Meaning in the Making: Meaning Potential Emerging From Acts of Meaning

This article is concerned with how meaning potential, in particular an individual's personalized meaning potential, emerges from acts of meaning. This happens during different time frames: logogenetic—the creation of meaning in text; ontogenetic—the learning of a personalized meaning potential; and phylogenetic—the evolution of the collective meaning potential. Logogenetically, a person learns through text in interaction with others, distilling meaning potential from the instantial acts of meaning and constantly revising their own personalized meaning potential, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This learning involves both learning language and learning “content” through language, locally within a single text or cumulatively over many texts. I will model both these aspects of learning and show how they vary registerially according to the contexts in which texts unfold.