Four Hypotheses On Meaning

Steering sideward from the morphographical study of meaning,the paper presents an ideophilosophical perspective.Stressing the existence of out-of-mind meaning and out-of-language meaning,the author proposed four hypotheses on meaning:An Architecture Hypothesis of Meaning,Inexpressibility Hypothesis,Innatism Hypothesis and Intersection Hypothesis.This thesis pains to illuminate the reader's intellectual curiosity through a new access to the study of meaning.The paper is built on two presumptions that there exists meaning out of mind and there exists meaning out of designated forms.The out-of-mind meaning is called Transcenotional meaning in this paper, while the conscious meaning out of designated forms is called Inner meaning;and the meaning signified by language form and other signs is called Morphographical Meaning while the meaning that has no external forms or the external-form-free meaning is called Formless meaning.One humble man or even an ideal sum of human can not grasp the whole set of meaning;meaning is not to penetrate into human mind fully for the limits of human faculty;one's conscious Inner meaning is by no way designated totally by his language forms.Limits of mind are the limits of one's world while limits of language are not the limits of one's mind.Object reality can not be fully embodied by thought which in turn can not be fully expressed by the signs of language.Meaning is optically designated by language;to fully obtain the essence of world through language is impossible.Where there is mind there is meaning;when there is mind there is meaning.Man is born with mind which is not blank,or we may make it a hypothesis that man is born with some kind of meaning whether the innate meaning is conscious or unconscious.Or to make it a compromise we are born with Meaning Acquisition Device at least.Different notion communities do not share a same meaning system. Taking into account of the diversity of respective reality and the differences of mind faculty human does not employ the same Inner Meaning.An Inner Meaning is optically designated by language;different speech community may have different options so their designated language meanings are not universally parallel.Based on non-isomeaning of different language forms to some extent,a frame work of Intermeaning is set up in this paper for the discussion of second language acquisition (SLA);A certain language is also of untranslatability for the heterogeneity of meaning in terms of Morphographical Meaning and Inner Meaning.The thesis consists of 6 chapters in all.In Chapter 1 the key research questions,the philosophical background of the research and its research methods are put forward.Chapter 2 outlines an Architecture Hypothesis on Meaning while in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 Meaning Inexpressibility Hypothesis and Meaning Innatism Hypothesis are detailed out.In Chapter 5 Intersection Set Hypothesis of Meaning is proposed and the implications of the hypothesis on SLA and translation Inequivalence are discussed.In Chapter 6 the author shows a way for the further study of the research and points out the limitations of this paper.Due to the limits of subjective and objective factors,in the research there exist some limitations.Meaning,meaning acquisition process and translation are too complicated to be formalized and represented by calculation formulas which are adopted in this paper;in the paper limited means are used to mean limitless meaning in term that while proposing that meaning is of inexpressibility as well as the world,the paper still adopts concrete language forms to illustrate the inexpressibility of meaning.Many new terms and original claims are put forward,which pays the forfeit that it may cause troubles for the readers in the understanding of the paper.