Between Relativism and Absolutism: Towards an Emergentist Definition of Meaning Potential

Abstract

The dialogical ‘meaning as a potential’ approach can be seen as a critique of those mainstream theories of semantics and pragmatics which take for granted the idea that a linguistic expression has an invariant linguistic meaning or a semantic representation independent of actual situated language use.1 In dialogism, this view is rejected and a linguistic expression is considered as a relatively open meaning potential, that is, a multiplicity of possible meanings. Thus, a linguistic expression represents a meaning resource which attains a fixed and specific meaning only as a result of dialogical interaction between speaker and listener in a certain social context. It is noteworthy that, within a dialogical approach to language, there are slightly different views concerning the applicability of the notion of meaning potential. For instance, Per Linell (1998: 118) sees it first and foremost as an alternative model of lexical semantics, whereas R. Rommetveit’s (1988) ‘linguistic expressions’ seem to include both words and sentences.