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Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was an American linguist and anthropologist. Born in Germany, his family moved to the United States when he was five. While studying at Columbia University he met the anthropologist Franz Boas, who encouraged Sapir to study native American languages and cultures. Sapir worked in Ottawa for fifteen years, researching the indigenous peoples of Canada. He later taught at the Universities of Chicago and Yale.
Sapir did important pioneering work in phonology and historical linguistics, and on the classification of the indigenous languages of America. His introductory textbook Language (1921) is an elegant and attractive book that is still often recommended as an introduction to linguistics. Sapir often made use of the notion of a grammatical process, not in the sense of a historical change over time but as a way of describing relationships between different variants of the same word or morpheme. For instance, the noun nation has a related adjective national. Thinking of this relationship as a process, one could say that the adjective is formed by adding al onto the end of the noun and changing the pronunciation of the first vowel from the one in hate to the one in hat. Many American structuralists were suspicious of this way of describing linguistic relationships, preferring a strictly distributional method (see American structuralism). Chomsky’s work in generative grammar reintroduced processes into grammatical theory.
Sapir’s name is sometimes linked with that of Whorf, though statements rejecting the ‘Whorf hypothesis’ can be found in his writings. He made important contributions to anthropology, notably on the relation between culture and society, and to Jewish studies. He read widely in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and wrote papers on the relation between culture and personality. His poems appeared in many places, and he wrote several musical works.
Although Sapir and Bloomfield are usually regarded as the main architects of structuralist linguistics in America, Sapir’s broader range of scholarly interests meant that much of his influence was in anthropology and cultural studies, leaving Bloomfield as the more dominant figure in linguistics. As Chomsky’s prestige grew in the second half of the century, however, Sapir was named more often as a major intellectual precursor, while the weaknesses of Bloomfield’s work were emphasized. One reason for this was that Bloomfield avoided linking language and the mind, whereas Sapir was keen to connect linguistics and psychology. The various brands of linguistics which use ‘cognitive’ as a label (see cognitive linguistics) see themselves as continuing Sapir’s work in different ways.
Sapir was a rare combination: a rigorous scholar with a broad humanist range of interests and achievements. For appreciations of his work, see Koerner (1984). (RS)
FURTHER READING
Koerner, K. (1984) Edward Sapir: Appraisals of His Life and Work, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sapir, E. (1921) Language, London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon (reprinted 1978).
Sapir, E. (1949) Selected Writings in Language, Culture and Personality, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (reprinted 1985).
Ferdinand-Mongin de Saussure (1857–1913), Swiss linguist, one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers on language. His posthumously published Cours de linguistique générale (1916), edited by colleagues on the basis of students’ notes, became the Magna Carta of modern linguistics. It is a key text not only in the development of language studies but also in the establishment of ‘semiology’, a more general science of signs, of which linguistics was to be one special branch and in the formation of that broader intellectual movement which came to be known as ‘structuralism’.
Saussure’s revolutionary proposal was that, instead of language being seen as peripheral to an understanding of reality, our understanding of reality revolves around language. This idea later became commonplace in various areas of intellectual inquiry, from anthropology to philosophy and psychology; but in Saussure’s Cours it is clearly articulated, and also expounded in some detail, for the first time.
The basis of Saussure’s thinking is a new conception of how the speaker, by uttering certain sounds, is able to articulate ideas. How are these two activities related? In a famous comparison, Saussure likens a language to a sheet of paper. Thought is one side of the sheet and sound the reverse side. Just as it is impossible to cut the paper without cutting corresponding shapes on both sides, so it proves to be impossible in the linguistic case, he held, to isolate thought from sound or sound from thought. The two matching configurations are the back and front of a single form of experience. They are not separate things artificially brought together for purposes of linguistic expression. On the contrary, their indissoluble unity is a precondition for the possibility of linguistic expression.
The minimal unit of correlations between sound and thought is the linguistic sign, which exists in the speaker’s mind as a pairing of signifiant (sound pattern) with signifié (concept). The linguistic sign is both arbitrary and linear. Arbitrariness implies that the relation between signifiant and signifié is determined by no external factors. Linearity implies the sequential concatenation of signs in linguistic messages, where they enter into ‘syntagmatic’ relations with signs preceding and following.
Saussure held that each language correlates sound and thought in its own unique way. In this sense, speakers of language A do not inhabit the same mental world as speakers of a different language B, even if they live in the same physical space. He insisted on distinguishing the individual linguistic act (parole) from the linguistic system underlying it (langue), and both of these from the human language faculty in general (langage). Langue he saw as a system belonging to society, i.e. to the collectivity of its speakers, and even said that it is never complete in any individual. He also insisted that it be studied as a ‘synchronic’ phenomenon (i.e. without reference to the passage of time) and relegated the study of linguistic change to ‘diachronic’ linguistics. In his view the failure to distinguish synchronic from diachronic facts had vitiated large areas of nineteenth-century language studies. (RH)
See also SIGNIFIANT and SIGNIFIÉ.
FURTHER READING
Harris, R. (1987) Reading Saussure, London: Duckworth.
Saussure, F. de (1972 [1916]) Cours de linguistique générale, ed. T. de Mauro, Paris: Payot.
Saussure, F. de (1983) Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris, London: Duckworth.
Adam Schaff (1913, Lwów– 2006, Warsaw) is a Polish philosopher. Of his numerous books, several treat problems of semantics, philosophy of language, logic, theory of knowledge and ideology. According to Schaff, language is a social product as well as a genetic phenomenon and is functional to human praxis. This is the basis of the ‘active role’ of the human subject both at the level of cognitive processes as well as of practical action. Language is not only an instrument for the expression of meaning, but also the material which goes to form meaning and without which meaning could not exist. Consequently Schaff criticizes the reductive innatist and biologistic interpretation of language as proposed by linguist Noam Chomsky and biologist Eric H. Lenneberg (see Schaff 1978).
According to Schaff, we must free ourselves from what he calls (1962) the ‘fetishism of signs’ (a direct echo of Marx’s ‘fetishism of commodities’). The ‘fetishism of signs’ is reflected in the reified conception of the relations among signs as well as between signifier and signified; analysis must begin from the social processes of communication, and sign relations must be considered as relations among humans who use and produce signs in specific social conditions. In Schaff’s opinion, by contrast with naïve materialism, we must recognize the superiority of language theories which stress the active function of language in the cognitive process; the connection between language and Weltanschauung; and the connection between language and the ‘image of reality’. However, the human being should be considered as the result of social relations, and language as inseparable from social praxis (Ponzio 1974).
In studies of human semiosis, this leads us to a new vision of issues related to sign and language: the problem of the connection between language and knowledge (see Schaff 1973, 1975); language and consciousness; language, ideology and stereotypes; and language and responsibility. Conversely, it is apparent that theories of knowledge are theories in need of support from studies on language; in order to maintain an adequate consideration of the concepts of ‘choice’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘individual freedom’, and such problems as the ‘tyranny of words’, ‘linguistic alienation’ and its causes must also be taken into account. (AP)
FURTHER READING
Ponzio, A. (1990) ‘Humanism, language and knowledge in Adam Schaff’, in A. Ponzio (ed.), Man as a Sign, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Schaff, A. (1973) Language and Cognition, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Schaff, A. (1978) Structuralism and Marxism, Oxford: Pergamon Press.
John Duns Scotus (c. 1266– 1308) does more than any Latin thinker after Aquinas but prior to Poinsot to explain how and why concepts are signs. He introduces the distinction between awareness of things physically present here and now, which he calls intuitive, and awareness of things absent or non-existent, which he calls abstractive, and shows that concepts are not self-representations but other-representations, necessary both for the interpretation of present things known and also for the making present in awareness of absent things as objects. The full import of this distinction for semiotics becomes clear in Book III of the early seventeenth-century Tractatus de Signis of John Poinsot. (JD)
FURTHER READING
Scotus, J. D. (1999–2006) Opera Philosophica, 5 vols. Critical edition ed. Timothy Noone et al., St Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications/ Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Thomas Albert Sebeok (Budapest 1920–Bloomington, IN 2001) emigrated to the USA in 1937, where he became a citizen in 1944. He was a faculty member of Indiana University for the whole time of his academic career. He acted as Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica, the journal and main organ of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS), from the time both were founded, in 1969. Sebeok has greatly contributed to the institutionalization of semiotics internationally, and to its configuration as ‘biosemiotics’, ‘semiotics of life’ or ‘global semiotics’ (Global Semiotics is the title of his 2001 monograph). His work was inspired by Charles S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Roman Jakobson. Sebeok’s diversified interests broadly ranged from the natural sciences to the human sciences.
