1. Communication theory
1.1. Jakobson confesses that he considers the concepts of communication theory, such as code and message, much clearer, less ambiguous and more operational than traditional dichotomies. Specifically, he values code above somewhat vague terms like the "common core" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 559).
1.1.1. On this point it would be a good idea to compare Jakobson's code with the Revzin's "common memory". qcqc
1.1.2. Jakobson talks about "semantic noise" and emphasizes the theoretically and pedagogically important problem of overcoming it (1971[1960]: 577). Semantic noise is elsewhere explained as a case of clear channel (no noise there) with the person at the other end speaking a language you don't understand - in which case "semantic noise" is merely a lack or disturbance of common code or common memory.
1.2. Jakobson notes that Norbert Wiener refused to admit "any fundamental opposition between the problems of our engineers in measuring communication and the problems of our philologists" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 570).
1.2.1. Wiener addressed communication engineers (cryptanalysts) in this regard. Martin Joos was indeed both a cryptanalyst and philologist, so there may not be a fundamental opposition between problems that researchers from these fields pose. It is quite likely that the philologist can benefit from reading communication theory and vice versa. This would thus be the place to expand on what Jakobson actually says about cryptanalysis.
1.2.1.1. "The attitude of the communication engineer" is supposed to coincide "with the attitude of the member of a speech community who participates in a speech exchange within this community and interprets signals received from a sender" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 224). He goes on that to say that this receiver "is a decoder, and the decoder is not a cryptanalyst, although these notions are ofter confused." The difference amounts to that between the "usual addressee of a message" and the cryptanalyst as an "unusual, marginal addressee, if not simply an eavesdropper" (ibid, 224).
1.2.1.2. The usual receiver "understands the message thanks to his knowledge of the code". The position of the linguist is different because he has to decipher "a language he doesn't know is different". He thus has to deduce the code from the message, which makes him not a decoder but a cryptanalyst. The decoder is thus "a virtual addressee of the message" while the cryptanalyst may be an actual receiver of the message. He goes on to note that the linguist must begin as a cryptanalyst but end up as a normal decoder of the given language - he is to become like a member of the studied speech community (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 560).
1.2.1.3. One of the points in the above quotes was elaborated later: the cryptanalyst attempts to break the code through a scrutiny of the message (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 574-575). In the same breath he also reinforces the notion that the cryptanalyst "is a recipient of messages without being their addressee and without knowledge of their code". This part may have important implications when we reach the "addressee" factor and function in Jakobson's model. E.g. how the addressee must be a participant and cannot be an observer. We must consider not only the object-channel but also the meta-channel, in Colin Cherry's terms.
1.2.1.4. In the next breath Jakobson suggests that linguistics should consider the "objective content and observing subject" problematic put forth by Niels Bohr and agrees with Jurgen Ruesch that the information that an observer can observe and correct depends upon his location within or outside the communication system (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 575). Jakobson's logocentrism breaks out in this being a linguistic concern, laying emphasis not with the observer's relation with the communication system but with the language observed and described.
1.3. MacKay warns against the confusion between the exchange of verbal messages and the exchange of information from the physical world on the basis that both are abusively unified under the label of "communication". Jakobson remarks that a similar confusion abounds those who attempt to construct a model of language without any relation either to the speaker or to the hearer because when the code is treated or represented as a concrete reality detached from actual communication it threatens to make a scholastic fiction out of language (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 576).
1.3.1. Bakhtin indeed seemed to conduct his metalinguistics on no one's word. There is also the fact that language can be used for other functions than communication (for artistic reasons, for example). qcqc
1.3.2. The problem demands a more thorough investigation, because the parallel between MacKay's and Jakobson's problematic does not seem as simple as it might. How far does the analogy go when we knowingly adopt the distinctions between signification, representation and communication?
1.3.3. The English school (of communication theorists) insist on "a clear-cut line of demarcation between the theory of communication and of information" although this delimitation is sometimes disregarded by linguists (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 573). Jakobson agrees with Colin Cherry who stresses that the stimuli received from nature are not pictures of reality but the evidence from which we build our personal models.
1.4. Jakobson subscribes to the cybernetic notion of self-regulation or self-steering as the internal logic of communication system (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 87). Although he admonishes this feature, it seems to play a small or even nonexistent role in his so-called model of communication.
1.4.1. This he calls, after Wallace and Srb, the "adaptive nature of communication". This adaptive nature involves two correlate genera: (1) self-adjustment to the environment; and (2) the adjusting of the environment to one's own needs. He considers this one of the most exciting problems in biology as well as a vital concern of contemporary linguistics (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 675).
1.4.2. Here Jakobson terms language a "social modeling system" (cf. primary modeling system) and it is "tending to maintain its dynamic equilibrium" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 676). This strain of his thought can be compared to the semiosphere model of Lotman.
1.5. Jakobson warns against any restrictive conception of communicative means and ends. He suggests viewing semiotics as the nearest discipline to encompass linguistics and considers the totality of communication disciplines to be the wider concentric circle around semiotics (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 662). The order thus goes: (1) linguistics as the study of a specific type of signs - language signs; (2) semiotics and other disciplines that deal with various other types of signs; and then (3) communication disciplines that link linguistics and semiotics with psychology and sociology.
1.5.1. Another iteration goes as follows: (1) Study in communication of verbal messages = linguistics; (2) study in communication of any messages = semiotic (communication of verbal message implied); (3) study in communication = social anthropology jointly with economics (communication of messages implied) (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 666). The "increasing degree of generality" follows from verbal communication being the most particular, to the semiotics of any messages (both verbal and nonverbal communication) and then to stuff that's not about messages at all (social structure, economic transactions) but imply or necessitate exchange of both verbal and nonverbal messages.
1.5.2. By using mouthpieces, Jakobson called for "the integrated science of communication" (Trubetzkoy) that would demonstrate "the systematic covariance of linguistic structure and social structure" (Bright). This is because "verbal messages analyzed by linguists are linked with communication of nonverbal messages or with exchange of utilities and mates", which is why linguistic research should consider the wider semiotic and anthropological implications of language (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 669).
1.6. The aliquid stat pro aliquo ("something stands for something else") view of signs necessitates for Jakobson the distinction between communication and information (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 703). In communication, a real or alleged addresser communicates the signs that serve to infer the existence of something else (something that the message refers to), while the source of information cannot (or rather should not) be viewed by the interpreter as an addresser. The distinction is based on the definition of sign because information(al) semiosis makes unwitting indexes into a variety of signs, while in communicative semiosis the signs or messages exchanged by the addresser and addressee are witting.
1.6.1. This distinction is followed by Burgoon & Saine (1978) who similarly distinguish behavior, information and communication from completely unwitting (behavior is not a message for neither) to accidentally unwitting (behavior is interpreted as information) to completely witting (behavior is interpreted as a message).
1.7. The task of the linguist is to bring forward the primordial significance the concept of "communication" for social sciences. In this announcement Jakobson relies on Sapir's formulation that every single act of social behavior involves communication in implicit or explicit sense. Society thus appears as a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between its members and is creatively reaffirmed by particular communicative acts. While language is the most explicit type of communicative behavior, Sapir's formulation allows for other ways and systems of communication to be considered (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 663).
1.7.1. The only downside of this announcement is that Jakobson is interested in the other systems as far as their multifarious connections with verbal intercourse go.
2. Terminology
2.1. "New terms are very often a children's disease of a new science or of a new branch of a science" writes Jakobson about terminology (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 557). He adds that he prefers to avoid too many new terms and that he used to introduce many new terms while discussing phonemic problems in the 1920s, but he was liberated from this terminological disease (or the "demon of terminological invention" as Malinoswski calls it) by chance.
2.1.1. He doesn't object to using new terms and quotes his late teacher A. M. Peškovskij as saying: "Let's not quibble about terminology; if you have a weakness for new terms, use them. You may even call it 'Ivan Ivanovich', as long as we all know what you mean" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 557).
2.1.2. He also emphasizes the connection between science and culture by stating that if we were to translate Einstein or Russell into Bushmen or Gilyak languages then this goal would be achievable but the language in question "must be enriched and adapted to the needs of a new scientific terminology" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 105).
2.2. Specific instances in which terminology and theory collide include at least the following:
2.2.1. When thinking about natural languages we mean English, Russian, French, Estonian, etc. but what makes these languages natural is that they are not formalized languages. The artificial constructs for various scientific and technical purposes are more like "transforms of natural language" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 659).
2.2.2. Jakobson notes the influence of Gabriel Tarde on Ferdinand de Saussure, especially in such matters as circuit, exchange, value, output/input, etc. (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 665) although Jakobson himself rarely uses these terms.
2.2.3. Jakobson agrees with Colin Pittendrigh's proposal to substitute "teleology" with "teleonomy" in order to make it clear that "the recognition and description of end-directedness" is freed from undesirable associations with the Aristotelian metaphysical dogma (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 685). Teleonomy thus refers to the study of goal-directed processes without the encumberances of teleological explanations.
2.3. In an early Conference in America, Jakobson surmises that even though communication engineering was not in the program of the conference most participants involuntarily discussed in terms of communication theorists, e.g. terms like encoders, decoders and redundancy (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 556). While we can replace encoder with addresser and decoder with addressee, redundancy apparently plays such an insignificant role in Jakobson's communication model that it is worthwhile to list his few remarks on this notion.
2.3.1. Linda Waugh defines redundant signs as those which "inform about other signs in the text and thus cannot be said to provide independent information" and that "they are used in a sense to ensure that the given information is provided" (Waugh 1980: 73). We can probably compare this definition with Morris's modors. qcqc
2.3.2. Jakobson was concerned about the prejudice against the redundant features and treating them as irrelevant but saw communication theory helping linguists to overcome their biased attitude towards reduntant features particularly due to its treatment of transitional probabilities (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 572). These transitional probabilities have to do with changes of the state of the communication system. A specific example is contained in Shannon's famous 1948 paper: the case of the probability of the letter i being followed by the letter j.
2.3.3. The only good use Jakobson seems to make of this notion consists of two different types of linguistic forms of redundancy: (1) pleonastic redundancy, meaning repetition of the same sense in different words, and this is opposed to brevitas or explicit conciseness; and (2) explicitness, or stating something clearly and in detail so as to leave no room for confusion or doubt, as opposed to ellipsis which is the omission of superfluous words from speech or writing (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 571)
2.4. There is also a problematic of "useless terminology".
2.4.1. When going over the progress made in the study of aphasia Jakobson also lists other types of loss of ability, such as agraphia (a loss of the ability to write or to express thoughts in writing because of a brain lesion), alexia (the inability to see words or to read, caused by a defect of the brain), asemasia (also known as asymbolia, a form of aphasia in which the significance of signs and symbols is not appreciated), and amusia (loss or impairment of the ability to produce or comprehend music) (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 688). Disappointingly, the last one, amusia, is not a "disturbance of gestual systems" as Jakobson claims, if not in the very specific sense of motor amusia, e.g. inability to produce music.
3. Nonverbal Communication
3.1. Jakobson defines language as a subclass of signs that we usually call symbols and specifies language by comparing it to "other symbolic patterns" such as "the system of gestures" described by Ray Birdwhistell, for example (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 555).
