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Introductory models and basic concepts: meaning
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Introductory models and basic concepts: meaning
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Please click here to ensure that Berlo's comments on meaning are displayed - they are used for navigating this section.
As Cherry puts it in On Human Communication,
...though many different pairs of people may say 'the same thing' (linguistically) on different occasions in conversation, each occasion, as an event, is observably different in many aspects from the others; such differences depend upon people's accents, their past experiences, their present states of mind, the environment, the future consequences of interpreting the message, knowledge of each other, and many other factors.
Cherry (1977)
If meanings were found in words, it would follow that any person could understand any language or code. Clearly we cannot, since some people have meanings for some codes and others do not. Some people have meanings for the signs of Mandarin Chinese and others don't. You can only get the meaning if you know the code.
It's worth bearing in mind that the term 'sign' is used by students of Communication to refer to signs in codes other than language. It might seem obvious that people from whatever culture would interpret the signs of photographs in a similar manner, but the evidence is that the meanings read from photographic texts are very different for two people who don't share the same photographic code. Indeed, research has even shown that peoples in remote areas who had not previously been exposed to communication in the form of drawings or photographs on paper had some difficulty in recognizing that photographic portraits portrayed people at all.
Interpersonal Communication: Language
Introduction to semiotics
Semantic differential
Fish on anti-formalism
Fish on interpretive communities
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