Ed McDonald On The Nature Of Semiosis

 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):

If social semiotic approaches are to free themselves from their current reliance on linguistic models, they will need to understand the nature of semiosis, in other words, to explicitly theorise the iconic and/or indexical and/or symbolic referential processes involved in recognising the links between expression and interpretation in the case of each modality, before they will be able to understand how modalities combine in ‘‘performance’’. Until we have, not a Semantics and the Body, to use the title of Ruthrof’s 1997 work, but a semantics of the body, the challenge of accounting for a multimodal text like opera in a semiotically democratic way will remain a question in search of an answer.

 

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the 'nature of semiosis' depends on the theory used to model it, which in turn, depends on the assumptions on which the theory is founded. The notion of a 'nature of a phenomenon' takes a transcendent view of meaning, which contradicts the the immanent view of meaning taken in SFL Theory. 

[2] To be clear, this confuses data with theory. Iconic and/or indexical and/or symbolic referential processes are not data to be theorised, but one way of theorising the data — that of Peirce. Moreover, Peirce's semiotics is inconsistent with SFL Theory in terms of the triadic sign relation, and in terms of icons, indexes and symbols referencing their objects (see here).

[3] To be clear, as previously demonstrated, McDonald first construed perceptible expression and interpretable behaviour as two poles of the context of a semiotic system, and then reconstrued these as the two poles of the semiotic system itself.

[4] To be clear, McDonald's notions of perceptible expression and interpretable behaviour construe the perspective of the listener only. The speaker and the musician — the performers — are excluded from this model of 'performance'.

[5] To be clear, the use of the word 'democratic' implies that other approaches are socially unjust, and that the approach McDonald advocates will right a wrong. As a logical fallacy, this might be termed an appeal to emotion.