SIX

Linguistics and Semiotics

The relationship between semiotics and linguistics is to be conceived of as either coordinate or hierarchical. If the relationship is hierarchical, there are two possibilities: either linguistics is superordinate, that is, it subsumes semiotics; or semiotics is superordinate, that is, it subsumes linguistics. Each of these three conjunctions has been variously put forward, but only the third has enjoyed sustained support. The first two can thus be disposed of briefly.

The view that semiotics and linguistics are coequal is maintained on utilitarian rather than abstract grounds. As Metz (1974:60), for instance, has expostulated, “In theory, linguistics is only a branch of semiotics, but in fact semiotics was created from linguistics. . . . For the most part semiotics remains to be done, whereas linguistics is already well advanced. Nevertheless there is a slight reversal. The post-Saussurians . . . have taken the semiotics he foresaw and are squarely making it into a translinguistic discipline. And this is very good, for the older brother must help the younger, and not the other way around.” Unfortunately, Metz’s argument is riddled with fallacies, the most serious among them being the historical one: semiotics was not at all created from linguistics, but, most likely, from medicine (Sebeok 1985a:181), and also has far deeper roots in the annals of humankind. Sometimes, however, the fraternal metaphor enjoys administrative sanction; thus Rice University, in 1982, created its Department of Linguistics and Semiotics (Copeland 1984:x).

Roland Barthes may have been unique in his advocacy of the radical stand that semiology (alias semiotics) is but “a part of linguistics: to be precise, it is that part covering the great signifying unities of discourse. By this inversion [of Saussure’s celebrated dictum, more of which below], we may expect to bring to light the unity of the research at present being done in anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis and stylistics round the concept of signification” (1967:11). Of this passage, one of Barthes’s memorialists remarked: “Even if language were the only evidence semiologists had, this would not make semiology part of linguistics any more than the historians’ reliance on written documents makes history a part of linguistics. But semiologists cannot rely on language alone; they cannot assume that everything named is significant and everything unnamed insignificant” (Culler 1983:73-74). Prieto’s opinion (1975:133), that “[m]algré l’attrait que peut exercer ce point de vue [that is, Barthes’s], je considère qu’il est insoutenable,” is shared by most semioticians and others.

The subject matter of semiotics is often said to be “the communication of any messages whatever” (Jakobson 1974:32) or “the exchange of any messages whatever and of the system of signs which underlie them” (Sebeok 1985a:1). Its concerns include considerations of how messages are, successively, generated, encoded, transmitted, decoded, and interpreted, and how this entire transaction (“semiosis”) is worked upon by the context. Further questions revolve around problems of coding, phylogenesis and history, ontogenesis, loss of semiosic capacity (“asemasia”; cf. Sebeok 1979a:71), and the like. A message is equivalent to a string of signs. Signs, defined by whatever rhetorical sleight-of-tongue—and, as Nietzsche observed, only what doesn’t have a history can be defined, and surely semiotics has a very long history—are classifiable according to many (often partially overlapping) criteria; common oppositions may comprehend subjective signs, or symptoms, versus objective signs (Sebeok 1984a; Thure von Uexküll 1986); “wanted” signs, or signals, versus “unwanted” signs, or noise (cf. Ch. 2, above); signs versus symbols (Maritain 1943; Cassirer 1944:31; Alston 1967b); icons versus indexes, and both against symbols (involving one of many Peircean trichotomies; cf. 2.274-307); and so forth. The distinction which is most immediately pertinent here, however, is the one between nonverbal signs (the unmarked category) and verbal signs (the marked category). This differentiation—which places semiotics in a superordinate position over both linguistics and the putative discipline, with, as yet, no universally agreed upon global designation, which studies nonverbal signs—enjoys a most respectable tradition among both philosophers and linguists.

