Misunderstanding The Difference Between Semiosis And Non-Semiosis

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 5):

Non-semiotic behaviour (somasis)

One basic challenge that has to be faced when working on paralanguage is how to distinguish it from behaviour – separating semiosis from non-semiosis in other words. … For Halliday and Painter the key criteria are that 

i. the act in question is interpretable as one of a systematic system of content/ expression pairs (i.e. signs with valeur), and 

ii. the act in question is used on a number of different occasions (i.e. not simply iterated in a single interaction). 

Halliday (1984/2003: 240) for example notes three signs oriented to action in his son’s protolanguage at 8 months of age (Fig. 2). The signs are constituted as the following content/expression pairs: 

‘I want it/grasp firmly’,
‘I don’t want it/touch lightly’ and
‘do that with it/touch firmly’. 

The contrast between semiosis and non-semiosis is evident here, perhaps most clearly in the contrast between touching something lightly (semiosis) and pushing it away (non-semiosis). In Peircian terms we might say that the semiosis symbolises the intention of the speaker while the non-semiosis indexes it. 

From this point on we will use the term somasis for non-semiotic behaviour, and semiosis for systems of signs.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, for behaviour to be semiotic, it must mean something other than itself, as when the act of pushing something away (also) means 'I don't want it'.

[2] Here the authors merely take a gesture that is not included in Halliday's model of his son's protolanguage, pushing something away, and conclude that it therefore cannot be semiotic.  To be clear, if a child is old enough to push something away, rather than just touch it firmly, and it is taken to mean 'I (emphatically) don't want it', then the gesture is semiotic.  Moreover, it is an instance of graduated attitude being realised protolinguistically, rather than linguistically.

[3] This is a serious misunderstanding. Here the authors misinterpret Peirce's semiotic distinction, symbolising meaning vs indexing meaning, as a distinction between semiotic and non-semiotic behaviour, respectively.

[4] To be clear, this is 'intention' in the sense of 'meaning'.