Two Dimensions of Meaning

<p>The book takes as its point of departure the notion that similarity and contiguity are fundamental to meaning. It shows how they manifest in oral literate print and internet cultures in language acquisition pragmatics dialogism classification the semantics of grammar literature and most centrally metaphor and metonymy. </p><p>The book situates these reflections on similarity and contiguity in the interplay of language cognition culture and ideology and within broader debates around such issues as capitalism biodiversity and human control over nature. Positing that while similarity-focused systems can be reductive and have therefore been contested in social science philosophy and poetry and contiguity-based ones might disregard useful statistical and scientific evidence Andrew Goatly argues for the need for humans to entertain diverse metaphors models and languages as ways of understanding and acting on our world. The volume also considers the cognitive connections between the similarity-contiguity duality and the noun-verb distinction. </p><p>This innovative volume will appeal to scholars involved in wider debates on meaning within the fields of cognitive semantics pragmatics metaphor and metonymy theory critical discourse analysis and the philosophy of language. Equally the motivated and intelligent general reader interested in language philosophy culture and ecology should find the later chapters of the book fascinating and the earlier technical chapters accessible.</p>