The early development of the notion “verbal signs” out of its Stoic beginnings has been expertly tracked by Telegdi (1976:267-305), but for the continuation of the story since the seventeenth century we must begin anew with Locke. In the two-page concluding chapter of his Essay (1690:720-721), where he deals with the division of the sciences, Locke abruptly introduces the term semiotics (with a minor variation in spelling), briefly defining it as the Doctrine of Signs, and explaining that its business “is to consider the Nature of Signs, the Mind makes use of for the understanding of Things, or conveying its Knowledge to others.” A bit further in the same paragraph, he goes on to observe: “to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary. Those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate Sounds. The Consideration then of Ideas and Words, as the great Instruments of Knowledge, makes no despicable part of their Contemplation, who would take a view of humane Knowledge in the whole Extent of it.” Locke’s epistemological classification here is based, as Armstrong (1965:380) rightly points out, “upon the special theory of relations between thing, idea, and word.” And, as Deely (1985:309-310) says, these key terms, “words and ideas,” are here used by Locke synecdochically, that is, by the former Locke means verbal signs, in the ordinary sense of any and all units of language, whereas he equates (1690:47) the latter with objects. At any rate, in these short passages, Locke establishes two points: first, that “words,” or the verbal, constitute only one class of signs but that, second, for humans, this class is a privileged one.

The Alsatian philosopher Lambert, who was strongly influenced by Locke, published his workmanlike Semiotik some three-quarters of a century later, devoting the first of its ten chapters to types of signs other than verbal, while the rest of his monograph deals with language (“die Untersuchung der Nothwedigkeit der symbolischen Erkenntnis überhaupt, und der Sprache besonders” [1764:8]). By this proportion, he implies his concurrence with Locke.

The importance Peirce attached to his doctrine of signs is vividly illustrated by a famous quotation from a letter he wrote to Lady Welby, on December 23, 1908: “Know that from the day when at the age of 12 or 13 I took up, in my elder brother’s room a copy of Whately’s Logic, and asked him what Logic was, and getting some simple answer, flung myself on the floor and buried myself in it, it has never been in my power to study anything—mathematics, ethics, metaphysics, gravitation, thermodynamics, optics, chemistry, comparative anatomy, psychology, phonetics, economic, the history of science, whist, men and women, wine, metrology, except as a study of semeiotic” (Hardwick 1977:85-86). We can confidently take “phonetics” in this catalogue as a pars pro toto for linguistics, which Peirce elsewhere (1935-1966:1.271) certifies as “the vast and splendidly developed science of linguistics.”

Among philosophers, Charles Morris (1946:220-223, 1964:60-62) appears to have been the most circumspect about the links between semiotics and linguistics. The suggestion he made in 1946 (221), and that I well remember from seminars of his that I had attended six years before that, is that semiotics was to provide “the metalanguage of linguistics,” and thus that the terminology of linguistics would be defined in semiotic terms. “The carrying out of this program consistently and in detail would mean the emergence of a semiotically grounded science of linguistics.” Oddly enough, Morris’s wish came true, in a way, four years after his death, when Shapiro made an earnest “attempt to found a Peircean linguistics . . . along lines suggested by Peirce’s semiotic in the context of his entire philosophy” (1983:ix). This shot seems, however, to have misfired, for it was either ignored by workers in the mainstream of linguistics or condemned by other experts on Peirce; for instance, one of these wrote: “Die Gefahr besteht, dass dieses Buch [that is, Shapiro’s] als Vorwand dafür dienen Könnte, dass andere Linguisten ihre Ausführungen ebenfalls mit semiotischen Begriffen dekorieren und ihre Publikationen dann als semiotische Analysen ausgeben. Eine Grundlagenwissenschaft wie die Semiotik darf nicht zum Dekor degradiert werden” (Walther 1984:117). (Actually, Shapiro’s approach was anticipated by several other linguists, notably including Uriel Weinreich and Raimo Anttila, but these treatments of linguistic data within a strongly semioitic framework, as Irmengard Rauch occasionally reminds us with characteristic understatement, have not provoked a revolution in linguistic method either.)

Linguistics, Carnap (1942:13) specified, “is the descriptive, empirical part of semiotic (of spoken or written languages). . . .” Charles Morris expanded on Carnap’s proposition by introducing the very general notion of a lansign-system, applicable not only to spoken and written languages but also to mathematics and symbolic logic, “and perhaps to the arts” (Morris 1964:60), noting that it is commonly admitted (he mentions, however, only Hjelmslev, L. Bloomfield, and Greenberg) “[t]at linguistics is part of semiotic” (ibid.:62). His proposal to replace the word “language” with “lansign-system” (1946:36), and associated terminological innovations, proved still-born; but he was right in observing that most linguists who have given the matter any thought at all did view their discipline as a part of semiotics. Among linguists of this persuasion, Saussure is customarily discussed first.