3.1.1. This is in line with the contention that "Language is an adjunct to bodily activities, an indispensable ingredient of all concerted human action" and "it does not always serve to communicate, but is always part of concerted activity" (Voegelin & Harris 1947: 590). This is exemplified by Malinowski's description of some old men going off to survey an area for agricultural purposes, wherein Malinowski equates technical terminology with gestures and other kinds of non-verbal behavior such as blazing trees and cutting saplings. The aspect of concerting human action is also ignored in Jakobson's model. qcqc
3.1.2. In 1964 he imputed visual sign patterns such as gestures and facial expressions to a confined or merely concomitant, subsidiary role. He is especially negative towards letters and glypts which constitute parasitic formulations or "optional superstructures imposed upon spoken language in implying its earlier acquisition (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 334). This last term he borrowed from John Lotz's "Natural and Scientific Language" (1951), which may be the source for the natural/formalized language distinction, but more generally suggests that secondary modeling systems (verbal art and textual culture) are parasitical formulations upon natural languages.
3.1.3. In 1967 he maintains that there is a wide range of idiomorphic systems which are but indirectly related to language. He goes on to note that gesture accompanying speech is defined by Sapir as an "excessive supplementary" class of signs. There are also semiotic patterns of bodily motions disjoined from speech, but Jakobson doesn't say much about them. Instead he insists that nonverbal means of communication "must be subjected to a comparative analysis with special regard to the convergences and divergences between any gives semiotic structure and language" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 661). This may hint towards why nonverbal communication does not have a place within his communication model - it's simply not on par with language for Jakobson.
3.1.4. Jakobson notes that the "communicative symbolism" of children's gestures after they have mastered the rudiments of language are noticeably distinct from the reflex movements of the speechless infant. From this he deduces that "any human communication of nonverbal messages presupposes a circuit of verbal messages" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 662). That is, Jakobson is unable to see nonverbal communication as an autonomous entity - it must presuppose language, even if on the basis of the flimsiest of arguments.
3.1.5. "Ritual usually combines speech and pantomimic components" he notes after Edmund Leach and adds that in these ceremonial customs there occur "certain kinds of information which are never verbalized patently by the performers but are expressed in action". This may give a hint to his treatment of context as nonverbalized but verbalisable - the information can be verbalized but it isn't for the sake of the ceremony. And of course the nonverbal aspect turns out to be parasitic or merely supplementary: "This semiotic tradition is, however, always dependent, at least on a framing verbal pattern which passes between generations" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 664).
3.1.6. A few pages later he does explicate the "motor sphere" of reciting a poem. The "motor activities" he lists include the manner of bodily, manual and facial movements, gait, handwriting and drawing, dancing, sport, and courtship (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 682). It should be investigated how these motor activities fit into his communication model.
3.1.7. He once again embraces the contention that although verbal communication is dominant, "we have to take into account also all further kinds of messages employed in human society" and in the same lengthy sentence says that other communicative devices are "secondary types of human messages and [this] makes them in various ways dependent upon language" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 698). He then adds a clarifying note that these secondary types depend on the antecedent acquisition of language and the use of verbal performances that accompany or interpret any other messages - again verifying the aspect of dependency.
3.1.7.1. I propose that this may be a source for "secondary modeling systems" which explicitly depend on language (e.g. poetry, literature, and other verbal art). Or, at least, this explanation can be applied on the TMS's modelling systems theory.
3.1.8. While discussing Johann Heinrich Lambert's Neues Organon (1764), Jakobson notes that he "takes into account the significant role played by gestures, for example, 'in order to enlighten the concept, which is dark in the soul [mind], or at least to give an indication of it to ourselves and to others', and he foresees the semiotic scope of simulacra (which reappears after a century in Peirce's list under the label of icons or likenesses)" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 201). Thus even in other thinkers he finds nothing but complementarity and dependency.
3.1.9. More lip service to nonverbal communication is found in Saussure, who "underlies the fact that language is far from being the only system of signs" and these others include writing, visual nautical signs, military trumpet signals, gestures of politeness, ceremonies, sets of rites, etc. and verify Saussure's statement that customs have a semiological character (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 209).
3.1.10. To add insult to injury, Jakobson says that the egocentrism of a linguist "who insists on excluding from the sphere of semiotic signs which are organized in a different manner from those of language, in fact reduces semiotics to a simple synonym for linguistics" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 213). It's almost as if he is talking about himself.
3.2. In pointing out ways to classify human sign systems he suggests resorting to several criteria (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 661), such as:
3.2.1. The relation between signans and signatum in accordance with Peirce's triadic division of signs into indices, icons and symbols with transitional varieties.
3.2.1.1. He says that types of semiosis amount to variable relationships between signans and signatum, thus enforcing a semantic typology of semiosis: "the nature of the signans itself is of great importance for the structure of messages and their typology" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 701).
3.2.1.2. An illustration of the relation between signans and signatum in nonverbal communication is exemplified in the code-switching case of head nods: "Russian soldiers who had been in Bulgaria in 1877-1878 during the war with Turkey could not forget the striking diametrical opposition between their own head motions for indicating 'yes' and 'no' and those of the Bulgarians [...] but the main difficulty was contained in the uncertainty of the Bulgarians over whether a given Russian in a given instance was using his own code of head movements or theirs" (Jakobson 1972: 91-92).
3.2.1.3. Jakobson notes that the Latinized terms signans and signatum that constitute a particular signum "was adopted by Saussure only at the middle of his last course in general linguistics, maybe through the medium of [Heinrich] Gomperz's Noologie (1908)" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 375).
3.2.2. Discrimination between merely bodily and instrumental production of signs.
3.2.2.1. Here the distinction is between organic (merely bodily) and instrumental signs. Jakobson remarks that among visual signs "gestures are directly produced by bodily organs" while "painting and sculpture imply a use of instruments" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 701). Similarly, in auditory signs, speech and vocal music are organic and instrumental music is instrumental. This is quite different from Ruesch's "instrumental actions" and Ekman's "intrinsic coding".
3.2.3. Distinction between pure and applied semiotic structures. (Morris?) qcqc
3.2.4. Visual or auditory forms.
3.2.4.1. These are reportedly the most important forms. He writes that all five external senses carry semiotic functions in human society and among innumerable examples one may cite handshakes, pats on the back, and kisses for touch, perfumes and incense for smell, the selection, succession, and grading of courses and drinks for taste and so on, but "it is evident that the most socialized, abundant, and pertinent sign systems in human society are based on sight and hearing" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 701).
3.2.5. Spatial and temporal semiosis.
3.2.5.1. Possibly influenced by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Laocoön (1766), Jakobson writes that "Both visual and auditory perception obviously occur in space and time, but the spatial dimension takes priority for visual signs and the temporal one for auditory signs" and that "A complex visual sign involves a series of simultaneous constituents, while a complex auditory sign consists, as a rule, of serial successive constituents" (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 336; my emphasis).
3.2.5.2. Compare this to an earlier exposition by Jan Mukařovský: "Thus a painting can present the entire appearance of a thing in front of a viewer's eyes at once, whereas poetry must depict the same thing in parts, gradually, in time: for poetry a state changes into events. On the contrary, of course, graphic arts cannot present events otherwise than as a state" (Mukařovský 1976[1944]: 241).
3.2.5.3. In terms of sign classification, Jakobson writes that there is a prevalence of icons among purely spatial, visual signs and a predominance of symbols among purely temporal, auditory signs (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 701).
3.2.6. Homogeneous and syncretic formations.
3.2.6.1. Homogeneous messages use a single semiotic system. Syncretic messages are based on a combination or a merger of different sign patterns. He observes that the "syncretism of poetry and music is perhaps [more] primordian compared to poetry independent of music and to music independent of poetry". Then he again invokes the non-autonomy of nonverbal communication: "Bodily visual signs display a propensity toward a combination with auditory sign systems: manual gestures and facial movements function as signs supplementary to verbal utterances or as their substitutes" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 705).
3.2.7. Various relations between the addresser and addressee, in particular interpersonal, intrapersonal or pluripersonal communication. This is obviously lifted from Jurgen Ruesch's (1972[1953]) synopsis of the theory of communication. Jakobson should be given credit for giving the several essential varieties of interconnection between participants a general name, calling it the radius of communication, e.g. "the multipersonal exchange of replies and rejoiners or the extended audience of a monologue which may even be addressed 'to whom it may concern'" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 697). While these relations constitute "levels" for Ruesch, for Jakobson this can be viewed as a gradual increase in participants.
4. Signs
4.1. Most every quote that touches nonverbal communication validates "the egocentrism of a linguist", as Jakobson put it above, to consider language above all other systems of signs. Thus he continues to remark that "there is no equality between systems of signs", "the most important semiotic system is language" and "other systems of symbols are concomitant or derivative" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 556).
4.1.1. Relying on Bertrand Russell's Logical Positivism (1950), Jakobson claims that "no one can understand the word cheese unless he has had an acquaintance [a nonlinguistic acquaintance] with the meaning assigned to this word in the lexical code of English" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 260). In an effort to place his "emphasis upon the linguistic aspects of traditional philosophical problems", Jakobson goes past the problem of nonlinguistic acquaintance and focuses on the lexical code.
4.1.2. In yet another iteration of how linguistics is part of semiotics, Jakobson turns to John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding where he foresees, names and delineates "σημειωτική or the 'doctrine of signs', the most usual whereof being words" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 657).
4.1.2.1. Locke is also praised for conceiving language as "the great instrument of cognition" when he writes that "to communicate our thoughts for our own use, signs of our ideas are almost necessary" and the most conventient such signs are articulate sounds (in Jakobson 1985[1974]: 199).
4.1.3. Then he defines semiotics as the study of the "diverse systems of signs" and aiming to "bring out the problems which result from a methodical comparison of these varied systems" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 199). For our current purposes it is relevant to see how the diverse systems of signs would function in Jakobson's model, how much of his typology of language function would apply to different sign systems, etc. qcqc
4.2. One of the most interesting parts in Jakobson's approach to the study of language is perhaps the notion of holophrase. The holophrase is a single-word construction. He describes on the basis of his model of language functions how the originally syncretic holophrase that is simultaneously emotive, conative and referential gradually branches off and gives rise to "a prevalent or purely referential subclass of holophrastic utterances which are used chiefly or solely to designate and identify certain environmental items" (Jakobson 1985[1969]: 93). Thus the holophrase can be quite a lot of help for rethinking the referential function in Jakobson's model.
4.3. Jakobson points out the difficulty in understanding Peirce's concept of the interpretant and how it is confused with interpreter. He makes the distinction clear by saying that the interpreter is the semiotic subject, "the receiver and decoder of a message". The interpretant on the other hand is "the key which the receiver uses to understand the message he receives" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 206).
4.3.1. In the same passage he points out that the popularizers of Peirce's semeiotic attribute the interpretant the sole role of "clarifying each sign by the mediating context" while in actual fact Peirce distinguished several (triadic distinctions of) interpretants, the most important for Jakobson being the Immediate Interpretant which is "the interpretant as it is revealed in the right understanding of the sign itself" or in other words "all that is explicit in the signs itself, apart from its context and circumstances of utterance" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 206). This interpretation of the interpretant likens it to the autofunction of Tynjanov and autosemantica of Marty. qcqc
4.3.2. The interpretation of the interpretant as the key for "unlocking" the meaning of the message is perhaps more interesting, because it would simultaneously connect with Ruesch's metacommunication and Morris's modors, as well as with Jakobson's own (and especially Lotman's) code. That is, compare metacommunication with Jakobson's metalingual function. qcqc
5. Meaning
5.1. Probably referring to Charles Morris, Jakobson suggests that if "you dislike the word 'meaning' because it is too ambiguous, let us simply deal with semantic invariants" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 565). Morris actually doesn't include the term "meaning" in his basic terms of semiotic because it "does not have the precision necessary for scientific analysis" (Morris 1949: 19). Suggesting to focus on semantic invariants may be a good idea for linguistic analysis but it just will not do for semiotic analysis in general. The notion of semantic invariants is almost completely inapplicable for nonverbal signs. (Or, rather, this possibility has not been investigated.)
