Raymond Williams's Keywords: Investigating meanings 'offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed'

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 48, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 1-26

  Durant, Alan ^a  

^a MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34347300626     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8705.2006.00743.x     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Keywords, 27
2. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (eds), New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture ond Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005)
3. Bennett et al., New Keywords, xxi
4. This is not the place for a review of New Keywords. Among many examples of difference in overall approach, perhaps the most startling is that, on the website for the book (www.blackwellpublishing.com/newkeywords), under the banner 'What would your key words be?', the editors invite readers to suggest their own words to be included in a future contents list, with entries by a certain date to be entered into a prize draw
5. 'Google' is the trademarked name of the Google search engine. Increasingly, however, as occasionally happens with successful branded products, the name is adopted in (unprotected) generic use, often visible as derived forms (e.g. 'to google', 'googling', etc.). Such 'genericisation' typically involves an intermediate stage during which generic use is contested by the trademark proprietor
6. For Webopedia, visit www.webopedia.com
7. The OED is the Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com)
8. first published, in parts, as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, ed. J. A. H. Murray, H. Bradley, W. A. Craigie and C. T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1884-1928; reissued 1933); 2nd edn ed. John Simpson and Edmund Weiner (1989); 3rd edn in preparation
9. Histories of the dictionary include the memoir by K. M. Elisabeth Murray, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)
10. and, more recently, Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)
11. For a highly detailed account of what each OED entry contains and how to read it, see Donna Lee Berg, A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993)
12. John Morrish, Frantic Semantics: Snapshots of Our Changing Language (London: Pan Books, 1999)
13. Williams, Keywords, 12
14. Michel Bréal, Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning (orig. 1900), trans. Mrs Henry Cust (New York: Dover, 1964)
15. for discussion of Bréal's classification of mechanisms in semantic change, see Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Richard B. Dasher, Regularity in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 52-60
16. for discussion, see Stephen Ullmann, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), 252-3
17. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960)
18. See John Paul Russo, I. A. Richards: His Life and Work (Routledge, 1989)
19. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929), 340
20. Williams points to two difficulties he sees with Richards: an 'element of passivity in his idea of the relationship between reader and work' (Culture and Society, 244), and a concern with global communication that lacks any close-up social engagement
21. William Empson, 'Compacted Doctrines: Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society', repr. in John Haffendon (ed.), Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987), 184-9
22. Empson incorporates some sections of the review into his 'Comment for Third Edition' of The Structure of Complex Words (orig. pub. 1951; 3rd edn, London: Chatto and Windus, 1979)
23. As well as giving the title to the Williams review, 'compacted doctrines' is also an essential concept in The Structure of Complex Words. See for example the opening paragraph of ch. 2 ('Statements in Words'), 39
24. For further comparative discussion of Empson and Williams, see Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe, 'Compacted Doctrines: Empson and the Meanings of Words', in Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp (eds), William Empson: The Critical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170-95
25. Empson, 'Compacted Doctrines', 185
26. See n.18 above
27. See also the Introduction to Culture and Society, 13-19
28. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with 'New Left Review' (London: Verso, 1979), 176-7
29. See, 'Abbreviations', in Williams, Keywords, 29
30. Empson, 'Compacted Doctrines', 184
31. Empson's most vivid statement of how apparent 'unity' of meaning is achieved from a cluster of possible senses occurs in the final chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and follows the common modernist trope of a chemical reaction: 'It is these faint and separate judgments of probability which unite, as if with an explosion, to "make sense" and accept the main meaning of a connection of phrases; and the reaction, though rapid, is not as immediate as one is liable to believe. Also, as in a chemical reaction, there will have been reverse or subsidiary reactions, or small damped explosions, or slow wide-spread reactions, not giving out much heat, going on concurrently, and the final result may be complicated by preliminary stages in the main process, or after-effects from the products of the reaction. As a rule, all that you recognise as in your mind is the one final association of meanings which seems sufficiently rewarding to be the answer - "now I have understood that"; it is only at intervals that the strangeness of the process can be observed': Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 277
32. This is an inevitably simplified statement of Traugott and Dasher's 'invited inference theory of semantic change' (IITSC), in which inferences regularly associated with linguistic material are gradually conventionalised as semantic meanings. See Traugott and Dasher, Regularity in Semantic Change
33. This distinction is inevitably caught up in theoretical problems of word meaning, especially in the structuralist tradition descended from Saussure's idea of a sign's differential 'value' (and still to some extent in discussing a word's meaning as its set of sense relations within a semantic field). For discussion of the thematic tradition in dictionaries, see 'Abandoning the Alphabet', in Howard Jackson, Lexicography: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), ch. 12