The entire universe is perfused with signs, Sebeok held, after Peirce, and enters ‘global semiotics’. In light of his ‘holistic’ approach, Sebeok’s research on the ‘life of signs’ was closely connected with his interest in the ‘signs of life’: semiosis and life converge. Semiosis originates with the first stirrings of life, which led to Sebeok’s cardinal axiom that semiosis is the criterial attribute of life. ‘Global semiotics’ provides a meeting point and observation post for studies on the life of signs and the signs of life. Sebeok’s global approach to semiotic theory and practice presupposes his critique of anthropocentrism and glottocentrism. He opened the science or ‘doctrine’ of signs (the term he preferred, recalling Locke) to include zoosemiotics (a term he introduced in 1963) or even more broadly biosemiotics, on the one hand, and endosemiotics, on the other, extending his gaze to semiosis throughout the whole livinguniverse, to the realms of macro- and micro-oganisms. In Sebeok’s conception, sign science is not only the ‘science qui étude la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale’ as Saussure famously held, the study of communication in culture, but also of communicative behaviour from a biosemiotic perspective.
Sebeok’s global approach to semiosis favours the discovery of new perspectives, interdisciplinary inter connect ions and interpretive practices, new cognitive fields and languages, which interact dialogically, as foreseen by the open and detotalized nature of his semiotics. Sebeok identifies sign relations where there only seemed to exist ‘mere’ facts and relations among things, independent from communication and interpretation processes. Use of the expression ‘doctrine of signs’ takes account of Peirce and of Kantian critique. According to Sebeok, the task of semiotics is not only to observe and describe signs, but also to interrogate the conditions of possibility that characterize and specify signs for what they are and for what they must be (cf. Sebeok’s Preface to his monograph of 1976).
A pivotal notion in global semiotics is ‘modelling’, used to explain life and behaviour among living entities conceived in terms of semiosis. On the basis of biosemiotic research, Sebeok averred that the modelling capacity is observable in all life forms and that these subsist in species-specific worlds – living beings signify and communicate in species-specifically modelled worlds. Modelling is an a priori transcendental in the Kantian sense, the foundation of communication and signification. Modelling systems theory (cf. Sebeok and Danesi 2000) studies semiotic phenomena in terms of modelling processes. Sebeok dubs the human species-specific primary modelling device ‘language’ (capable of constructing multiple worlds, therefore the condition for the evolution of humanity), distinguishing it from ‘speech’ (the capacity for verbal communication) which appeared much later in human evolution. With speech, different historical languages arise which assume a secondary modelling function through exaptation and generate a plurality of cultural systems which constitute tertiary modelling (cf. Sebeok 1988b, 1994).
Sebeok’s opening remarks to The Sign and Its Masters (1979a) can be extended to all his research viewed in light of current debate in philosophico-linguistic and semiotic theory. A transition is now occurring from ‘code semiotics’ to ‘interpretation semiotics’, from semiotics centred on linguistics to one which is autonomous from it.
Sebeok privileged interpretation semiotics in his early theoretical volume Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), and explored semiotics as an adequate methodological tool applicable to different fields in his more discursive volume The Play of Musement (1981a).
Other important volumes have since followed in rapid succession: I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1986c), Essays in Zoosemiotics (1990), A Sign is Just a Sign (1991a), Semiotics in the United States (1991b) and Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics (1994). (SP)
See also SEMIOTIC SELF.
FURTHER READING
Brier, S. (ed.) (2003) Thomas Sebeok and the Biosemiotic Legacy, Sebeok Memorial Special Issue, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 10(1).
Petrilli, S. and Ponzio, A. (2001) Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life, Cambridge: Icon Books.
Sebeok, T. A. and Danesi, M. (2000) The Forms of Meaning. Modelling Systems Theory and Semiotic Analysis, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Secondness is one of Charles S. Peirce’s three categories of phenomena, the other two being firstness and thirdness. The category of secondness (obsistence, over-againstness), together with firstness and thirdness, are the omnipresent categories of mind, sign and reality (CP 2.84–94).
Secondness is the category according to which something is considered relative to, or over against, something else. It involves binarity, a relation of opposition or reaction. From the viewpoint of signs, secondness is connected with the index. The index is a sign that signifies its object by a relation of contiguity, causality or by some other physical connection. However, this relation also depends on a habit or convention. For example, the relation between hearing a knock at the door and someone on the other side of the door who wants to enter. Whereas the icon, which is governed by firstness, presents itself as an original sign, and the symbol, which is governed by thirdness, as a transuasional sign; the index, which is governed by secondness, is an obsistent sign (CP 2.89–92).
From the viewpoint of logic, inference regulated by secondness corresponds to deduction. In fact, in the case of an Obsistent Argument or Deduction, the conclusion is compelled to acknowledge that the facts stated in the premises, whether in one or both, are such as could not be if the fact stated in the conclusion were not there (cf. CP 2.96).
From the viewpoint of ontology, that is, of being, secondness is present in the law of anancasm or necessity which, on Peirce’s account, regulates the evolutionary development of the universe together with agapasm (creative love, which corresponds to firstness) and tychasm (causality, which corresponds to thirdness) (cf. CP 6.287–317; Petrilli 1999b).
Therefore, on the level of logic, firstness, secondness and thirdness correspond to abduction, deduction and induction; on the level of the typology of signs they correspond to the icon, index and symbol; and on the level of ontology to agapasm, anancasm and tychasm.
To secondness or obsistence, a binary category, there corresponds a relation of relative alterity in which the terms of the relation depend on each other. Effective alterity, the possibility of something being-on-its-own-account, absolute per se, autonomously, presents itself under the category of firstness, or orience, or originality, according to which something ‘is what it is without reference to anything else within it or without it, regardless of all force and of all reason’ (CP 2.85). An effective relation of alterity would not be possible if there were only binarity, secondness, and therefore obsistence (cf. Ponzio 1990a: 197–214). Relations of alterity would not be possible in a system regulated exclusively by secondness and, therefore, by binarity, where an element exists only on the condition that it refers to another element and would not exist should this other element be negated.
Take, for example, a husband and wife. Here there is nothing but a real twoness; but it constitutes a reaction, in the sense that the husband makes the wife a wife in fact (not merely in some comparing thought); while the wife makes the husband a husband.
(CP 2.84) (SP)
FURTHER READING
Peirce, C. S. (1955) ‘The principles of phenomenology’, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler, New York: Dover.
Peirce, C. S. (1958) ‘Letter to Lady Welby, 12 October 1904’, in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. P. Wiener, New York: Dover.
Petrilli, S. (1999) ‘About and beyond Peirce’, Semiotica,124(3/4): 299–376.
In Morris’s theory of semiosis, the semantical dimension of the functioning of signs pertains to ‘the relation of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable’ (1938: 6) and the study of this dimension is called semantics. In linguistics, this translates into a view of semantics as the component of a linguistic theory dealing with meaning, whether at the word level (lexical semantics) or at the sentence or propositional level. Often, semantics is said to study meaning out of context, whereas pragmatics studies meaning in context (Levinson 1983). However, most sentences can only be understood against a set of background assumptions which effectively define a context (Searle 1978). A more useful distinction may be, therefore, to regard the province of semantics as the properties of the language system that directly enable the generation of meaning in language use, a process which is itself within the realm of pragmatics. (JV)
FURTHER READING
Lyons, J. (1995) Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Not to be confused either with semantics or with semiotics, despite the fact that the latter term is often loosely treated as synonymous with semiology. The English word is a translation of the French word sémiologie, coined by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1894 and intended as the designation for a (then non-existent) discipline devoted to studying ‘the life of signs as part of social life’. In Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale this discipline is presented as a branch of social psychology. Saussure did not conceive of semiology as a general science of signs of every kind. From his Geneva lectures, it seems clear that he excluded from semiology all signs dependent on or controlled by the decisions of individuals. Nor did he include so-called ‘natural’ signs (storm clouds, blushing, etc.). Semiology was apparently to be confined to the study of public institutional signs, particularly those in which the relation between form and meaning was ‘arbitrary’: of these Saussure regarded linguistic signs as constituting the most important class.
Followers of Saussure later extended the definition of the term. Buyssens equated semiology with the study of communication processes in general (at least when conceived of as actions intended to influence others, and recognized as such by the ‘others’ in question). Barthes reversed Saussure’s view of the relations between semiology and linguistics, treating the former as part of the latter. Lévi-Strauss considered anthropology to be a branch of semiology. None of these later developments corresponds to Saussure’s original conception. (RH)
See also HJELMSLEV, POSTSTRUCTURALISM and STRUCTURALISM.
FURTHER READING
Saussure, F. de (1983) Course in General Linguistics, trans. R. Harris, London: Duckworth.
Semiosis is the name given to the action of signs. Semiotics might therefore be understood as the study of semiosis or even as a ‘metasemiosis’, producing ‘signs about signs’. Behind this simple definition lies a universe of complexity. In general parlance, and sometimes in semiotics, signs are conceived only as inanimate objects which are utilized for the purpose of sending messages. However, semiosis occurs in many different ways and in places where signs are not necessarily apparent to humans. Whereas human semiosis has been the object of the many investigations which make up anthroposemiotics, there is an enormous variety of semiosis which is non-human in character. Moreover, anthroposemiosis should not be considered as separate from the wider-ranging actions of signs between all kinds of cells. Instead, it should be understood as being contained within the latter, its vicissitudes merely being differently ordered than that of its neighbours: ‘Thus, physics, biology, psychology and sociology each embodies its own peculiar level of semiosis’ (Sebeok 1994: 6).
