Sight, sound, and sense

301 Pages·1978·7.163 MB·English

by  Thomas Albert Sebeok

SIGHT, SOUND, AND SENSE

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ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS

General Editor, Thomas A. Sebeok
Indiana University Press

Bloomington and London

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SIGHT,

SOUND,

and SENSE

Edited by

Thomas A. Sebeok

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Copyright © 1978 by Thomas A. Sebeok
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on
Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Don Mills, Ontario
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Sight, sound, and sense.
(Advances in semiotics)
Includes index.
1. Semiotics—Addresses, essays, lectures.
I. Sebeok, Thomas Albert, 1920- II. Series.
P99.S47 001.5 77-21520
ISBN 0-253-35230-4
123458281 80 79 78
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Contents
Preface vii
I. HISTORIOGRAPHY
Toward the Origin of Semiotic, John N. Deely 1
Peirce’s Genera] Theory of Signs, Max H. Fisch 31
II .METHODOLOGY
Semiotics: A Discipline or an Interdisciplinary Method?
Umberto Eco 73
The Contiguity Illusion, Decio Pignatari 84
Communication vs. Semiosis: Two Conceptions of Semiotics,
Alain Rey 98
III. NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION
Affective and Symbolic Meaning: Some Zoosemiotic Speculations,
Peter Marler 113
Facial Signs: Facts, Fantasies, and Possibilities, Paul Ekman 124
Sign Languages and the Verbal/Non verbal Distinction,
William C. Stokoe 157
IV. APPLICATIONS
Verbal Patterns and Medical Disease: Prophylactic Implications
of Learning, Harley C. Shands 175
For a Semiotic Anthropology, Milton Singer 202
A Semiotic Approach to Religion, Boris Ogibenin 232
A Semiotic Approach to Nonsense: Clowns and Limericks,
Paul Bouissac; with an Appendix by Ivan Karp 244
On Semiotic Aspects of Translation, Boguslaw P. Lawendowski 264
Index of Names 283
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PREFACE
Throughout the 1975-76 academic year, a pilot program in Semiotics in
the Humanities, unprecedented in the nation, was undertaken at Indiana
University with the aid of a generous grant from the National Endowment for
the Humanities (EP 22467-75-375). The intent of the project was to in­
augurate and facilitate the integration of semiotics into the curriculum of the
Bloomington campus of Indiana University (with the cooperation of the
Indianapolis campus).
The pilot program consisted of: (1) a year’s lecture course, Signaling
Behavior in Man and Animals, conducted by the undersigned under the spon­
sorship of the Honors Division, and open to qualified undergraduates and
interested graduate students from any department of the university; (2) a
series of lectures and seminars in connection with the course, offered by out­
standing visiting semioticians, who also advised on the shaping of the eventual
semiotics curriculum; and (3) a thorough survey of the Indiana University
Library holdings in semiotics, with recommendations for relevant acquisitions
of books and serials. This three-pronged development undoubtedly succeeded
in increasing awareness among members of the faculty and in the university
community at large of the usefulness and importance of semiotics as a general
method of analysis, and in opening the way to the accommodation of semiotic
studies into already existing curricula. We found that student interest was so
widespread to begin with that our efforts were greeted in those quarters with
animation and much more ready acceptance than by their conservative elders
in the ranks of the administration and teaching staff.
On June 1, 1976, I submitted a lengthy narrative report to the National
Endowment for the Humanities summarizing the results of the experiment.
This statement was based, in part, on a very careful and exhaustive prior as­
sessment of the overall impact of the program by a distinguished outside eval­
uating committee, which, in turn, reported to the Visiting Committee of our
Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. Since curricula in semi­
otic studies are now also unfolding in other universities throughout the coun­
try, notably, Brown, Colorado (Boulder), and Vanderbilt, even in the Public
School System of Brookline, Massachusetts, it may be worth mentioning that
a limited number of copies of the final report, with extensive supporting docu­
mentation, including copies of the video-taped television interviews with six
of the visiting speakers, can be made available through the facilities of the
Research Center, which administered the pilot program.
Eighteen visiting speakers participated in this enterprise, some of whom
gave several lectures. Thirteen of the papers, most of them revised, were then
viii Preface
selected for inclusion in this volume. Some of the others have appeared, or will
appear, elsewhere, in more or less modified form; they include:
Raymond Bellour (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), “Hitch­
cock’s The Birds: Analysis of a Fragment,” previously published (in
French) in Cahiers du cinema, no.219 (September 1968).
Erving Goffman (University of Pennsylvania), “Picture Frames,” now incor­
porated in his monograph Gender Advertisements, in Studies in the An­
thropology of Visual Communication, vol.3, no.2 (1976).