Saussure, who used the word semiology rather than semiotics—and sometimes the more apt, yet never espoused, French synonym signologie—seems to have devoted very little time in his lectures to thus situating linguistics. A compact, but revered and influential, passage reads as follows:

A language . . . is a social institution. But it is in various respects distinct from political, juridical and other institutions. Its special nature emerges when we bring into consideration a different order of facts. . . . A language is a system of signs expressing ideas [cf. Locke!], and hence comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites, forms of politeness, military signals, and so on. It is simply the most important of such systems. . . . It is therefore possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeion, “sign”). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has the right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be the laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge [Saussure 1983:15-16].

Several essays were subsequently fashioned to carry out the implications of Saussure’s program, the first among them being the thoughtful—and too long neglected—attempt of Buyssens, who took it as given that “[s]eul le point de vue sémiologique permet de déterminer scientifiquement l’objet de la linguistique” (1943:31). To the principle articulated here, according to which linguistic problems are “first and foremost semiological,” and the “need will be felt to consider them as semiological phenomena and to explain them in terms of the laws of semiology” (Saussure 1983:16-17), another has to be juxtaposed, namely, that linguistics, in Saussure’s view, was to serve as the model) “le patron général”) for semiology (or semiotics). (This formula, by the way, turned out to have been thoroughly mistaken, and fatally misleading for research endeavors, for instance, in such adjacent areas as “kinesics.”)

Sapir (1929:211) also viewed linguistic facts as “specialized forms of symbolic behavior,” and he mentions among “the primary communicative processes of society . . . language; gesture in its widest sense; the imitation of overt behavior; and a large and ill-defined group of implicit processes which grow out of overt behavior and which may be rather vaguely referred to as ‘social suggestion.’ ” He then adds that “[l]anguage is the communicative process par excellence in every known society” (Sapir 1931:78-79). He did not, however, as far as I know, use any term of the “semiotics” family.

Gardiner (1932:85) remarks about the “student of linguistic theory” that he “treats utterances solely as instruments of communication, as significant signs. His interest is, in fact, what has been variously called semasiology, signifies, or semantics. It is a wide field, and when rightly understood, embraces the entire domain of both grammar and lexicography” (cf. Sebeok 1985a:47-58 as to the terminological confusion inherent in the foregoing).

Here should be mentioned, as well, Bloomfield’s dictum (1939:55), that “linguistics is the chief contributor to semiotic”; and Weinreich’s (1968:164), that “specialized research into natural human [sic] language—the semiotic phenomenon par excellence—constitutes linguistics.” To round out such aphoristic dicta, one might finally cite Greimas and Courtés’s (1982:177) interpretation of what linguistics is: this, they claim, “may be defined as a scientific study of language as semiotic system.” (See further Mounin 1970.)

The contributions of two major figures of twentieth-century linguistics need to be singled out: those of Hjelmslev—who was thoroughly influenced by Saussure—and of Jakobson—who was equally permeated by Saussure but far more persuaded by Peirce. Of Hjelmslev, Trabant (1981:169n10) observes: “Zusammen mit Saussures vorbereitenden Bemerkungen zu einer allgemeinen Wissenschaft von den Zeichen stellt die Glossematik den eigentlich europäischen Beitrag zur allgemeinen Semiotik dar, der auch gleichzeitig der Betrag der Sprachwissenschaft zur Semiotik ist.” Greimas and Courtés (1982:288), ignoring history altogether, proclaim that Hjelmslev “was the first to propose a coherent semiotic theory,” a reckless exaggeration by which they seem to mean merely that he considered semiotics “to be a hierarchy . . . endowed with a double mode of existence, paradigmatic and syntagmatic . . . and provided with at least two articulation planes—expression and content.” Natural semiotic systems, then, in Hjelmslev’s conception, comprehend natural languages. As Eco (1984:14) says, Hjelmslev’s definition can indeed be taken “as a more rigorous development of the Saussurean concept,” but it is also the case that his program for semiotics “so confidently advertised has never been carried out successfully in any domain of science” (Sebeok 1985b:13). Even Trabant (1981:149) concedes that “Hjelmslev hat selber die theoretisch radikale Konzeption seiner Theorie nicht konsequent durchgehalten,” even while he tries to show Hjelmslev’s originality in the development of modern linguistics in his only partially successful feat of having commingled it with general semiotics.

