Approaches to semiotics.

295 Pages·1972·8.32 MB·English

by  Thomas Albert Sebeok

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JANUA LINGUARUM
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NICOLAI VAN WIJK DEDICATA

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SERIES MAIOR
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1964
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London . THE HAGUE • Paris
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APPROACHES TO

SEMIOTICS
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY - EDUCATION
LINGUISTICS • PSYCHIATRY
PSYCHOLOGY
Transactions of the Indiana University Conference on
Paralinguistics and Kinesics
Edited ^ (':■ H
THOMAS A. SEBEOK
ALFRED S. HAYES • MARY CATHERINE BATESON
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1964
MOUTON & CO.
London • THE HAGUE • Paris
© Copyright 1964 Mouton & Co., Publishers, The Hague, The Netherlands.
No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm,
: or any other means, without written permission from the publishers.
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This text was developed pursuant to a contract between the United States Office of
Education and Indiana University, and is published with the permission of the
United States Office of Education.
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Printed in The Netherlands by Mouton & Co., Printers, The Hague.
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PREFACE
The term semiotic, confined in earlier usage to the medical theory of symptoms, seems
to have been introduced into philosophical discourse at the end of the 17th century by
John Locke to cover one of the three branches of science, namely, the doctrine of
signs, “the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use
of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others”. The real
founder and first systematic investigator of the field, however, was the subtle and
profound American philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce; as he himself observed:
“...I am, as far as I know, a pioneer, or rather a backwoodsman, in the work of
clearing and opening up what I call semiotic, that is, the doctrine of the essential
nature and fundamental varieties of possible semiosis; and I find the field too vast,
the labour too great, for a first-comer.” The unique place of semiotic among the
sciences - not merely one among the others, “but an organon or instrument of all the
sciences” - was stressed by Charles Morris who, in 1938, proposed to absorb logic,
mathematics, as well as linguistics entirely within semiotic. “The whole science of
language”, Rudolf Carnap then reaffirmed in 1942, “is called semiotic”, and, in 1946,
Morris introduced further refinements when he distinguished among pure semiotic,
which elaborates a language to talk about signs; descriptive semiotic, which studies
actual signs; and applied semiotic, which utilizes knowledge about signs for the
accomplishment of various purposes.
In the final moments of the conference the transactions of which are set forth in the
following pages, the well-known linguistic process Hanns Oertel called “analogic
creation” was perhaps at work when Margaret Mead proposed semiotics - a plural
noun possibly in pseudo-proportional analogy with “semantics” - as a term which
might aptly cover “patterned communications in all modalities”. Implying the iden­
tification of a single body of subject matter, this summative word was incorporated,
overburdened as it is, and not without remonstrations from several quarters, into the
main title of our work. By choosing it for the title, we intend to stress the interactional
and communicational context of the human use of signs and the way in which these
are organized in transactional systems involving sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste.
The selection of some single term seemed a persuasive device to advance unified
research. On the one hand, by reckoning linguistics as a branch of semiotics, we
meant to imply that coding in all modalities takes place within a cultural context as
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6 PREFACE
learned behavior at various levels of consciousness, and to underscore the relevance
. of the linguist’s model to the study of other semiotic codes. On the other hand, the
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methodological integrity of linguistics is preserved, for we also recognized that not
all semiotic coded are indentical and that, in most cases, they have been and will
remain most amenable to study by non-linguists.
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Sponsored by the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, x
; and Linguistics, the conference, the immediate results of which are embodied in this
1 book, was held in Bloomington, on May 17-19, 1962, with the generous support of
the United States Office of Education (contract #SAE 9490). The meeting was
attended by some sixty scholars (see pp. 289-294),who gathered for a discussion designed
to focus primarily on paralinguistics and kinesics. While inquiry and debate not
infrequently widened to comprehend other areas of nonverbal communication, there
was also a tendency to view these problems with constant reference to language which
is, as Edward Stankiewicz reminded us, “the most pervasive, versatile and organizing
instrument of communication”, and a growing awareness that there must be similari­
ties of structure in communication in all modalities.
Five “state of the art” papers were prepared and distributed in advance to all the
participants in the original conference.1 Each paper, written by a specialist in one of
the five principal disciplines represented (cultural anthropology, education, linguistics,
psychiatry, and psychology), was the center of debate during a four-hour session,
where it was reviewed and examined in an interdisciplinary context. This book fol­
lows the same pattern: each paper is reproduced with a minimum of after-thoughts
and is then succeeded by an edited version of the actual transcript of the ensuing
discussion. Slightly less than one half of the transcript was retained and is rendered
here after considerable reorganization and stylistic revision, in the first instance
by each individual to whom a remark was attributed and, in final form, by the
editors. Pure, descriptive, and applied approaches to semiotics are all displayed by
the contributors of papers and comments,* the variations in emphasis reflecting
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differences in specialty, professional interest, and personal preferences.
i Margaret Mead, instead of being asked to prepare a working paper, was invited to
