Relationship In Thinking Patterns, Conventionality Of Language And Meaning Analysis

The study of meaning is always the center of linguistics. Because of the inseparability of language, thought and the world, it haunted philosophy, psychology and logic. A great number of theories and approaches of these disciplines are widely used in meaning study;this vigorously accelerated the development of meaning study. Thus a lot of meaning theories and approaches are obtained in an extensive range of field. Judging from what I have learned, they seem to be discrete outside. For example: the viewpoints of different schools are not exhaustedly the same, some of them are even opposite;some of them do not have the last word.Two main points are to be clarified in this thesis. One is the relationship between thinking patterns, conventionality of language and meaning analysis. The other is to form a complete network of meaning theories that can base them on the common background.In Chapter 1, I have reviewed some key meaning theories to show their surface discretion, and concluded the causes that make them so: these theories are advanced at the different historical stages;theories as such are developmental;they are tightly related to thought and conventionality, while, thought can not be studied directly at present, and conventionality is of great flexibility. In addition, I have illustrated the feasibility of this study: they have the same foundation, i.e. no theories are beyond the studies of thought, the world and conventionality;they have the same objective— to study the meaning of language;and they have the same ultimate aim—to get utterance meaning.Chapter 2 and 3 proceed from the basic relationship between language, thought and the world and end with conventionality of language and the theory of grammaticalization. I try to throw light on the relationship between thinking patterns, conventionality of language and meaning analysis. Cognitive semantics and mental representational theory originate from the basic relationship between language and thought;Truth-conditional theory and referential theory start with the basic relationship between language and the world;conventionality and grammaticalization can be used to interpret almost all the variations of language in linguistic structures and meaning. In addition, in the end of chapter 3, a tentative conclusion about the first point is drawn up: the basic laws of the world determines the basic principles of thought, thinking patterns and linguistic patterns, including meaning, change with the changes of the world, thinking innovating is the immediate motivation of the evolutions of linguistic patterns and meaning;conventionalization andgrammaticalization are the main mechanisms. When new linguistic patterns and new meaning are conventionalized, in turn, they will influence habitual thinking. Thinking patterns and linguistic patterns are interactive and develop in a spiral line.In Chapter 4, 5 and 6, I have presented and analyzed the functions of some conventionalized rules in meaning analysis respectively, like phonological rules, grammatical rules, semantic rules and pragmatic rules, according to the two cardinal lines: referential theory and mental representational theory, from the three different levels of meaning: word meaning, sentence meaning and utterance meaning, taking the methods of comparison, rearrangement and introspection, for the purposes of further demonstrating the relationship between meaning analysis, thinking patterns and conventionality of language. On the other hand, attempting to sort out their internal correlations and finding out their similarities and complementarities to establish a complete network that makes them easier to be understood. For example, logic inference is the base of formal semantics;pragmatic inference is the base of pragmatics;Frege's principle of compositionality, Hjemslve's componential analysis and Chomsky's T-G grammar are the base of the theories to analyze word meaning and sentence meaning. Katz and Fodor's semantic theory, Fillmore's case grammar, Jackendoff's conceptual structure semantics and the theory of situations are the development of these three theories.Finally, for ease of understanding and applying the meaning theories to practice, I attempt to form a network by drawing a figure sketchily showing that all the meaning theories are connected in one way or another, and each plays one or more role/s in meaning analysis, all together, they serve as part of the general enterprise: to get utterance meaning.