5.1.1. In an even more outrageous generalization, Jakobson insists "on the intrinsically linguistic character of semantics" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 565), as if pushing everything nonlinguistic beyond the semiotic pale.
5.1.2. "The meaning of [...] any word or phrase whatsoever is definitely [...] a semiotic fact." This much is agreeable, but by the same token the meaning of any behaviour or action whatsoever is definitely a semiotic fact. In fact, all meaning is a semiotic fact. He adds that "An array of linguistic signs is needed to introduce an unfamiliar word." Although this, too, seems true, it would be interesting to study how far this applies to nonverbal communication - does the introduction of an unfamiliar gesture or facial expression necessarily need an array of linguistic signs? An actually worthwhile contribution appears in this passage when he discloses the semantic noise of mere pointing to a cheese, which "will not teach us whether cheese is the name of the given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of any box of camembert, or of camembert in general, or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 260). This illustration works only if one is ready to dismiss the context of the pointing. Mere pointing will indeed signify little. It is when pointing is used in conjunction with other verbal or nonverbal signs that the point of the pointing becomes apparent.
5.1.3. Jakobson writes that Wilhelm von Humbolt taught us an eternal crucial problem in the age-old science of language. Specifically, that "there is an apparent connection between sound and meaning which, however, only seldom lends itself to an exact elucidation, is often only glimpsed, and most usually remains obscure" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 375). This connection between sound and meaning is problematic in linguistics but similar problem is rampant in semiotics: the connection between a behaviour and its meaning is similarly difficult to elucidate exactly. This is also why some (like Morris) choose to be more specific and define "meaning" as something more concrete (signification and denotation, for example).
5.1.4. According to Jakobson, various reductionist experiments to study grammatical structure without meaning demonstrated graphically "the omnipresent semantic criterion, no matter what level and constituent of language is examined" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 86). By the same token, the semantic criterion is omnipresent in semiotics in general and doesn't in fact have an "intrinsically linguistic character". The notion that in language everything "is endowed with a certain significative and transmissible value" (ibid, 86) applies equally well on any other semiotic system.
5.1.5. "Everything language can and does communicate stands first and foremost in a necessary, intimate connection with meaning and always carries semantic information" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 85). This suggests that when amending the referential function of the communication model, we should consider semantic information more broadly than mere reference. To this I would add the question of (semantic) exformation, as opposed to semantic information - and more pertinently, by what means one acts upon the other (e.g. not only what is meaningful in a message but also what is not meaningful and what is meant to be unmeaningful and how).
5.2. Nominantur singularia, sed universalia significantur.
5.2.1. This formula belongs to the 12th-century scholastic John of Salisbury. Jakobson notes that Peirce refers to it repeatedly and translates it as: "Particulars are named but universals are signified" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 90). My first interpretation was that this distinction is comparable to Morris's distinction between denotation (this particular horse with a carrot strapped to its head) and signification (the idea of a unicorn).
5.2.2. In another paper Jakobson explains further: "The dialectical tension between the generic unity of the inherent meaning, on the one hand, and the multitude of contextual meanings, suppositionum varietas, on the other hand, or briefly, between intension (depth) and extension (breadth), was conceived as the fundamental proprietas terminorum" (Jakobson, "The medieval insight into the science of language", pp. 195).
5.2.3. A paper by Gary Fuhrman on Peirce, titled "Rehabilitating Information" explains this more thoroughly.
5.2.3.1. Peirce wrote in 1902 (CP 8.119) in relation with "meaning" that logicians have long recognized that there are two aspects to it: (1) the thing that any sign, external or internal, stands for; and (2) another thing which it signifies. The first is "denoted breadth" and the second is "'connoted' depth". He adds that the early logicians generally held that depth/signification is intrinsic and breadth/denotation is extrinsic.
5.2.3.2. To explain this, Fuhrman quotes Peirce's translation of John of Salisbury's full statement: "what is well known to everyone, namely that what common names (appelativa) mean and what they name are not identical. They name particular things, but their meaning is universal." That is, common names name or denote singulars (individual things) but they mean or signify universals or generals. Taken at face value that this is about "common names" then the given name Iris denotes a person named Iris, but it signifies the Greek goddess of rainbows.
5.2.3.3. In conjunction with Jakobson's quote (in 5.2.2.) this would mean that the denotation of a sign is "the generic unity of the inherent meaning" of the sign and its signification is constituted by "the multitude of contextual meanings". Here it is relevant that Peirce prefers the scholastic term "signification" instead of J. S. Mill's "connotation", although they are almost the same.
5.2.3.4. Peirce found Mill's terminology to be objectionable (CP 2.341), and wrote that "Mill's term connote is not very accurate. Connote properly means to denote along with a secondary way. Thus "killer" connotes a living thing killed" (CP 2.317). I think the issue must remain unresolved at the moment.
5.2.4. Much in line with the previous discussion and 5.1., Linda Waugh proposes that if "we take the signatum ["signified"] of any linguistic sign, it evidences a continual dichotomy between a relational invariant - sometimes called a general meaning (Gesamtbedeutung) - and a variety of hierarchized contextual variants (specific meanings) including the basic variant (= Grundbedeuting)" (Waugh 1980: 71).
5.2.4.1. Given that "Particulars are named but universals are signified" (Jakobson in 5.2.1.) and for Morris "the problem is not what the sign signifies but whether or not it denotes anything" (Morris 1949: 18), we can deduce that the general meaning or relational invariant is something like signification and the specific meaning or contextual variant is something like denotation.
6. Charles S. Peirce
6.1. Although Jakobson helped to popularize Peirce in America, he was criticized by later Peircean linguists for being more Saussurean than Peircean. Elizabeth Bruss even argued that Jakobson was a selective reader of Peirce and used "Peirce to supply additional support for his own positions" (Andrews 1990: 1). Since this is my own impression as well, I'm going to point out the passages that do refer to Peirce and if possible show how "selective" Jakobson actually was.
6.1.1. Jakobson held that Peirce assigned to "the vast and splendidly developed science of linguistics" a privileged position among the "studies of mental performance and products" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 655).
6.1.1.1. Peirce at some point did indeed refer to "the vast and splendidly developed science of linguistics" (CP 1.271), but the statement was taken out of context. The actual passage is just another classification of sciences, which makes it utterly unsurprising that Peirce mentions linguistics. Under the order of psychotaxy Peirce includes two suborders: (1) one that embraces studies of mental performances and products, which is referred to linguistics and Brinton's ethnology; and (2) the other embraces studies of incarnations, or ensoulments of mind, such as the studies of the minds of insects, octopuses, sexual characteristics, the seven ages of human life, professional and racial types, temperament and characters.
6.1.1.2. Thus Peirce didn't actually assign linguistics to a privileged position. He refers the study of mental performances and products also to the study "of customs of all kinds, of [Daniel Garrison] Brinton's ethnology generally" (CP 1.271). Linguistics is actually quite unremarkable in this context. Much more important, I think, is that he classified something like zoo- or biosemiotics as comparable to the study of human language and customs.
6.2. Edna Andrews further notes that reading Peirce never seemed to demand for Jakobson to make serious revisions of his own categories and "The Peirce that Jakobson presents is therefore Jakobson's Peirce" (Andrews 1990: 1). She points out that Jakobson mainly discusses two notions of Peirce: (1) the icon/index/symbol trichotomy; and (2) the importance of the interpretant. We have already seen him discussing the interpretant (e.g. 4.3., above), so let's focus on the trichotomy. Off the top of my head I can say that this is the semantic trichotomy (the relation between the representamen and the object), which makes it more understandable why Jakobson focused on this trichotomy first and foremost.
6.2.0. Jakobson's Peirce's division of signs into indexes, icons and symbols is here based primarily on a passage that discusses mostly conventional rules of the symbols (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 335).
6.2.1. For the interpreter an icon is associated with its object by a factual similarity.
6.2.2. For the interpreter an index is associated with its object by a factual, existential contiguity.
6.2.3. For the interpreter a symbol is associated with its object by no compulsory existential connection but "by virtue of a law" or customary contiguity.
6.2.3.1. "The connection between the sensuous signans ["signifier"] of a symbol and its intelligible (translatable) signatum ["signified"] is based on a learned, agreed upon, customary contiguity" (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 335).
6.2.3.2. Comparing Peirce to Saussure in this regard, Jakobson finds that Saussure and his disciples rejected a general definition of symbol because it involved "some natural bond between the signans and signatum (e.g., the symbol of justice, a pair of scales)" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 347). In Saussure's notes, the conventional signs pertaining to a conventional system were tentatively labeled seme. Peirce on the other hand likened seme (or séma) to the index. E.g. hyposemes or subindices are associated by an actual connection with their objects (CP 2.283) or more succinctly, "'Seme" is usually reserved for indexical dicisigns which are only a subclass of the indices," (CP 2.283 Fn 1) like proper names, personal demonstrative or the letter attached to a diagram (CP 2.284). That is, Peirce's own categories are not nearly as simple as Jakobson's Peirce's.
6.2.3.3. In praising Peirce's Speculative Grammar Jakobson makes a blunder by appropriating Peirce's thesis that "a genuine symbol is a symbol that has a general meaning" and adding that "this meaning in turn 'can only be a symbol', since 'omne symbolum de symbolo'" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 358). Peirce indeed says that a genuine symbol has a general meaning and further explicates two kinds of degenerate symbols, the Singular Symbol whose object is an existent individual and which signifies only the characters of that individual, and the Abstract Symbol whose only object is a character as such (CP 2.293). Nowhere is it stated here that the meaning of the genuine symbol is another symbol. Peirce demonstrates to the contrary that the meaning of a symbol is complicated by the set of indices it is attached to and the icons it is associated with, this on the basis of the word "loveth": "Associated with this word is an idea, which is the mental icon of one person loving another" (CP 2.295). Jakobson's interpretation is correct only if this "mental icon" is generalized as a symbol.
6.2.4. It follows (for Jakobson) that for the interpreter a parallelism is associated with its object by an imputed similarity.
6.2.4.1. The possibility of a fourth class, an imputed similarity, is apparent in the 1964 passage. Jakobson holds that the structure of symbols and indexes both imply a relation of contiguity: in case of indexes this contiguity is physical; but in symbols this contiguity is artificial (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 335). Thus it would seem perfectly logical to assume that in case of icons there is a physical similarity and that there can be a fourth clas that is structured on artifical similarity. From this point of view it is quite understandable why Jakobson adopts Gerard Manley Hopkins's notion of (poetic) artifice for this fourth class of signs.
6.2.4.2. I propose that a conception of the fourth class is already present when Jakobson discusses icons. Because Jakobson is an über-linguist, even his understanding of icons is linguistic. According to him, Peirce conceived vividly that "the arrangement of the words in the sentence, for instance, must serve as icons, in order that the sentence may be understood" (Peirce in Jakobson 1971[1965]: 350). If we look at the context of this statement, we find that Peirce goes on to say: "The chief need for the Icons is in order to show the Forms of the synthesis of the elements of thought," because in precision of speech, "Icons can represent nothing but Forms and Feelings" (CP 4.544). Thus it is indeed the case that the arrangement of words in the sentence must serve as an icon, but not in the sense that Jakobson understands it. Peirce is discussing the circumstances for understanding a proposition and propounds that the sentence (e.g. "Why, it is raining!") is not only a symbol but also has its indexical and even iconic aspects. For Jakobson, the passage he "selectively" quotes seems to suggest an altogether different matter, that of the syntax (arrangement of words in the sentence) serving as an icon. Thus it appears to me that Jakobson already comes to an understanding of parallelism as iconicity on the level of a sentence (e.g. a line of poetry, a verse).
