Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

5. Language Signs

CHAPTER 5 Language Signs HIPPOCRATES, a fourth-century B.C. Greek physician, is recognized as the father ofsemiotics, the discipline that focuses on signs and their ways of signifYing. Hippocrates made medicine more of a science when he began interpreting symptoms as signs of what might be ailing his patients. Not just communication and language but all life depends on signs and what they are interpreted to mean. This chapter will examine the ways that arbitrary and natural signs differ, a distinction essential to language. American semiotician Thomas Sebeok, working from the pioneering studies of Charles Peirce, has identified six major kinds, or species, of signs: s(f.Znal, symptom, icon, index, symbol, and name. Sebeok's text introduces and distinguishes them this way: 1. Signal. The signal is a sign which mechanically (naturally) or conventionally (artificially) triggers some reaction on the part of a receiver . [emphasis in original] 2. Symptom.A symptom is a compulsive, automatic, non-arbitrary sign, such that the signifier [is] coupled with the signified in the manner of a natural link. 3. Icon. A sign is said to be iconic when there is a topolofZical similarity between a signifier and its denotata. remphasis added] 67 68 Language Signs 4. Index. A sign is said to be indexic insofar as its signifier is contiguous with its signified, or is a sample ofit. The term contiguous is not to be interpreted literally ... as necessarily meaning 'adjoining' or 'adjacent': thus Polaris may be considered an index of the north celestial pole to any earthling, in spite of the immense distances involved. 5. Symbol. A sign without either similarity or contiguity, but only with a conventional link between its signifier and its denotata ... is called a symbol. 6. Name. A sign which has an extensional class for its designatum is called a name. [emphasis added]1 These words give us convenient labels for discussing signs, but the names and descriptions come from long study of the whole process of semiosis-how one thing comes to be recognized (by someone or something ) as a sign for something else. These six species of signs are the result of sorting out various matters of sign form, sign interpreting, and a world full of possible sign interpretations. Peirce's formulation had sixty-six varieties that went into all the fine distinctions, but Sebeok's six varieties simplify- the task. They allow us to examine the semiotic underpinning of signed languages and spoken languages. To illustrate Sebeok's six species, let us look again at how E. coli bacteria interpret the presence of sugar (i.e., cease their random swimming pattern and swim toward the greatest concentration ofsugar molecules). It is apparent that sugar in the water is a signal. There is no "topological similarity" between dissolved sugar and the motion ofthe cell's flagellathus sugar cannot be an icon. Nothing about the chemical composition of sugar has shaped the bacteria's swimming motion, so sugar cannot be an index. A person's arm movements to suggest swimming would be an index because the normal action ofswimming has obviously influenced the way the arms are moved. A swimming gesture would also be an icon, because of the similarity between the gesture and actual swimming. To a human observer, the bacteria's swimming is a symptom. The way the flagella are moving tells an observer with a microscope that the bacteria are finding food. Without sugar in the water, the tumbling action is also a symptom, to an observer, that the bacteria are seeking food. Language Sign.> 69 The remaining two species of sign, the symbol and the name, would seem to be found only in human behavior. Other creatures appear not to use names as we do.A dog may be suddenly all attention when it hears its master speak its name, but the dog is really responding to sounds that it has learned to associate with its master's actions. To the dog the sound of its name is a signal. Of symbols, Sebeok writes: A sign without either similarity [i.e., not an icon] or contiguity [i.e., not an index], but only with a conventional link between its signifier and its denotata, and with an intensional class for its designatum, is called a symbol ... an intensionally defined class is one defined by the use of a propositional function; [that is] the denotata of the designation are defined in terms...