Description
It never got its due in academic circles, despite an erudition arguably surpassing that of any other work on the subject before or since. The authors, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, had little time for linguistics, but The Meaning of Meaning (1923) would have a strong impact on the field, mainly from an appendix by Bronisław Malinowski which overshadowed the book proper. Ogden’s and Richards’s proposal of an international auxiliary language called ‘Basic English’ would receive worldwide attention, and would even inspire one of the century’s great novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Yet the centenary of The Meaning of Meaning passed with little notice.This CISPELS meeting is an appropriate occasion on which to re-examine the book and its treatment of the history of attempts to conquer meaning from the pre-Socratics up to the first decades of the 20th century, and including Asian as well as European traditions. Its writing was triggered by its authors’ shared belief that the abuse of linguistic meaning was what occasioned the First World War, and that the future of humankind rested on enlightened analysis of meaning, so that governments could never again fool the populace into supporting international hostilities.
Ogden had been a protégé of Victoria, Lady Welby, and was associated with the circle of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. He translated Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and published it in the important book series which he created and ran. His and Richards’s account of earlier and contemporary analysis of meaning in some ways reveal more about how people thought about meaning than does the actual literature they discuss.
Malinowski’s appendix, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, would have a shaping influence on British linguistics through J. R. Firth, and on French linguistics through Émile Benveniste, whose work on enunciation theory was grounded in a close reading of Malinowski. For 20th-century European linguistics, Benveniste is a key figure in the struggle to expand structuralism so as to complement its focus on the semiotic with what he called le sémantique, the semantic, which includes the act of uttering, bringing speakers, sujets parlants or ‘speaking subjects’, into the analysis – along with hearers, in relation to whom speakers are positioned and indeed constructed. For Benveniste, meaning cannot be grasped by the semiotic alone. This too is part of the neglected heritage of The Meaning of Meaning. If the 20th is the semantic century, this is its key text, pulling together all that went before and projecting enduring futures.
| Period | 9 Oct 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Coordinamento Intersocietario per la Storia del Pensiero Linguistico e Semiotico (CISPELS): Storie del significato: il “secolo semantico” e le sue radici |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Arcavacata, ItalyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |