Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Theories of language

Theories of language
Hansen reviewed several kinds of language theories. Firstly, referential theory holds that the meaning of a ward is the object it refers to. But this theory have big problems, for instance, it cannot explain the relationship between wards which cannot referred to in reality. The second is the entity theory which has two variants, ideational theory and propositional theory. The representative is Locke. He claims that a ward represents a mental concept and a sentence stands for a mental statement. The basic element is so called mentalese. The propositional theorists like Russel and Moore asserts that sentence represents proposition which is eternal, infinite, objective.

But what Hansen really wanted to introduce is his special insight of language, especially in interpretation and translation. He introduced Quine's radical translation which claims translation is not indeterminate because there will be always several options and no reason to say one is better than others. But Davison develops a theory claiming that the basic measure of evaluating different versions of translation is the truth which is formed by the version. This means the best version should be the one which will be able to develop a more complete truth convincing it's audience.

Miaokun's husband, Zhong Zhenyu, arrived in Singapore today. We had lunch together in arts carteen.

No comments:

Post a Comment