Misunderstanding Semiosis

Martin & Zappavigna (2019: 6, 29):

But we have found it useful to try and compile a range of behaviours that border on semiosis and which can be interpreted by social semiotic animals as indexing purposeful activity. As Halliday and Painter have shown, early protolinguistic semiosis involves a reconstrual of some of these activities as the expression face of signs. And all of the behaviour outlined above has the potential to be used as signs – for example stamping one’s foot in frustration, coughing to remind a meeting of one’s presence, shivering to indicate one is cold, sniffing to object to an odour, kissing on the cheek as a greeting and so on. In these cases there is some degree of deliberation involved, as manifested in the fact that the behaviour will synchronise with the prosodic phonology and turn-taking structure of an interaction and will be responded to as meaningful by co-participants.ⁱ⁰

ⁱ⁰ To put this another way, we are arguing that the behaviours outlined in Figure 3 can be treated as paralinguistic or not depending on whether or not they are negotiated as meaningful in interaction. We also need to acknowledge that what we are calling somatic behaviour has the potential to be imbued with cultural norms (e.g. a style of walking, norms for coughing or spitting etc.); these need to be taken into account in future work on somatic behaviour.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, any behaviour that can be interpreted as "indexing" anything other than itself, purposeful or otherwise, is functioning semiotically.  The behaviour is the expression (signifier) and what it "indexes" is the content (signified) of Saussure's sign.

[2] This is all true.  However, what the authors are totally unaware of is that they have already interpreted most of these behaviours as the expression "face" of signs when presenting them as non-semiotic, as demonstrated in the previous post.  Note that none of the examples provided are exclusively paralinguistic — the model being developed in this paper — since they can occur in the absence of language.

[3] To be clear, deliberation — or indeed deliberateness — is not criterial in determining whether a behaviour is interpreted as semiotic (meaning something other than itself). The lack of intention of a meaning maker does not make a meaningful behaviour any the less meaningful to others.

[4] To be clear, this is a bare assertion, unsupported by evidence.  Consider what is being claimed.  The following behaviours are claimed to synchronise with the ongoing rhythm and intonation of the behaver's own speech:

• stamping one’s foot in frustration, 
• coughing to remind a meeting of one’s presence, 
• shivering to indicate one is cold, 
• sniffing to object to an odour, 
• kissing on the cheek as a greeting.

[5] To be clear, this is not a matter of interpersonal negotiation.  What matters is if a behaviour is construed as meaning something other than itself.  This does not depend on two interactants negotiating any agreement. 

[6] To be clear, assigning cultural values (content) to behavioural tokens (expression) is again treating the behaviours as semiotic, not as "somatic".