I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs

262 Pages·1986·8.03 MB·English

by  Thomas A. Sebeok (auth.)

I Think
I Am a Verb
MORE CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS
TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY SEMIOTICS
Series Editors: Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Indiana University
CLASSICS OF SEMIOTICS
Edited by Martin Krampen, Klaus Oehler, Roland Posner, Thomas A. Sebeok,
and Thure von Uexkiill
I THINK I AM A VERB: More Contributions to the Doctrine
of Signs
Thomas A. Sebeok
KARL BUHLER: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory
Robert E. Innis
THE MESSAGES OF TOURIST ART: An African Semiotic
System in Comparative Perspective
Bennetta Jules-Rosette
SEMIOTIC PRAXIS: Studies in Pertinence and in the
Means of Expression and Communication
Georges Mounin
THE SEMIOTIC SPHERE
Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok
SPEAKING OF APES
Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok
I Think
I Am a Verb
MORE CONTRIBUTIONS
TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS
Thomas A. Sebeok
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sebeok, Thomas Albert, 1920-
I think I am a verb.
(Topics in contemporary semiotics)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Semiotics. I. Title. II. Series.
P99.S324 1986 001.51 86-9402
ISBN 978-1-4899-3492-5
ISBN 978-1-4899-3492-5 ISBN 978-1-4899-3490-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-3490-1
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1986
Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1986
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher
Grant on the porch at Drexel Cottage at Mount McGregor on July 19, 1885.
This last photograph of him was copyrighted on the day before he died. The
General's valet, Harrison Tyrrell, is peering from the shadows in the door
way [Library of Congress].
For my immediate and emotional interpretants,
Jessica Anne and Erica Lynn.
Preface
My writing career has been, at least in this one respect, idiosyncratic: it had to
mark and chart, step by step, its own peculiar champaign. My earliest papers,
beginning in 1942, were technical articles in this or that domain of Uralic
linguistics, ethnography, and folklore, with a sprinkling of contributions to
North and South American linguistics. In 1954, my name became fecklessly
associated with psycholinguistics, then, successively, with explorations in my
thology, religious studies, and stylistic problems. It now takes special effort for
me to even revive the circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a
hefty tome on the supernatural, another, in 1958, on games, and yet another, in
1961, utilizing a computer for extensive sorting of literary information.
By 1962, I had edged my way into animal communication studies. Two
years after that, I first whiffled through what Gavin Ewart evocatively called
"the tulgey wood of semiotics." In 1966, I published three books which tem
porarily bluffed some of my friends into conjecturing that I was about to meta
morphose into a historiographer of linguistics. The topmost layer in my scholarly
stratification dates from 1976, when I started to compile what eventually became
my "semiotic tetralogy," of which this volume may supposably be the last.
In the language of "Jabberwocky," the word "tulgey" is said to connote
variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, the allusion seems to me apt.
Arthur Stanley Eddington, the astronomer, pointed out, in The Nature of the
Physical World, the affinity of "Jabberwocky" to the quantum view of the
universe, where terms are applied to "something unknown" that is "doing we
know not what." This is not a bad reminder of the state of semiotics and its
dawning association with a certain kind of physics.
All this has proved a bit confusing. I continue to get invitations from
outlying districts to lecture on topics deeply buried under more recently accumu
lated debris. Just a few months ago, ] received a letter from a lady colleague in
ix
x PREFACE
another land asking me precisely how I was related to the man who had published
a book on psycholinguistics thirty years ago; only by the coincidence, I wrote
back, that we shared the same set of parents.
There appear to be two antipodal sorts of bookmen. There are those who
derive endless delight from their solitary pleasure, which they pursue like self
stimulating laboratory rats, with electrodes implanted in their anterior hypo
thalamus, unceasingly bar-pressing in preference to any other activity. Then
there are those of us whose bar-pressing habit is rewarded solely by a change in
the level of illumination-in a word, novelty.
Despite its venerable pedigree, semiotics, as practiced today, continues to
astonish. Behind its every revelation an abeyant illusion lurks; but behind every
mirage confounding reality lies dormant. The dynamic of semiotics is immense
in scope, seemingly all-encompassing; but this is so only because the essence of
each happening can be dissected out, abstracted, and finally resolved into yet
another instance of a simple triadic action of signs, in a word, semiosis.
