Emotive Speech

Ogden and Richards, whose triangle of signification (word, concept, reference) has had a significant impact in evangelical hermeneutics, begin their book on the “meaning of meaning” by acknowledging that words have other functions than referential, “which may be grouped together as emotive. These can best be examined when the framework of the problem of strict statement and intellectual communication has been set up.” They note that the reverse order would be appropriate if they were focusing on “popular or primitive speech,” but conclude that “for the analysis of the senses of ‘meaning’ with which we are chiefly concerned, it is desirable to begin with the relations of thoughts, words and things as they are found in cases of reflective speech uncomplicated by emotional, diplomatic, or other disturbances.” In other words, they spend the first part of the book reflecting on the meaning of language as it is never used in real life.

Barfield had them pegged:

Taking up their claim that “it is impossible thus to handle a scientific matter in metaphorical terms,” Barfield argues “The reader is thus confronted with a long and clever book on Meaning, the authors of which have never managed to grasp its essential feature – the relation to metaphor.” They “have taken as their jumping-off place one particular, highly elaborated system of meanings, which they apparently regard as being in some way fundamental. The book is thus a painful example of the lack of just that power of detachment from the thought-forms of a particular civilization, to which I have referred. The authors of The Meaning of Meaning have never practiced the gentle art of unthinking , though it is one for which the subtlety and agility of their intellects must, as a mater of fact, make them peculiarly fitted.”

Barfield thinks they remain “under the spell of those verbal ghosts of the physical sciences, which today make up practically the whole meaning system of so many European minds,” and defends this formulation by saying that “surely nothing but a kind of enchantment could have prevented two intelligent people who had succeeded in writing a treatise some four hundred pages long on the ‘meaning of meaning’ from realizing that linguistic symbols have a figurative origin.” As a result, the “book is a ghastly tissue of empty abstractions.”