Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
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Sky Marsen
Abstract
This article explores some major elements in the human capacity to create meaning, or signify. Motivated by a problematic emerging from artificial intelligence and cognitive science research, the article discusses the specific features of natural language that distinguish it from other forms of communication and underlie the difficulties found in designing electronic forms of language processing. In particular, the article proposes a model of human communication based on a quadripartite model composed of language, emotion, embodiment, and community. It discusses some areas of the representational aspects of language, which have been identified by literary approaches to texts, and which any attempt at emulating human intelligence and communication should take into account. The article supports the claim that the human propensity to create meaning lies largely in representational ambiguity, which underlies most forms of symbolism.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- The biosemiosis of prescriptive information
- Kitsch, irony, and consumerism: A semiotic analysis of Diesel advertising 2000–2008
- Modeling semiosis in Roentgen diagnosis
- The semiosis of stone: A “rocky” rereading of Samuel Taylor Coleridge through Charles Sanders Peirce
- Disability in African films: A semiotic analysis
- Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir
- Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
- Is meaning information? Some thoughts on linguistic ambiguity, embodied emotion, and the making of meaning
- Double binds, triadic binds
- Symbiotic symbolization by hand and mouth in sign language
- Picture, text, and imagetext: Textual polylogy
- Metonymy and its manifestation in visual artworks: Case study of late paintings by Bruegel the Elder
- Comments concerning the artist in a Peircean perspective
- Seven short comments on pragmatic semeiotic and branding