6.2.5. Jakobson seems to be fond of Peirce's categories mainly because they shed light on more complex relations apparent in verbal symbols. The relation between signans and signatum is comparatively simple when compared to "the different ranks of coassistance of the three functions in all three types of signs" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 349). Unsurprisingly, Jakobson is especially fond of how Peirce draws attention to the indexical and iconic components of verbal symbols. He positively favors Peirce's thesis that the most perfect signs are those in which the iconic, indexical and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible (ibid, 349).
6.3. Omne symbolum de symbolo.
6.3.1. This is another latin quote that Jakobson values in Peirce. Because it is such an important maxim, I'll dedicate a separate discussion to it (instead of discussing it alongside symbols in 6.2.3., above). It can be said that omne symbolum de symbolo is the backbone of Peirce's semiotics, especially his conception of semiosis as an endless chain of sign-processes. Kalevi Kull ("On semiosis, Umwelt, and semiosphere") even notes that this is very similar to Francesco Redi's principle omne vivum ex vivo (all life comes from life) and thus has pertinent implications for biosemiotics. Something like this concept was also evident in Lotman's semiotics of culture (e.g. a culture is born of a culture).
6.3.2. We saw above (in 6.2.3.3.) that Jakobson uses this Latin phrase as a shorthand or justification not to go into the nitty-gritty of Peirce's infinitely complex system of classification. The latter part of that passage shows exactly how Jakobson understands omne symbolum de symbolo and we can then show how it differs from Peirce's own explanation.
6.3.2.1. Jakobson argues that a symbol is incapable of indicating any particular thing (which is wrong, as evidenced by the notion of a Singular Symbol) but necessarily denotes a kind of thing (in which case Jakobson means Peirce's Abstract Symbol). He goes on to argue that the symbol is itself a kind of thing and not a single thing. Here he likens a symbol to a general rule "which signifies only through the different instances of its application" in thing-like (written or articulated) replicas. This is concluded by the statement: "However varied these embodiments of the word, it remains in all these occurrences 'one and the same word'" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 358). What we have here is actually the distinction between types and tokens which Jakobson paints as symbols as general rules and thing-like replicas. That is, the signum becomes a symbol, the signatum becomes a general meaning and the signans becomes a thing-like replica.
6.3.2.2. Peirce himself attributes a much grander role to omne symbolum de symbolo. He begins the relevant passage with a magnificently conclusive pair of words: "Symbols grow." (CP 2.302). The argumentation goes a little something like this: symbols come into being by developing out of other signs, particularly from icons; we think only in signs and these mental signs have a mixed nature, the symbol-parts being called concepts; if a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts; "So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow." Omne symbolum de symbolo. He goes on to add that once a symbol is brought to being, it spreads among the peoples and its meaning grows in use and in experience. Thus we see that Peirce's understanding of symbols is not primarily linguistic - he is not talking about words as much as about mental concepts. It's a shot in the dark but I guess Jakobson's simplification may have come out of his thinking about the meaning of words (the signatum) as something invariant. For Jakobson, symbols don't grow.
6.3.3. Elsewhere Jakobson makes his linguistic disposition in this regard more apparent by saying that "language is learned through the medium of language" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 103), which is certainly true. The problematic comes to the fore in what follows: "the child learns new words by comparing them with other words, by identifying and differetiating the new and previously acquired verbal constituents" (ibid, 103). This part is more dubious, because we cannot be sure that the child goes through these operations. A new word can be learned "at face value", so to say. Most of us probably know and use correctly words that we have never compared to other words. Jakobson's linguistic interpretation of omne symbolum de symbolo is most visible in attributing to Peirce the "precise formula" of "verbal symbol originates from verbal symbol" (ibid, 103), which is not Peirce's formula but Jakobson's Peirce's formula. When Jakobson adds that "Such is the way of language development" it is palpable that Jakobson and Peirce are thinking on different levels: Jakobson is viewing the matter from the standpoint of a child's language development (or ontogeny), while Peirce is viewing the matter from the standpoint of symbols in culture, basically (or, if you will, from the standpoint of semiotic phylogeny).
7. Linguistics
7.1. Jakobson's semiotic inclination is apparent when he suggests that we focus our attention on "the need for classification of sign systems and corresponding types of messages", and his linguistic disposition shows itself when he finishes the same sentence with adding, "particularly with regard to language and verbal messages" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 699). Aside from arguing over whether Jakobson was a semiotically inclined linguist of linguistically disposed semiotician, we can quibble over the details (which is exactly what I'm going to do in the following).
7.1.1. Calling for a classification of sign systems instead of a classification of signs (a la Peirce), Jakobson shows an affinity towards the semiotics of culture of the Tartu-Moscow school (or vice versa). When Lotman says that Peirce began with a sign and Saussure with a system, it is more likely that he meant that Saussurean semioticians, like Jakobson, began with a system. The primary system in question is language and other systems are derivative or dependent upon it. The Tartu-Moscow school went a step further and viewed the condition for signs and sign systems as a totality, a semiosphere.
7.1.2. Jakobson continues in the same passage, remarking that "Without efforts toward such a typology neither the communication of messages, nor even human communication in general can undergo a thorough scientific treatment" (ibid, 699). Here the distinction between communication of messages and communication in general is interesting, for it implies that there can be communication without messages. If messages are understood as signs then this possibility is indeed realized by Charles Morris's notion of communization (Morris 1949: 118).
7.1.3. It is possible that "communication in general" refers to nonverbal communication understood here as communication without (explicit) messages. This is suggested by the early (that is, late-1960-ish) use of the notion of "implicit communication" in place of nonverbal communication. That is, nonverbal communication rarely operates through "messages". Message is typically understood as a verbal, written or recorded communication (sent to or left for a recipient who cannot be contacted directly). Another definition states that a message is "a discrete unit of communication" (but neither Wiktionary nor Wikipedia are a reliable source). If these unreliable definitions are taken seriously then nonverbal communication is indeed utterly unable to operate through "messages".
7.2. Thinking of Jakobson as a linguist/semiotician without picking either is perfectly justified when we consider his remark that "It is difficult for a modern linguist to confine himself to his traditional subject matter" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 655). He says that the (intellectual) horizon of linguistics has substantially widened and that this is most emphatically enunciated by Edward Sapir who argued that linguists must became increasingly concerned with the anthropological, sociological and psychological problems that invade the field of language (ibid, 655).
7.2.1. In the same passage Jakobson suggests that the imaginative linguist can share some or all of the mutual interests which tie linguistics with anthropology, culture history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and more remotely with physics and physiology. In our course in reading Roman Jakobson's selected writings we have indeed seen that most all of these fields are in some way or other tied with linguistic interests. Being a linguist of the imaginative kind, he found interesting connections with all these fields, even with the remote ones (e.g. his papers and presentations on Albert Einstein).
7.2.2. If we take seriously his division of three fields into three concentric fields with communication sciences containing semiotics and semiotics containing linguistics, then Jakobson himself could be placed on the border of linguistics and semiotics.
7.2.3. The Tartu-Moscow school defined semiotics as the application of linguistic theory (a la Saussure) to non-linguistic or cultural phenomena that depend on language. Juri Lotman, who was more historically and culturologically inclined that Jakobson, could very well be placed on the border between semiotics and the study of communication as social anthropology. That is, Lotman focused on phenomena that imply communication of verbal or other types of messages (e.g. everyday behaviour of Russian nobility, the city as a text, animal behaviour, dreams, etc.).
7.2.4. The inability of modern linguistics to confine itself to its traditional subject matter may have been noticed by Jakobson not on the basis of the development of linguistics (which indeed in the so-called "post-structuralist" era turned to a linguistic analysis of everything) but due to influence of semiotics, which as-if lacks a traditional subject matter.
7.3. Jakobson's perhaps most interesting efforts in linguistics are (in my mind) historical. He holds that "For all human beings, and only for human beings, language is the vehicle of mental life and communication" and from this deduces that "It is natural that the study of this explicit and effective instrument, together with the rudiments of mathematics, is among the oldest sciences" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 91).
8. Language
8.1. In his overview of structuralism for the first issue of Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York, Ernst Cassirer outlines the most general propositions about (the structuralist approach to the study of) language. For starters, he says that language is neither a mechanism nor an organism, neither a dead nor a living thing, not a thing at all in fact but "a very specific human activity, not describable in terms of physics, chemistry, or biology" (Cassirer 1945: 110).
8.1.1. The immediate criticism that comes to mind is that language though of as an activity robs it of its special status as an abstract system. In Saussurean terms, it would be langage as parole without langue. By analogy, the rules of chess are not themselves an activity. This criticism put aside, the idea itself is understandable and Paul Cobley has argued, from a cybersemiotic point of view, that perhaps we should talk of languaging instead.
8.1.2. Cassirer defines the structuralist stance against the mechanistic one which views language as consisting of sound and considers the laws of language found when the mechanical laws that govern the phenomena of sound-shift and phonetic change are found. The structuralists are adversaries to this thesis and emphasize that "sounds, as mere physical occurrences, have no interest for the linguist" because "the sound must have meaning; the phoneme itself is a 'unit of meaning'" and "meaning is not a visible or tangible thing" (Cassirer 1945: 113).
8.2. "There is no such a thing as private property in language: everything is socialized."
8.2.1. Addressing Charles F. Hockett and his concept of idiolect at a joint conference, Jakobson claims that there is no private property in language and that idiolect proves to be "a somewhat perverse fiction" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 559). His argumentation for claiming so is extremely flimsy: he refers to the fact that verbal exchange requires at least two communicators - which should somehow convince us that language thus cannot be private. It would be easy enough to point out that he seems to be confusing sign system (language) and communication system (any form of intercourse or interaction).
8.2.2. The relevant passage begins with a definition of idiolect. Idiolect is understood as the speaking habits of a single individual at a given time (and not including the individual's habits of understanding the speech of others). Jakobson then boasts how he has never used the word "idiolect" himself but has used many other terms in the same way. Because he doesn't do any more explaining it comes across as an irrational move on his part. Of course there are individual speaking habits. But this is not an issue for us. What is actually interesting is the following statement:
8.2.2. "Everyone, when speaking to a new person, tries, deliberately or involuntarily, to hit upon a common vocabulary: either to please or simply to be understood or, finally, to bring him out, he uses the terms of his addressee" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 559). This is extremely important for rethinking the communication model. As it stands the model seems to consider "code" to be common and that is that. If something is unclear, the metalingual function clarifies the code and common code is achieved again. Here, on the other hand, we have an effort made to reach common vocabulary and the justifications for doing so are interesting when compared to the functions in the model: using another's words to please the other could be conative; to be understood should be poetic or referential; and "to bring him out" is phatic. If a revision of his communication model be attempted, the "code" must be dismissed as a homogeneous, completely common, entity and individual variations should be included. That is, despite Jakobson's absolute statement, not everything in language is socialized.
8.2.3. He comes to recognize this on/in his own terms later when he writes that "Language is never monolithic; its overall code includes a set of subcodes" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 574). Although this is not exactly a question of private language, it is a question of privatized language. I consider Morris's types of discourse a model for explicating these subcodes. These are technical, poetic, cosmological, etc. Here it makes sense, for example, that even different linguists (such as Jakobson and Hockett) must search for some common core in their own technical subcodes in order to communicate. qcqc
8.3. "Language is the central and most important among all human semiotic systems."
8.3.1. Statements such as this are scattered all around Jakobson's writings and several iterations have already made it into the current text (e.g. 3.1.). On the grounds of this notion Jakobson validates Leonard Bloomfield's statement that linguistics is the chief contributor to semiotic. He then (once again) proposes to compare language with the structure of different sign patterns since then we can find out "what properties are shared by verbal signs with some or all other semiotic systems and what the specific features of language are" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 658). Here his motivation is discernible: we must compare language to other sign systems to learn something about language (and not the other way around, as is more commonly done).
