Ed McDonald On The Largely Symbolic Nature Of Linguistic Signs

Edward McDonald wrote to sys-func on 19 Nov 2023, at 14:02:

(3) … Can language be taken as the model / interpretant of all other semiotic systems …

 (McDonald 2013):

[F]rom the point of view of a general semiology, it is the very difficulty of accounting for the largely symbolic, unmotivated nature of linguistic signs that makes a clear understanding of linguistic meaning very hard to attain. At the same time, whether or not we regard language as functioning as the (potential) interpreter of all other semiotic systems, it is undeniable that it tends to be used that way by many semioticians, especially Social Semioticians, very often in the same breath as denying that language has any special status. A refocusing on communication as multimodal may well be being forced on us by developments in communicative technologies, as Machin suggests, but it also represents a long overdue recognition of the importance of embodied semiotics in much human interaction, as Ruthrof shows.… Much multimodal work in the Social Semiotic tradition seems curiously visually-biased, and at the same time largely unproblematically ‘analogising’ concepts from linguistics for the analysis of other semiotic systems, without seemingly feel much need, as Machin notes, to engage with existing scholarship in those areas.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, this is a pair of bare assertions (ipse dixit), each without supporting argument. They are:

[A]: the largely symbolic nature of linguistic signs is difficult to account for.

[B]: [A] makes a clear understanding of linguistic meaning very hard to attain.

With regard to [A], the largely symbolic nature of linguistic signs is accounted for by the fact that it evolved in the species from symbolic protolinguistic signs (phylogenesis) and develops in the individual from symbolic protolinguistic signs (ontogenesis). So the question is, rather, why should protolinguistic signs be largely symbolic? On Halliday's model, the symbolic nature of protolinguistic signs can be understood as motivated by the general functions that protolanguage serves: the personal, interactional, instrumental and regulatory microfunctions.

With regard to [B], this is clearly false, since a clear understanding of linguistic meaning is demonstrated whenever the users of language understand each other's meaning, and a clear theoretical understanding of linguistic meaning is proposed by linguistic theories such as SFL.

[2] To be clear, McDonald provides no evidence in support of his ad hominem attack.

[3] To be clear, SFL Theory explicitly models language as "embodied" semiotics in human interaction. Halliday (2003: 13):

[4] To be clear, written language is also "visually-based".

[5] To be clear, scholarship framed in terms of other theories needs to be reframed in terms of the theory being used. In the immanent view of meaning that SFL Theory takes, there is no ultimate theory of phenomena that can be reached by cherry-picking from different theories. Instead, there are applications of each theory that are either valid or invalid in terms of that theory.