The Language Impact - Evolution -- System -- Discourse - Alwin Frank Fill
7. General Semantics (Korzybski, Hayakawa, Stuart Chase)
The Language Impact - Evolution -- System -- Discourse - Alwin Frank Fill
Alwin Frank Fill [+]
University of Graz
Alwin Frank Fill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Graz, Austria. His previous books include Ökolinguistik: Eine Einführung (Gunter Narr, 1993), Das Prinzip Spannung (Gunter Narr, 2003 (2nd ed. 2007)) and (co-edited together with Peter Muhlhäusler) The Ecolinguistics Reader (Continuum, 2001).
Description
General Semantics was a movement in linguistics which is no longer regarded as a serious ‘school’ by many scholars. For the topic of this book, however, the General Semanticists are important because they believed that: 1. Language has a serious impact on thought and action (cf. Hayakawa’s book title). 2. This influence is frequently misleading and induces unnecessary suffering. 3. It is possible to overcome the negative influence of language through awareness of it: everyone should become a semanticist – semantics being understood as ‘the study of human interaction through communication’ (Hayakawa 1974: ix).