Between relativism and absolutism

towards an emergentist definition of meaning potential

Mika Lähteenmäki

pp. 91-113

in: Finn Bostad, Craig Brandist, Lars Evensen, Faber (eds), Bakhtinian perspectives on language and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

The dialogical "meaning as a potential" approach can be seen as a critique of those mainstream theories of semantics and pragmatics which take for granted the idea that a linguistic expression has an invariant linguistic meaning or a semantic representation independent of actual situated language use.¹ In dialogism, this view is rejected and a linguistic expression is considered as a relatively open meaning potential, that is, a multiplicity of possible meanings. Thus, a linguistic expression represents a meaning resource which attains a fixed and specific meaning only as a result of dialogical interaction between speaker and listener in a certain social context. It is noteworthy that, within a dialogical approach to language, there are slightly different views concerning the applicability of the notion of meaning potential. For instance, Per Linell (1998: 118) sees it first and foremost as an alternative model of lexical semantics, whereas R. Rommetveit's (1988) "linguistic expressions' seem to include both words and sentences.

Cited authors

Linell Per