Meaning change and changing meaning

The changing meaning of disaster

Adverse events such as disasters are interpreted through a system of meaning provided by culture. Historically, research into society’s response to disasters provides numerous examples of community resilience in face of adversity. However, since the 1980s, numerous researchers have challenged the previous optimistic accounts and argue that such incidents result in long-term damage to the commun...

Meaning and change in psychotherapy.

Starting from two accounts of psychological change in therapeutic settings, based respectively on the analysis of metaphors (Faccio et al. 2011, this issue) and on transformative moments in self narratives (Ribeiro and Gonçalves 2011, this issue), this paper examines core processes of psychological change. Drawing on sociocultural psychology, the paper first argues that core processes of change...

The changing meaning of cohabitation and marriage.

"In the Netherlands, the social meaning of both marriage and cohabitation has changed. Cohabitation started as an alternative way of living, developed into a temporary phase before marriage, and finally became a strategy for moving into a union gradually.... This article addresses the question whether or not individual past and current life-course experiences become increasingly important in ex...

Word meaning, sentence meaning, and syntactic meaning

The lexicon has long been assumed to be the source of all conceptual content expressed by sentences. Syntactic structures have correspondingly been seen only as providing instructions for the assembly of the concepts expressed by words. Under this view, sentences have meaning, but the syntactic structures which sentences instantiate do not. This paper challenges this view: it uses the phenomeno...

Generalized Change and the Meaning of RationalityPostulatesRenata