8.3.2. Jakobson quotes George Gaylord Simpson as saying that human language "is absolutely distinct from any system of communication in other animals" (in Jakobson 1985[1969]: 97). He then calls out for an interdisciplinary study of "the genesis of language as the principal event in the metamorphosis of the actually prehuman Homo alalus into a true human being, Homo loquens" (ibid, 97).
8.3.3. Rudy and Waugh affirm that for Jakobson, spoken language was the human semiotic system par excellence and he considered it the phylogenetic and ontogenetic basis for all other semiotic systems (Rudy & Waugh 1998: 2256). The latter bit can be argued against (and Sebeok has already done so in his criticism of the modeling systems theory of the Tartu-Moscow school).
9. Similarity and contiguity
9.1. Jakobson notoriously (or rather, influentially) delineates two fundamental factors that operate on any level of language. The first, selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymity and antonymity. The second, combination is based on contiguity and constitutes the building up of any chain of signs. In poetic language these factors have a very definite role: "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 704).
9.1.1. The distinction between selection and combination is based on Saussure's distinction between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axis. These distinctions also underlie the distinctions between similarity and contiguity, which Jakobson uses to appropriate Peirce's classification of signs (cf. 6.2.). There is also a possibility that these latter terms originate from James Mills's "contiguity law" and John Stuart Mills's "similarity law" (a matter that demands investigation). The poetic function will receive its own subheading which is why I can skip discussing it for the moment. Rather, I will focus on how he applies this distinction in relation with the study of aphasia.
9.2. Jakobson applied "purely linguistic criteria to the interpretation and classification of aphasic acts" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 240) and did so on the basis of the similarity/contiguity distinction. He calls these aphasic impairments accordingly similarity disorder and contiguity disorder.
9.2.1. Patients inflicted with the similarity disorder could grasp the literal meaning of words but could not understand the metaphorical character of the same words: "words had no capacity to assume additional, shifted meanings associated by similarity with their primary meaning" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 149).
9.2.2. The contiguity is more interesting in this regard, because it draws our attention to the fact that speech does not consist of only words but of words referring to one another in a particular manner. Thus Jakobson terms contexture-deficient aphasia contiguity disorder or agrammatism. The loss of syntactical rules organizing words into higher units reduces sentences to a mere "word heap", their order becomes chaotic and grammatical ties are dissolved (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 251). He adds that because words endowed with purely grammatical functions disappear first, it gives rise to the so-called "telegraphic style" recognizable in a sentence such as "Why waste time say a lot word when few word do trick?", a style that Kevin (in the show The Office) used to communicate with his foreign language speaking car mechanic.
9.2.3. Jakobson later notes that approaching aphasia from a strictly linguistic framework actually coincides with the topography of cerebral lesions responsible for the impairments (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 688). That is, similarity disorder is associated with Wernicke's area and contiguity disorder with Broca's area.
10. Code
10.1. "No communication is feasible without a certain stock of what the [communication] engineers [...] call preconceived possibilities and prefabricated representations" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 558). This quote by itself gives impetus to revise the "code" feature of the communication model. As it stands, the model presumes that both addresser and addressee have at their disposal a more or less the same "filing cabinet" of prefabricated representations (signs, in other words).
10.1.1. Jakobson reaffirms this notion again the next year by stating that "the speaker is by no means a completely free agent in his choice of words: his selection (except for the rare case of actual neology) must be made from the lexical storehouse which he and his addressee possess in common" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 241). Later we should consider if common lexical storehouse is enough or if common memory or something like it should be included.
10.1.2. More succinctly: "the speaker, as a rule, is only a word-user, not a word-coiner" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 242). The rationale behind this statement is actually pretty reasonable: "When faced with individual words, we expect them to be coded units" (ibid, 242). Here another possibility of merging Jakobson with Ruesch and Bateson appears in the type of metacommunication focusing on codification. That is, the case is relatively straightforward with words: we expect individual words to be coded units, but we don't necessarily expect nonverbal behaviour to constitute coded units - unless, of course, some form of a cue is given to instruct the receiver to treat it as a coded unit.
10.2. Jakobson writes that after reading all that was written by the communication engineers (Cherry, Gabor and MacKay) about code and message he realized that this dichotomy was anticipated in linguistic and logical theories of language under various names: langue / parole, Language / Speech, Linguistic Pattern / Utterance, Legisign / Sinsign, Type / Token, Sign-design / Sign-event, etc. (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 558). To this list one could also add: sign-vehicle / sign-family (Morris), token / a class of tokens (Reichenbach), Erlebnis / Erfahrung (Benjamin), etc. To all this, one could reply as one person actually did: "Various terms are used to mark the distinction between these two senses" but "Once made, however, the distinction seems to be largely ignored" (Blyth 1952: 35).
10.2.1. We can promptly agree that code and message are indeed better than the alternatives, but then we also have to consider that this is within the confines of communication theory. For general semiotics, Peirce's type and token seem to be more appropriate, and when approaching nonverbal communication where codes and types are rare to come by, Morris's sign-vehicle and sign-family fare better in my opinion.
10.2.2. The matter gets more interesting when we consider that Jakobson himself reiterates the communication theory definition of code as an agreed, usually one-to-one and reversible, transformation by which one set of information units is converted into another set (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 572). One could argue that this is too restrictive and reduces code to something like the Morse code.
10.2.3. Jakobson himself tackles this problem later head-on by recognizing the "necessity to face the fact that any speech community and any existing verbal code lack uniformity; everyone belongs simultaneously to several speech communities of different extent; he diversifies his code and blends distinct codes" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 87). Thus we arrive at a less constricting definition that considers subcodes of different groups and acknowledges the non-uniformity or heterogeneity of the sign-repertoires of individuals.
10.3. The notion of code also applies to other phenomena than language. For example, the beginnings of modern biosemiotics can be found in Jakobson's musings about George and Muriel Beadle's book The Language of Life (1966). Jakobson is impressed by the fact that these molecular biologists borrowed terms from linguistics and communication theory and use them not figuratively but with an extraordinary degree of analogy: "The deciphering of the DNA code has revealed our possession of a language much older than hieroglyphics, a language as old as life itself, a language that is the most living language of all" (Beadle & Beadle 1966; in Jakobson 1971[1967]:678).
11. Discreteness and continuity
11.1. Jakobson mentions this dichotomous principle that underlies the whole system of distinctive features in language in relation with the communication engineers. The latter corroborated "the binary digits (or to use the popular portmanteau, bits) employed as a unit of measurement" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 571). That is, the selective information of a message can be defined in terms of "the minimal number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to reconstruct what he needs to elicit from the message on the basis of the data already available to him" (ibid, 571). Here the notions have a more archaic form - digital and analogue. It is worthwhile to remark that analogue codification is equally used for measurement. While digital codification involves amount (e.g. numbers), analogue codification involves magnitude (e.g. size) (cf. Bateson 2000[1966]).
11.1.1. Unlike Bateson, who used the latter notions to approach animal communication, Jakobson applies these notions on language. Here the stream of oral speech is physically continuous while written speech is presented by a finite set of discrete constituents (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 570). These terms come from the work of Badouin de Courtenay, who borrowed them from contemporary mathematics and used them to study "the relation between continuity and discreteness in language" in an attempt to deploy more quantitative operations in linguistics (Jakobson 1971[1961]: 568).
11.1.2. It is allowable to view these two pairs of notions as variants because Jakobson himself mixes them liberally. For example, he writes that "a motion picture continually calls for simultaneous perception of its spatial composition" and that a verbal or musical sequence must be "resolvable into ultimate, discrete, strictly patterned components designated ad hoc (or, in Thomas Aquinas's terminology, significantia artificaliter)" (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 336).
11.1.3. This is further explained later: "The two particularly elaborate systems of purely auditory and temporal signs, spoken language and music, present a strictly discontinuous, as physicists would say, granual structure" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 701). That is, speech and music are composed of ultimate discrete elements and this principle is alien to spatial sign system. "These ultimate elements and their combinations and rules of patterning are special, ad hoc shaped devices" (ibid, 701). Or in another iteration: "both music and language present a consistently hierarchical structure, and, second, musical as well as verbal signs are resolvable into ultimate, discrete, rigorously patterned components which, as such, have no existence in nature but are built ad hoc" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 341).
11.1.4. In terms of codification, Jakobson writes that "the genetic code and the verbal code are the only ones based upon the use of discrete components which, by themselves, are devoid of inherent meaning but serve to constitute the minimal senseful units, i.e. entities endowed with their own, intrinsic meaning in the given code" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 679). From this we can deduce that while discrete units are inherently devoid of signification, then continuous units must be inherently significant (on this see 3.2.5.3. above).
11.1.5. Promptly after the major discoveries of neurophysiology in the late 1960s he associates this dichotomous principle with the functional asymmetry of the brain, much like he did with similarity and contiguity. Here he reports that "any verbal signals such as words, nonsense syllables and even separate speech sounds are better discerned and identified by the right ear and all other acoustic stimuli such as music and environmental noises are better recognized by the left ear" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 86).
11.2. A topic that Jakobson doesn't treat explicitly but which is relevant for my purposes, concerns a variety of interrelation between discrete and continuous systems. This involves verbal representations of nonverbal behaviour, or what I call concourse, for convenience. There are only a few passages that touch this topic, but I would be remiss not to handle them.
11.2.1. The first of these passages concerns synecdoches and captured my attention because Jakobson reviews the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Jakobson exemplifies the synecdoche by some bodily features, such as "hair on the upper lip" and "bare shoulders" standing for the female character to whom these features belong (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 255-256). This method is often used by Jevgeny Zamyatin in his novel We (1921). Namely, the protagonist refers to all other characters with some such synecdoche: E-330's eyebrows, O-90's wrists, etc. This is a curious case of an outstanding body part signifying the whole person.
11.2.2. Jakobson also discusses how a grammatical process can reflect the hierarchy of the grammatical concepts on the basis of the basic order in declarative sentences with nominal subject and object in which the former precedes the latter. That is, the subject on which the action is predicated is, in Edward Sapir's terms, "conceived of as the starting point, the 'doer' of the action" in contradistinction to "the end point, the 'object' of the action" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 351). A typical example of a sentence wherein the main verb denotes nonverbal communication, "Tom frowned his displeasure, but nobody believed him" (Ross 1970: 239), accords to this formula extraordinarily well: the 'doer' of the action (Tom) is followed by the 'object' of the action (displeasure). This starting point and ending point can also be termed actor-expression and action-expression (Joos 1950).
11.2.3. Another aspect of this concerns Peirce's discussion of relative terms. Jakobson obviously sought out passages in which Peirce dealt with linguistic issues and discussed an excerpt from Peirce. Jakobson quotes: "A dual relative term, such as "lover," "benefactor," "servant," is a common name signifying a pair of objects. Of the two members of the pair, a determinate one is generally the first, and the other the second; so that if the order is reversed, the pair is not considered as remaining the same" (CP 3.328). This obviously echoes an example of the semantic import of word order in Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry: "the word order "A kills B" by the inverse sequence "B kills A," we do not vary the material concepts involved but uniquely their mutual relationship" (Jakobson 1981: 87). Here we can see Jakobson applying happenstance tidbits of Peirce to his own linguistic theory. What Peirce was actually talking about becomes clearer in another instance (CP 1.363) dealing with the same matter. He was mainly discussing the cosmic importance of threes. For example: "The fact that A presents B with a gift C, is a triple relation, and as such cannot possibly be resolved into any combination of dual relations" (CP 1.363). In my previous example, "Tom frowned his displeasure, but nobody believed him", this three-fold relation also occurs in Tom (A) frowning his displeasure (B) to those who don't believe him (C).
