General semantics

Keith Allan
Table of contents

General semantics was a movement initiated by the work of Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) in Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics (1933), propagated through the journal ETC., by Stuart Chase (1938, 1954), and probably best known to linguists from the work of S. I. Hayakawa (1949). Its aim is “The study and improvement of human evaluative processes with special emphasis on the relation to signs and symbols, including language” (Chase 1954: 128). Korzybski wrote:

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