Meaning, Discourse and Society

by Wolfgang Teubert

Overview

Meaning, Discourse and Society investigates the construction of reality within discourse. When people talk about things such as language, the mind, globalisation or weeds, they are less discussing the outside world than objects they have created collaboratively by talking about them. Wolfgang Teubert shows that meaning cannot be found in mental concepts or neural activity, as implied by the cognitive sciences. He argues instead that meaning is negotiated and knowledge is created by symbolic interaction, thus taking language as a social, rather than a mental, phenomenon. Discourses, Teubert contends, can be viewed as collective minds, enabling the members of discourse communities to make sense of themselves and of the world around them. By taking an active stance in constructing the reality they share, people thus can take part in moulding the world in accordance with their perceived needs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521885652
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/25/2010
Pages:	300
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Wolfgang Teubert is Professor of Corpus Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. His previous book publications include Corpus Linguistics: A Short Introduction (2007, with Anna Cermakova), Text, Discourse and Corpura (2007, with Michael Hoey, Michael Stubbs and Michaela Mahlberg) and he was co-editor of Corpus Linguistics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics: A Reader (2007) and Text Corpora and Multilingual Lexicography (2007).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

No meaning without other people 1

The futile quest for a language system 5

Should the mind be an object of scientific enquiry" 9

The discourse community constructs reality 11

The sixteen topics of this book 12

Part I Meaning, the mind and the brain 31

1 The cognitive turn 33

2 The long history of mind linguistics 47

3 What do we know about mental concepts" 53

4 Morphing theoretical sémes into 'real' concepts 63

5 From mental representations to conceptual ontologies 67

6 What is meaning" 73

7 Where should we look for meaning" 88

Option a The individual intentional mind 88

Option b The individual computational mind/brain 90

Option c The brain where language becomes reality 95

Option d The discourse as the collective mind 107

Part II Discourse and society 111

8 Language as discourse 113

9 Society presupposes language, and language presupposes society 124

Language as an essential human feature 124

Language and society 127

Blumer's symbolic interactionism 132

From the individual mind to the discourse as the collective mind 135

10 A closer look at oral societies 140

11 Differences between oral and literate societies 150

The profane and the arcane origins of writing 152

Some effects of literacy 156

Literacy, meaning and reflection 163

12 Empirical linguistics deals only with recorded language 166

13 Meaning, knowledge and the construction of reality 171

Truth and meaning 171

Meaning and knowledge 176

The collaborative construction of reality 180

14 The language of the scientific experimental report 190

15 Diachronicity, intertextuality and hermeneutics 199

16 Meaning and the interpretation of a haiku 215

Conclusion 241

Authorship, intentionality and mental states: can the quest for meaning dispense with the investigation of the solitary mind" 241

How real are the realities we experience" 249

The social dimension of experience and intentionality 258

Why the media discourse advertises individual agency 262

We can collaborate to change our reality 269

Bibliography 273

Index 283

Editorial Reviews

'The power of this exciting new book lies simultaneously within the detailed, continental traditions of scholarship that it brings to many readers for the first time; and the internal skepticism that it impliedly expresses towards the empirical instrumentation available to corpus linguists … Teubert offers us an erudite and convincing reason for deep reflection before we contemplate discarding even the bath-water of hermeneutics. This book is a unique product of a tradition that combines philosophy, philology and hermeneutics on the one hand with an understanding of the power of corpora as a potential substitute for the experiences of a community during its lifetime … a compelling read right up to its last paragraph and has my warm recommendation.' Bill Louw, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

'… provides a refreshingly original and long overdue theoretical rationale for the effectiveness and value of corpus linguistics.' Geoff Thompson, Languages in Contrast

'The book is well-organized, inspiring and clear. It will be of great interest to those who view language as social interaction and are therefore concerned with the social contexts in which discourse is embedded.' Jing Chen, Discourse Studies

From the Publisher