''This work meets the highest standards of scholarship by any measure. It is masterly in combining succinct and broad-ranging coverage. The treatment of the initial galaxy of thinkers and its lead-in to later chapters stands as a model for interdisciplinary scholarship. Without exception, the topics treated are carefully reasoned and clearly expressed in every detail. The writing is lively and engaging, infected, one suspects, in places by Ogden's whimsical approach to style, where McElvenny invents phrases such as "referential hygiene". Splendid!'W. Terrence Gordon, Dalhousie University, HalifaxIn exploring influential currents in the philosophy of language and linguistics of the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of the English scholar C. K.

Ogden, this book presents a fascinating study of the historical origin of key concepts in semantics and semiotics.Ogden was connected to several of the most significant figures of the modernist period, including Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Victoria Lady Welby, Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap. In investigating these connections, this book reveals links between early analytic philosophy, semiotics and linguistics in a crucial period of their respective histories, and in turn sheds light on the intellectual history of the early twentieth century.Within this book readers are introduced to the important interaction between Ogden's thought and Victoria Lady Welby's 'significs', Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'logical atomism' in its various forms, and the philosophy and political activism of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle. The background to the ideas espoused in Ogden's book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I. A. Richards, is also examined in detail along with the application of these ideas in Ogden's international language project Basic English.James McElvenny is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Potsdam.

Cover image: derived from Bildtafel 76 of the 1930 Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: bildstatistisches Elementarwerk, produced by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna.[EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.comISBN 978-1-4744-2503-2 [PPC]ISBN 978-1-4744-2506-3 [cover] Barcode.