In the early 1960s, I undertook an ambitious global editorial project, Cur
rent Trends in Linguistics. the first volume of which appeared in 1963, and the
fourteenth of which, containing a complex of indexes, came out in 1976. In
between lie nineteen other tomes (that is, fourteen volumes in twenty-one tomes)
comprehending close to 17,000 large-format pages. Semiotics proper occupies a
mere 415 of these, or something short of 3%. My own chapter (Sebeok 1974b:
121211-264), "Semiotics: A Survey of the State of the Art," which I wrote
between 1969 and 1971, and which was designed to be an overall presentation of
the state of the "art," took up 53 pages, or slightly more than one-eighth of the
latter.
With Current Trends behind me, and two collections of my own selected
writings-one on animal communication (Sebeok 1972), the other on verbal art
(Sebeok 1974a)-also published, I began, in the mid-1970s, to think earnestly
about preparing a series of essays on diverse semiotic topics, some theoretical,
others applied, some broadly historical, others focusing on the assessment of past
and a few contemporary figures, several of whom I prejudicially labeled "ne
glected" (a tag which, as it turned out, has since become affixed to many a
butcher and baker and candlestick maker). I conceived of these papers as
eventually congealing into a reasonably integrated trilogy, an expectation which,
measured by its reception (e.g., cf. Adams 1983, Baer 1981, Bouissac 1979,
Buczynska-Garewicz 1981, Deely 1978a, Howard Gardner 1982, Golopenlia
Eretescu 1977, Lindemann 1980, Therien 1982, and by dozens of others), had
indeed been realized: Vol. 1 became Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs
(1976), Vol. 2 became The Sign & Its Masters (1979), Vol. 3 became The Play
ofMusement (1981). This book-the one you are flipping through right now-is
an unplanned fourth offspring, so that, were I compelled to preserve the idea for
PREFACE xi
a trilogy, I would retrospectively demote (some might judge with justification)
my Contributions to Vol. O. I might add that I am fully aware of Gore Vidal's
whimsical dictum (1976:363), ..... I have a deep mistrust of writers who
produce trilogies (tetralogies are beyond the pale) ... ," for which I have good
precedent, to wit, his own tripartite sequence of novels, Burr, 1876, and Wash
ington, D.C.
It should surprise no reader of a book wherein the author mentions his male
parent right in the first sentence that numerous themes sounded in his previous
writings recur, though with variations, often elaborated, and sometimes thor
oughly transmogrified. Familiar drama tis personae will enter from behind the
arras, have their say on stage, only to fade out afterwards. Like the famous ghost
who haunted the royal castle of Elsinore, the ghosts of former kings, the spirits of
my forefathers appear and reappear demanding not to be avenged but to be
remembered and to be heard: "Whither wilt thou lead me? ... Speak, I am
bound to hear .... And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book
and volume of my brain. " The axis of my work has shifted over time, but not so
radically as to put the continuity of the whole project in doubt.
In this introduction, for instance, I attempted to augment "The Semiotic
Self" (Sebeok 1979, Appendix I), where I proposed to discriminate between two
apprehensions of the self, (a) the immunologic or biochemical self, with, howev
er, semiotic overtones, and (b) the semiotic or social self, with, however, biolog
ical anchoring. In a nutshell, I was concerned with showing that the self is a joint
product of both natural and cultural processes, and the kinds of complementary
interactions that are played out in a very special arena. As was later argued by the
distinguished oncologist, Prodi (1981), the recognition of the non-self by the
immune system is, in effect, a way of reading reality according to one's own
idiosyncratic frame of reference. "To read" refers here to the formation of a
unique complex between the reader, or the subject, and what is read, or the
object. This modus is not, in principle, different from our perception and in
terpretation of spoken or written sentences or of any other nonverbal string of
signs. To make my point, I chose to analyze a short, concrete text, somewhat in
the manner in which I decomposed a fragment from the Histories of Herodotus in
1979 (Chapter 8), or examined certain structural features of a Steven Spielberg
epic later (1981b:7-11) (except that I had intended this latter exercise to be
parodic, a failure because not a few of my readers mistook the spoof for the
genuine article). Still other dimensions of the fuzzy notion of "intertextuality"
are prospected in this book (Chapter 15), with reference to yet another Spielberg
film, apropos of which I should like to repeat my answer to a question I was
asked after I presented this material as a lecture. A student at the University of
Frankfurt wanted to know why my contributions to film semiotics involved
strictly juvenile pictures. I confessed that I ordinarily viewed films only under
two conditions: either when accompanying my pre-teen children, or on long,