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MeaningRonald Kephart (rkephart@OSPREY.UNF.EDU)Thu, 4 Apr 1996 12:02:00 -0500
Matthew Hill writes: > Just to be disputatious, I would suggest that meaning is idiosyncratic > and thus irrelevant to the anthropological endevour. I know that is not > spelled right but it looks better than any of the seven alternatives I > have tried. Culture is shared. There is simply no way of knowing whether > meanings are. Of course, there is an idiosyncratic component to meaning. "Dog" does not "mean" the same thing to Timmy (Lassie) as it does to the folks who encountered Cujoe. I don't see how it follows from this that meaning is irrelevant to the anthropological enterprise. As a linguist, I can't analyze language without finding out something about meaning. Only when I discover that Aymara "utasa" and "utama" mean different things can I analyze "uta" as 'house' and "-sa" and "-ma" as suffixes meaning 'ours (yours and mine)' and 'yours (but not mine)' respectively. Without meaning "utasa" and "utama" are just noise. Ronald Kephart Dept of Language & Literature University of North Florida Jacksonville, FL USA 32224-2645 Phone: (904) 646-2580
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