Morris famously defines semiosis as a ‘process in which something is a sign to some organism’ (1946: 366). Like Peirce, he identifies a threefold operation of semiosis consisting of the sign vehicle, the designatum and the interpretant (equivalent to representamen, object and interpretant), in which the first acts as a sign, the second is what is referred to and the third is the effect of, and the effector of, the relationship between the other two (Morris 1938). Morris’s work is a good example of how simple sign relations entail semiosic complexity. He envisages three realms of semiosis: these are the relations between sign vehicles, to which he gives the name syntactics (or syntax); the relations between each different sign vehicle and its designatum, named semantics; and the relations between signs and their users – pragmatics. With adjustments, this triad of approaches to semiosis in general has provided the agenda for much of modern linguistics.
The relations between the terms ‘semiosis’ and ‘communication’ should also be noted. It is well known that Peirce used the term ‘semiosis’ and seldom invoked concepts of ‘communication’ and ‘intentionality’ (although, see Johansen 1993: 189ff.). The latter, however, are often taken as axiomatic in anthroposemiotics. Saussure, for example, in his Cours, outlines the ‘speech circuit’. A diagram of two human heads is shown, passing coded speech to each other and thus connecting the contents of two minds in an act of ‘telementation’ (1983: 11; cf. Harris 1987: 205ff.).
Such emphasis on the ‘success’ of human semiosis characterizes much communication theory. Much later in the twentieth century, for example, relevance theory questioned code models, suggesting that:
most human communication is intentional, and it is intentional for two good reasons. The first reason is the one suggested by Grice: by producing direct evidence of one’s informative intention, one can convey a much wider range of information than can be conveyed by producing direct evidence for the basic information itself. The second reason humans have for communicating is to modify and extend the mutual cognitive environment they share with one another.
(Sperber and Wilson 1995: 64)
The code in Saussure’s speech circuit and the ostension and inference in relevance theory are powerful components in the act of human communication. Both imply the manifest transaction in the verbal transmission of signs.
However, this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that communicative acts and intentionality are only a small part of the universal semiosic repertoire. For biosemioticians, especially after Sebeok, ‘life’ and ‘semiosis’ are sufficiently synonymous that one cannot exist without the other. For others, such as Deely, physiosemiosis must be considered as a possibility because before life it is possible that there were, nevertheless, the first flickerings of thirdness that eventually take hold when the full throttle of semiosis in life occurs. For Deely, however, this does not entail pansemiosis (see Deely 2006d); nevertheless, there are (pan)semioticians who are happy to embrace the possibility that the entirety of the universe is semiosic, for example the theoretical biologist Stanley Salthe (1999) and the sociologist/anthropologist Edwina Taborsky (2002). What is not in dispute is that semiosis is simply ineffable and many semioses, like the action of subatomic particles (Sebeok 1994: 8), can only be discerned through a model of their activity. (PC)
See also SIGNIFICATION.
FURTHER READING
Hoffmeyer, J. (2008) Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press.
Morris, C. (1938) Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sebeok, T. A. (2001) Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
The term ‘semiosphere’ has at least three broad definitions in contemporary semiotics. Derived from Vernadsky’s idea of a ‘biosphere’, Lotman (2000: 123) defines semiosphere as the ‘semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has a prior existence and is in constant interaction with languages’. Lotman’s idiosyncratic use of ‘language’, here, is to refer to ‘a cluster of semiotic spaces and their boundaries’. Outside these spaces, for Lotman, there is no communication. As such, Lotman’s idea of semiosphere contributes directly to a theory of culture compatible with cybernetics and autopoiesis: ‘Every living culture has a “built-in” mechanism for multiplying its languages.’ Thus, the smallest unit of semiosis is not a ‘language’ but the entire semiosphere of ‘languages’ in all its heterogeneity of semiosis (see also ‘The logic of explosion’ in Lotman 2009); the semiosphere’s highest form and final act is when it is able to produce self-description.
Kull’s definition of semiosphere extends Lotman’s by making it more compatible with semiotics as it is to be understood after biosemiotics. He suggests that ‘Semiosphere is the set of all interconnected Umwelts. Any two Umwelts, when communicating, are a part of the same semiosphere’ (Kull 1998: 301). Thus, a domestic cat and its owner share the same semiosphere when they are each eating a portion of a fish that the latter has cooked for both of them. For both, the fish is a component of what they understand as food. However, the ways that these two members of different species will relate to the food, how the food exists in their Umwelt, are very different – the cat’s eating may be solely for survival, it may be totally dependent on its owner; the human might eat simply for pleasure, for specific gustatory experience, to partake of a cultural and culinary pursuit, to exercise some knowledge of the history of the fish and members of its species. In Lotman’s terms, different ‘languages’ are at play in the consumption of this food.
A third definition of semiosphere is proposed by Hoffmeyer, who developed his notion initially without reference to Lotman (Hoffmeyer 1996). Later, he writes that:
The biosemiotic idea implies that life on Earth manifests itself in a global and evolutionary semiosphere, a sphere of sign process and elements of meaning that constitute a frame of understanding within which biology must work. The semiosphere is a sphere like the atmosphere, hydrosphere, or biosphere. It per meates these spheres from their innermost to outermost reaches and consists of communication: sound, scent, movement, colors, forms, electrical fields, various waves, chemical signals, touch, and so forth – in short, the signs of life.
(Hoffmeyer 2008a: 5)
Thus, Hoffmeyer’s understanding of semiosphere is compatible with his idea of semiotic niche, that part of a species’ existence holding all the things that are necessary for it to survive within its Umwelt, which is itself specifically placed within a larger semiosphere of Unwelten. It is also compatible with Sebeok’s equation of semiosis and life, although not with any notion of semiosphere that might be developed to account for physiosemiosis.
For Kull, the notion of semiosphere in Hoffmeyer suggests that it is partially independent of organisms’ Umwelten. His own understanding of semiosphere entails that it is entirely created by organisms’ Umwelten. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Hoffmeyer, J. (2008) Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press.
Kull, K. (1998) ‘On semiosis, Umwelt, and semiosphere’, Semiotica, 120(3/4): 299–310.
Lotman, Y. M. (2000) Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture, London: I. B. Tauris.
SEMIOTIC NICHE see HOFFMEYER and SEMIOSPHERE
Fundamental formulation of subjectivity and self-hood introduced by Sebeok in 1979 and subsequently elaborated (Sebeok 1989, 1992, 1998b). Sebeok’s notion of the ‘semiotic self’ derives from an account of anxiety, an indexical sign integral to the workings of the immune system of any organism, that system being the mechanism which maintains a distinction between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. According to Sebeok, the immune system harbours a kind of ‘memory’ based on biological discrimination, but also operates another kind of memory, anxiety, whose domain is patterns of behaviour. Anxiety is activated when the self is menaced and the organism identifies the behaviour of another organism in terms of its own Umwelt. Considering self-hood at the semiotic threshold of the humble cell, Sebeok identifies two apprehensions of the self: a) immunologic, or biochemical, with semiotic overtones; and b) semiotic, or social, with biological anchoring. The immune system responds to (the threat of) invasion somatically, but does so in an indexical fashion; anxiety develops from somatic roots but becomes almost fully autonomous in its semiotic vicissitudes. As Sebeok adds, ‘In evolution, (a) is very old, whereas (b) is relatively recent’ (1979c: 267). Despite the proliferation of theories of the subject since the Enlightenment and, especially, the myriad twentieth-century theories which implicate signs or discourses as nurturing factors in the constitution of self-hood, Sebeok’s theory of the semiotic self goes further than any other reflection on subjectivity yet offered. Featuring some cognate implications but approaching the matter through the heritage of Peirce, Mead and the pragmatic tradition in sociology, as opposed to approaching the matter from biosemiotics, is Wiley’s concept of the semiotic self in his 1994 book of the same name. (PC)
FURTHER READING
Sebeok, T. A. (1979) ‘The semiotic self’, in The Sign and Its Masters, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Semiotics may be understood as indicating:
1 the specificity of human semiosis;
2 the general science of signs.
Concerning (1) in the world of life which coincides with semiosis, human semiosis is characterized as metasemiosis, that is, as the possibility of reflecting on signs, of making signs not only the object of interpretation not distinguishable from the response to these signs, but also of interpretation as reflection on signs, as suspension of response and possibility of deliberation. We may call this specific human capacity for metasemiosis ‘semiotics’. Developing Aristotle’s correct observation made at the beginning of his Metaphysics, that man tends by nature to knowledge, we could say that man tends by nature to semiotics. Human semiosis, anthroposemiosis, is characterized by its presenting itself as semiotics. Semiotics as human semiosis, or anthroposemiosis, can a) venture as far as the entire universe in search of meanings and senses, considering it therefore from the viewpoint of signness; or, b) absolutize anthroposemiosis by identifying it with semiosis itself.
