Jane Geaney, "The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China: Normative Models for Words "
English | ISBN: 1438488939 | 2022 | 279 pages | PDF | 3 MB
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.