Abstract
Semiotics and linguistics (in the modern sense) emerge at the same time and in the same book, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. So, they share many of the same analytical tools and many of the same theories. The difference is that semioticians, by and large, seek to understand the connection between language and other meaning-making codes, from the nonverbal to the artistic. The ancient Greek philosophers defined language as logos, the faculty that had transformed the human being from an insentient brute into a rational animal. However, they also saw language as a potentially dangerous weapon for inflicting harm upon others. Even today, there is a widespread tendency to blame linguistically based misunderstandings for many of the world’s ills, from conflicts between individuals to wars between nations. Clearly, understanding what language is and what it allows us to do, socially, conceptually, and creatively, is a central aim of semiotics. This chapter looks at how we learn to speak in infancy without any specific training, through just exposure to samples of it; at the relation between language, culture, and cognition; at the relation between vocal language and written language; at how language and writing are evolving in the age of the Internet; at the nature of slang; at the relation between vocal speech and language; and finally, at the connection between language and common rituals.
Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Noam Chomsky, On nature and language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
- 2.
Charles W. Morris, Foundations of the theory of signs (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1938).
- 3.
See, Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962).
- 4.
Julian Jaynes, The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975).
- 5.
An in-depth synthesis of this line of work in linguistics, known more technically as cognitive linguistics, can be found in Gary B. Palmer , Toward a theory of cultural linguistics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
- 6.
Robert Levine, A geography of time: The temporal misadventures of a social psychologist or how every culture keeps time just a little bit differently (New York: Basic, 1997).
- 7.
Ronald W. Langacker has studied this aspect of language rather profoundly in Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990) and Grammar and conceptualization (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).
- 8.
Roger W. Brown, Psycholinguistics (New York: Free Press, 1970), 258–73.
- 9.
The most in-depth theory of modeling systems in semiotics is the one by Thomas A. Sebeok , Signs: An introduction to semiotics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).
- 10.
F. M. Müller, Lectures on the science of language (London: Longmans, Green, 1861).
- 11.
B. Alpher, “Feminine as the unmarked grammatical gender: Buffalo girls are no fools,” Australian Journal of Linguistics 7 (1987): 169–87.
- 12.
Edward Sapir, Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1921).
- 13.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic color terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
- 14.
N. McNeill, “Colour and colour terminology,” Journal of Linguistics 8 (1972): 21–33.
- 15.
A detailed treatment of color categories, as well as an up-to-date debate on the relation between color categories and perception, can be found in C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi , eds., Color categories in thought and language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- 16.
David Crystal, Language and the Internet, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 17.
Marcel Danesi, The semiotics of emoji: The rise of visual language in the age of the Internet (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
- 18.
Danesi, op. cit.
- 19.
Leslie Savan, Slam dunks and no-brainers: Language in your life, the media, business, politics, and, like, whatever (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005). In Conversation: A history of a declining art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),Stephen Miller also decries the loss of true co nversation, which he similarly claims is due to media influence. But I have a slightly different take on this, namely that conversation is a code that changes over time and it does so because the channels we use to converse are changing. Talk online is bound to be different from talk face-to-face. But the content of conversations have always remained the same from time immemorial. Conversation is about presenting the Self in daily life with the strategies that are consistent with trends within that very life.
- 20.
Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible action as utterance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 348.
- 21.
David McNeill, Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Gesture & thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
- 22.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 194.
- 23.
R. A. Gardner and B. T. Gardner, “Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee,” Science 165 (1969): 664–72.
- 24.
D. Premack and A. J. Premack, The mind of an ape (New York: Norton, 1983).
- 25.
R. Epstein, R. P. Lanza, and B. F. Skinner, “Symbolic communication between two pigeons,” Science 207 (1980): 543–545.
- 26.
G. Urban, “Metasignaling and language origins,” American Anthropologist 104 (2002): 233–246.
- 27.
M. L. Jensvold and R. A. Gardner, “Interactive use of sign language by cross-fostered chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes),” Journal of Comparative Psychology 114 (2000): 335–346.
- 28.
Cited in Stephen Pinker, The language instinct: How the mind creates language (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 37.
Bibliography
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Sebeok, Thomas A. 1994. Signs: An introduction to semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Urban, G. 2002. Metasignaling and language origins. American Anthropologist 104: 233–246.
Vygotsky, Lev S. 1962. Thought and language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Danesi, M. (2018). Tell Me About Yourself: What Is Language?. In: Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95348-6_4
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