Concerning (2), semiotics as a discipline or science (Saussure) or theory (Charles Morris) or doctrine (Sebeok) presents itself in the first case (a) as ‘global semiotics’ (Sebeok) extensible to the whole universe insofar as it is perfused by signs (Peirce); whereas in the second case (b) it is limited and anthropocentric.
The origins of semiotics as a field of knowledge are identified above all in the origins of medical semiotics, or symptomatology, the study of symptoms. In truth, since man is a ‘semiotic animal’ all human life has always been characterized by knowledge of a semiotic order. If, therefore, medical semeiotics may be considered as the first branch of development in semiotics, this is only because, in contrast to Hippocrates and Galen, hunters, farmers, navigators, fishermen and women, with their wisdom and sign practices relative to the production and reproduction of life, have always been involved in semiotics, but without writing treatises.
Given that verbal signs, oral and written, are unique in the sense that they carry out nothing other than a sign function, reflection on verbal signs since ancient times represents another pillar in the semiotic science. Indeed, the study of verbal signs has greatly oriented the criteria for determining what may be considered as a sign.
This explains how, in very recent times (the beginning of the twentieth century), semiotics presents itself, on the basis of its linguistico-verbal interests, in the form of sémiologie with the task, in Saussure’s view, of studying the life of signs ‘dans le sein de la vie sociale’. And though linguistics was included as merely a branch of semiology, sémiologie in its totality was profoundly influenced by it. Saussure only recognized signs in entities which carry out an intentionally communicative function in a social context. From the limits of this conception, communication semiotics, a transition takes place to signification semiotics (Barthes) which also recognizes signs in what is not produced with the intention of functioning as such, and finally to the phase which with Barthes (1975b) may be called ‘third sense semiotics’, or ‘text semiotics’, or significance semiotics. But parallel to all this, other semiotic perspectives have developed in different fields of interest as well. Without claiming to exhaust the list, consider the following perspectives together with the names of their main representatives: the psychological (Freud, Bühler, Vygotsky), philosophical (Peirce, Welby, Ogden and Richards, Wittgenstein, Morris, Cassirer), literary critical (Bakhtin), biological (Romanes, Jakob and Thure von Uexküll, Jacob, Monod) and mathematica–topological (René Thom). By making the ‘semiosphere’ (Lotman) consist in the ‘semiobiosphere’, Sebeok’s ‘global semiotics’ has offered the most exhaustive account of signs: this perspective is the most capable of questioning the presumed totalities of semiotics and showing them up for what they really are, its parts. (SP)
See also ANTHROPOSEMIOTICS, BIO SEMIOTICS and ZOOSEMIOTICS.
FURTHER READING
Cobley, P. (2010) Contemporary Semiotics: History and Practice, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Deely, J. (1994) The Human Use of Signs, or Elements of Anthroposemiosis, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Posner, R., Robering, K. and Sebeok, T. A. (eds) (1997–2004) Semiotik/Semiotics. A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture, 4 vols, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
SHIFTER see DEIXIS
A sign is a factor in a process conceived either dyadically (signifier/signified) in accord with Saussure and his followers or triadically (sign [representamen]/object/ interpretant) in accord with Peirce and his.
The fundamental terms of a sign include what we may call the interpreted sign, on the side of the object, and the interpretant in a relation where the interpretant is what makes the interpreted sign possible. The interpreted becomes a sign component because it receives an interpretation, but the interpretant in turn is also a sign component with the potential to engender a new sign: therefore, where there is a sign, there are immediately two, and given that the interpretant can engender a new sign, there are immediately three, and so forth as described by Charles S. Peirce with his concept of infinite semiosis (popularized by Eco as unlimited semiosis), the chain of deferrals from one interpretant to another.
To analyse the sign beginning from the object of intepretation, that is, the interpreted, means to begin from a secondary level. In other words, to begin from the object-interpreted means to begin from a point in the chain of deferrals, or semiosic chain, which cannot be considered as the starting point. Nor can it be privileged by way of abstraction at a theoretical level to explain the workings of sign processes.
An example: a spot on the skin is a sign insofar as it may be interpreted as a symptom of sickness of the liver: this is already a secondary level in the interpretation process. At a primary level, retrospectively, the skin disorder is an interpretation enacted by the organism itself in relation to an anomaly which is disturbing it and to which it responds. The skin disorder is already in itself an interpretant response.
To say that the sign is first an interpretant means that the sign is first a response. We could also say that the sign is a reaction: but only on the condition that by ‘reaction’ we intend ‘interpretation’ (similarly to Charles Morris’s behaviourism, but differently from the mechanistic approach).
The expression ‘solicitation– response’ is preferable to ‘stimulus– reaction’ to the end of avoiding superficial associations between the approaches that they recall respectively. Even a ‘direct’ response to a stimulus, or better solicitation, is never direct but ‘mediated’ by an interpretation: unless it is a ‘reflex action’, formulation of a response involves identifying the solicitation, situating it in a context, and relating it to given behavioural parameters (whether a question of simple types of behaviour, e.g. the prey–predator model, or more complex behaviours connected to cultural values, as in the human world). Therefore, the sign is first of all an interpretant, a response beginning from which something is considered as a sign and becomes its interpreted and is further able to generate an unlimited chain of other signs.
A sign presents varying degrees of plurivocality and univocality. A signal may be defined as a univocal sign, or better as a sign with the lowest degrees of plurivocality.
(Note, also, that ‘sign’ is the usual shorthand term given to the formal sign language used by the deaf.) (SP)
See also SEMIOLOGY, SEMIOSIS, SEMIOTICS and SIGNIFICATION.
FURTHER READING
Deely, J. (2001) ‘A sign is what? A dialogue between a semiotist and a would-be realist’, Sign Systems Studies, 29(2): 705–743.
Peirce, C. S. (1955) ‘Logic as semiotic: The theory of signs’, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. J. Buchler, New York: Dover.
Sebeok, T. A. (2001) Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, 2nd edn, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
The signans is, with the signatum, a sign component. These recently revived Augustinian terms are preferable to the Saussurean signifiant and signifié, ‘acoustic image’ and ‘concept’, since they do not imply a psychologistic and phonocentric version of sign.
The signans is an object which, once interpreted, becomes material of the signatum. The sign is the totality and should not be confused with the signans as in the current expression ‘to be a sign of’, which would be better said as ‘to be a signans of’: something is interpreted as that which stands for, or refers to, or is a vehicle of a signatum – or designatum (Morris 1938), or significatum (Morris 1946), or signification (Morris 1964) – to be distinguished from denotatum. Instead, when a whole sign acts as a new signans of a signatum at a secondary level, we then have the case of connotation (Hjelmslev 1961).
The materiality of the signans (cf. Petrilli 1990: 365–401; Rossi-Landi 1992d: 271–299) is not only extrasign materiality, physical materiality (the body of the signans) and instrumental materiality (nonverbal signs, their non-sign uses and functions), but also semiotic materiality, that is, historico-social materiality at more or less high levels of complexity, elaboration and/or articulation (elaboration materiality); ideological materiality; extra-intentional materiality, that is, objectivity independent from consciousness and volition; and also signifying otherness materiality, that is, the possibility of other signata with respect to the signatum of any one specific interpretive path. (SP)
FURTHER READING
Rossi-Landi, F. (1992) ‘Signs and material reality’, in Between Signs and Non-signs, ed. and intro. S. Petrilli, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
The sound pattern which, through its association with the signifié, forms the linguistic sign according to Saussure. The first English translation of Saussure’s Cours erroneously renders the term as ‘signifier’ (i.e. synonymous with ‘that which signifies’), while Barthes’ much-consulted Saussurean primer Elements of Semiology (1967a) attempts to present the signifiant as a material substance (i.e. the sounds uttered by a speaker or, by extension in semiology, any material element that signifies). Both misconstruals constitute departures from Saussure’s restriction of signifiant to the mental realm. (PC)
See also SIGNANS.
Charles Morris distinguishes between signification and significance, thereby indicating two different aspects of ‘meaning’: the semantic and the axiological. Victoria Welby, instead, uses significance (see significs) for the third term of her meaning triad, the other two being ‘sense’ and ‘meaning’. Both authors (in the same way as others who work on the same concepts, e.g. Barthes 1975b) relate sense to value and, therefore, semiotics to axiology. In the words of Morris (1964: vii), ‘if we ask what is the meaning of life, we may be asking a question about the signification of the term “life”, or asking a question about the value or significance of living – or both’. And the fact that usage of such terms as ‘meaning’ (with the polarity suggested) is so widespread suggests, continues Morris, that there is a fundamental relation between what he distinguishes as signification and significance. (SP)
Use of the term significatum in semiotics is explained by Charles Morris in Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946). The sign, or better, the signans, signifies its significatum. To signify, to have signification and to have a significatum are synonyms. In the words of Morris: ‘Those conditions which are such that whatever fulfills them is a denotatum will be called a significatum of the sign’ (1971: 94). In his description of the conditions which allow for something to be a sign, the significatum is distinct from the denotatum. If something satisfies the conditions such that something else functions as a sign, while this second something is a denotatum, the first something is the significatum.
