The Fog of Meaning
This event will be the next part of a thematic lecture series called Figurative Language Across Cultures. Title of the talk: The fog of meaning
The distinction between polysemy and monosemy determines the degree of parsimony that can be achieved in the semantic description of natural languages: the question how many senses a word or construction has, boils down to the question whether contextual reading x should be considered different from contextual reading y. My presentation reviews the criteria that have been formulated to answer that question, and analyzes the theoretical issues that explicitly or implicitly play a role in the discussion. These issues involve the demarcation of semantics and pragmatics, and, as a closely related topic, the relationship between linguistic system and linguistic usage.
Dirk Geeraerts is professor of linguistics at the University of Leuven, where he founded the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics at the turn of the millennium.
Time and place: the 22nd of April 2021, 18:00‒19:00 (CET); zoom
Please register by sending an email to szabo.rita@btk.elte.hu and you will be sent the zoom link.