13. Cognition and autocommunication
13.1. Jakobson writes that "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 263). His belief in the omnipotence of language is premised on the notion that whatever deficiency in terminology can be compensated be loanwords or loan-translation, by neologisms or semantic shifts and circumlocutions. There are numerous accounts of the significance of language for cognitive operations scattered around in his writings (e.g. Jakobson 1971[1967]: 671).
13.1.1. In one instance, Jakobson refers to Emil Post's musings on the decisive role which "language of the ordinary kind" plays in the "birth of new ideas", their rise "above the sea of the unconscious" and their subsequent mutation of vaguer intuitive processes "into connections between precise ideas" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 659).
13.1.2. In another instance he discusses how Einstein, "the future proponent of 'empathy [Einfühlung] into external experience", felt spiritual affinity with Winteler and quotes his book's preface: "My work in its essence is addressed solely to those who are able to grasp verbal form as a revelation of the human mind that stands to the mind in much more inner and sweeping relations than even the best products of a most consummate literature" (Winteler 1875; in Jakobson 1985[1972]: 84).
13.1.3. The sweeping relations between verbal form and the human mind also come to the fore in "the inward aspect of speech, the so-called strategies of mind deployed by interlocutors" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 671). Needless to mention, Jakobson felt favorably towards neurolinguistic research (ibid, 688).
13.1.4. A trivial side-note comes from a later reviewer who affirms that "Jakobson never abandoned the conviction that poetry is a vitalizing force in our mental life" (Kock 1997: 306). This note is quite on line with Charles Morris's view that "Only the individual who utilizes the signs of the artists, the prophets, and the philosophers, as well as the information given to him by the scientist, is living at the level of a complex individual" (Morris 1949: 240).
13.2. The topic of autocommunication is a suitable follow-up for the topic of cognition because these two notions are intimately connected. According to Peirce, a person's thoughts are "what he is 'saying to himself,' that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time" (CP 5.421).
13.2.1. We may begin this exposition with Cassirer's note that "Even our self, our personality, is nothing but a 'bundle of perceptions'" or "a mere mosaic of sense-data" (Cassirer 1945: 101). In a more semiotic (or Lotmanian) formulation of this maxim, our self is a bundle of sign processes or sign systems.
13.2.2. In tracing Jakobson's statements on autocommunication, we can proceed in a chronological order, beginning with the early 1950s when he stated that "There is no sender without receiver - oh, yes, there is, if the sender is drunk or pathological" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 559). Here, curiously, he affirms that "dialogue underlies even inner speech, as demonstrated from Peirce to L. S. Vygotskij" (ibid, 559). Yet the revelant passage begins with a remark that "individual speech doesn't exist without an exchange" and continues that "non-exteriorized, non-uttered [...] inner speech [...] is only an elliptic and allusive substitute for the more explicit, enunciated speech" (ibid, 559). To make sense of this mess, it must be made clear that in case of inner speech, which is indeed dialogical, there is as if no receiver. If the sender is drunk or pathological, he will indeed exteriorize, but wouldn't constitute a sender/receiver in the strict sense. The problem is made more explicit by quoting Sage Francis's lyrics in "Message Sent" (2002): "I've got some letters inside of my drawer that should have been stamped and delivered [and] one is addressed to myself but I don't know what personality or hand to give it." In this case we may question whether the message is indeed sent if it involves only passing the letter from one hand to the other. This is a general problem in autocommunicology: is there communication in the real sense if the sender and the receiver are one and the same person?
13.2.3. Only a year later Jakobson writes that "A competition between both devices, metonymic and metaphoric, is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 258). Thus he recognizes that there are indeed intrapersonal symbolic processes - symbolic processes do not necessarily involve exchange and externalization. This specific remark concerns the inquiry into the structure of dreams. Here we can tentatively say that dreaming is a form of autocommunication wherein the sleeping "subconscious" mind communicates with the waking "conscious" mind. Dreams, though, are not the only form of intrapersonal symbolic process.
13.2.4. In the late 1960s Jakobson has become more favorable towards autocommunication. Having read Ruesch, he now writes that "it was often overlooked that besides the more palpable, interpersonal face of communication, its intrapersonal aspect is equally important" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 662-663). Here he is seemingly autocommunicating and addressing himself, having earlier overlooked the intrapersonal aspect of communication himself. In this passage he combines Ruech's notion of intrapersonal network with Peirce's conception of giving signs to oneself: "inner speech, keenly conceived by Peirce as an 'internal dialogue', is a cardinal factor in the network of language and serves as a connection with the self's past and future" (ibid, 662-663).
13.2.5. As the phrase "network of language" in the previous quote indicates, Jakobson's understanding of autocommunication is primarily linguistic (which should not come as a surprise). This is relevant because here he recognizes that the "code" of autocommunication (the intrapersonal network of language) goes along with an autocommunicative "message". For this Jakobson utilizes the notion of privata privatissima. This notion originates from Tolstoy's diaries which he kept from an early age and ultimately developed into several categories: "those to be published, intimate ones that he shared with his wife, and the privata privatissima - for himself only" (Pomorska 1992: 66). In connection with this, Jakobson writes that the psychoanalytic endeavor is "to disclose the privata privatissima of language by provoking the verbalization of unverbalized, subliminal experiences, the exteriorization of inner speech, and [...] to revise and reinterpret the correlation between signans and signatum in the mental and verbal experience of the patient" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 672).
13.2.6. Concerning terminology, Jakobson distinguishes autocommunication from intercommunication. He writes that linguistics and cognate sciences deal chiefly with speech circuit and similar forms of the lotter, wherein the addresser and the addressee alternate their roles and the latter gives either an overt or at least a silent reply to the interlocutor (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 680). It must also be noted that Jakobson himself does not use the word autocommunication, which is Juri Lotman's favored term, or self-communication, as Charles Morris names it. Instead, he prefers to use Jurgen Ruesch's notion of intrapersonal communication, in which Jakobson emphasizes linguistic communication, but also mentions Ruesch's preferred psychological and neurological aspects (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 697).
13.2.7. Jakobson also takes up Peirce's understanding of "what he is 'saying to himself,' that is, is saying to that other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time" (CP 5.421) and generalizes it as inner dialogue "between the silent sayer and 'that very same man as he will be a second after'" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 698). The novelty here is that instead of using this long formulation, Jakobson uses a circumlocution, describing autocommunication as "verbal communication which insures the continuity of one's past, present, and future", as opposed to "verbal intercourse which bridges the spatial discontinuity of its participants" (ibid, 698). Here it must be emphasized that for Peirce, "all thought whatsoever is a sign, and is mostly of the nature of language" (CP 5.421), that is, the "saying to himself" does not necessarily involve saying out loud or even silently, but may occur in one's thought. For Peirce, there is apparently no "circuit" involved: thoughts are not instantaneous but involve the passage of time; a person's thoughts are what he is "saying to himself", that "other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time". For Jakobson, there must be a speech circuit, but instead of a Saussurean two-person circuit there is a circuit between a person uttering some words, even if silently, and the same person hearing himself saying those very words.
13.2.8. By 1968 Jakobson has fully accepted that there is indeed a form of communication in which there is a sender without an apparent receiver - and without the sender being drunk or pathological. Here his approach is more explicitly semiotic: "A sign requires an interpreter. The perspicuous [easily understood] type of semiotic communication involves two separate interpreters, the addresser of a message and its addressee. However, as mentioned above, inner speech condenses the addresser and addressee into one person, and the elliptic forms of intrapersonal communication are far from being confined to verbal signs alone" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 702). An example of such "elliptic" and nonverbal type of autocommunication is embodied in "The mnemonic knot on a handkerchief made by Russians to remind themselves to accomplish an urgent matter" (ibid, 702). This "typical example of an inner communication between the earlier and later self" (ibid, 702) is not actually that typical. The only person other than Jakobson who turns to this example is another Russian, Juri Lotman.
13.2.9. A few years later, Jakobson finds that "Inner speech, one's dialogue with oneself, is a powerful superstructure on our verbal intercourse" and adds that "A lesser dependence on the environmental censorship contributes to the active role of inner speech in the rise and shaping of new ideas" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 91). Giving rise and shaping new ideas comes very close to Lotman's treatment of autocommunication only a year later. For Lotman it was imperative that in case of intercommunication the information communicated remains constant, while in case of autocommunication we can speak of the growth and transformation of information, of formulating it in other categories without producing new messages but new codes that transform the autocommunicating person himself - this is related to and necessary for a broad field of cultural functions, from sensing one's individual existence to self-consciousness and autopsychotherapy (Lotman 2010[1973]: 139-140).
13.2.10. Soon enough Jakobson writes that autocommunication develops gradually in children's acquisition of language and creates such important mental procedures as inner speech with its internal dialogues (Jakobson 1985[1973]: 98). Here he also comes forward with the most concise statement of the difference between inter- and autocommunication: "While interpersonal communication bridges space, intrapersonal communication proves to be the chief vehicle for bridging time" (ibid, 98). One can only quibble with this generalization with respect to its strictness: more often than not, intercommunication also bridges time; while autocommunication may equally involve bridging space, as in sending oneself a message in another location or recording a voicemail. It must be kept in mind that these attributions to time and space are generalizations, each being "the chief vehicle for" these operations.
13.2.11. After recognizing the importance of autocommunication Jakobson proceeds to find suggestions of autocommunication in the history of the field. For example, in Bernard Bolzano's footnotes, he finds a distinction "between signs (Zeichen) and indices (Kennzeichen) which are devoid of an addresser, and finally on another pressing theme, the question between interpersonal (an Andere) and internal (Sprechen mit sich selbst) communication" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 203). Sprechen mit sich selbst is literally "talking to yourself".
13.2.12. On a more general note, Jakobson reviews William Dwight Whitney's 1894. unfinished study of language in which it is written that "the sign does not begin to be really known until we have seen that it is not only a transmissible thing but by its very nature a thing destined to be transmitted", or, reformulated by Jakobson himself in Peircean terms: "the sign demands the participation of an 'interpreter'" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 209-210). Chiming in from the perspective of autocommunication, we can say that what differentiates semiosis plain and simple from autocommunication is exactly the quality of being destined to be transmitted, even if the person who does the transmitting and the person who is transmitted to are one and the same. The letter written for oneself, the privata privatissima, is autocommunicative exactly because it is addressed to oneself.
13.2.13. In a lecture given in French in 1942 and published in English a whole half a century later, Jakobson "argued for the basically dialogic nature of language: For Jakobson, monologue is secondary and based on dialogue; and thinking as an interiorization is also based on the dialogue (with oneself)" (Waugh 1997: 102). Although both langue and parole are fundamentally social, "they may also have a personal, individual side (personal styles and messages addressed to the self)", but as an "overlay, so to speak, on the social underpinnings" (ibid, 102). This contention is obviously based on the premise that language is fundamentally social. Thus, Jakobson did not contradict his later statement that there is no private property in language and this view is even in harmony with Charles Morris's notion of personal signs, which he calls post-language signs (cf. Morris 1949: 147-148), exactly because they constitute a kind of "overlay".
14. Structuralism and functionalism
14.1. "For the Prague Circle, functionalism and structuralism were inseparable. Jakobson himself described his theory of language as one in which function (language as a tool for communication) and structure (language as a lawful governed whole) are combined" (Waugh & Monville-Burston 2002[1990]: xxii). In the following we shall review some of Jakobson's main theoretical strongholds, such as hierarchy, markedness and opposition. The aim is to make structuralism and functionalism, and their interrelation, clear in his work.