All signs signify, that is, have a significatum, but not all signs denote. The significatum of the bell (sign) which attracts the attention of Pavlov’s famous dog (interpreter) is that something edible is available; the food found by the dog which enables it to respond in a certain way (interpretant), as provoked by the sign, is the denotatum. The latter, however, may actually not exist, to the dog’s great disappointment. In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938: Ch. 2), Morris uses the term designatum instead of significatum. Every sign insofar as it is a sign has a designatum, but not every sign has a denotatum, because not every sign refers to something which actually exists: where what is referred to (significatum or designatum) actually exists as referred to, the object of reference is a denotatum. In other words, the significatum is what the sign or signans refers to, a set of qualities forming a class or type of objects or events to which the interpreter reacts independently of the fact that what is referred to actually exists (denotatum) according to the existence value attributed to it by the sign (cf. Ponzio 1981a). In Signification and Significance (1964) he replaces the term ‘significatum’ with ‘signification’ while the term ‘denotatum’ is dropped altogether. (SP)
FURTHER READING
Morris, C. (1971) Writings on the General Theory of Signs, ed. T. A. Sebeok, The Hague: Mouton.
Significs is a neologism introduced by Victoria Welby, after first trying sensifics, for her approach to the study of signs, meaning and interpretation. A provisional definition of significs was formulated by Welby in Significs and Language (1911): ‘the study of the nature of significance in all its forms and relations’ (Welby 1985a [1911]: vii), with a practical bearing ‘not only on language but on every possible form of human expression in action, invention, and creation’ (ibid.: ix). But see her own dictionary definition of 1902 and encyclopaedia entry of 1911 (now Welby 1977). In contrast to ‘semantics’, ‘semasiology’ and ‘semiotics’, ‘significs’ was free from technical associations, thus making it suitable to signal the connection between meaning and value in all its aspects (pragmatic, social, ethic, aesthetic, etc.) (cf. Welby 1983, 1985a; Schmitz 1985). It takes account of the everyday expression ‘What does it signify?’, with its focus on the sign’s ultimate value and significance (see signification/significance) beyond semantic meaning. In addition to a theory of meaning, significs proposes a ‘significal method’ that transcends pure descriptivism and strictly logico-epistemological boundaries in the direction of axiology and of the study of the conditions that make meaningful behaviour possible (cf. Petrilli 1988, 1998a, 2009). Central to significs is Welby’s analysis of meaning into three main levels: ‘Sense’ – ‘the organic response to environment’; ‘Meaning’ – the specific sense which a word ‘is intended to convey’; and ‘Significance’ – ‘the far-reaching consequence, implication, ultimate result or outcome of some event or experience’ (cf. Hardwick 1977: 169). According to Charles S. Peirce, the triad of sense, meaning and significance relates closely to his own triad of Immediate Interpretant, Dynamical Interpretant and Final Interpretant, respectively (Hardwick 1977: 109–111). (SP)
FURTHER READING
Petrilli, S. (ed.) (2009) Signifying and Understanding: Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Significs Movement, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
The conceptual component of the linguistic sign according to Saussure. In the first English translation of Saussure’s Cours and then in subsequent translations of broadly Saussurean commentaries, the signifié was called the ‘signified’, giving the false impression that Saussure intended ‘the thing signified’ (i.e. the referent), which was never the case. (PC)
SIGNIFIED see SIGNIFIÉ
SIGNIFIER see SIGNIFIANT
Sign-environment is a defined sign-space belonging to a given living being (interpretant). In biosemiotics, sign-environment contains partly the sign system of a living being and partly other foreign signs providing information about the other elements of this environment. At the level of anthroposemiotics, peoples, communities and individuals have their own sign-environments respectively. Human beings have always developed their own sign-environments which, due to their interactions, produced new development lines. In history, cities have constitued exceptionally saturated sign-environments compared to villages and have contributed to a considerable extent to the evolution of human civilization. (MS)
Phenomena to which the term sign language has been, or might be, applied are numerous indeed. A great many species in the animal kingdom survive by interpreting and using what they see. For many of them, the most important information comes from interpreting the visible actions of conspecifics (e.g. von Frisch on the language of honey bees). The broadest views of the phenomena are taken by semiotics and biology. But when the behaviour is human, researchers in anthropology, linguistics, psychology and sociology also take note of portions of this behaviour. They may label their selection as gesture, gesticulation, kinesics, surrogate speech, nonverbal behaviour or something else; but sign language is the designation that frequently seems to have the most appeal to the public and the broadest scope.
The amount and variety of such phenomena cause great variation in what is covered by the terms used for them. Philosophers from ancient times regarded gesture either as a forerunner of speech or dismissed it and saw language as spoken only. It was only in the middle of the twentieth century that social scientists came to recognize that the signing of deaf people serves in all respects as does the speaking of hearing people, to make the primary signs of a language; in short, that a sign language; is a language. When members of a social group sign instead of speaking their first or only language, their signing expresses a language. Their manual, facial and body actions constitute language signs just as vocal actions do. This is true also of sign languages people use as alternatives to the languages they normally speak (Kendon 1988; Farnell 1995). But circumstances keep apart the groups using these ‘primary’ and ‘alternative’ sign languages (SLs) even more than they keep apart groups using spoken languages (see sign languages (alternative)). Different groups of people use different languages, whether they speak or sign them.
Although humans who share no common language can communicate with gestures, no common or universal sign language exists. (WCS)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS and SIGN LANGUAGES (PRIMARY).
A century ago studies of alternative sign languages (SLs) tended to concentrate on what has come to be known as Plains Indian Sign Language. The work of Mallery (1972 [1881]) provides much otherwise unobtainable data about the signs used in various Native American tribes. However, virtually all linguistic studies of Native American languages have been focused on their spoken languages, their possible relationship and their linguistic typology. These tribes may have used (and still use: see Farnell 1995) their SLs as alternatives to the languages they normally speak, but linguists have so far failed to treat their SLs as languages too.
Apart from works by Kendon (1988) and Farnell (1995), there is a dearth of research on alternative SLs. This may result from the tendency in the social sciences to rely on Aristotelian or rigorous logic – something is either language or is not language. With such a mind set, it becomes impossible to determine whether what one is looking at in an exotic population is the gesturing everyone is likely to do while speaking or the signing that expresses a sign language. Logical categorization puts out of reach the possibility that gesturing and signing are related by evolution. (WCS)
See also SIGN LANGUAGES (PRIMARY) and STOKOE.
FURTHER READING
Farnell, B. (1995) Do You See What I Mean? Plains Indian Sign Talk and the Embodiment of Action, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Languages where signing is the primary mode of communication. There are many primary sign languages (SLs), and when a widely distributed population uses one of them, it may be marked by dialects. That is, deaf signers may have signs that differ from those used in other parts of the country, but they share a grammar.
Signers of the dialects still use the same key grammatical markers, like signs for ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘to’, ‘for’, ‘not’, ‘because’, etc., but usually do so differently. This variety in national SLs comes about from the same causes that make spoken languages different – separation and contact of populations. But another factor operates with deaf SLs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, changes in attitudes towards deaf people led great innovators to provide effective formal education for those who could not hear. Most notable was the institute founded in Paris (1755) by the Abbé Charles Michel de l’Epée (1712–1789).
Its success, based on the use of the pupils’ own signs, led rapidly to establishment of schools for the deaf in most European capitals and as early as 1817 in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Consequently, deaf persons educated in Paris became leaders in the arts, printing and publishing, and other fields. They carried their successes – and their sign language – to other places, where their language and that used in the national schools inevitably led local signers to adopt new signs. This process continues today: deaf signers in Asian countries are rapidly adopting signs from American Sign Language (ASL). Modern Thai SL differs greatly from that used by deaf signers of an older generation, and the difference is the use of signs from ASL.
Apart from Woodward’s lexicostatistic studies of the relatedness of primary SLs, little has been done to compare primary SLs. Instead, recent attempts by linguists to find a Universal Grammar of language have led some sign language researchers to ignore differences and look for similarities among SLs, and between SLs and spoken languages. Much current post-Chomskyan theory has it that language comes from an organ in the human brain not from social interaction. This has turned SL research towards treating deaf signs and infants’ gestures as automatic products of innate mechanisms. In this view, differences in SLs and comparative study have little to offer, as the goal is not sought for in bodies of visible data but in the intricacies of the brain. (WCS)
Sign-space is a semiotic space in which different sign systems exist and function synchronously. In Jakob von Uexküll’s model, the living being actually experiences and uses this space as its own sign-environment due to continuous communication. At the level of biosemiotics a sign-space always offers occasions for the development of new pragmatic situations because of the changing coincidence of sign systems and codes. In the anthroposemiotic sense of the word, the human’s sociosemiotic space contains all its sign systems, enabling their free interactions, including their partial cognition and conscious use. (MS)
See also SIGN-ENVIRONMENT and UMWELT.
