James Mcelvenny

Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism

C.K. Ogden and His Contemporaries

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

''This work meets the highest standards of scholarship by any measure. It is masterly in combining succinct and broad-ranging coverage. The treatment of the initial galaxy of thinkers and its lead-in to later chapters stands as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship. Without exception, the topics treated are carefully reasoned and clearly expressed in every detail. The writing is lively and engaging, infected, one suspects, in places by Ogden's whimsical approach to style, where McElvenny invents phrases such as "referential hygiene". Splendid!' W. Terrence Gordon, Dalhousie University, Halifax In exploring influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of the English scholar C. K. Ogden, this book presents a fascinating study of the historical origin of key concepts in semantics and semiotics. Ogden was connected to several of the most significant figures of the modernist period, including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victoria Lady Welby, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In investigating these connections, this book reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories, and in turn sheds light on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century. Within this book readers are introduced to the important interaction between Ogden's thought and Victoria Lady Welby's 'significs', Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'logical atomism' in its various forms, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden's book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I. A. Richards, is also examined in detail along with the application of these ideas in Ogden's international language project Basic English. James McElvenny is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Potsdam. Cover image: derived from Bildtafel 76 of the 1930 Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: bildstatistisches Elementarwerk, produced by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna. [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-2503-2 [PPC] ISBN 978-1-4744-2506-3 [cover] Barcode

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Edinburgh University Press
• Seitenzahl: 200
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Februar 2018
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 236mm x 152mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 458g
• ISBN-13: 9781474425032
• ISBN-10: 1474425038
• Artikelnr.: 50110825

Autorenporträt

James McElvenny is a Researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre "Media of Co-operation" at the University of Siegen, and has previously held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Potsdam. He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (EUP, 2018), and editor of The Limits of Structuralism (2023) and Form and Formalism in Linguistics (2019).

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. The Meaning of Meaning
I. The many functions of language
II. Definition and the canons of symbolism
III. Logical atomism and its allies
IV. The trigonometry of reference
V. Significs and sympathisers
VI. Antagonism and synthesis
VII. Philologists, psychologists and anthropologists
3. Basic English
I. The Enlightenment and modernity
II. Peace and progress
III. The common solution
IV. Basic English and the common solution
V. Panoptic conjugation
VI. Grammatical reform
VII. Bentham and beyond
VIII. Totalitarianism and Newspeak
4. Ogden and the Vienna Circle
I. The Viennese scene
II. The everyday versus metaphysics
III. International picture language
IV. Contact and collaboration
V. Totalitarianism revisited
5. Epilogue
I. Linguistics
II. Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Bibliography