Gongsun Longzi’s “form”: Minimal word meaning

Authors

  • Limin Liu College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Sichuan University
  • Qiao Huang College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Sichuan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18063/fls.v2i1.1200

Keywords:

Gongsun Longzi, semantic minimalism, word meaning, meaning holism

Abstract

Inspired by Gongsun Longzi’s “form-naming” idea about word meaning, this paper argues that 1) the internal lexicon contains only the list of word-meaning pairs, with no additional information either as part of word meaning or as a structural level above it; 2) the meaning of word is a minimal C-Form, the identifying conceptual meaning that individuates a concept; 3) C-Form is the interface between word meaning and concept meaning; and 4) a sentence has a minimal semantic content, consisting of the minimal meanings of the words composing it, which is propositional and truth-evaluable, and contextual elements contribute nothing to the meaning of language expressions. This paper adheres to semantic minimalism, believing meanwhile that meaning holism helps in semantics inquiry, since reflection on language meaning differs from language meaning itself.

 

 

Author Biography

Limin Liu, College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Sichuan University

Professor LIU Limin teaches philosophy of language, general linguistics, psychological linguistics in Sichuan University, and the academic research has been mainly about philosophy of language, theories of modern linguistics, especially psychological linguistics, social linguistics, etc. 

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Published

2020-08-12

Issue

Vol 2, No 1: (Published)

Section

Original Articles

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