1 The following seven papers, most of which have been published elsewhere, were also circulated, as
background material, to all participants:
i Kramer, E., “Personality stereotypes in voice: a reconsideration of the data”, J. Soc. Psychol, (in
press).
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-----, “The judgment of personal characteristics and emotions from nonverbal properties of speech”,
Psychol. Bull., 60 (1963), pp. 408-420.
Kroeber, A. L., “Sign language inquiry”, Int. J. Amer. Ling. 24 (1958), pp. 1-19.
Moses, P. J., “Modern trends in singing”, Paper presented at the 1st Int. Congress of Audiology and
Phoniatrics (Mexico City, August, 1961).
Sebeok, T. A., “Coding in the evolution of signalling behavior”, Behavioral Science, 7 (1962), pp.
430-442.
Trager, G. L., “Paralanguage: a first approximation”, Studies in Ling., 13 (1958), pp. 1-12.
Voegelin, C. F., “Sign language analysis, on one level or two?”, Int. J. Amer. Ling. 24 (1958), pp.
71-77.
PREFACE 7
present a lecture on the second night of the conference which would relate to its pur­
poses but would also be intelligible to a larger audience, as part of the Indiana Univer­
sity Horizons of Knowledge Lecture Series. Her lecture drew on materials which are
being published elsewhere,2 and also on unpublished materials on which she and
Rhoda Metraux, with Ray L. Birdwhistell as an active consultant, are working in a
project, Studies in Allopsychic Orientation. Her paper which concludes this book
was written subsequent to the reorganization of the conference proceedings and thus
takes into account the continuity provided for by that rearrangement and by the dis­
cussions of future plans at the close of the conference.
The continuing work of Thomas A. Sebeok in the “Linguistic evaluation of non­
verbal communication” is supported by the United States Public Health Service
(MH 07488-01). The paper of Alfred S. Hayes was completed pursuant to a separate
contract with the Office of Education, under which he is preparing a manuscript
dealing with research relevant to foreign language teaching.
Each of the five “state of the art” papers has a separate bibliography at the end
save that of Weston La Barre who chose to integrate his extensive references with the
body of his text. While insuring that all references were consistent with the require­
ments of the author’s particular scholarly tradition, the editors strove to make them
fully accessible to readers from each of the other disciplines involved. Beyond that,
however, we avoided interfering with any bibliographic apparatus.
The editors particularly regret their inability to convey in this book not only an
accurate multimodal representation of the formal proceedings of the conference, such
as by sound recording or motion pictures, but also the rich informal verbal interaction
among the participants which punctuates all events of this nature.
Although specific guide lines for future programs of research and more exact theo­
retical formulations in semiotics have not been included here, the conferees concluded
their deliberations with concrete plans for a symposium in which representatives of
different sciences might bring their tools to bear cooperatively on a unified corpus of
tape and film.
The assistance of Alexandra Ramsay in preparing the manuscript for press and
reading proofs is gratefully recorded.
January, 1964 Thomas A. Sebeok
Alfred S. Hayes
Mary Catherine Bateson
* Mead, M., Continuities in cultural evolution, The Terry Lectures (New Haven, in preparation).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface . 5
Peter F. Ostwald
How the Patient Communicates about Disease with the Doctor 11
Discussion Session on Psychiatry.................................................. 35
Chairman: John I. Nurnberger
George F. Mahl and Gene Schulze
Psychological Research in the Extralinguistic Area 51
Discussion Session on Psychology........................... 125
Chairman: Roger W. Russell
Alfred S. Hayes
Paralinguistics and Kinesics: Pedagogical Perspectives 145
Discussion Session on Language Teaching.................... 173
Chairman: William R. Parker
Weston La Barre
Paralinguistics, Kinesics, and Cultural Anthropology . 191
Discussion Session on Cultural Anthropology................ 221
Chairman: C. F. Voegelin
Edward Stankiewicz
Problems of Emotive Language . 239
Discussion Session on Linguistics 265
Chairman: Thomas A. Sebeok
Margaret Mead
Vicissitudes of the Study of the Total Communication Process 277
List of Participants 289
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HOW THE PATIENT COMMUNICATES
ABOUT DISEASE WITH THE DOCTOR
by
PETER F. OSTWALD
A medical doctor is concerned with total human functioning - the way the body works,
how patients think, what they feel, and their activities in family and social situations.
He must always emphasize the detection and correction of malfunction, and part of
this primary task is to interpret a patient’s sign-making behavior correctly, be it
linguistic, paralinguistic, or kinesic. The doctor listens to the patient’s words in
terms of symptoms that point to disease; he looks for physical signs in order to re­
cognize underlying bodily malfunction; he postulates diagnoses as a guide for sub­
sequent management of the problem presented by the patient; and he administers the
appropriate treatment to reverse tangible pathology and prevent further disability.
Medical history-taking, examination, diagnosis, and treatment all involve com­
munication between two persons whose individual roles are usually quite clear and
whose tasks are also well-defined. This is why clinical problems offer such interesting
possibilities for investigation in terms of current theories about processes of in­
formation exchange. The purpose of this paper is to highlight but one aspect of the
sign-making behavior of sick persons as perceived by physicians: communication
without words.
THE PATIENT-DOCTOR RELATIONSHIP
An old physician has said:
For him who has eyes to see and ears to hear no mortal can hide his secret; he whose lips
are silent chatters with his fingertips and betrays himself through all his pores.(45)
Physicians traditionally function in two-person relationships with their patients, and
the assumptions of this clinical dyad must be understood if one uses it as a model for
research in communication (27). From the beginning of his interaction with a patient,
the physician alerts himself to visible, audible, palpable, and smellable signs that
nonsymbolically transmit information about pathology. He is allowed to behave in
such a way as to facilitate direct body contact with the patient, touching naked skin,
listening to inner noises, and inspecting private openings so as to learn things which
may be unknown to the sender. During the course of their interaction the patient