EVALUATIVE MEANING AND ITS CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE

Abstract

In the framework of traditional descriptive semantics, evaluative meaning is defined as an aspect of affective meaning. By virtue of its general positive and negative evaluation, evaluative mean-ing finds its place in the compartment of interpersonal meaning in functional linguistics. The concept of evaluative meaning is also in agreement with the categorisation of meaning in contem-porary stylistics. Having stated its spread and disagreement with logic, the cultural significance of evaluative meaning is analysed in this article. Employing the contextual and binary methods of analysis, it has been shown that much of cultural significance in fiction and the image of culture in general owes much to evaluative meaning. It is both plain evaluation and its emotive compo-nent that increase the potential of evaluative meaning in fiction and render most delicate senses in it. In fiction, evaluative meaning ranges from rude and moderate name calling to metaphor and irony at the other extreme. The chosen methods appear sufficient in the analysis of evaluative meaning, while its expressiveness is shown to gain much because of its logical inconsistency. Like any rational description of language, the linguistic analysis of research material is a fundamental engagement in language study. Like any rational un-dertaking of man, the linguistic analysis of meaning is expected to comply with the rules of logic and concrete methodological principles. The linguistics of the twentieth century had seen much formalised analysis of language, which defi-nitely gratified some of the authors as an exercise in formal reasoning rather than as an adequate description of natural human language. One of the prob-lems of natural human language is that it is idiomatic and deviant, which means that it often defies logic and this is obvious in the analysis of meaning. A gen-eral question that this paper addresses concerns the socio-cultural significance of evaluative meaning. It further concerns rational treatment of the linguistic phenomena to which logic applies in the least. A more specific question would be that of the method which would apply to the analysis of the most delicate aspects of meaning which we encounter in statements like the following:

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.