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Biology, Linguistics, and the Semiotic Perspective on Language

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Book cover Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics

Part of the book series: Biosemiotics ((BSEM,volume 13))

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between biology and linguistics by tracing the corresponding parallel developments of phylogenetic thinking in the nineteenth century. The conception of languages and species as historical entities developed from a philosophical current that originated with philosophies of nature deriving predominantly from Kant, Goethe and Schelling. Following the epistemological and metaphysical trajectory of German Naturphilosophie, this paper explains how J. von Uexküll carried this biosemiotic approach to biology and language into the twentieth century while linguistics aligned its methods with psychology and other social sciences. Sebeok’s contributions to linguistics and semiotics throughout the twentieth century were characterized by his commitment to biosemiotics, maintaining a close connection to biology and the anti-psychologism associated with the semiotic perspective on language. In several key aspects, Sebeok’s views are shown to be compatible with Chomsky’s biolinguistics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Darwin 1859.

  2. 2.

    Darwin 1871, pp. 89–90.

  3. 3.

    Where several manuscripts existed that were copies of an older manuscript, the stemma diagrams helped philologists establish a record of which manuscript came first and provided the basis of other, later manuscripts.

  4. 4.

    Lowth 1762.

  5. 5.

    Murray 1795.

  6. 6.

    Atkinson and Gray 2005.

  7. 7.

    Richards 2004, p. 32.

  8. 8.

    Cf. Richards 2002 and 2008.

  9. 9.

    Cf. Richards 2008.

  10. 10.

    Goethe, quoted in Richards 2008, p. 111.

  11. 11.

    Cf. Uexküll 1992.

  12. 12.

    Apparently it was Fedi Ditmar who invented the term according to Uexküll (1957, p. 61).

  13. 13.

    Cf. Kull 2001, p. 3.

  14. 14.

    Schleicher 1863, quoted in Richards 2008, p. 105.

  15. 15.

    While it is obvious that the analogy between texts and fossils is more problematic than this comparison allows for, a critique of the comparative methods in linguistics and biology would certainly lead beyond the objectives of this paper.

  16. 16.

    Cf. Richards 2008, p. 257; Schleicher 1863.

  17. 17.

    Richards 2008, p. 259.

  18. 18.

    Schleicher 1848, p. 258.

  19. 19.

    Deacon 1997.

  20. 20.

    Darwin , quoted in Richards 2008, p. 262.

  21. 21.

    McWhorter 2011, p. 12.

  22. 22.

    Wilkins 2010.

  23. 23.

    Hoffmeyer 1993[1996] and 2008.

  24. 24.

    For instance, Hoffmeyer (2007) illustrates concepts such as semiotic causation, semiotic emergence, and semiotic scaffolding in evolution with the movement of an Escherichia coli cell, a reproductive disorder in amphibians, and the development of the word spam in English respectively.

  25. 25.

    Lanier Anderson 2005, p. 288.

  26. 26.

    Stjernfelt 2013.

  27. 27.

    Lanier Anderson 2005, p. 292.

  28. 28.

    Stjernfelt 2013, p. 77.

  29. 29.

    Saussure 1916.

  30. 30.

    Saussure 1916 [1986, p. 109].

  31. 31.

    Chomsky and Halle 1968.

  32. 32.

    Boas 1911.

  33. 33.

    1916 [1986, p. 15].

  34. 34.

    E.g., Trubetzkoy 1939.

  35. 35.

    E.g., Bloomfield 1933.

  36. 36.

    Some of the articulations in the CGL also became the target of other types of criticism. Jacques Derrida (Derrira 1967) could have articulated his Grammatology in a positive way based on the semiotic perspective he gleaned from Peirce , but he chose to couch his work in a critique of the “linguist from Geneva”, thereby denying the Saussurean legacy of semiology.

  37. 37.

    Stjernfelt 2013, p. 77.

  38. 38.

    Schwanenflugel 1991.

  39. 39.

    E.g., Barber et al. 2013.

  40. 40.

