The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China: Normative Models for Words (SUNY series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) - Hardcover

Geaney, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1438488939 ISBN 13: 9781438488936

Verlag: SUNY Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Posits the origin of a specifically Chinese concept of "word-meaning," and sheds new light on the linguistic ideas in early Chinese philosophical texts.

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded-and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered-yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings.

The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text."

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Geaney is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Richmond. She is the author of Language as Bodily Practice in Early China: A Chinese Grammatology, also published by SUNY Press, and On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: SUNY Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1438488939
• ISBN 13: 9781438488936
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar