[Xmca-l] language and semiotics

[Andy Blunden]

I'm re-posting this. I know there are a number of linguists 
on this list. I cannot be the first person to raise this 
question.

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Thank you for raising this issue, Greg. I have been 
participating in an academia.edu session on my origins of 
language paper concurrently with little overlap between 
participants. However, I am struck by the persistence of 
this claim, viz., that language is a system of signs, and 
sign-use is universal in the animal kingdom (and Peirce 
would correctly say: "not only animals, but all processes 
without exception"). The issue is not one of Peirce's 
Semiotics, but simply the view that the subjective element 
is irrelevant to language.

Can some of the linguists on this list tell me how this 
claim is usually dealt with. Vygotsky is clear enough (as I 
read him anyway): "a word without meaning is just a sound" 
but *how does linguistics more widely rebut the claim that 
language, however simple* (i.e., e.g. a one-word sentence 
lacking recursion) *is not simply a sign**-system*?

Andy

------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden
http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm

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