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Religious Meaning (1)

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Religious Meaning (1) What is the meaning that religious adherents derive from their faith? Certainly it seems compelling, even if not communicable to those who have ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Religious Meaning (1)


1
Religious Meaning (1)
  • What is the meaning that religious adherents
    derive from their faith? Certainly it seems
    compelling, even if not communicable to those who
    have not experienced that reality.
  • Religion can be seen as the sacralization of
    identity, which presupposes order and consistency
    in our views of reality. It becomes meaningful in
    acts ritual, prayer, mystical encounters. As in
    myth, the language of religion is closed and
    self-supporting, not easily translated or
    transferred from one culture to another.

2
Religious Meaning (2)
  • Meaning is formed by acts of communication and
    has to be recreated in those acts time and again.
    It is always possible to reduce religion to
    anthropology or social science, but such
    explanations are ultimately unsatisfying, lacking
    the emotion-laden demonstration of a man's place
    in a meaningful world.

3
Pragmatic Meaning (1)
  • Pragmatics studies the ways that context affects
    meaning. The two primary forms of context
    important to pragmatics are linguistic context
    and situational context. Linguistic context
    refers to the language surrounding the phrase in
    question. The importance of linguistic context
    becomes exceptionally clear when looking at
    pronouns in most situations, the pronoun him in
    the sentence "Joe also saw him" has a radically
    different meaning if preceded by "Jerry said he
    saw a guy riding an elephant" than it does if
    preceded by "Jerry saw the bank robber" or "Jerry
    saw your dog run that way"

4
Pragmatic Meaning (2)
  • Situational context, on the other hand, refers
    to every non-linguistic factor that affects the
    meaning of a phrase. Nearly anything can be
    included in the list, from the time of day to the
    people involved to the location of the speaker or
    the temperature of the room. An example of
    situational context at work is evident in the
    phrase "it's cold in here", which can either be a
    simple statement of fact or a request to turn up
    the heat, depending on, among other things,
    whether or not it is believed to be in the
    listener's power to affect the temperature.

5
Pragmatic Meaning (3)
  • . A request, for example, has as its
    illocutionary point to direct someone to do
    something. Its perlocutionary effect may be the
    doing of the thing by the person directed.
    Sentences in different grammatical moods, the
    declarative, imperative, and interrogative, tend
    to perform speech acts of specific sorts. But in
    particular contexts one may perform a different
    speech act using them than that for which they
    are typically put to use. Thus, as noted above,
    one may use a sentence such as "it's cold in
    here" not only to make an assertion but also to
    request that one's auditor turn up the heat.

6
Pragmatic Meaning (4)
  • When we speak we perform speech acts. A speech
    act has an illocutionary point or illocutionary
    force. For example, the point of an assertion is
    to represent the world as being a certain way.
    The point of a promise is to put oneself under an
    obligation to do something. The illucutionary
    point of a speech act must be distinguished from
    its perlocutionary effect, which is what it
    brings about.
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