TY - BOOK AU - Melrose,Robin TI - The Margins of Meaning: Arguments for a Postmodern Approach to Language & Text T2 - Costerus New Series SN - 9789004454934 AV - PE1 U1 - 401 23 PY - 1996/// CY - Leiden; , Boston PB - BRILL KW - Deconstruction KW - Discourse analysis KW - Language and languages KW - Philosophy N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index; Introduction -- Chapter 1: The Triumph of Technology, or What Speaks When I Speak -- Chapter 2: Potentiality and Relativity, or Meaning is in the I/Eye of the Beholder -- Chapter 3: Analysing Indeterminacy: the Search for a Quantum Theory of Language -- Chapter 4: A Postmodern Approach to Language and Text: Language as Socio-Neural Semiotic -- Chapter 5: Discourse as Poaching: the Case for a Postmodern Approach to Language and Text -- Bibliography N2 - The title of this book is inspired by Jacques Derrida and by his seminal work, The Margins of Philosophy . The study of meaning in the past thirty years has focused on core meaning, and largely ignored the margins of meaning, where much of the power of language is to be found. The present work seeks to shift this focus by taking a postmodern approach that sees meaning as an accretion of verbal, social, cultural and personal sign systems, with fluid boundaries that shrink or expand with each meaner . Chapter 1 begins with a brief examination of present-day approaches to meaning, and goes on to a deconstruction of four twentieth century linguists. Chapter 2 takes as its starting point two aspects of the 20th century scientific paradigm, non-deterministic causation and relativity, and considers a number of thinkers who have worked within this paradigm. A major aim of this work is to convince students and teachers of literary theory, cultural studies and feminist theory of the validity of a linguistics of indeterminacy , so Chapter 3 focuses on an analytical approach that models indeterminacy in language, and Chapter 4 applies the model to a newspaper editorial, a Wallace Stevens' poem, and an extract from a Patrick White novel UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004454934 ER -