This book explores the 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 (1889–1957). 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. 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. McElvenny also examines the background to the ideas espoused in Ogden’s book The Meaning of Meaning, co-authored with I. A. Richards, along with the application of these ideas in Ogden’s international language project Basic English.

This work meets the highest standards of scholarship by any measure. It is masterly in combining succint and broad-ranging coverage. Without exception, the topics treated are carefully reasoned and clearly expressed in every detail. The writing is lively and engaging, infected in places, one ventures to guess, by Ogden’s whimsical approach to style… Ogden allows McElvenny to work with a fine brush and create an overview of intellectual history in the 20th century, integrated to a degree that is all too rarely seen... The breadth and depth of McElvenny’s impeccable work more than earns him the right to title his book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. -- W. Terrence Gordon, Dalhousie University * Historiographia Linguistica *

James McElvenny is a Researcher in the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Co-operation” at the University of Siegen, and has previously held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Potsdam. He is the author of Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism (EUP, 2018), and editor of The Limits of Structuralism (2023) and Form and Formalism in Linguistics (2019).