A INDETERMINAÇÃO DO SIGNIFICADO E A METALINGUAGEM

Abstract

The concept of indeterminacy and of its linguistic manifestations such as vagueness, ambiguity, indirectivity and metaphor imply the possibility of the existence of opposing phenomena such as literality, determinacy and semantic transparency. In this paper, this dichotomy is treated as problematic. As result, we propose a conceptualization of indeterminacy where this is viewed not as a characteristic of interaction or discourse processing, but as a phenomenon of metalanguage. Aspects of discourse which seem to reflect a set of assumptions about the stability of meaning are analysed and treated as evidence of the metalinguistic nature of (in)determinacy.