14.1.1. Jakobson's brand of structural functionalism (for a lack of better term), is characterized by talking not only about how something is structured, but how "it is structured as it is in order to do something" (Kock 1997: 305). This should be kept in mind so as to avoid looking "too exclusively at the internal functionings of language in poetic texts" (ibid, 305), for example.
14.1.2. For sake of a theoretical illustration, we may look at the following: "The 'function' of a given message is, in Jakobson's terminology, an intrinsic quality of the message itself; this, the focus upon the message is an inherent quality of a poem" (Waugh 1980: 62). That is, the poetic function is inherent in the poetic message itself, not a fancy of the researcher. Consulting Jakobson, we find the following explication: "Sometimes these different functions act separately, but normally there appears a bundle of functions [that] is not a simple accumulation but a hierarchy of functions, and it is very important to know what is the primary and what the secondary function" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 557). Already we can note that any given message does not have a single function but a bundle of functions in which a specific function is primary - this is the dominant function in the hierarchy of functions.
14.2. In the following we shall review some cases in which Jakobson has imputed a hierarchy on something. The first instance that should come to mind is his scheme of language functions, according to which "we distinguish six basic aspects of language [although we could hardly] find verbal messages that would fulfill only one function" (Jakobson 1985[1956]: 113). Here he emphasizes that "The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some one of these several functions but in their different hierarchical order" (ibid, 113). That is, although the verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function, it also depends on the secondary function, and less so on all the other functions. This is apparent in Jakobson's own analyses, in which he often puts forth two functions. For example, in "Anthony's contribution to linguistic theory" he writes that "A typical property of children's speech is an intimate interlacement of two functions - the metalingual and the poetic one - which in adult language are quite separate" (Jakobson 1971[1962a]: 286). In this case Anthony's babblings are primarily metalingual and secondarily poetic.
14.2.1. Next, Jakobson writes that "there is a feedback between speaking and hearing, but the hierarchy of the two processes is opposite for the encoder and decoder" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 576). That is, the dominance of either listening or speaking alternates along with the roles: while you are speaking, speech production is subordinate; and conversely when you are listening, speech production is subordinate. A dialogue is in this sense a continual reversal of importance between these processes. One can readily imagine there to be other subordinate processes, such as interjecting or pretending to be listening.
14.2.2. Curiously, Jakobson imputes a hierarchy on Peirce's classification of signs, in that "the difference between the three basic classes of signs is merely a difference in relative hierarchy" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 349). This view may seem faulty, but is in fact quite in line with Peirce's classification. Namely, different types or signs are, in Peirce's classification, compound triads. E.g. a general diagram is a rhematic iconic legisign. One may only question how in depth Jakobson considers this when he writes, for example, that "the main difference among the three types of signs is rather in the hierarchy of their properties than in the properties themselves" (Jakobson 1971[1964]: 335; my emphasis).
14.2.3. There is also, according to Jakobson, a hierarchical relation between the relationships of similarity and contiguity or denotation and connotation of a verbal sign: "Star means either a celestial body or a person - both of preeminent brightness. A hierarchy of two meanings - one primary, central, proper, context-free; and the other secondary, marginal, figurative, transferred, contextual - is a characteristic feature of such asymmetrical couples" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 355). What we have at hand, in fact, is a hierarchy between the auto- and synfunction. Thus, "star" has an autosemantic value of "a celestial body" and in the context of discourse about a specific known person, "star" also has a synsemantic value of "a famous person".
14.2.4. There seems to be one outstanding exception: "Hierarchy, the manifold and fundamental principle of any linguistic structure, is alien to animal communication" (Jakobson 1985[1969]: 96). This seems to be because in animal communication "the code is tantamount to the corpus of signals, and neither directional changes in deictic signals nor the gradation of emotional force could be equated with creative freedom, the essence of human language" (ibid, 96). At a time when the study of animal communication (zoosemiotics) was just beginning to form such views of animal communication codes as a restrictive selection of simple one-to-one transformations was quite common. It is doubtful whether modern zoosemioticians would agree with a lack of creative freedom in animal communication. In fact, even some zoosemioticians of that by-gone era didn't agree with him. For example, Alexandra Ramsay writes that the implication of Jakobson's insistence that the "acoustic modality is the one most adapted to the notion of hierarchy" is that "only sound should receive scrutiny as a possible forerunner in the search for a linguistic homologue" (Ramsay 1969: 183). Based on what we can read from Jakobson, though, it is difficult to determine whether he indeed insisted on such a thing. In any case, Ramsay deemed identifying the hierarchical functions of elements in animal communication difficult and somewhat arbitrary, because "No operational criterion has been given by which to assign an event unambiguously to a class" (ibid, 186).
14.2.5. Although Jakobson apparently dismissed finding a hierarchy of functions in animal communication, he did insist on embarking on an investigation of "the presence and hierarchy of those basic functions which we observe in language" in other semiotic systems (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 661-662). Particularly, he called for "a comparative analysis of structures determined by a predominant fixation upon the message [in] verbal, musical, pictorial, choreographic, theatrical, and filmic arts" (ibid, 661-662).
14.2.6. Linda Waugh in turn suggests that "one could make a typology based on which other function(s) assume some importance" in a given art (Waugh 1980: 59). She quotes examples from Jakobson: "Epic poetry, focused on the third person, strongly involves the referential function of language; the lyric, oriented toward the first person, is intimately linked with the emotive function; poetry of the second person is imbued with the conative function and is either supplicatory of exhortative, depending on whether the first person is subordinated to the second or the second to the first" (Jakobson 1960: 357; in Waugh 1980: 59). We may take up this issue again when we have reviewed all the language functions in Jakobson's scheme.
14.3. Next we will consider that "every single constituent of any linguistic system is built on an opposition of two logical contradictions: the presence of an attribute ("markedness") in contraposition to its absence ("unmarkedness")" and that "The entire network of language displays a hierarchical arrangement that within each level of the system follows the same dichotomous principle of marked terms superposed on the corresponding unmarked terms" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 85). The generality of these statement would seem to indicate that this dichotomous principle works not only on the levels of phonemes and syllables but also on the levels of words, sentences, semantic blocs and general intentions of linguistic utterances or texts. That is, we should investigate the applicability of markedness theory to other semiotic systems.
14.3.1. "Any [...] phonological correlation acquires in the linguistic consciousness the form of a contraposition of the presence of certain mark to its absence" writes (Trubetzkoy 1975: 162f; in Waugh 1998: 300). Thus, "one of the terms of the correlative necessarily proves to be 'positive', 'active', and the other becomes 'negative', 'passive'" (ibid, 300). Something like this approach to the phonological system has indeed been put to use in the semiotics of culture: "We should distinguish the nontext from the "antitext" of a given culture the utterance which the culture does not preserve from the utterance which it destroys" (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 62; footnote 13). Comparing these notions we may find that in cultural semiotics antitexts are "negative" and nontexts are "passive". There is a possibility of further distinguishing between texts that "positively" exist and texts that are "active" in a given period and/or location.
14.3.2. A more strictly semantic application was suggested by Trubetzkoy himself: "It seems to me that it has a significance not only for linguistics but also for ethnology and the history of culture" (Trubetzkoy 1975: 162f; in Waugh 1998: 300). He suggested investigating the marked element in oppositions such as life/death, liberty/non-liberty, sin/virtue, holidays/work days, etc. in a given epoch, group, nation, etc.
14.3.3. The dichotomous principle of markedness and unmarkedness is comparable to Charles Darwin's principle of antithesis, according to which every meaningful expression must also have a movement of a directly opposite nature (Darwin 1998[1872]: 34). Jakobson was aware of this principle and made good use of it in his analysis of the interrelation of naturalness and conventionality in the motor signs for affirmation and negation: "The direct opposite of bending the head forward as a sign of obedience ought to be throwing the head back as a sign of disagreement, dissent, refusal - in short, as a sign of a negative attitude" (Jakobson 1972: 92).
14.3.4. Jakobson also sought for this principle in Peirce, quoting tidbits from various papers, such as the statement, "A thing without opposition ipso facto does not exist" (CP 1.457; in Jakobson 1985[1975]: 251). But here, too, he is using Peirce to supply additional support for his own positions as in the relevant passage Peirce is actually discussing physical opposition: "Existence is that mode of being which lies in opposition to another. To say that a table exists is to say that it is hard, heavy, opaque, resonant, that is, produces immediate effects upon the senses" (CP 1.457).
14.3.5. Jakobson writes that "To speak of the 'grammar' of an art is not to emplay a useless metaphor: the point is that all art implies an organization of polar and significant categories that are based on the opposition of marked and unmarked terms" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 214). All art is reportedly linket to a set of artistic conventions and styles and the originality of a given work "finds itself restricted by the artistic code which dominates during a given epoch and in a given society" (ibid, 214). That is, the uniqueness of a given artwork comes to the fore against the background of dominant codes, conventions and norms of contemporary art. An example of such an artistic code with a marked element concerns "the diverse techniques of perspective which the spectator much learn to apprehend paintings of dissimilar artistic schoos; the differences in the size of figures have divergent meanings in the various pictorial codes; in certain medieval traditions of painting, villains are specifically and consistently represented in profile, and in ancient Egyptian art only en face" (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 349).
15. Culture
15.1. Since Roman Jakobson's life work was intimately tied with the semiotics of culture developed in Tartu, the following discussion will turn attention to his remarks about issues related to culture and the semiotics of culture. We must begin with what can be called the underlying premise of semiotics of culture: "language and culture imply each other" and "language must be conceived as an integral part of the life of society" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 555). This premise ties Jakobson's structural linguistics together with the semiotics of culture. Stated very generally: language is a system of signs and culture is a system of sign systems.
15.1.1. Jakobson saw linguistics as the center of the sciences of man, "due primarily to the unusually regular and self-contained pattern of language and to the basic role which it plays in the framework of culture" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 655). This unusual regularity is embodied in the fact that "All human beings except those with pathological conditions speak" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 340).
15.1.2. "Now, when taking into account the universally human, and only human, nature of language, we must approach the question of boundaries between culture and language; between cultural adaption and learning on the one hand, and heredity, innateness on the other - briefly, to delimit nurture from nature" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 106). Here he affirms that there is no absolute boundary between culture and nature - both "intervene significantly in the behavior of animals, and also in that of human beings" (ibid, 106). Here we can once again take up the question of nontext vs. antitext and view another culture with another language as an "anticulture" and nature, marked with the lack of human language, as "nonculture".
15.1.3. If culture and language are viewed in conjuction, as "implying each other", then a distinct possibility of defining a culture as a speech community opens up. Jakobson explains that interlocutors belonging to a single speech community use "one and the same linguistic code encompassing the same legisigns" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 573). In other words, a culture with a common code constitutes an interpreter-family (Morris 1949: 21). In discussing the work of Dwight Whitney, he reports Whitney's thesis of language as a social institution (Jakobson 1971[1965]: 348). Language is a system of arbitrary and conventional signs, or, in other words, "language is a sign phenomenon social in nature" (Morris 1949: 32).
15.2. Given that language and culture are to be viewed in their interconnection, Jakobson urges the following question: "Can we consider language as a part, as a constituent of culture, or is language something different, separate from culture?" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 102). In this regard it is wise to pay attention how Jakobson himself defines culture. He borrows the following definition from Bernard Grant Campbell's 1966. Human Evolution: An Introduction to Man's Adaptations: "Culture is the totality of behavior patterns that are passed between generations by learning, socially determined behavior learned by imitation and instruction" (in Jakobson 1985[1967]: 102-103). Compared to the definition of culture in the 1973 "Theses", Campbell says "totality" while the semioticians of culture say "a certain unity"; instead of "behavior patterns" we have "information" and instead of being "passed between generations by learning [such as] imitation and instruction" we have "processing, exchange, and storage of information with the help of signs" (cf. Salupere & Torop 2013: 24).
