John Bateman Failing To Understand Tom Bartlett On The Origins Of Language

John Bateman replied to Tom Bartlett on SYSFLING on 6 Jul 2021 at 16:53:

OK, Tom, I'll bite! ... was extremely confused by your post actually...

What is the vervet monkey, for example. doing with its call - making an instinctive noise or saying something? If its call says danger - to those who are conditioned to recognise this - at what point does this move from an identifying relation to a verbal process?

.... isn't this confusing a description of grammar (for some subset of human languages) with a metalanguage for talking about semiotics? 

Or is the use of 'identifying', 'verbal' stand-ins for indexical and symbolic? (or something else?). …

And at what point in our linguistic evolution and development (phyologenesis and ontogenesis) do semiotic noises as minor clauses (including holisms) develop the systemic regularities that index mood?

Similarly here: "semiotic noises as minor clauses"? 'minor clause' is a grammatical (systemic) feature (of a language)... why should there be a 'point' that indicates that a grammatical system is indexing speech functions... And 'semiotic noises' (you mean materiality shaped as a realisation of the forms of a semiotic system?) can only be 'minor clauses' when the said semiotic system include an alternation with 'minor clause' as one of the alternatives...

I suspect what is confusing me throughout is the conflation of specific grammatical terminology with intendedly general semiotic vocabulary without explicit marking in your text. So you mean whatever it is that the interpersonal semantics of 'minor clauses' is taken to be as what the 'semiotic noise' might be doing with respect to the semiotic system at issue? …

I guess this is all why they banned discussion of the origins of language way back :-) They were probably on to something ...

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the confusion here is entirely Bateman's, as he rightly acknowledges. On the one hand, a semiotic theory is not a metalanguage unless the semiotic system being theorised is language. A metalanguage is language turned back on itself, not language turned onto some other semiotic system. So Bateman's "metalanguage for talking about semiotics" is actually the use of language to theorise semiotics.

On the other hand, using metalanguage to theorise semiotics is precisely what Bartlett was trying to do.  Moreover, in this he was following the example set by this blogger, most obviously on Informing Thoughts. 

Importantly, just as language can be used to theorise any domain of experience, so too, obviously, can metalanguage. One advantage of using SFL metalanguage to theorise phenomena is that its architecture is explicitly defined, and inconsistencies in theorising can be identified and dismissed on the basis of reasoned evidence.

[2] Clearly not, since 'identifying' is the relation of symbolic abstraction and projection ('verbal') the relation between different orders of experience, whereas by 'indexical' and 'symbolic', Bateman means the distinction in Peircean semiotic theory, whose fundamental assumptions are incompatible with the social semiotic model of SFL Theory.

[3] See the previous post Tom Bartlett On The Origins Of Language.

[4] On the other hand, as Thomas Babington Macaulay said:

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

and as Niels Bohr said:

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.