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Semantic Axiom Number One

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Martin Joos*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto

Abstract

The heuristic principle of empirical discovery in semantics, as in all other understanding, is here derived from the particular case of words apprehended as mysterious in their environment; it is the rule that the best guess is that one which maximizes the redundancy of word and environment together. But the environment cannot be exclusively delimited; it is partly wordy and partly wordless, partly factual and partly fictionally invented, partly past and partly future, and so on without limit. Thus correspondence meaning (Hill 1970) can be separated out from ‘other’ meaning(s) only conceptually and then only for the moment; as soon as one tries to employ the distinction, it vanishes.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Linguistic Society of America 1972

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