Henry Hiz (University of Pennsylvania), “What Do Stones and Bricks Have
to Say: Meaning in Architecture,” partially incorporated into his 1976
presidential address to the Semiotic Society of America.
Roman Jakobson (Harvard University and MIT), “Science of Sounds as
Signs,” to be incorporated in his forthcoming book (with Linda Waugh),
The Ultimate Constituents of Language (Indiana University Press).
Sebastian K. Shaumyan (Yale University), “Linguistics as a Part of Semiotics,”
Forum Linguisticum, vol.l, no.l, but also to appear, in substantially en­
larged form, in the Studies in Semiotics series (Peter de Ridder Press).
The choice of topic was left to each of our guests to determine, the only
constraint being, of course, the overall theme of the program. Variety was de­
sirable because we wanted to appeal to the largest possible segment of the
university community, and, in fact, audiences ranged from about fifty to a
thousand or more.
Semiotics can be informally defined as a science that studies all possible
varieties of signs, the rules governing their generation and production, trans­
mission and exchange, reception and interpretation. Concisely put, semiotics
has two complementary, interdependent aspects: communication and signifi­
cation. As I have delineated in a number of recent publications, semiotics is
an ancient discipline, stemming from pre-Socratic clinical roots, which then
led to the development of three fundamental semiotic traditions—the medical,
the philosophical, and the linguistic—that have thoroughly intermingled at
various periods in Western intellectual history, although there were times
when they strove for autonomy. In the middle of the last decade, semiotics
underwent a spontaneous and rapid international development that led to the
emergence of semiotic workshops in Eastern and Western Europe, North and
South America, Australia, Israel, and Japan. The influence of the semiotic
method has variously encompassed or influenced all subjects commonly called
“the humanities,” most of the social sciences, some of the behavioral sciences,
and even some natural sciences such as genetics, physiology, and, most no­
tably, ethology. Although most often involving the “sciences of man” (espe­
cially the nomothetic sciences), semiotics has also become a powerful tool in
animal communication studies. Further, one may speak of the semiotic be­
havior of machines such as computers.
This explosive development no doubt partially derives from the pressure
and technological improvement of the mass media, in consequence of which
the problem of communication has proved to be one of the most pivotal ones
Preface ix
of our civilization. It is readily understandable, therefore, why so many disci­
plines were reoriented and have converged upon the study of the general laws
of cultural and natural signification. Another pertinent factor here has been
the emergence of a few charismatic figures at the turn of the century (e.g.,
Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, Charles S. Peirce in philosophy), fol­
lowed by such creative contemporary synthesizers of their major traditions as
Roman Jakobson.
No single collection, such as this one, can possibly claim to present a com­
plete panoramic vista of so complex an area of human concern, with its vener­
able history and with so many disciplinary ramifications, as the doctrine of
signs. Nonetheless, when read in conjunction with A Perfusion of Signs
(Indiana University Press, 1977), one can gain a fairly comprehensive over­
view of current semiotic theory and practice, for these two compendia were
meant to complement one another. The ordering of the contents was imposed
by the editor after the fact. It is arbitrary. The essays can be sampled, at the
readers pleasure, and enjoyed according to any arrangement.
Now for some concluding words about the title of the present volume,
Sight, Sound, and Sense. Since the Greeks proposed that the sign is constituted
of two indispensable moieties, one aistheton, “perceptible” or “sensible,” the
other noeton, “intelligible” or “rational,” almost every semiotic model put for­
ward since has retained this dual conception, labeled with one pair of terms
or another. Accordingly, the last noun in the title alliteratively renders semai-
nomenon and its successive transformations. The first two nouns split the Stoic
semainon with a view to the two main channels upon which semioticians have
lavished the bulk of their attention: the optical and the acoustical. It is impor­
tant, however, to be mindful that these are but two out of the much vaster
range of media of communication at the disposal of organisms, including par­
ticularly man. Some of them are discussed in a very recent book, How Animals
Communicate (Indiana University Press, 1977); in much larger part, how­
ever, they constitute an endlessly fascinating area of research still on the
threshold of man’s scientific grasp.
The pilot program owed much to the help of Theresa de Magalhaes Calvet,
Research Associate (now at the University of Paraiba, Brazil), and Margot D.
Lenhart, Administrative Assistant in the Research Center. May Lee assisted,
with her customary skill, in the transmogrification of the manuscript into print.
Bloomington, Thomas A. Sebeok
February 7, 1977
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