The Language of the Sciences and the Language of Literature
Because of the socially conventional (and not empirically given) nature of language as a sign system, there is always an inherent ambiguity, an element of playfulness, a likelihood of game and error in language. This inherent play in language is treated in different ways by different discourses. The languages of the sciences try to reduce this playfulness, this indeterminacy and ambiguity, while the language of literature very often enhances, intensifies, and plays with this inner undecidedness in language, in order to make language even more expressive
Review questions
1. Why is it not possible for human beings to exchange meaning directly in communication?
2. What does it mean that there is an arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified?
3. Is the empirical reality part of language as a sign system?
4. Why is literariness not an objective category?
Task/groupwork
1. Choose a literary text and work out a plan for using it as an example in a language class for the explanation of how meaning depends on the historical, cultural, individual context of the reader.
2. Choose a scientific text and a literary text and work out an exercise for language students to compare the linguistic differences between them.