RUMSEY, ALAN, Meaning and Use in Ngarinyin Kin Classification: A Rejoinder to Scheffler , Oceania, 54:4 (1984:June) p.323 Meaning and Use in Ngarinyin Kin Classification: A Rejoinder to Scheffler. Alan Rumsey· Both the present contribution by Scheffler and earlier private corres- pondence with him have been very useful in pointing up some ways in which m}' article could have been , improved. First, I should have been more careful in my use of <the word 'meaning', or avoided it altogether. Max Black (1968:163) has called tills term 'a Casanova of a word in its appetite for ·association:;'. Ogden and Richards (1930, chap. 9) purport to show that the · tenn has at least 23 distinct senses. In one of these senses, 'mean' is used more or less synonymously with 'refer · to': A person discussing the remark 'The President went to India' might say 'That moans Harry Truman, not F.D.R.'. Clearly, though, there is a sense of 'meaning' in which Harry Truman is no part of the meaning of the words 'the President'. A French translation of that sentence will make no mention of Henri Truman; nor will you find Truman mentioned in any dictionary definitions of ·preside.nt'. 'Means' in the sentence has the same sense as 'refers to' (Cooper 1973,17-8). The latter sense of 'mean' was clearly the one intended in the final, offending sentence of the following: ... there are differences between the singular referent [terms] and .the plural referent ones with respect to widening: the latter undergo it much more than the fanner. Notice, for example, that it is a plural-referent tenn for 'mother' which is used in the text [po 183] to refer -to 'all women of the opposite moiety'. Similarly, the use of garndingirri to mean 'a group of males of my mother.'s agnatic line', is far more frequent than the use of garndingi to me. an MoFa' (Rumsey 1981:186) . From the parallelism set up between tbe final two sentences by the connective word 'Similarly', it is clear that 'means' in the latter is used as a mere stylistic variant of 'refers to' in the former. But elsewhere in the article the tenn s 'mean' and 'meaning' arc consistently 'Used in the 'sense of "meaning" , in which Harry Truman is no part of the meaning of the words "the President"'. When I say that ·the meani1'.3 of, for example, the term ngajirri varies depending on its context of OCCO.lrrencc, I am obviously not just talking about variability of concretf; reference; all kin temlS (and almost all other common nouns) · in every language have variab le 'meanings' in that sense. Rather, what is of interest is the systematic vadation in . the sense of some Ngarinyin terms - in what Scheffler calls their 'significata'. The terms which are mainly at issue (in Rumsey 1981: are the various suffixed fonos of the roots garndi-, and In .. University of Sydney. 1 For the pattern of suffixation, see now Rum$eY 1982a, p. 46-51. In my 1981 article, I uSl;!d the first-person singular propositus forms of these terms as citation forms, whei"eas here I will cite the unsuffixed roots. In his introductory precis of my argument Scheffler (above, p. 1) uses rus own glosses [or thes£ terms, but the differences between his glosses and mine are of no consequence [or the present discussion. Copyright (cj 2002 ProQuest Information and Learning Company Copyright (cj Oceania Publications 323