The Body in Language
About this book
This book opposes the position that meanings can be explained by way of intralinguistic relations, as in structural linguistics and its successors, and rejects definitional descriptions of meaning as well as naturalistic accounts. The idea that we are able to live by strings of mere signifiers is shown to rest on a misconception. Ruthrof also attempts an explanation of why arguments grounded in a post-Saussurean view of language, as for instance certain feminist theories, find it so difficult to show how precisely the body can be reclaimed as an integral part of linguistic signs. In reinstating the body in language, Ruthrof draws on Peirce, Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, cognitive linguistics and rhetoric, as well as on the writings of Helen Keller.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-title
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The corporeal turn
- Chapter 2: There is no meaning in language
- Chapter 3: Meaning as quasi-perceptual
- Chapter 4: The body in deixis and reference
- Chapter 5: Sign rapport: meaning as intersemiotic
- Chapter 6: Sign conflict: meaning as heterosemiotic
- Chapter 7: The disembodiment of the signifier
- Chapter 8: The corporeality of the signified
- Chapter 9: Social traces in abstract expressions
- Chapter 10: The role of the community
- Chapter 11: Sufficient semiosis
- Chapter 12: Semantic assumptions
- Chapter 13: Meaning, metaphysics and representation
- Afterword: Corporeal semantics and the obsolete body
- Bibliography
- Index
