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Verb and Context: The impact of shared knowledge on TAME categories
Edited by Susana Rodríguez Rosique and Jordi M. Antolí Martínez
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 34] 2023
► pp. 307–326

Meaning, degrees of abstraction and shared knowledge

| Universitat d’Alacant

Human communication has proven to be a complex, multi-layered phenomenon, embracing social and individual, abstract and concrete, conceptual and referential elements. This complexity has found its reflection in the several linguistic branches devoted to its study: cognitive and functional linguistics, semantics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, conversational analysis, among others. Far from excluding each other, these different strands can be complementary and contribute to a better understanding of human communication and the semiotic system attached to it. The main objective of this chapter is to bring together the knowledge on human communication, language and meaning construction in order to relate meaning with its different levels of abstraction and pinpoint a definition of shared knowledge.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Language and meaning
  • 3.Language and abstraction levels
    • 3.1Form, meaning and transmitted knowledge
    • 3.2Degrees of transmitted knowledge
    • 3.3Transmitted knowledge and language segmentation
  • 4.Cultural models, shared knowledge and common ground
  • 5.An intermediate degree of abstraction: Form, meaning and context
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.34.13san
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