Last update:
2 September 2010
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Interpretation and Understanding
2003. xxii, 714 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 2604 4 / EUR 160.00 978 1 58811 414 3 / USD 240.00
e-Book
– Available from e-book platforms
Our species has been hunting for meaning ever since we departed from our cousins in the evolutionary tree. We developed sophisticated forms of communication. Yet, as much as they can convey meaning and foster understanding, they can also hide meaning and prevent comprehension. Indeed, we can never be sure that a "yes" conveys assent or that a smile reveals pleasure. In order to ascertain what communicative behavior "means", we have to go through an elaborate cognitive process of interpretation.
This book deals with how we achieve the daily miracle of understanding each other. Based on the author ’s contributions to pragmatics, the book articulates his perspective using the insights of linguistics, the philosophy of language and rhetoric, and confronting alternatives to it. Theory formation is shaped by application to fields of human activity – such as legal practice, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, the media, literature, aesthetics, ethics and politics – where interpretation and understanding are paramount. Using an accessible language, this is a book addressed to specialists as well as to anyone interested in interpreting understanding and understanding the potentialities and limits of interpretation.
Table of contents
“[...] as the reader can find in this collection of essays, Dascal's contribution to pragmatics has been enormous and highly valuable. The range of perspectives and objects of analysis that he had undertaken in the last decades is incredibly wide, covering not only typical aspect of pragmatic analysis, but also other areas not often (or not sufficiently) studied within pragmatics.”
Francisco Yus, University of Alicante, Spain, on Linguist List Vol. 15-638, February 2004.
“This book provides valuable insights on a impressively rich set of topics, also managing to link them in a unitary design.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics