Evolutionary steps for linguistic signs: The place of indexicality (original) (raw)
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The paper is premised on the assumption of a radical gradualism in the emergence of language in opposition to catastrophe theories advocating its sudden birth. On this hypothesis, the paper argues against the view that the evolution of language has meant a loss of iconicity. Instead, I claim that while iconicity has been eliminated from the arbitrary signifier it has been retained and refined at the level of the motivated signified. In support of this claim I place imaginability at the hub of language, as the human capacity for the mental variation of perception and an indispensable component of the linguistic sign. The main vehicles of iconicity are shown to be aboutness and voice, with protosyntax functioning as a forerunner to linguistic syntax. Only once we acknowledge that language is not a symbolic system but rather a heterosemiotic hybrid, with a capacity to accommodate symbolicity, the paper concludes, will we be in a position to do justice to the emergence of language from its nonverbal precursors.
Morphogenesis of Symbolic Forms: Meaning in Music, Art, Religion, and Language. Proofs of chapter 6. The morphogenesis of languageLecture notes in morphogenesis, 2023
Morphogenesis, the general topic of the Lecture Notes, has been applied to language and other cultural media (symbolic forms). An essential input came from René Thom, the French mathematician and Fields Medal winner. The chapter starts by considering the role of morphogenesis in the life sciences and the transition from biological to semiotic morphogenesis (semiogenesis). Further elaborations consider the impact of individuation, the specification of morphogenesis for human populations and individuals, the role of traditions and reflection (ratiogenesis), and, eventually, the relation between morphogenesis (in the sense of Thom 1972) and "semiophysics" (exposed in Thom: Esquisse d'une sémiophysique: physique aristotélienne et théorie des catastrophes. Interéditions, Paris [English translation: Semiophysics. A Sketch. Addison-Wesley, Boston 1990], 1988 [19]). Parallel to Thom's proposals, the interdisciplinary field of Synergetics, introduced by Herman Haken, has widened the consideration by enlarging the field to stochastic dynamics, the analysis of cooperative effects between systems, and the complexities of self-organization in nature and culture.
The emergence of the linguistic sign : vocomimesis, symmetry and enaction
Signifiances (Signifying), 1(3), 115-132, 2017
STEELS postulates that the origins of the linguistic sign were both self-referential and vocomimetic. More precisely, vocal resonances accompanying bilaterally symmetrical, close-open movements of the jaw may have been unconsciously recruited by Homo to refer back to the jaw and its anatomical region, before being mapped homologously to other bilaterally symmetrical parts of the body located to each side of the median plane, or along its 'midline'. I claim that this body-naming strategy, which may still be detectable submorphemically in certain Proto-Indo-European body-part words, involves key enactive concepts such as sense-making and embodiment, and neurophysiological phenomena such as mirror neuron systems.
Sign Systems Studies, 2014
The paper discusses the theory of semiosis in the context of Peirce’s philosophy of evolution. Focussing on the thesis that symbols grow by incorporating indices and icons, it proposes answers to the following questions: What does Peirce mean by the “self-development of signs” in nature and culture and by symbols as living things? How do signs grow? Do all signs grow, or do only symbols grow? Does the growth of signs presuppose semiotic agency, and if so, who are the agents in semiosis when signs and sign systems grow? The paper discusses objections raised by culturalists and historical linguists against the assumption that signs can still grow and are still growing in complex cultures, and it draws parallels and points out differences between Peirce’s theory of semiotic growth and the theories of memetics and teleosemiotics.
HYPERBOREUS, 2019
The article attempts to trace how the difference in approaches to the question of language origin in the Democritus’ and Epicurus’ traditions is reflected in modern linguistics. According to the monograph by Alexander Verlinsky (2006), Democritus insisted on the arbitrary connection between objects and words, while Epicurus insisted on a necessary correlation between them. At first glance, Democritus’ tradition has ultimately won, being reflected in the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure that remain of crucial importance for modern linguistics. If looking further, however, the research on motivation or iconicity of language sign is still quite alive, with a number of relevant studies. This paper argues that the majority of studies on the motivation of language signs still follow the Democritus’ tradition rather than Epicurus’ one. They tend to find the motivation based on purely intralingual data rather than in the “world of denotata”, the works by Roman Jakobson being of especial importance in this sense. Jacobson offered the idea of paradigmatically motivated signs that are segmentally smaller than morphemes, and this idea was further developed by Konstantin Pozdniakov and other linguists into the theory of submorphemic signs and submorphemic neutralizations. In support of this theory, this paper illustrates how the submorphemic level of the language can be used for the description of Latin personal pronouns.