内容简介：
The author has developed a theory of speech which stresses the fact that speech is no bilateral affair consisting of articulate sounds as distinct from meaning, but is really quadrilateral, requiring a speaker, listener, words, and things to be spoken about. The speech arises from a desire of a speaker to acquaint a listener with the "thing-meant." The listener must think as actively as the speaker and must draw upon his past experiences with the speech symbol to identify his thinking with that of the speaker. Words in themselves do not mean anything, although they may represent sentences when supplemented by figures of speech, gesture, or past experience on the part of listener and speaker. Word-function is "the work which a spoken word has to perform in order to present the thing meant by the speaker in the formal character in which he must be supposed to have intended the listeners to see it." Word-function is distinguished from word-form, which the author discusses in reference to syntax, grammar, and the internal and external attributes of the word. The sentence, not the word, is the unit of actual speech and differs from language because it is language meaningfully applied to some state of things and purposely addressed to some listener. Speech is elastic, so that two sentences with the same words may have entirely different meanings, depending on the various factors concerned, such as sentence form, word order, meaning of silence, and the uses of various parts of speech. The book contains detailed discussions and illustrations of these various points. These are based on examples found in the English language, although other languages are freely drawn upon. The author compares his theories with those of others, particularly Jespersen, Ries and Wundt. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
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