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Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

  • Melih Levi EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: March 1, 2021
Semiotica
From the journal Semiotica Volume 2021 Issue 240

Abstract

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.

Keywords: gesture; ordinary language philosophy; P. F. Strawson; poetry; semantics; speech–act theory; syntax; voice; W. V. Quine; Wallace Stevens
Corresponding author: Melih Levi, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, E-mail:

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Received: 2021-01-26
Accepted: 2021-01-31
Published Online: 2021-03-01
Published in Print: 2021-05-26

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. An introduction: use and meaning – a special issue of Semiotica devoted to Jerzy Pelc
  4. Research Articles
  5. Functional logical semiotics of natural language
  6. The manner of use, the uses and sub-uses of terms in social sciences: from the functional approach to natural language to applied semiotics and the philosophy of science
  7. Investigations of an anti-semiote: Stanisław Lem’s semiotic ideas in light of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc
  8. Metaphilosophical metamorphoses of analytic philosophy of language
  9. Four puzzling paragraphs: Frege on ‘≡’ and ‘=’
  10. On how to legitimately constrain a semantic theory
  11. Łukasiewicz, determinism, and the four-valued system of logic
  12. The representation of gappy sentences in four-valued semantics
  13. Fictional names, their use and pragmatic interpretations
  14. Names of places
  15. Groundwork for a pragmatics for formalized languages
  16. Token reflexivity and logic
  17. Indexicals and essential demonstrations
  18. On the logical form and ontology of inferences in conversational implicatures
  19. Omnipresent meaning-interdependence and ubiquitous analyticity
  20. Are representations glorified receptors? On use and usage of mental representations
  21. Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2021-0018
Keywords for this article
gesture; ordinary language philosophy; P. F. Strawson; poetry; semantics; speech–act theory; syntax; voice; W. V. Quine; Wallace Stevens

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. An introduction: use and meaning – a special issue of Semiotica devoted to Jerzy Pelc
  4. Research Articles
  5. Functional logical semiotics of natural language
  6. The manner of use, the uses and sub-uses of terms in social sciences: from the functional approach to natural language to applied semiotics and the philosophy of science
  7. Investigations of an anti-semiote: Stanisław Lem’s semiotic ideas in light of semiotic functionalism of Jerzy Pelc
  8. Metaphilosophical metamorphoses of analytic philosophy of language
  9. Four puzzling paragraphs: Frege on ‘≡’ and ‘=’
  10. On how to legitimately constrain a semantic theory
  11. Łukasiewicz, determinism, and the four-valued system of logic
  12. The representation of gappy sentences in four-valued semantics
  13. Fictional names, their use and pragmatic interpretations
  14. Names of places
  15. Groundwork for a pragmatics for formalized languages
  16. Token reflexivity and logic
  17. Indexicals and essential demonstrations
  18. On the logical form and ontology of inferences in conversational implicatures
  19. Omnipresent meaning-interdependence and ubiquitous analyticity
  20. Are representations glorified receptors? On use and usage of mental representations
  21. Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens
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