Charles S. Peirce’s term for the second division of his trichotomy of the grounds of signs. A sinsign is a sign which, in itself, is an existent thing or event. There are different kinds of sinsigns distinguished principally by whether they represent their referents iconically, e.g. an individual diagram (an iconic sinsign), or indexically, e.g. a cry of pain or a weathervane (dicent sinsigns). Iconic sinsigns inform of essences while indexical sinsigns only inform of causes or actual facts. A sinsign may be a token of a type. (NH)
Utterances, spoken or written, always occur in (social) situations. In socially oriented theories of language the assumption is that features of the situation (who is involved, in what social relations, for what purposes, in what institutional settings) will be reflected in aspects of the utterance. (GRK)
See also FIELD, MODE and TENOR.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS see SOCIOSEMIOTICS
Social theories of language (or of representation more generally) explicitly or implicitly refer to the structurings of the social environment. These may be structures of class; of ‘stratification’; and of derived or dependent categories, such as power, gender or family. The type of structure assumed will affect assumptions about language (use). (GRK)
See also SITUATION.
Sociolinguistics deals with the variability of language given changes in social circumstances. Three distinct approaches are discernible: one sees language and its uses as a reflection of social factors; a second treats the social as an effect of the linguistic; and a third accounts for relations between social and linguistic structures, where both are seen as autonomous. Instances of the first describe the language (use) of professions; of social dialects or ‘codes’; of genres and registers of all kinds; or the language uses associated with gender, age and class. Instances of the second are forms of discourse analysis which see social organizations – the law, medicine and science – as the result of linguistic action. Here too belong studies which deal with ‘language about’ genders, races, classes or ethnicities, producing the social facts of gender as sexism, or of race as racism. Attempts to change the social by changing linguistic behaviours, the struggles of feminism to change naming practices, for instance, rest on this approach. The third approach treats language and society as autonomous, but sees regularities in interrelations between them: code-switching shows how changes in social circumstances lead to a switch from one language (or dialect) to another; studies in phonological variation show how speakers pronounce the same word differently in an informal and a formal environment. (GRK)
FURTHER READING
Hudson, R. A. (1996) Sociolinguistics, 2nd edn, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
All semiotic activity is communal, available for humans as social, being produced or articulated in human communities. Sociosemiotics studies semiosis, communication and communicative situations (comprising physical, cultural and social objects) in social conglomerations and with the human semiotization of surrounding phenomena (nature, space, universe), treasuring the original foundation triplet of semiotic analysis: semantics, syntactics, pragmatics. Sociosemiotics shares in the constructivist view on reality filtered by sociocultural reality. Sociocultural systems are reflective systems and the overt behaviour revealed in culture traits depends on the covert behaviour directed by cognitive structures (image schemas, values, behavioural schemes). The aim of understanding cultures is to describe them as reflective systems of knowledge, as intersemiotic and intersemiosic systems. Human semiotic systems filter semiotic reality in communication; thus human cognition is largely defined through language and language-based sign systems. Human perceptual abilities form through sign systems; therefore ‘reality’ is inevitably mediated and arbitrated. The realization of the semiotic determination of the human relation to ‘reality’ comes from a pragmaticist understanding influencing various fields from linguistics to sociology. The realities in which humans live are socially, culturally and linguistically constructed, and fundamentally semiotic (sign systems structure the world, the world structures sign systems). Therefore, the metalevel must concentrate on the study of methods people use to build their sociocultural environment. Socio semiotics focuses on processes and structures inside sign systems as described by Saussure (the idea of semiology as a subdivision of social psychology, all human sign systems as social). Principles of studying relations between sign systems and the environment derive from Peirce who equated semiotics with logic, while abductive logic is socioculturally contextual and habitual. Pragmaticism gave rise to ethnomethodology, verstehen-methodology, Conversation Analysis and discourse analysis, all of which bring sociocultural studies back to the notion of representation that also applies to the concept of ‘self-in-society’.
Understanding the self as a product of social communication relates to the topic of socialization and the social construction of reality. Hence, sociosemiotics studies signs, representations, sign systems and sociocultural systems in their creation, maintenance and transmission of information at the level of individuals, groups, cultures and societies in intracultural and intercultural communication. Thus sociosemiotics concentrates also on processes between individuals and socio cultural systems (e.g. levels of acculturation and integration), as on intercultural relations (e.g. cultural distance). Chronotopically specific tendencies of semiotization are disclosed through the analysis of the interplay between physical, cultural and social objects in communicative situations. Likewise, sociosemiotics concentrates on linguistic, communicative, cultural and semiotic competence.
The sociosemiotic research kit contains object, subject and informant (information from users of the meaningful phenomena analysed), enabling differentiation between signs and entities interpretable as signs. This sociosemiotic analytic triplet places semiotics within the social sciences as the empirical paradigm par excellence. Its objects and empiricism are rooted in the ‘mediatedness’ of physical and sociocultural reality and its study of the mediation of these realms in communication goes as far as possible in search of ‘objective empirical reality’. The contextuality of sociocultural phenomena, and the same complementarity in the organization of semiotics, requires an understanding of social and cultural entities in terms of processes and functions that vary in space and time. (AR)
See also HALLIDAY, KRESS, LABOV, ROSSI-LANDI and Randviir and Cobley.
FURTHER READING
Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, T. (1972 [1966]) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Parsons, T. (1952) The Social System, London: Tavistock.
Ruesch, J. (1972) Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (Approaches to Semiotics 25), The Hague: Mouton.
The term ‘speech act’ was first introduced by Austin (1962) to draw attention to the fact that people perform actions when saying something. It was Searle’s (1969) further elaboration of this idea that made ‘speech act theory’ into a popular domain of research not only in the philosophy of language but also in linguistics. The general form of a speech act is F(p), where ‘p’ stands for a proposition (a reference and a predication) and ‘F’ for the illocutionary force of the utterance. Speech acts can be described in terms of constitutive rules which bear on the necessary and sufficient conditions for the felicitous performance of an act of a certain type. Thus a ‘propositional content condition’ for a promise is that the speaker predicates a future act on his/her own part; ‘preparatory conditions’ for promising include that the hearer would prefer the speaker to perform this act to his/her not performing it, and that it is not obvious to both speaker and hearer that the speaker would perform this act in the normal course of events; the ‘sincerity condition’ for promising is that the speaker intends to do what he/she promises; and the ‘essential condition’ is that the speaker intends his/her utterance to place him/her under an obligation to do as promised.
An important distinction is made between direct and indirect speech acts (Searle 1975). Indirect speech acts such as ‘Can you reach the salt?’ have a double illocutionary force: there is a primary illocutionary act (a request to pass the salt in this case) and a secondary act (i.e. the one by means of which the primary force is indirectly obtained, in this case a question pertaining to one of the preparatory conditions for the speaker being able to make the request). (JV)
FURTHER READING
Searle, J. R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A language is not uniformly the same throughout: there are differences of geographical and social dialect; of specialist languages, the language of the law, of medicine, of motor mechanics; of differences in levels of formality; and others. One can assume either that these just exist (‘In this part of the country this dialect is spoken, in this part that dialect is spoken’), or one can attempt to understand the causes of that difference.
The term ‘speech community’ locates the origins of difference in the fact that members of groups are characterized, among other things, by a greater density/frequency of interaction than others; that the occasions of their interaction within the community, the ‘speech events’, are marked by greater similarity than those of interaction ‘outside’ the community or across communities; that certain ‘speech events’ in the group occur frequently; and that the substance/content of interaction has relative persistence and stability. A number of factors of this kind will lead to the emergence of very similar pronunciations, of words used, of grammar, syntax, and of genres. All these mark the group as a ‘community’, are reinforced by the community, and make its language uses recognizably distinct. (GRK)
FURTHER READING
Gumperz, J. J. (ed.) (1982) Language and Social Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zeno of Citium (c. 336–260 BCE) founded a movement of thought that came to be known as Stoicism, because of the location at which he originally taught, the famous stoa poecille or ‘painted porch’. The Stoic philosophy encouraged involvement in public affairs and the performance of great deeds as fulfilling the mission of human existence. A nearly opposite view was proposed in Epicurean philosophy, the movement of thought founded at nearly the same historical moment by Epicurus of Samos (341–270 BCE).
Epicurus taught withdrawal from public notice and the ‘cultivation of one’s own garden’ where, with like-minded friends and associates, one could explore the realm of reason (so far as wisdom is given to humankind) in the peace that only avoidance of the currents of public life can provide. Stoics and Epicureans tended to agree on the basically material nature of the world. But whereas Stoics saw the universe suffused with divine reason which they called, after the usage attributed to the poem of Heraclitus (c. 540/535–c. 480/475 BCE), the 
, the ‘fertilizing wisdom of God’, and which they saw as the purpose of human reason to grasp, Epicureans saw the universe rather, after the teachings of Democritus (c. 460–370/362 BCE), as a dance of atoms in a void.
