Anvita Abbi / V. Prakasam
Meaning, being the core of the existential reality of language, need to be comprehended and analyzed, properly grasped and talked about. The first part of this book, Semantics, Stylistics and Pedagogics, is planned to strengthen our comprehension of the ‘meaning’ facet of language at ‘isolable’ level (lexical) and also at ‘combinatorial’ level (discoursal). The way ‘meaning’ is viewed and analyzed at different times and in different intellecting traditions is presented in the first three chapters which constitute the part called Semantics. The fourth chapter constitutes the second part of the book—Stylistics—dealing with the way ‘meaning’ is juiced out from a text. One can even say that we actually juice out meaning for a text because the meaning is actually a response from the aesthetic and cognitive capabilities of a reader. So the ‘grasping’ of meaning of a text is again a dynamic process comprising denotative, connotative and suggestive responses. The third part of the book is ‘Pedagogics’ which subsumes ‘androgogics’ too. Here we see how the language teacher who has comprehended and grasped ‘meaning’ conveys it to the student in the classroom. This conveying is actually facilitating comprehension and grasping in the minds of the students. 3
