Table Of ContentVarieties of Tone
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Varieties of Tone
Frege, Dummett and the Shades of
Meaning
Richard D. Kortum
East Tennessee State University, USA
© Richard D. Kortum 2013
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-26353-7
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-44259-1 ISBN 978-1-137-26354-4 (eBook)
DOI10.1057/9781137263544
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Sir Michael Dummett, whose thoughts on language and meaning are
in large part the foundation upon which this book is built, was as
sharp, as deep, and as brilliant a philosopher as this or any age has
seen. In the bustling streets beneath the ivory towers he stood out as
an equally remarkable person. His was truly a good life, a model of
the highest order of human excellence. To him I owe an emperor’s
fortune. I revere him tremendously. I miss him terribly.
With boundless affection I dedicate this book,
To Michael
A nobler knight shall England ne’er see shining.
Sleep well, good Sir. Sleep well.
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments x i
Introduction 1
Part I Historical Preliminaries
1.1 Historical Preliminaries 11
1.2 Frege’s Ingredients of Meaning 15
1.3 Theory of Meaning: Dummett’s Canonical Framework 2 2
Part II Varieties of Tone
2.1 Varieties of Tone 33
2.2 Frege’s Hints and Colors 40
2.3 Active vs. Passive Voice and Nominative–Dative
Transformations 47
2.4 Onomatopeia, Assonance, and Alliteration 51
2.5 Dialect, Subject, and Style Labels 53
2.6 ‘Perspiration’ and ‘Sweat’ 65
2.7 ‘Dead’ and ‘Deceased’ 67
2.8 ‘Doggie’ and ‘Bunny’ 70
2.9 ‘Woman’ and ‘Lady’ and ‘Vous’ and ‘Tu’ 72
2.10 Poetic Language 75
2.11 The Adverbs ‘Still’, ‘Already’, and ‘Yet’ 82
2.12 Conjunctions and the Limits of Truth-Table Logic 87
2.13 Expressive Terms: Pejoratives and Honorifics 102
2.14 Evocatives: Profanity and Other Taboos 119
2.15 Funny Words: The Language of Humor 134
2.16 Interjections 143
2.17 Sentence Adverbs 149
2.18 Conducive Questions 165
2.19 Hyperonyms and Hyponyms 178
2.20 A Taxonomy of Tone 181
vii
viii Contents
Part III Tone and the Representational
Character of Meaning
3.1 Tone and the Representational Character of Meaning 191
3.2 Shades of Sense 1 93
3.3 Towards a Comprehensive Formula 198
3.4 Theory of Meaning Revisited 222
Notes 233
Bibliography 2 43
Index 2 51
Preface
And though she tried her best to help me, she could steal but she could
not rob.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
This book is about language. It is not about any particular language,
like English or French or Mandarin Chinese, say, or Latin, or ancient
Sumerian. It is about language in general – language p er se. More specifi-
cally, this book is about meaning . Not the meaning of life, mind you. You
can look for that in a Monty Python movie. No, this book is about some-
thing rather more mundane. It’s about what makes a mark or a string
of marks, or a particular utterance or string of uttered sounds, mean-
ingful. That is to say, it’s about the concept of meaning as this applies
to sentences, words, and other components of words and sentences –
seemingly little things, like prefixes, suffixes, punctuation and intona-
tion patterns, and stress, for example. These kinds of things belong to all
languages. This book is also about the ways in which all these elements
can be mixed together to form a whole, an entire system of meaningful
sounds and marks, the rules of which enable us to form thoughts, to
speak and to write these thoughts, and thus, ultimately, to communi-
cate our thoughts back and forth with each other.
Most particularly, this book is about what can informally be called the
three basic ‘ingredients’ of meaning, nowadays known as sense , force ,
and tone . To be sure, these are not household terms. They’re theorists’
appellations. Even so, they’re simple enough to explain. This is mainly
because they designate things about which every speaker already knows.
This book, then, is about things that are, as a matter of actual practice,
intimately familiar to each of us. It is about ordinary, everyday sorts
of things – things that even young children know – like the difference
in meaning between the words ‘and’ and ‘but’. Virtually every English
speaker past the age of three or four knows how to use these two simple
words. We instantly recognize the difference between the sentences ‘It
is snowing and Billy is happy’ and ‘It is snowing, but Billy is happy’. And
yet. When it comes to explaining exactly what it is that we all know
so well – that which enables us to do what we do, which is speak the
language – I suspect that most of us as experienced adults feel at a loss.
ix
