone in the edifice of sense."As I read this, the stability of meaning is merely relative to that of sense, i.e., in the context of speech, rather than "teh aggregate of all psychological facts." He is not at all denying the fact of polysemy or the cultural and historical migration of meaning.
Andy mike cole wrote:
I agree, very clearly statements of the sense/meaning relation, along with the Mandelshtam line, " I forgot the thought I wanted to say, and thought, unembodied, returned to the hall of shadows." In the quote here, I think LSV is somewhat overstating the stability of meaning across contexts; yes relative to the microgenetic processes of sense making capturable with modern technologies, but not totally "context independent." Even dictionary meanings change, as LSV was well aware from his interest in the history of words in relation to their appearance in children's vocabularies in ontogeny. Keeping the simultaneous relevance of several time scales in mind in these discussions seems really important, as hard as it is to do. mike