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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.
In the terminology of semiotics, Berlo is saying here that all texts need readers. Meanings do not reside within texts, but are actively constructed from those texts by readers.
All of us tend, according to Berlo, to be egocentric. In other words, we tend to interpret the world from our own vantage-point. This makes it difficult to communicate at all. It is often said that words do not mean the same to all people. It would be more accurate to say, as he proposes, that 'words do not mean at all, only people mean'.
One day, I set off to go and see my boss in his office. As I was on my way to his office, he came round the corner and bumped into me. 'Oh, Mick,' he said, 'That was very fortuitous. I was just coming to look for you.' Now, that struck me as an odd thing to say. I understood 'fortuitous' to mean what the Oxford English Dictionary says, namely: 'that happens or is produced by fortune or chance; accidental, casual.' So, since he didn't know I was going to be there and I didn't know he was going to be there, it was obviously a fortuitous encounter. How could it be 'very fortuitous'? Either it was fortuitous or it wasn't. In any case, what he said didn't seem to me to be very sensible.
Perhaps the use of the word had changed while I had been living abroad, perhaps I had never really paid that much attention to how it was used. I have noticed in the meantime that most people seem to use it to mean 'that happens or is produced by a fortunate chance', with the emphasis clearly on the good fortune.
Now, I could insist on using the term as the dictionary defines it, for example referring to a tragic accident as 'fortuitous'. If I did, though, I would be making the mistake of thinking that meanings are in the message, rather than in the message-users. If I am to communicate successfully, I have to use signs in approximately the same way as everyone else appears to use them.
What Berlo is saying here is similar to what the literary theorist Stanley Fish is saying when he talks of 'anti-formalism'. Meaning may be thought of as a formal property of sentences, without consideration of any actual occasion of their use. Equally, it may be thought of as what is in the speaker's mind at the moment the sentence is uttered. Once you accept the second view of meaning (the 'anti-formalist' view) then it follows that there are as many meanings to a sentence as there are speakers and hearers for the sentence in whatever context it is uttered. Fish quotes the linguist Ruth
Kempson:
One is thus faced with an analysis of meaning which claims that every sentence has an indeterminate number of indeterminable meaning representations. And if the meanings of sentences are indeterminable, then meaning relations between sentences such as entailment, contradiction, by definition cannot be predicted. Moreover ... it would follow that the grammaticality of sentences cannot be determined either, independent of the situation in which they are uttered. But this has the immediate consequence that one's grammar would not be predictive.
Kempson (1975)
Kempson rejects this anti-formalist view - in Fish's view she has to because she is a practising linguist - but Fish wholeheartedly accepts these consequences of the anti-formalist viewpoint, with a warning to his readers that:
once you start down the anti-formalist road, there is no place to stop; remove the connection between observable features and the specification of meaning, and you also remove everything else that is supposedly independent of context; entailment, contradiction, grammaticality itself, all become as variable and contingent and presupposition.
Fish (1989)
From this point of view, a sentence is
no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this happening -- all of it and not anything that could be said about it or any information one might take away from it -- that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence
Fish (1980)
In an examination of certain of Milton's poems, Fish argues that 'any procedure which attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail' (1980). Fish examines certain of Milton's sonnets whose meaning has always been problematic and controversial He shows how various editors of Milton's poems have used criteria such as English and Latin syntax, a variety of sources, Milton's known attitudes, Milton's use of the same words in others of his works and so on in order in order to arrive at a final meaning for the problematic sonnet. Fish criticizes this approach because it overlooks and devalues the reader's interpretive work, assuming that the text is self-sufficient, that the meaning is somehow in the text itself, whereas, for Fish, the meaning arises out of the reader's interpretive acts.
It is quite possible for two different readers to arrive at two very different readings of the same text. In such a case, says Fish, they might be tempted to complain that they couldn't possibly have been reading the same text. And they would be right, because 'each of us would be reading the poem he had made'. Fish rejects the text's independence as a repository of meaning. He emphasizes that meaning is not inherent waiting to be 'tranmsitted' to more or less passive 'receivers'. Rather, the reader's active construction of meaning is so central that it might even be more accurate to speak of writing than of reading. In the understanding of texts, there is no possibility of an 'author-centred' or somehow 'objective' interpretation. The reader will always necessarily bring to the text whatever pre-understanding she has.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that there will rarely be as many meanings as there are readers. If you are interested to see how Fish accounts fro the broad areas of agreement which do exist, you may find his notion of interpretive communities helpful.
Interpersonal Communication: Language
Introduction to semiotics
Semantic differential
Ang on meaning
Baudrillard
Fish on anti-formalism
Fish on interpretive communities
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