Towards the Semantics of Music: the 20th Century
Antovic M.
In Language & History Vol.52, Issue 1 (01 May 2009), pp. 119-129.Research paper which discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some 20th century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search of the conceptualization of music, provides the most solid grounds for the foundation of a true "musico-semantics".