Pragmatics, in contrast to both semantics and syntactics, deals with the relation of symbols to behavior. This element of meaning is increasingly recognized as important, for in communication the effective meaning of any message is what gets through to the receptor. Hence, the reactions of people to symbols are fundamental to any analysis of meaning. Words such as Americanism, Communism, propaganda , nigger, wop, dago, panty-waist passion, playboy, sex, and death саrry with them certain associations, which are often determinants of behavior. The reactions with which we are concerned here are not, however, responses to the referents in question, but to the symbols, for the same referents can be symbolized by other words which do not саrry the same behavioral overtones.

The pragmatic elements of meaning are especially important in the study of religious vocabulary, for terms often carry a heavily charged pragmatic meaning quite out of proportion to any referential value. For example, among some Pentecostal sects the expression Holy Spirit becomes almost a fetish symbol, and the response of the Pentecostal audience to such a name is almost automatic, regardless of the content of the total message. In many religious systems. Christian and non-Christian, there is a steady tendency for many terms to shift within the pragmatic area from an ethical response to an esthetic one, a shift аccomplished largely by the techniques of ritualistic embellishment. Thus many words deeply embedded in creeds have lost any immediate behavioral relevance to the people, but have become important emblems of emotional association.

The linguistic-anthropological approach to meaning has in many respects paralleled developments in symbolic logic, though the immediate area of study in the two fields is different and the approach seemingly quite divergent. This parallelism is attributable to the fact that both symbolic logicians and linguists are interested in the distribution of symbols, both in language, as the primary concern of linguistics, and in general behavior, as linguistics has touched the field of anthropology.

Except for Edward Sapir there was a tendency before World War II for American linguists to shy away from semantic studies, since a concern for structural analysis dominated the scene. Moreover, following the lead of Leonard Bloomfield, they saw little merit in trying to define the content of meaning, since presumably such a definition could be produced only by all the descriptive sciences working together to describe man's total environment and behavior. However, Bloomfield has been somewhat misunderstood, for his seemingly negative approach to meaning was in a sense a definition by restriction, for he sought to define the semantic value of symbols in terms of lexico-behavioral distinctiveness, in contrast to other symbols and their corresponding areas of distribution. He was not one to repudiate meaning as irrelevant to language or linguistic study, for in describing the relation of form to meaning, he said: "In language, forms cannot be separated from their meanings. It would be uninteresting and perhaps not very profitable to study the mere sound of a language without any consideration of meaning [but]... we must start from forms and not from meanings" (1943, p. 103).

During more recent years the stimulating work of Sapir and Whorf, together with increasing concern for symbolization in all fields of scientific inquiry, has resulted in a number of significant probes into the area of language and culture. Here the distribution of words is studied not merely in terms of where they occur within sentences, but also where they occur in all types of human behavior. Moreover, there is increasing evidence that these distributions are highly and intricately structured.

One reason for earlier tendencies to reject the relevance of the study of meaning to certain aspects of linguistics was the mistaken belief that one could not understand a word apart from some nonlinguistic acquaintance with it; and that such an acquaintance, moreover, involved evidence from òne or more of the other sciences. Of course, such evidence is often quite impossible to adduce, as in the case of such words as ambrosia, dragon, unicorn, and mermaid, and in no instance is it necessary, for the meaning is of the symbol and not of the referent (Roman Jakobson, 1959b). In the study of meaning, attention has therefore shifted from concern with the referents to the distribution of the form within the total behavior, so that, as Bloomfield (1943. p. 102) states, "The features of situation and action which are common to all utterances of a speech form are the meaning of that speech form." Zellig Harris (1940, p. 227) makes this type of definition somewhat more explicit by stating: "The meaning of a linguistic form may best be defined as the range of situations in which that form occurs. or more exactly, it is the features common to all the situations in which the form occurs and excluded from all those in which it does not."

This type of functional definition of meaning not only provides a more useful tool with which to analyze meaning; but it also suggests the very process by which terms acquire meaning, namely, through contextual conditioning. For example, the Motilones in Colombia have borrowed the Spanish word purisima "most pure" from the phrase Maria purisima "Mary, most pure", but have given it the meaning of "the devil", for they observed Spanish-speaking persons using this expression in identically the same types of contexts in which the Motilones called upon demonic powers.

This emphasis upon meaning in terms of behavior has come as a healthy antidote to traditional mentalism, for language as a mode of action is described as a system of symbols which signal behavior, and not merely as countersigns of or indices to thought. This campaign against unwarranted mentalism also had certain practical and even ethical overtones, strongly espouscd by the general semanticists and cogently stated by Aldous Huxley (1940, pp. 16 - 17), who denounces "the apparently irresistible human tendency to objectify psychological states and project them, on the wings of their verbal vehicle, into the outer world." Words like beauty, goodness, spirit, and personality are classified by Huxley as "typical vehicles of objectification. They are the cause of endless intellectual confusion, endless emotional distress and endless misdirection of voluntary effort."

责任编辑：admin