Readership: This is a non-technical book which will interest linguists, philosophers, students of communications and cultural studies, semioticians/semanticists, sociologists, and anthropologists.
Rudi Keller, Professor of German Linguistics, Heinrich Heine University, Dusseldorf
Introduction: Signs in Everyday Life Part I: Two Notions of Signs 1: Plato's Instrumental Notion of Signs 2: Aristotle's Representational Notion of Signs 3: Frege's Representational Notion of Signs Part II: Semantics and Cognition 5: Conceptual Realism versus Conceptual Relativism 6: Types of Concepts versus Types of Rules 7: Expression and Meaning Part III: Sign Emergence 8: Basic Techniques of Interpretation 9: Inferential Procedures 10: Arbitrariness versus Motivatedness Part IV: Sign Metamorphosis 11: Iconification and Symbolification 12: Metaphorization, Metonymization and Lexicalization 13: Literal and Metaphorical Sense 14: Rationality and Implicatures Part V: The Diachronic Dimension 15: Costs and Benefits of the Metaphoric Technique 16: The Metaphoric Use of Modal Verbs 17: The Epistemic Weil Summary