34. For discussion of how the contrast between these two approaches is reflected in different kinds of research question regarding meaning change, see Traugott and Dasher, Regularity in Semantic Change, 24-6
35. The view now widely known as 'the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis' involves the claim that 'two languages may "code" the same state of affairs utilizing semantic concepts or distinctions peculiar to each language; as a result the two linguistic descriptions reflect different construals of the same bit of reality. These semantic distinctions are held to reflect cultural distinctions and at the same time to influence cognitive categorizations': John Gumperz and Stephen Levinson, 'Introduction: Linguistic Relativity Re-examined', in Gumperz and Levinson (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. The origins and subsequent history of the hypothesis are complicated, and involve not only all the celebrated words for snow, or Sapir and Whorf themselves (separately and together) but also antecedents including the eighteenth-century linguist and philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt and the nineteenth-century anthropologist Franz Boas
36. See, for example, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969)
37. Anna Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through their Key Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
38. See, for example, Eve Sweetser, From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
39. Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through their Key Words, 16
40. In her most recent book, English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Wierzbicka takes as one of her case studies the cultural loading implicit in unreflective use, as here, of the word 'reasonable'. Her analysis combines a historical account of philosophical and legal use of the expression with contemporary corpus analysis, to map not just its range of senses but how such senses work together to create a distinctive field of cultural value
41. See ch. 4 ('Being Reasonable: A Key Anglo Value and its Cultural Roots'), 103-40
42. John Lyons describes the General Semantics movement (a name for work by writers in the 1930s and 1940s including Korzybski, Chase and Hayakawa) as involving a concern 'to make people aware of the alleged dangers of treating words as something more than conventional and rather inadequate symbols for things'; he suggests the movement might be more appropriately known as 'therapeutic semantics'. See John Lyons, Semantics, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 98
43. For further discussion, see Geoffrey Leech, Semantics: The Study of Meaning, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), ch. 4 ('Semantics and Society'), 40-58
44. Interestingly, many of the examples Leech links to different types of meaning here are also in the Keywords list of headwords. Cautioning against Hayakawa's arguments in Language in Thought and Action (1949), Leech is also close to Williams on the risk of cultivating 'an over-optimistic faith in the curative power of semantics': Semantics, 57
45. Williams, Culture and Society, 18
46. Given the trajectory of Williams's work, it is not surprising that he showed little interest in 1960s theories of lexical decomposition (such as Katz and Fodor). But it is surprising he didn't engage with (for instance) notions of meaning as use in Wittgenstein, or the idea of performative utterances in Austin, or the approach to implied meaning developed by Grice. As regards lexicography, it may be unsurprising that Williams didn't engage with theoretical arguments, from the early 1970s onwards, to do with how much work is done by inference in calibrating a word's meaning in a given context. But given Williams's admiration for the OED, it seems puzzling that he never addresses the issue of how sense boundaries are established. (For a recent, thought-provoking discussion of sense boundaries, see William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 5 ('The Construal of Sense Boundaries'), 109-40
47. Empson laments lack of acceptance of The Structure of Complex Words among linguists in 'Comment for the Third Edition' (1977), viii. He says the book was in this respect 'a failure' and 'fell like a stone'
48. For a general outline of corpus linguistics, with useful discussion of lexicography, see Douglas Biber, Susan Conrad and Randi Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
49. For reading concordance lines in particular, see John Sinclair, Reading Concordances: An Introduction (London: Pearson, 2003)
50. An especially detailed account of corpus approaches to word meaning is Michael Stubbs, Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)
51. On the basis that individual uses of words involve 'a realization of widespread discourse patterns', Stubbs (in ch. 7, Words in Culture 1: Case Studies of Cultural Keywords', pp. 145-69) investigates 'constellations of repeated meanings' in corpus data, linking Williams's interest in cultural keywords to empirical corpus analysis (includes brief case studies of 'ethnic' and 'racial')
52. In this respect, reading a concordance line still draws on methods Murray outlines in his 1870 leaflet for OED volunteer readers on choosing illustrative quotations; see Winchester, The Meaning of Everything, 109
53. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973)
54. Williams, Politics and Letters, 177. The question of the means of diffusion and propagation of meanings can be asked in different ways. As Stubbs notes in his discussion of keywords, there are affinities between how Williams outlines the issue and how Dan Sperber addresses the question of how representations (which may be much longer than individual words, and might for example include verbal images or whole stories) suddenly become contagious and spread across a society. As a model for analysis (with helpful contrast between how representations can establish a tradition or how alternatively they can spread like a rapid epidemic, then just as quickly disappear), Sperber develops the idea of an 'epidemiology of representations'
55. See esp. 'Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations', in Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 56-76