A
THESIS PROPOSAL FOR THE AWARD OF
DOCTOR
OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.)
Written By:
Written By:
Ngozi U. Emeka-Nwobia.
Languages and Linguistics Department.
Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki, NigeriaBACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
One essential property
of language is communication of meaning among the users. There are, however, certain
aspects of meaning that may not derive from the additive value of the word,
phrases and sentences. This type of meaning is not conveyed by the plain sense
of words as done in semantics. It is necessary to understand, not only what
words mean but also what the speaker or writer intends to convey.
The quest for the meaning of meaning has been the preoccupation of linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists etc. Since the primary essence of language is for
the purpose of communication, many attempts have been made to describe what an effective communication is. One issue that runs through all the attempts is the area of meaning generation as pivotal factor for an effective communication. Over the years, meaning generation has remained problematic because most of the approaches developed to explain how meaning is generated rely on the linguistic knowledge of the language users without looking at the extra linguistic factors employed in the processes of communication. This subjected the approaches to heavy criticism.
The quest for the meaning of meaning has been the preoccupation of linguists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists etc. Since the primary essence of language is for
the purpose of communication, many attempts have been made to describe what an effective communication is. One issue that runs through all the attempts is the area of meaning generation as pivotal factor for an effective communication. Over the years, meaning generation has remained problematic because most of the approaches developed to explain how meaning is generated rely on the linguistic knowledge of the language users without looking at the extra linguistic factors employed in the processes of communication. This subjected the approaches to heavy criticism.
Like
the branch of science, the study of modern linguistics has been one of constant
experiments, investigation, and discoveries. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure,
who published A General Course in Linguistics (1916), has been thought
of as the father of modern linguistics. Saussure advanced the distinction
between “langue” and “parole”, in which langue refers to the linguistic system
itself while parole refers to the manifestation of the actual use of the
linguistic system. Chomsky in 1968
developed the concept of linguistic competence as a major concern in formal
linguistics. He introduced Saussure’s notion of “langue” with greater emphasis
on the homogeneity of language knowledge. For him, linguistics is the study of
a homogenous speech community where everyone speaks alike. Chomsky’s (1968)
universal grammatical rule did not take cognizance of the explanation of some
social basis of some communicative behaviours. Chomsky’s rules were criticized
for being abstract, invariant and independent of social influences. His rules
are not subject to language use and language variations (Wardaugh 1986);
neither do they respond to class, age, gender and other stratifications. This
subjected Chomsky’s notion of context free grammar and language homogeneity to
heavy attack.
This
attracted the attention of anthropologists who were concerned with structural
analysis of grammar in different cultures. They emphasized the interdependence
of language, culture and social structures. This rechanneled the attention of
formal grammarians from their misconception of language, and consequently began
to shift towards the incorporation of social factors into grammar (Firth
1957). Pragmatics came up as a reaction to structural linguistics of Ferdinand
de Saussure and Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar. According to
Gernert D (2006), Pragmatics has been strongly utilized by the American
Philosopher Charles William Morris (1901-1975), starting mainly from specific
parts in the extensive work of Charles Sander Peirce. Peirce in (1878) published
an article titled “How to Make our Ideas Clear.” In his essay, the founder of
semiotics, the science of signs, presented a general principle of enquiry which
was later formulated by William James as the first formulation of ‘Pragmatism’.
Although Peirce did not use the term per se in his original work, it is in this
essay that he presented the thesis to which the meaning of the concept finds
its practical bearing.
This work by Peirce had tremendous
influence on philosophers such as William James and John Dewey, which led to
the establishment of “pragmatism” as an American philosophical movement. On the
linguistic dimension, it was that of Charles W. Morris (1938) who consequently
proposed three ways of studying signs, which are: syntactic studies, which
analyze the relation between a sign and other sign; semantic studies which
investigate the relation between a sign and what it is suppose to refer to; and
pragmatic studies, which examine the relation between a sign and its users/
interpreters. While Morris reflection was devoted to the functioning of signs
in general, Rudolf Carnap started to use this trichotomy to speak of the
different manners of studying natural language.
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