Text and Sign

Part One

Hartmut Haberland

(1)

Text and sign, form and meaning

General topics covered in Part One of the course

• What is a sign?

• What is language?

• What is a text?

• How do we communicate?

Some issues

• We are dealing with meanings

• A sign is something that means something else or stands for something else

• There are different kinds of signs as there are different kinds of meanings

A basic distinction

• Some signs have to do with human language, some do not

• There is human language (speaking, writing), there are pictures, there is music, ...

保安 bǎoān to maintain law and order

保安 to maintain law and order

The sign

In most accounts of the linguistic sign, the

material sign (sound, printed marks on

paper or on other material) is related to two

things:

• something in the ’real world’ (an object), and

• something more abstract ’in the head’, a concept or thought

The Stoic philosophers(3rd century BC)

First clear distinction between meaning and

reference

Note that there is no distinction as to whether the ’voice’ (the spoken, audible sign) is a word or a sentence or a whole conversation.

Therefore what is meant can be a concept or a statement.

And what happens to be the case can be a thing or living being or a situation.

“There is a cat listening to music”

what is meant (meaning)

The following picture by Magritte (which is not a pipe, but a picture of a pipe) ist just in order to remind you that referents of signs are pipes or cats or cats listening to music, not pictures of all those. But I cannot have a cat on the screen, so a picture of it (but a nice one) will have to do.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Swiss linguist (Geneva)

1916 Cours de linguistique générale

de Saussure’s model

At first glance, the signified (signifié) resembles what the Stoics called ’what is meant’, and the signifier (signifiant) the voice of the Stoics.

But for de Saussure it’s ’all in the head’: concepts, acoustic images, etc.

The Stoics noticed one abstract thing in the head (concept, idea, statement) confronted with two things in the real world: the audible sign (voice) and the (mostly visible) thing or situation.

Different triangular models

Ogden and Richards (1923) introduced a model which is quite similar to the Stoics’.

Note that it is turned around (just to make things more complicated). The voice of the Stoics has become a symbol, ’what is meant’ (the meaning) has become ’thought or reference’, and ’what happens to be the case’ has become the referent. But the idea is the same.

Bronisław Malinowski (1923) elaborated on the Ogden-Richards model. His point was that the third element, ’what is not in the real world’ or ’what’s in the head’ and which relates the sign and the thing, does not have to be an idea or a concept or a statement.

It can be missing completely – this is the first, primitive step where the sign (not quite a symbol yet) relates directly to something in the real world:

His article ’The problem of meaning in primitive languages’ contains beautiful descriptions of language use among the islanders of the New Guinea archipelago, where concepts and ideas play no role or only a small one.

Then it comes to narrative speech (like in what later becomes literature) and the symbol and the referent are connected through an act of imagination …

Finally, there is the language of ritual magic. (We don’t really believe in that any more, or do we?)

Here, sign and referent are connected not by a concept, but by a ritual act.

Arne Næss (*1912)

Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer and ecologist, got tired of the confusing terminology: sign, voice, symbol all mean the same, then there are referents which are different from reference which is the same as thought and meaning. He cut through and called them A, B, and C. (But which is which?)

Arne Næss

A-entities: expressions, words,terms

B-entities: things, states of affairs(the contingent, the real world)

C-entities: concepts, statements

Arne Næss

A-entities: ”cat”, ”this is a cool cat”, ”the cat is listening”

B-entities: cats, cats listening tomusic

C-entities: concepts of cats, statements aboutcats

Signs (A) express their meanings (C)

Signs (A) refer to their referents (B)

But how do they do that?

de Saussure: arbitraire du signe. The sign isarbitrary. The dog might as well be called cat andthe pig could be called cow.

Italian caldo means ’hot’, German kalt means ’cold’.

Stoic philosophers: sign and meaning arenot totally arbitrarily related, sign and reference are(non-essentialist position)

Degrees of arbitrariness

iconic signs : low degree of arbitrariness

symbolic signs: high degree of arbitrariness

Degrees of arbitrariness

a picture (as taken by a photographer)has a very low degree of arbitrariness.The degree of arbitrariness increases witha painting or a pencil drawing.

Words like ”dark lager”, (Czech) ”tmavýležák” have a high degree of arbitrariness. Notealso the words ”Budweiser Budvar” on the beermug. The relationship of the town of České Budĕjovicein the Czech to its name is arbitrary.

Ambiguity of the term language(Linell 1979)

1 The dark falls early, shower comes after shower, the leaves get yellow and fall. Everything is speaking its distinct language: autumn is here.

2 Only the human race, no animal, has access to language. It is language that has made culture possible.

3There are thousands of languages in the world. Some people speak only one language, e.g. Swedish.

4 Politicians and ordinary people don’t understand each other, they speak separate languages.

Meanings of language

In 1, we find a metaphorical extension of the meaning of language in 2.

In 4, we find a metaphorical extension of the meaning of language in 3.

Per Linell (* 1964)

What makes human language different from

other sign systems?

First, it is a sign system.

Reasons why human language is so efficient

• double articulation (de Saussure): minimal signs (words and meaningful parts of words) are composed of meaningless elements (sounds, letters): possibility of many signs

• arbitrariness (de Saussure): possibility of creating new signs

• stimulus independence: possibility of negation• acoustic medium

Double articulation

pear and bear have different meanings, but p and b don’t have meanings in themselves.

First articulation:

The | bear | love|s | eat|ing | pear|s

(into meaningful elements)

Second articulation:

p|e|a|r

(into meaningless elements, here: letters)

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)

Russian linguist, later in Prague, Sweden

and the USA

Models of communication

The letter shoot model

Addresser Addressee

(Sender) (Receiver)

M1 → (coding) → message → (decoding) → M2

M1 = M2

meaning1 = meaning2

• What is M? Is it really a mean ing (a thought) or is nti rteally a reference?

• How do we know that M is independent of the code?

• Do we express ourselves through language or in a language?

Jakobsons model of the functions of language

What makes poetry poetic?

Context

Addresser Message Adressee

Contact

Code

Referential

Emotive Poetic Conative

Phatic

Metalingual