The Routledge Companion to Semiotics

L

LABOV

The sociolinguistic work of William Labov (b. 1927) takes the relation between social and linguistic structures as the primary object of inquiry. This can be read in two ways. On the one hand, it establishes through precise empirical work – in the analysis of phonetic variation, and in quantitative documentation and evaluation of variation – the close co-variation of linguistic form and social structure. On the other hand, it can provide the theoretical basis and detailed description of the mechanisms of linguistic change. It may be most productive to see Labov’s work as integrating sociolinguistic and historical inquiry by a single powerful assumption, namely that the ‘correlations’ which he has described are produced by social forces and processes; and that they are the same for the differences visible at the micro-level of phonetics as for the macro-level that come to constitute separate languages.

Labov’s method was to isolate an element subject to significant variation within a linguistic community, for instance the r sound which follows a vowel (post-vocalic r) in New York English (as in bear, party). He manufactured texts which differed in terms of this variable alone. This enabled him to establish its function as a marker of socio-economic position, and to describe how it functioned as a prestige-marker, correlating significantly with judgements about the speaker’s socioeconomic status, or about the status of an occasion of speaking (ranging from formal to casual).

Labov found consensus by all members of groups (in a socially stratified structure) on certain meanings. These meanings were assigned on the basis purely of chosen markers. All groups related users of the prestige forms as possessing higher earning power; in terms of physical power (‘good in a fight’), those who were of high socio-economic status tended to rate users of low-prestige forms highly, and higher than did those who themselves used the forms.

This procedure opened up what had previously been impressionistically understood as (linguistic) prejudice to quantitative description: making available a precise and new instrument for studying the mechanisms and processes of group formation, and the complex social–ideological meanings which sustain them. In microanalyses of this kind Labov could detect and describe evidence of ideological shifts and contradictions in group alliances, resistances by established groups to ‘newcomers’ – as for the residents of Martha’s Vineyard who resented and rejected incoming ‘outsiders’ using hyper-corrected forms of the local dialect.

Labov’s work has given rise to a large effort in linguistics: variation studies. His assumption that the processes which operate on the micro-level are effective in the same way at the macro-level has enabled him to work in both (as in his work on language in the inner city, on verbal duelling, for instance). In some of his work the use of the framework of transformational generative grammar with its incompatible theoretical assumptions has led him into positions at odds with his foundational work, as in his enormously influential article ‘The logic of nonstandard English’ in which the attempt is made to erase, in the description, the difference between Black English and (White) middle-class forms. (GRK)

See also SOCIOLINGUISTICS.

The term ‘language’ in common parlance has many possible meanings but, most often, these are to do with verbal expression: national languages, dialects, accents, idioms, verbs, nouns, conjugation, and so forth. For semiotics, and particularly its semiological variants, this is also sometimes the case. However, it is a definition that lacks rigour and leads to confusion about the object under discussion. While language is now widely accepted to be central to the definition of what it is to be human, there is no consensus on what language actually is. The one point of agreement that does exist, however, is that English, Turkish, Chinese and American Sign Language (ASL), for example, are to be considered as languages; ‘body language’, music, animal communication systems and other semiotic devices like traffic signals, on the other hand, are not. Thomas A. Sebeok (2001d) warns against such misleading figures of speech. Moreover, the idea that the world is ‘constructed in language’, as derived from the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and elsewhere, is multiply confusing in this respect.

Instead, contemporary semiotics proceeds from a conception of language as primarily a biological faculty of human modelling, the very constitution of the human Umwelt. This conception had already arisen in linguistics in the latter part of the twentieth century (see Augustyn 2009). Noam Chomsky and his co-workers posited an innate human propensity for language – more accurately, a Universal Grammar – which profoundly re-orientated linguistic study. Second, three key figures – Charles Morris, Roman Jakobson and Sebeok – two of whom were schooled in and contributed to modern linguistics, worked tirelessly to broaden the remit of sign study beyond the merely vocal. For all three, the sign theory of Peirce, itself a reformulation of the ancient doctrine of semiotics, was pivotal in their attempts to investigate the breadth of communication and signification and to define language.

Both the enterprises of Chomskyan linguistics and contemporary semiotics problematized the commonly utilized term ‘language’. Chomsky’s work presented a serious challenge to both common sense and academic understandings of language as a material phenomenon made up of words, sentences and so forth which facilitate human communication. After Chomsky it has become necessary to investigate the possibility that language is more adequately seen as a system of knowledge in the minds of humans.

Jakobson’s studies of the iconic and indexical qualities of vocal signs and his discussions of their role in certain speech disorders also challenged the frequently assumed symbolic status of language. Terrence Deacon was later to extend some of these insights with an investigation, contributing to biosemiotics, which suggested humans share an iconic and indexical bearing with animals but that humans are quintessentially the ‘symbolic species’. Even more important in approaching the elusive definition of language, perhaps, was the earlier work, led by biology, of Morris and Sebeok. In particular, the latter’s investigations into animal communication – captured in the self-coined designation zoosemiotics – revealed a considerable amount about the human capacity for communication and signification. Contrary to the more credulous commentators on the attempts of experts to teach a limited repertoire of signs to captive primates, Sebeok’s writings have repeatedly demonstrated the exclusively human propensity for what is to be understood as language.

What is known about early humans provides some important evidence for classifying ‘language’, ‘communication’ and ‘speech’. It is thought that early hominids (Homo habilis, about two million years ago) harboured a language, grammar or modelling ‘device’ in their brains. Homo erectus (about one-and-a-half million years ago), with an increased brain size over his/her predecessor, also possessed the capacity, an as yet unrealized ability to learn a sophisticated human verbal communication system. However, verbal encoding and decoding abilities only came into use about 300,000 years ago with early Homo sapiens. Humans therefore possessed the capacity for language long before they started to implement it through speech for the purposes of verbal communication. Prior to the verbal form, communication would have taken place by nonverbal means, a means that humans continue to use and refine today (see Sebeok 1986b and 1988b; cf. Corballis 1999), and, in conjunction with the possession of syntax, constitutes language or the human Umwelt.

What had been clear to many linguists, at least from Wilhelm von Humboldt onwards, was that languages consist of a finite set of rules and a finite set of lexical items which together can, potentially, generate an infinite number of different word combinations. Even Saussure seems to subscribe to this idea in distinguishing langue from parole, although his use of the word ‘règle’ certainly does not correspond to Chomsky’s ‘rule’ and he does not formally present langue as a generative system. The product of applying the finite set is syntax or syntactic structure; yet even with the seemingly very social notion of generative ‘rules’ and their socially useful product, language resists being defined as a purely ‘cultural’ phenomenon in the sense of existing somehow separate from nature. Chomsky’s contention is that at least some generative rules are inexorable in the same sense as rules of logic which humans are constrained to obey without even being aware that they know them. Hence ‘rules’ are not something that humans ‘agree on’ through social interaction.

The study of language cannot proceed through the dissection of human brains; linguistics, instead, has had to work backwards by examining actual language use in order to be able to theorize the constitution of the mental system which precedes it. Yet the problem remains: the search for a definition of language needs to take account of a human faculty which pre-exists its verbal manifestations. Organisms other than humans are not aided in their communication by the syntactic component; that faculty is, at root, a biological one specific to the species Homo. (PC)

L

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING

FURTHER READING