    Stjernfelt 2013, p. 77. It should be noted that in the twentieth century, some linguists became uncomfortable with linguistic abstractions and critiques came from inside the field. For example, John Rupert Firth criticized linguistics for its exclusion of the context. Michael Halliday formulated a social semiotics. The most irreverent and far-reaching criticism of linguistic abstractions is probably Roy Harris’ integrationist linguistics that takes into consideration all the aspects of linguistic exchanges that phonemes, morphemes or syntagms cannot capture. Firth’s context, Halliday’s social semiotics, Harris’ integrationism, and Gunther Kress’ multimodality are all reactions to a linguistics estranged from a semiotic perspective on language.

  41. 41.

    Cf. Augustyn 2009.

  42. 42.

    Uexküll 1928, p. 40.

  43. 43.

    Uexküll 1981 [1987, p. 149].

  44. 44.

    Cf. Jenkins 2000, p. 1.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., p. 10.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 3.

  47. 47.

    Sklar 1968, p. 213.

  48. 48.

    Chomsky 2006, p. x.

  49. 49.

    Ibid.

  50. 50.

    Sebeok 2001, p. 70.

  51. 51.

    Cf. Sebeok 1998, p. 32.

  52. 52.

    Ibid.

  53. 53.

    Cf. Uexküll 1928.

  54. 54.

    Sebeok 1998, pp. 32–34.

  55. 55.

    Sebeok 2001, p. vii.

  56. 56.

    Chomsky 2006, p. 83.

  57. 57.

    Lenneberg 1964, p. 372.

  58. 58.

    E.g., Sebeok 1977, p. 181 and 2001, pp. xix, 22.

  59. 59.

    Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), 1980.

  60. 60.

    Sebeok 1991, p. 53.

  61. 61.

    Cf. Andersen and Merrell 1991; Sebeok and Danesi 2000.

  62. 62.

    Chomsky 2006, p. 178.

  63. 63.

    Sebeok 2001, p. 29; Boeckx and Piatelli-Palmarini 2005, p. 460.

  64. 64.

    E.g., Pinker 1994 and 2003.

  65. 65.

    Boeckx and Piatelli-Palmarini 2005, p. 461.

  66. 66.

    Chomsky 1959, p. 57.

  67. 67.

    Chomsky 2006, p. 6.

  68. 68.

    Ibid.; italics mine. – P.A.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., p. 12.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., p. 20.

  71. 71.

    Ibid.

  72. 72.

    Ibid., p. 84.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., pp. 79–80.

  74. 74.

    Chomsky 2007, p. 14.

  75. 75.

    Hoffmeyer 2004, p. 73.

  76. 76.

    Latour 1991 [1993].

  77. 77.

    Ibid., p. 39.

  78. 78.

    Ibid., p. 11.

  79. 79.

    Latour 1991 [1993].

  80. 80.

    Sensu Latour 1991 [1993].

  81. 81.

    Latour 1991 [1993, p. 34].

  82. 82.

    Ibid.

  83. 83.

    Cf. Chomsky 2005, p. 6.

  84. 84.

    Chomsky 1966 [2009].

  85. 85.

    Ibid., p. 1.

  86. 86.

    Jenkins 2000.

  87. 87.

    Fitch 2009, p. 284.

  88. 88.

    Ibid., p. 285.

  89. 89.

    Ibid.

  90. 90.

    Cf. Andrews 2011.

  91. 91.

    Fitch 2009, p. 284.

  92. 92.

    Ibid., p. 285.

  93. 93.

    Ibid., p. 286.

  94. 94.

    E.g., Barbieri 2010.

  95. 95.

    Cf. Kull et al. 2009.

  96. 96.

    Hoffmeyer 2008, p. 15.

  97. 97.

    Sebeok 1998, p. 25.

  98. 98.

    Ibid., p. 24.

  99. 99.

    Weber 2008.

  100. 100.

    Haeckel 1866.

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  1. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

    Prisca Augustyn

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  1. Prisca Augustyn
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Slavic and South Asian Studies, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Ekaterina Velmezova

  2. Professor in biosemiotics, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Kalevi Kull

  3. Dept. of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Slagelse, Denmark

    Stephen J. Cowley

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Augustyn, P. (2015). Biology, Linguistics, and the Semiotic Perspective on Language. In: Velmezova, E., Kull, K., Cowley, S. (eds) Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. Biosemiotics, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20663-9_9

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