Turning now to Jakobson, whose input into the doctrine of signs is every bit as pervasive as Hjelmslev’s, yet remains less readily identifiable (it is presented cogently and comprehensively in Eco 1977), the point most pertinent to the matter under discussion here is that, while Jakobson (1974:32) concurs with other linguists that “of these two sciences of man,” to wit, semiotics and linguistics, “the latter has a narrower scope,” being confined to the communication of verbal messages, “yet, on the other hand, any human communication of non-verbal messages presupposes a circuit of verbal messages, without a reverse implication,” he unfurls a more all-embracing multilayered hierarchy of the “communication disciplines.” (In doing so, he is actually fine-tuning a scheme originally put forward by Lévi-Strauss; cf. 1958:95.) According to this wider conception, in any (human) society communication operates on three levels: “exchange of messages, exchange of commodities (namely goods and services), and exchange of women (or, perhaps, in a more generalizing formulation, exchange of mates). Therefore, linguistics (jointly with the other semiotic disciplines), economics, and finally kinship and marriage studies ‘approach the same kinds of problems on different strategic levels and really pertain to the same field. . . .’ All these levels of communication assign a fundamental role to language.”

In my view, what vitiates this design is that it is not catholic enough by far; in particular, it fails to take into account the several fundamental divisions of biosemiotics or biocommunication (Tembrock 1971), such as endosemiotics (Thure von Uexküll 1980:291), zoosemiotics (Sebeok 1963), phytosemiotics (Krampen 1981), and so forth, in none of which does language—an exclusively genus-specific propensity of Homo—play any role whatsoever. In short, while elegantly disposing of the chief departments in the “semiotics of culture,” this scheme fails to account for those of the much broader domains in the “semiotics of nature” within which all of the foregoing rest embedded. If semiotics is indeed to remain “the science of communicative sign systems,” its immense responsibility for synthesizing linguistics with “research on animal behavior, particularly signaling systems, and much more” (Lekomcev 1977:39) is forfeited.

At the end of the fourth paragraph of this chapter, I alluded to the fact that, while the study of verbal signs is everywhere called linguistics, the correlative province of nonverbal signs—the unmarked member of the pair—lacks a commonly accepted denomination. Since I have discussed the whys and wherefores of this state of affairs before (see Sebeok 1985:158-162), let me merely cross-refer interested readers to that survey, with the assurance that none of the facts has changed.

A sweeping study of signs and systems of signs, whether verbal or nonverbal, demands both synchronic approaches (structural as well as functional) and an application of diachronic perspectives (developmental, or ontogenetic, and evolutionary, or phylogenetic) (cf. Sebeok 1979a:27-34, 57-60, and Sebeok 1985a26-45). The following concluding remarks are intended to round out arguments previously introduced by reflecting on their historical dimensions.

As to the ontogeny of semiosis in our species, it is perfectly clear that manifold nonverbal sign systems are “wired into” the behavior of every normal neonate; this initial semiosic endowment enables children to survive and both to acquire and to compose a working knowledge of their world (Umwelt) before they acquire verbal signs (in general, see, for example, Bullowa 1979 and Bruner 1983). The point to keep in mind is that nonverbal sign systems by no means atrophy (though they may, of course, become impaired; cf. Sebeok 1979:69-73) in the course of one’s reaching adulthood and old age. In other words, the two repertoires—the chronologically prior and the younger—become and remain profoundly interwoven, both to complement and to supplement one another throughout each individual’s life. This reliance on two independent but subtly intertwined semiotic modes—sometimes dubbed zoosemiotic and anthroposemiotic—is what is distinctively human, rather than the mere language propensity characteristic of our species.

