What Is Meaning?

In the same way as Descartes defined body & soul, linguistic expression & meaning can be defined as extensive & divisible & as inextensive & indivisible respectively. Linguistic meaning is analyzed in a model containing (1) the situation or scene of communication, (2) the physical utterance act, (3) the inextensive thought which is what the utterance counts as, & (4) the situation that the thought is a representation of. The thought is inextensive in time & space, but organized in a logical hierarchy of conceptual meaning included in propositional meaning, informational meaning, & interactional meaning. Such a model of linguistic meaning makes it possible to make a functional analysis of, among other things, the overwhelming amount of monosemiation of the almost always polysemic lexemes of language. 14 References. Adapted from the source document