What is a sign?

• A knot on a handkerchief• stands in for, substitutes sg. absent

• Umberto Eco: „A sign is what can be used to lie”

• a smile • (false) clues • symptoms

The structure of the sign

Ferdinand de Saussure: two aspects of the sign:signifier: material signified: the idea (+referent) Meaning = relationship between Sr and Sd

Kinds of signs 1: primary and secondary

Anything may be(come) a signa flower, a stone or rock

Primary signs: made to be signs (traffic signs, letters, flags)

• Primary and secondary sign

Kinds of signs 2

Kinds of signs 2: the relationship between Sr and Sd

• icon – index – symbol

Kinds of signs 3: motivated and unmotivated

• Heart: love • Flower: kindness

• Motivated: we don’t have to know anything• unmotivated: we need to know the code • arbitrariness, convention

hieroglyphs

Chinese characters

Pictograms

Edinburgh

How do signs signify? Signs make up systemsMeaning as difference (rather than

correspondance)Meaning ~ value: pieces of a chess set bill vs. pill

bullpit

meaning: result of a play of differences within the semiotic system

LANGUAGE

The language of the bees

• Karl von Frisch, 1923• Sophisticated, abstract, arbitrary code: circles,

figures of 8, different heights• Yet:• limited set and themes• no extension or modification• no real response• no passing on of the information

Language as a system

• LANGUE and PAROLE (Saussure) • Langue: general rules and code, shared

system, underlying structure (to study ‘English’)

• Parole: the sum of particular acts of language put together (always changing, growing)

• We encounter parole – we want to learn langue (lang. acquisition)

Competence and performance

• Creation of new statements • Knowledge of langue – participating in parole

• Language: finite set of elements – infinite number of possible sentences

Denotation - connotation Why do signs have several meanings?

(1) Often there at the start ‘farkas’ - wolf (vlk, loup, lobo, lupus, lycos) Grammatical gender: der Schlüssel – la llavedie Brücke – la puente (2) Come into being through useSigns (words): repeatable, used in many

situations

“The idea was to show other inhabited planets, in case they were listening, how intelligent we were. We had tortured circles until they coughed up this symbol of their secret lives: ”

(Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions)

Connotations

• Concentric circles: public meanings – private meanings

• No word is free from connotations • No dictionary is ever complete: new meanings

are born and discarded every day • Meaning is never entirely fixed

language

self world

other(s)

Problems with language 1: language and the world

Referentiality (language refers to the world) • crisis of referentiality• language: general – world: particular

Ted Hughes: Crow Goes Hunting

Crow / Decided to try words.He imagined some words for the job, a lovely pack Clear-eyed, resounding, well-trained, / With strong teeth.You could not find a better bred lot.He pointed out the hare and away went the words / Resounding.Crow was Crow without fail, but what is a hare?It converted itself to a concrete bunker.The words circled protesting, resounding.Crow turned the words into bombsthey blasted the bunker.The bits of bunker flew upa flock of starlings.Crow turned the words into shotguns, they shot down the starlings.The falling starlings turned to a cloudburst.Crow turned the words into a reservoir, collecting the water.The water turned into an earthquake, swallowing the reservoir.The earthquake turned into a hare and leaped for the hillHaving eaten Crow’s words.Crow gazed after the bounding hare / Speechless with admiration.

Problems with language 2: language and thought

• which comes first? • (body/clothes or melody/notes?) • Benjamin Whorf (Am. linguist): language

constructs our worlds/thought• ‘How should I know what I think before I have

said it?’ (Marx brothers)• the Hopis: no tenses - “it was impossible to

learn their language without learning their world” (Jeanette Winterson)

Problems with language 3: Language as communication

• Meaning of words: different for each of us - Verbal exchanges involve an act of interpretation, translation

• Every understanding: also a misunderstanding• Wilhelm von Humboldt, 19th-c. German scholar:

“There isn’t a single word that is interpreted in the same way by two people. The difference, however small, vibrates in language, like ripples or circles on the water. Therefore, any act of comprehension is also a non-comprehension, every single encounter of thoughts and emotions is also a moving apart”

Babel TowerYHWH says: “Yes! A

single people, a single tongue for all: that is what they begin to do!

Come! Let us descend! Let us confuse their tongues, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbour”

(Genesis)

Language as the work or gift of the devil

• St. Augustine: language is a sign of our fallen nature

• Talleyrand: language is there for us to be able to disguise our thoughts

Language and communication• Yet, communication is possible: • Contract (agreement) • ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein)• Context • Habit “He believes that he and she can choose their words and

make a private language, with an I and you and here and now of their own. But there can be no private language. Whatever they may say to each other, even in the closest dead of night, they say in common words, unless they gibber like apes.” (J. M. Coetzee: In the Heart of the Country)