Reconstruction of Stoic views in particular represents a problem, because the report of their theoretical views survives for us only in the reports of their enemies, notably the sceptic Sextus Empiricus (c. 150–c. 225) and the follower of Epicurus Philodemus of Gadara (c. 110–40 BCE). As far as this concerns semiotics, by far the most important testimony concerning both the Stoics and the Epicureans is that which shows a crossing of their theoretical paths in the understanding of natural signs. The main source of this testimony is the mid-first-century BCE tract On the Sign and Inferences Therefrom, 
ì 
I
I 
w, by Philodemus. Philodemus intended that his tract prove the Epicurean position correct on all matters at issue. Even so, in present hindsight, what is fundamentally interesting about the tract (variously referred to by a Latin plural title, De Signis, or by the English title under which it was in fact published, On Methods of Inference, which omits the Io even in the singular) is the evidence it provides of a controversy rooted in the notion of sign, Io, toward the dawn of the Christian era, a controversy whose terms reveal that at this late period there did not exist in Greek philosophy a general notion of sign in which the two orders of nature and culture (linguistic communication in particular) are unified. The sign still belonged to the order of nature, language to the order of convention.
As we might expect in a controversy between Epicureans and Stoics over the subject matter of logical inference, the Epicureans view everything in a posteriori, experiential terms, the Stoics in a priori terms of rational necessity. In the Stoic and the Epicurean analysis alike the Io is a material object or natural event accessible to sense, a tynchánon (in the transliteration of Manetti, for a Stoic actual sensible referent). To such an object a linguistic expression, s
maínon in the Stoic logic, onoma in Epicurean, is mediately related; in the former case by what the Stoics call the smaínomenon or lekton, in the latter case by prolepsis (
o'
, ‘pre-conception’ or ‘anticipation’).
Hence, within the agreement ‘about the validity of particular signs’, this great theoretical difference emerges: ‘while the Stoics considered an object to be a sign beginning from the consequent (or rather from what was referred to), the Epicureans considered it from the point of view of the antecedent’ (Manetti 1993: 128–129). Much more than this as a firm general conclusion we have no evidence of to state particulars. All that appears definitive is that in both the Stoic and the Epicurean cases the link between any theory of linguistic expressions and signs as such remains indirect and implicit in their time.
What Manetti (1993: 98) remarks regarding the Stoics applies equally to the Epicureans, to wit, they ‘do not reach the point of saying that words are signs (Augustine is the first to make such a statement)’, and, in the particular case of the Stoics, ‘there remains a lexical difference between the smaínon/ smaínomenon pair and smeíon’. Concerning this triad of terms, Eco (1984: 32) had already remarked that ‘the common and obvious etymological root is an indication of their relatedness’; so that perhaps (Jackson 1972: 136) we see in the smaínon/ smaínomenon pairing some semantic drift in the direction Augustine will mark out as a unique path for philosophy to pursue in its Latin language development. But this suggestion seems unlikely and, in any event, exceeds actual evidence from existing texts. Much more obvious than any such imputed or implicit drift is the approximation to isomorphism between the Stoic smaínon/smaínomenon pair and the signifiant/signifié pair proposed by late modern semiology as the technical essence of ‘sign’. This similarity would also, and perhaps better, explain why Mates’ version of Stoic logic (e.g. Mates 1961: 20) proves so congenial to the logical theories of Frege and Carnap.
Speculations to one side, the present evidence from Greek antiquity requires us to hold that the eventual suggestion for sign as a general notion by Augustine (354–430) will mark an original Latin initiative in philosophy, the one which will most distinctively mark the speculative character of the Latin Age from its origin in Augustine’s day to its culmination in the 1632 work of John Poinsot (1589– 1644), where Augustine’s general notion, for the first time, is reduced systematically to its foundations in the theory of relative being. After Poinsot, the Latin Age gives way to the development of modern times. Attention turns to the work of Galileo and Descartes, and Latin gives way to the national languages. The crossing of ways of the Stoics and Epicureans will not be of interest again till the contemporary development of semiotics makes the historical ancestry of notions of sign a matter of general interest and scholarly urgency. (JD)
See also SIGNANS, SIGNIFICATION, SIGNIFIED and SIGNIFIER.
FURTHER READING
Fisch, M. H. (1986) ‘Philodemus and semeiosis (1879–1883)’, section 5 (pp. 329–330) of the essay ‘Peirce’s general theory of signs’, reprinted in M. H. Fisch, Peirce: Semeiotics and Pragmatism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 321–356.
Mates, B. (1949) ‘Stoic logic and the text of Sextus Empiricus’, American Journal of Philology,LXX(3): 290–298.
Philodemus (c. 110–c. 40 BCE). i.54–40 BCE. ìow (De Signis), trans. as On the Methods of Inference in the edition of P. H. De Lacy and E. Allen De Lacy, rev. with the collaboration of M. Gigante, F. Longo Auricchio and A. Tepedino Guerra, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1978; Greek text pp. 27–87, English pp. 91–131.
William C. Stokoe (1919– 2000) was an American educator and linguist widely recognized as the pioneer of the linguistic study of American Sign Language (ASL), which led to the international study of the world’s signed languages of the deaf. Stokoe received his bachelor’s and PhD degrees from Cornell University in the 1940s. He taught at Wells College before moving to Washington, DC in 1955 to teach English to deaf students at Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University). It was here that he first began to study the signing used by his deaf students.
In his 1960 treatise Sign Language Structure, Stokoe offered the first structural analysis of ASL form, demonstrating that it exhibits duality of patterning. Stokoe analysed signs into three major phonological classes: handshape (the configuration that the hand makes when producing the sign), location (the place where the sign is produced) and movement (the movement made in producing the sign). He termed these meaningless units of formation cheremes, the signed equivalent of phonemes in spoken languages. Stokoe argued that signed language phonological structure is in important aspects simultaneous. While recognizing that the articulation of certain signs exhibited internal sequentiality, recording this fact in his notational system, Stokoe claimed that the major units of organization, the cheremes, are simultaneously rather than sequentially organized. Applying this linguistic approach to signs, Stokoe and his colleagues Carl Croneberg and Dorothy Casterline produced the first dictionary of American Sign Language. Previous to this work, there were no true dictionaries of the language. At most, so-called dictionaries were lists of signs ordered alphabetically by their English translation equivalent, or by semantic category (food, people, etc.). Stokoe’s Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles (1965) introduced a writing system based on his phonological analysis of signs, using this system to list signs alphabetically.
Stokoe returned to the formational structure of signed language in a 1991 essay entitled ‘Semantic phonology’. He sought to simplify what he regarded as overly complex models of sign phonology, including his own original three-part conception of handshape, location and movement. In this new view, Stokoe proposed that signs should be viewed more simply as ‘something that acts together with its action’.
The term ‘semantic phonology’ was meant to unify two facts about signed language. First, Stokoe recognized that the phonological primes of a signed language, hands and their shapes, locations and movements – or, in his simplified view, something that acts with its action – possess inherent conceptual import in the same way that cognitive linguists attribute conceptual or notional import to grammatical categories such as noun and verb. Second, Stokoe believed that this archetypal conceptual structure corresponded to the nature of human vision and the difference of retinal cells receptive to detail (‘something’) and movement (‘acts’).
Stokoe was also a proponent of the gestural theory of language origin. This notion was a part of his conception of language from the start, appearing in the first few pages of Sign Language Structure, where he noted that ‘communication by a system of gestures is not an exclusively human activity, so that in a broad sense of the term, sign language is as old as the race itself’ (Stokoe 1960: 1). Seeing the gestural activity of a culture to be the raw material on which the signed languages of deaf people are built, he came to regard the essence of all human language as the ability to make and understand meaningful, visible movements.
Prior to Stokoe’s work, signed languages were regarded as nothing more than pictorial gestures without internal structure, strung together without grammar. Stokoe demonstrated that signed languages are true human languages, and in so doing he revolutionized deaf education and fuelled the Deaf Pride movement. (SW)
FURTHER READING
Armstrong, D. F., Karchmer, M. A. and Van Cleve, J. V. (eds) (2002) The Study of Signed Languages: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
Stokoe, W. C. (1991) ‘Semantic phonology’, Sign Language Studies,71: 107–114.
Stokoe, W. C. (2001) Language in Hand, Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press.
The term ‘structuralism’ designates a number of things. American structuralism refers to tendencies in linguistics associated with the names of Bloomfield, Sapir, Harris and, more problematically, Chomsky. Structuralism also refers to a tendency in anthropology instanced by contemporary anthropologists such as Douglas. Then there is the ‘structural linguistics’ or structuralism of the Prague School which focused upon different functional levels in language and was carried from Russian Formalism through the Prague Linguistic Circle and into his later work by Roman Jakobson (for example, Jakobson 1960). Most often, however, structuralism is associated with a widespread movement in the human sciences whose heyday was the 1950s and 1960s in France and the late 1960s and 1970s in the Anglo-American world (see, for example, de George and de George 1972; Macksey and Donato 1972). The term ‘structure’ is undoubtedly latent in ‘structuralism’ but is not always explicit; what is quite frequently implicit is a set of semiological principles derived from Saussure’s notion of langue.