When it comes to questions of phylogeny, I have previously contended (Sebeok 1985c) that the emergence of life on earth, some 3.5 billion years ago, was tantamount to the advent of semiosis. The life science and the sign science thus imply one another. I also argued that the derivation of language from any animal communication system is an exercise in total futility, because language did not evolve to subserve human communicative exigencies. It evolved, to the contrary, as an exceedingly sophisticated modeling device (in the sense of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umweltlehre, as presented, for example, in 1982; cf. Lotman 1977), surely present—that is, language-as-a-modeling-system, not speech-as-a-communicative-tool—in Homo habilis. This ancestral member of our genus appeared, rather abruptly, only about two million years ago. Language, which was an evolutionary adaptation in the genus, had become “exapted” (Gould and Vrba 1982) in the species by a mere 300,000 years ago in the form of speech. It took that long for the encoding abilities of Homo sapiens to become fine-tuned with our species’ corresponding decoding abilities. Note that, as in human ontogeny, verbal semiosis has by no means replaced the much, much hoarier diversiform nonverbal manifestations, for reasons that are spelled out and elucidated by Bateson:

[The] decay of organs and skills under evolutionary replacement is a necessary and inevitable systemic phenomenon. If, therefore, verbal language were in any sense an evolutionary replacement of communication by [nonverbal] means . . . we would expect the old . . . systems to have undergone conspicuous decay. Clearly they have not. Rather, the [nonverbal sign uses] of men have become richer and more complex, and [nonverbal communication] has blossomed side by side with the evolution of verbal language [1968:614].

In sum, a preponderance of expert opinion persuades that linguistics is a structurally rather than functionally autonomous branch of semiotics, the rest of which encompasses a wide variety of nonverbal systems of signification and communication which, in humans, flourish side by side with the former, related in reciprocity. In the longitudinal time section, whether in the life of organisms or in the lives of men and women, nonverbal semiosis has substantial primacy. Studies of precisely how verbal and nonverbal signs intermingle with and modify each other in the multiform speech communities of human beings must be further considered conjointly by linguists and other semioticians.

All living beings interact by means of nonverbal message exchanges. Normal adult human beings interact by both nonverbal and verbal message exchanges. Although the latter, namely, language, is a semi-autonomous structure, it lies embedded in a labyrinthine matrix of other varieties of semiotic patterns used among us and variously inherited from our animal ancestry. “Since,” as Jakobson (1974:39) emphasizes, “verbal messages analyzed by linguists are linked with communication of nonverbal messages,” and since, as Benveniste (1971:14) insists, “language is also human: it is the point of interaction between the mental and cultural life in man,” efficacious language teaching should be regarded as endeavor in what Morris (1946:353-354) has called “applied semiotic [which] utilizes knowledge about signs for the accomplishment of various purposes.” The question that I would like to repeat here (from Sebeok 1985a:179, but first raised in 1975) is this: “if, as is the case, we lavish incalculable amounts of energy, time, and money to instill in children and adults a range of foreign-language competencies, why are the indissolubly parallel foreign gesticulatory skills all but universally neglected, especially considering that even linguists are fully aware that what has been called the total communication package, ‘best likened to a coaxial cable carrying many messages at the same time . . .’ is hardly an exaggerated simile?”

When I first asked this question, over a decade ago, very sparse materials existed for training in foreign gesticulatory skills; those that did were restricted to French and Spanish (Iberian, Colombian). Today, the situation has ameliorated, but not by much. The impact of nonverbal behavior on foreign-language teaching was reviewed by Ward and von Raffler-Engel (1980:287-304), but they describe the results of a very modest experiment. In the late 1970s, our Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies began to give this manifest lack of material some preliminary attention (the project is described by Johnson, in her 1979 dissertation, “Nonverbal Communication in the Teaching of Foreign Languages”; and in Wintsch 1979). Johnson also completed handbooks on nonverbal communication for teachers of Japanese, which were accompanied by a widely used half-hour film in which native Japanese perform specific gestures as well as situational interactions, and for teachers of Gulf Arabic. Later, Harrison (1983) published a parallel handbook comparing Brazilian and North American social behavior. All this, however, can only be deemed a mere beginning in what needs to be accomplished worldwide, especially in the production of indispensable visual aids.

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This chapter is based on my keynote address delivered at the 37th Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (1986), and then published in the Proceedings volume, Developments in Linguistics and Semiotics, Language Teaching, and Learning Communication across Cultures, ed. Simon P. X. Battestini (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1987), 1—18. A version has also appeared in German.