General language

General language

Use this category for general terms related to languages.

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General language

nominal realism

Language; General language

Jean Piaget uses this term to refer to the way in which young children sometimes appear to have difficulty in separating the labels which we give to things from the things themselves, as if such ...

Marshall McLuhan's notion that 'the medium is the message' can be seen as a semiotic concern: to a semiotician the medium is not 'neutral'. Each medium has its own technical constraints, affordances ...

object

Language; General language

Term used in Peirce's triadic model of the sign to describe the referent of the sign - what the sign 'stands for'. Note that unlike Saussure's abstract signified, the referent is an object in the ...

ontology

Language; General language

This philosophical term (from metaphysics) refers to assertions or assumptions about the nature of reality: about what 'the real world' is like and what exists in it. It concerns what Foucault called ...

reductionism

Language; General language

Reductionism involves the reduction of explanatory factors involved in some phenomenon to a single primary function or cause.

redundancy

Language; General language

Broadcast codes have what information theorists call a high degree of redundancy - texts using such codes are structurally simple and repetitive ('overcoded').

referent

Language; General language

What the sign 'stands for'. In Peirce's triadic model of the sign this is called the object. In Saussure's dyadic model of the sign a referent in the world is not explicitly featured - only the ...