Crudely put, structuralism entertained a common method across disciplines whereby surface manifestation of phenomena were interrogated in order that they might reveal a limited set of underlying principles. The anthropology of Lévi-Strauss is a good example of this, particularly his approach to myth. Essentially, his approach is akin to searching through numerous examples of parole (the various myths under study) in order to discover a universal langue (a master code which makes possible all myths). In the process, a given myth might therefore be stripped bare to reveal its own structure in relation to the master code. Famously, Lévi-Strauss took the Oedipus myth and treated it ‘as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered as a unilinear series’ (1977a: 213). The result was a table of columns showing the distribution of various narrative functions in a fashion almost resembling the cross-section of a cell and certainly fulfilling the synchronic remit set by Saussure. This was not just an abstract exercise, however; as a result of such work Lévi-Strauss was able to posit theories about the recurrent – or even universal – features of the human mind in such activities as mythmaking and storytelling.
A broadly similar approach can be seen in the work of Greimas, Bremond and even ‘proto-structuralists’ such as the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp (about whose work Lévi-Strauss wrote an incisive critique in 1961 – see Lévi-Strauss 1977b). The early writings of Roland Barthes might also be said to be structuralist in their orientation. Such works as his 1957 collection Mythologies (1973a [1957]) have become famous for the skilful way in which they show some of the most ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’ artefacts of popular culture to have been generated by a more or less coherent system that is ideological through and through.
Even though Barthes undoubtedly harboured a critical purpose in his structuralism, what underlies his approach and that of the others mentioned above is the belief in a semiological master code governing the appearance and immediate nature of phenomena. For this reason structuralism is often associated with functionalism, a tendency in sociological thinking which is already present in Saussure’s langue, a concept which itself is frequently thought to have been influenced by the functionalist sociology of Durkheim. In functionalism, the machinery of society works to facilitate human interaction and its different branches are largely believed to operate with a minimum of conflict. (Work deriving from Vološinov and the tradition of sociolinguistics posits virtually the opposite theory: see Vološinov 1973 [1929].) As such, humans are frequently seen in structuralism to be the ‘bearers’ or ‘arbitrators’ of systems rather than their controllers. Where poststructuralism breaks with structuralism is precisely on this point, seeing humans, instead, as largely the effect of systems and structures. However, the distinction here is subtle and it is usually difficult to immediately identify such a break between the two movements. (PC)
FURTHER READING
de George, R. and de George, F. (eds) (1971) The Structuralists: From Marx to Lévi-Strauss,Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1987) The View from Afar, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Macksey, R. and Donato, E. (eds) (1970) The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
In early generative grammar, the level of analysis after transformations have applied. The basic idea was that the grammatical structure of complex sentences is best described by decomposing them into more transparent representations called deep structures to which a series of operations called transformations apply. Surface structures are thus the grammatical structures that are immediately discernible in sentences: it is not quite true to say that they are ‘the sentences we see or hear’, since phonological rules apply to surface structures to produce actual sequences of sounds, sometimes called phonetic form.
In more recent work the role of deep structure was reduced and more work was done by surface structure. The most recent theory proposed by Chomsky and his associates, known as minimalism, suggests that surface structure can be dispensed with. (RS)
A syllogism is a deductive argument consisting of two categorical premises with a conclusion resulting from the elimination of a common term, as in: All men are born of women; anything born of a woman is mortal; therefore, all men are mortal. Traditional logic focused on the study of the forms of syllogism and rules for valid inferences. The principle of transivity (if a then b, and if b then c, then if a then c) is the key to syllogistic reasoning. (NH)
This term is polysemic both in everyday discourse and in philosophical–scientific discourse including the semiotic one. We may distinguish between the following two main acceptations: symbol is
1 a synonym for sign; or
2 a special type of sign.
As regards (1): The notion of symbol is used by Ernst Cassirer in Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1953–1957 [1923– 1929]) to refer to signs. The human being constructs culture through signs and is an animal symbolicum. Symbol is connected to symbolic form which leads to Cassirer’s critique of symbolic reason or of the diverse aspects of culture including language, myth, religion, etc.
In Ogden and Richards (1923) as well, ‘symbol’ stands for sign which presents meaning in terms of the interactive relation between so-called symbol, thought or reference, and referent.
As regards (2): For Freud and subsequent psychoanalytically oriented thinkers the symbol is a particular type of sign which indicates all psychic or oniric activity insofar as it reveals the unconscious. The unconscious, by presenting consciousness with the symbol of the symbolized object, exerts a screening and protective function.
The symbol is also a particular type of sign in the typology described by Charles S. Peirce: the symbol is the sign ‘in consequence of a habit (which term I use as including a natural disposition)’ (CP 4.531).
According to Charles Morris, it is a sign which replaces another as a guide for behaviour (cf. Morris 1946: I, 8). In John Dewey’s account (1938: ‘Introduction’), it is an arbitrary or conventional sign.
The symbol is a particular type of sign for Saussure (1916: Ch. I) as well. However, on the latter’s account it is not completely arbitrary and therefore it is distinct from the verbal sign. In contrast to verbal signs, the relation between signifier and signified in the symbol is always to a degree conventional (as in the case of scales acting as a sign of justice), though not wholly arbitrarily.
With reference to the encyclopaedic entry ‘Symbol’ by S. S. Averincev (1971), M. Bakhtin (1974) describes the symbol as the sign which most requires answering comprehension, given the dialectic correlation between identity and alterity. The symbol includes the warmth of mystery that unites, juxtaposition of one’s own to the other, the warmth of love and the coldness of extraneousness, juxtaposition and comparison: it is not circumscribable to an immediate context but relates to a remote and distant context, which accounts for its opening to alterity. (AP)
FURTHER READING
Ponzio, A. (1985) ‘The symbol, alterity, and abduction’, Semiotica,56(3/4): 261–277.
Synchrony is the Saussurean technical term for a theoretical perspective in which a (linguistic) sign system is seen as a self-contained structure not subject to change. The study of linguistic change Saussure relegated to ‘diachronic’ linguistics. The opposition between synchronic and diachronic is often loosely but wrongly interpreted as merely contrasting relations between linguistic phenomena which happen to be contemporaneous with relations between linguistic phenomena which happen to be separated in time but phylogenetically connected. Thus ‘diachronic’ becomes (misleadingly) equated with ‘historical’. For Saussure langue is an exclusively synchronic concept, and diachronic linguistics does not study langue in any sense. Saussure’s alternative term for synchronic linguistics was ‘static linguistics’, i.e. the study of linguistic states (états de langue). (RH)
In Saussurean terminology, syntagmatic relations are those into which a linguistic unit enters in virtue of its linear concatenation in a speech chain. Thus the word unbeatable is a syntagm comprising three syntagmatically related signs: i) un, ii) beat and iii) able. The meaning of a syntagm is always more than the sum of its parts. Syntagmatic relations are contrasted in Saussurean theory with ‘associative’ relations (see paradigm). Syntagmatics should not be confused with syntax, in the sense in which that term is usually understood in traditional grammar or non-Saussurean linguistics. (Saussure’s editors warned explicitly against this confusion, but it is commonly made.) Saussure described syntagmatic relations as holding in praesentia, as opposed to associative relations, which hold in absentia. (RH)
Syntax is the part of a grammar which deals with the arrangement of words in sentences. An important part of syntax is the order of words. Compare these English and German sentences:
1 Max has read the book.
2 Max hat das Buch gelesen. (Max has the book read.)
The two sentences have the same meaning, but the two languages have different syntactic rules of word order: in English, the object normally comes after the verb (read +the book), whereas in this kind of German sentence the object comes before the verb (das Buch +gelesen).
Syntax also deals with operations on sentences. English and German have a way of turning statements like (1) and (2) into questions by moving the first auxiliary verb to the front of the sentence, giving us:
3 Has Max read the book?
4 Hat Max das Buch gelesen? (Has Max the book read?)
In French, however, the syntax of questions is different, since French does not allow (5) to be turned into a question like (6):
5 Max a lu le livre.
6 *A Max lu le livre?
(The asterisk in (6) indicates that this sentence is not possible in French.) Since the meaning of the sentences is the same in each language, these rules of syntax are independent of mean ing. (RS)
SFG is an approach to language which puts function first: the emphasis is on what people do with language, rather than analysing the structure of language in isolation (for this reason it is also known as functional grammar (cf. Halliday 1994)). The driving force is Michael Halliday, a British linguist who has worked in Australia for many years. Any single utterance or longer text is seen as the result of choices by speakers or writers, and systemic grammarians try to classify these choices in terms of three basic functions of language: the ideational function is the use of language to convey information; the textual function is the creation of links between different parts of a text; and the interpersonal function is the use of language to create and maintain social relations between people.
Systemic grammar is one of the few frameworks which analyses whole texts, identifying the words and structures which makes texts coherent (cf. Halliday and Hasan 1976). It is also distinctive in giving a central place to links between language and social processes. Because of this it has been influential in stylistics, in sociolinguistics and in education. (RS)
FURTHER READING
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994) An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn, London: Arnold.
SYSTEMS THEORY see AUTOPOIESIS, CYBERNETICS, CYBERSEMIOTICS, MODELLING SYSTEMS THEORY and POST-HUMANISM