Meaning and emotion

This dissertation may be divided into two parts. The first part is about the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission. This model, introduced here, is meant to better explain how humans communicate and understand each other. It has been developed to apply to cases that were left unexplained by the two main models of communication found in contemporary philosophy and linguistics, i.e. the code/semantic model (including ‘super-semantic’ models, natural codes, etc.) and the Gricean/pragmatic model (including neo- and post-Gricean models). I focus on why these two models cannot apply to cases where one communicate through spontaneous emotional expressions and how the Extended Gricean Model of information transmission does. The second part of the dissertation is about what emotional signs mean, in various senses of the term ‘mean’. I review existing theories of meaning and see how they apply to emotional signs, i.e. signs which give us information about the affective state of the sign producer (the discussion include natural meaning, probabilistic meaning, sender-receiver games, teleosemantics, speech act theory, speaker-meaning, and ostensive-inferential communication).

Publication year:2021

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open