15.2.1. In 1973, Jakobson quoted Edward Sapir, who characterized communication as the dynamic aspect of human society. Reportedly, there is "a highly intricate network of partial or complete understandings between the members of organizational units of every degree of size and complexity" and language is merely "the most explicit type of communicative behavior" (Sapir in Jakobson 1985[1973]: 98). The language of a culture is, in Sapir's words, a "sure, complete, and potentially creative [...] apparatus of referential symbolism" (ibid, 98). These qualities can be compared to the informational functions put forth in the "Theses": reliability and completeness can be related to exchange and storage; and processing with creative potential. "Apparatus" is also semantically close to the "device" (устройство) in the "Theses".
15.2.2. With respect to the "Theses", Jakobson's attitude seems mixed. In 1973 he once again attested that "Language is the fundamental but not at all the only system of communication", lauded the "now rapidly developing" science of signs that "investigates the common features of all sign systems, their interrelation, and their specifics" (Jakobson 1985[1973]: 98) but in the following year, after presumed acquaintance with the "Theses", he warns that semiotic research should "guard against the imprudent application of the special characteristics of language to other semiotic systems" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 214).
15.2.2.1. His remark that "the confrontation of language with 'secondary modeling structures' [sic] and with mythology particularly points to a rich harvest and calls upon able minds to undertake an analogous type of work which attempts to embrace the semiotics of culture" (ibid, 213-214) comes across as cryptic. Moreover, his statement that "it would be a fallacy to neglect or underestimate all the other systems of human signs and to impose upon them properties characteristic of language but foreign to the other sign systems" (Jakobson 1985[1973]: 98) seemingly goes against the definition of semiotics (of culture) as the application of (structural) linguistic theory on non-linguistic phenomena, held by some members of the Tartu-Moscow school.
15.2.2.2. Aside from these irrelevant methodological confrontations between Jakobson and the authors of the "Theses", there are some neat congenialities between some passages in Jakobson's papers and the later developments of semiotics of culture. For example, he contemplates that "If we define language as a cultural phenomenon, a very serious question immediately arises. In culture, we deal with the relevant notion of progress. I hardly need to add that any idea of straightforward progress is a bewildering oversimplification. We find most various and whimsical curves" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 103). This is congenial with Lotman's theory of the sinusoidal alternations in the development of artistic styles.
15.2.2.3. Some passages in Jakobson's papers even seem to anticipate Lotman's later model of the semiosphere. For instance, Jakobson remarks that there are several essential points common to sciences of communication and thermodynamics, in particular the equivalence of negentropy and information: "Many more examples of new, common, theoretical and methodological problems could be named, as, for example, the concepts of symmetry and antisymmetry which acquire a still more important position in linguistics and in natural sciences, as well as questions of 'temporal' or 'morphic' determinism and of reversible fluctuations or irreversible changes" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 690). These notions should ring familiar to anyone who has read Culture and Explosion (Lotman 2009). In the same paper we find the following statement: "[Jacques Lucien] Monod describes the central nervous system as 'the most evolved of teleonomic structures' and ventures to interpret the emergence of the superior, specifically human system as a sequel to the appearance of language which changed the biosphere into 'a new realm, the noosphere, the domain of ideas and consciousness'" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 686).
15.3. Jakobson noted that the relations of similarity and contiguity can appear "on any verbal level - morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological" (Jakobson 1971[1954]: 255). In the "Theses on the semiotic study of cultures" this list of levels is expanded to the following scheme: Phoneme level → Level of phonemic groups (syllables) [morphemic] → Word level [lexical] → Syntactic-semantic structure of the sentence [syntactic] → Level of major semantic blocs [phraseological] → General intention of the text (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 67).
15.3.1. Next, "if we take the hierarchy of signs such as phrases, clauses, sentences, utterances, discourses, not only is this a part-whole hierarchy of ascending complexity, but also one of ascending freedom or creativity" (Waugh 1980: 62). Waugh goes on to note that "the sentence is the largest sign for which the rules of combination are obligatorily codified" (ibid, 62) but beyond that, on the the level of major semantic blocs and the general intention of the text (discourse), there are virtually no rules beyond social norms. The ascending complexity and freedom allows the sign user "to be 'creative,' to construct new and unique messages (i.e., new signs)" (ibid, 62). Almost two decades later Waugh again argues that semiotic creativity is associated with semiotic structure and affirms that "Discourses and texts arise from only very generalized, and optional, rules of combination and thus allow the most freedom to be creative" (Rudy & Waugh 1998: 2259).
15.3.2. One of the most significant differences between Jakobson's linguistics and the semiotics of culture is that Jakobson was oriented toward spoken language and the semiotics of culture dealt with written language. For Jakobson, "'spoken' language is the unmarked term and 'written' language the marked term" because "'Written' language is more specialized in many ways than 'spoken' language" (Waugh 1998: 308). Spoken language is reportedly universal while written language is nonuniversal - there are cultures with no written language while all human communities have a spoken language: "Speechlessness (aphasia universalis) is a pathological state" but "On the other hand, illiteracy is a widespread, in some ethnic groups even general, social condition" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 340).
15.3.3. In this regard Jakobson poses the question: "Why is it thta visual word messages are, so to say, a superstructure, a 'parasitical formation' upon the universal phenomenon of spoken language? Why are all other forms of human communication only secondary and optional?" (ibid, 340). Here one can notice yet another interpretation of the "secondary modeling structures" of the semiotics of culture: "natural" language in this sense is primary because it is universal, while written language "only substitutes for oral communication" and other forms of communication, such as gestures and facial expressions, are "merely concomitant, subsidiary vehicles" (ibid, 340). He adds that these facts demand elucidation.
15.3.4. In the same year that Jacques Derrida published his De la grammatologie (1967), Jakobson wrote that "written language, sometimes underrated by linguists, deserves an autonomous scientific analysis with due respect to the particular characters of writing and reading" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 658-650). Derrida, in turn, took issue with the primariness of spoken language: "The argument of Jakobson and Halle [in Fundamentals of Language (1956)] appeals to the factual genesis and invokes the secondariness of writing in the colloquial sense," (Derrida 1998[1967]: 54) and quoting the following statement: "Only after having mastered speech does one graduate to reading and writing." (Jakobson & Halle 1956: 16). Derrida writes that this proposition cannot be rigorously proven and goes on to deconstruct their argument in undecipherable derridaisms.
15.3.5. Later, Jakobson is still sure that "Written language is an evident transform of oral speech" and adds something to the social aspect: "almost half of the world's people are totally illiterate, and the actual use of reading and writing is an asset of scarce minority" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 91). Today, only around 15% of the world population is illiterate. Nevertheless, Jakobson also assures that "the role of schooling and continual transmission, far from being confined to the world of letters, is attested as well in oral traditions and rhetorical art" (ibid, 91).
16. Interestibilia and time
16.1. Before proceeding to much heavier topics of translation and the communication model, I will list some merely quite interesting tidbits that wouldn't fit anywhere else and finally the question of time.
16.1.1. One such tidbit concerns the formalist concept of "frustrated expectations". Jakobson writes that Boris Viktorovič Tomaševskij skilfully combined mathematics and philology, using Markov chains for the statistical investigation of verse. This lead to "a linguistic analysis of the verse structure [...] based on the calculus of its conditional probabilities and of the tension between anticipation and unexpectedness" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 579).
16.1.2. "In every proposition the circumstances of its enunciation show that it refers to some collection of individuals or of possibilities, which cannot be adequately described, but can only be indicated as something familiar to both speaker and auditor. At one time it may be the physical universe, at another it may be the imaginary 'world' of some play or novel, at another a range of possibilities" (CP 2.536). Remarking on Augustus De Morgan's Universe of Discourse (1846), Jakobson writes that "from a linguistic point of view the verb of existence remains elliptic as far as it is not accompanied by a locative modifier: 'unicorns do not exist in the fauna of the globe'; 'unicorns exist in Greco-Roman and Chinese mythology', 'in the tapestry tradition', 'in poetry', 'in our dreams', etc." (Jakobson 1985[1956]: 120). Thus, circumstances of enunciation should be considered in the context component of the communication model.
16.1.3. Rudy and Waugh give an overview of Jakobson's earliest monograph, The Newest Russian Poetry (1921), a characteristic work of Russian formalism, that sets out some key points that can be seen in his own later works and in the semiotics of culture: (1) the autonomy of literary studies; (2) insistence upon studying the deformation of linguistic norms by means of an artistic device; (3) the concept of literariness in culture and history; (4) the opposition of practical and poetic language; (5) a theory of literary evolution and historical alternation of outworn and innovative devices fueled by novelty and deautomatization; and (6) the deliberate laying-bare of the artistic device and self-conscious focus on artistic metalanguage (Rudy & Waugh 1998: 2262-2263), thus anticipating the concept of metafiction.
16.1.3.1. The opposition between practical and poetic language in which "the latter [is] viewed as a radical transformation of the former's norms aimed at disrupting the automatism of everyday speech" (ibid, 2262-2263), was relevant for Jakobson half a century later as well: "The attempted confrontation between arts and language may fail if this comparative study relates to ordinary language and not directly to verbal art, which is a transformed system of the former" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 214; emphasis added). This is particularly interesting because in his scheme of language functions, the message carries a poetic function and the practical, ordinary, communicative, function of the message is neglected. It makes me wonder if it was simply too self-evident and obvious, or whether Jakobson, in his influential paper "Linguistics and Poetics", was mainly considering poetry.
16.1.4. In the 1928 "Theses" co-written with Tynjanov, they "recognized the interdependence of the 'literary series' on other historico-cultural series' (Rudy & Waugh 1998: 2263) and from this one can argue, for example, that "a poem does not exist in a vacuum: it is part of a general historico-cultural context and indeed depends on that context for its interpretation" (Waugh 1980: 72). So, too, one can argue that any kind of criticism is part of the general historical and cultural context. For example, Jakobson himself was baffled by newspaper reports about Nikita Khrushchev's "declarations on modern art, his sharp and dictatorial protest against nonrepresentational, abstract painting" and interprets it as "a violent aversion to this kind of pictures" and as an "outraged reaction, this superstitious fear and inability to grasp and accept nonobjective painting" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 339). Unbeknown to Jakobson (this did not surface until the current century) the CIA funded abstract expressionism as a cultural "weapon" in the Cold War. Khrushchev's outright rejection of modern art may have not been an aversion towards modern art itself but an aversion to American cultural influence.
16.1.5. Concerning music, Jakobson distinguishes introversive and extroversive semiosis on the basis of the referential component. In introversive semiosis each sonic element has a reference to the other elements in the work while extroversive semiosis denotes the referential link with the exterior world. In other words, introversive semiosis is synfunctional or syntagmatic while extroversive is autofunctional or paradigmatic. Semioticians of music have made good use of these terms, although Jakobson originally attributed semiotic introversiveness to poetry and the bulk of representational visual art and noted that "the referential component is either absent or minimal in musical messages, even in so-called program music" (Jakobson 1971[1968]: 705). Later he explains introversive semiosis further as "intramusical embodied meaning" wherein one tone or a group of tone indicates or leads the experienced listener to expect that another tone or group of tones will be forthcoming at some more or less specific point in the musical continuum (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 216). Due to music being a temporal art form, this can be related to Brentano's proteraesthesis: "The source of our concept of time, according to Brentano, is the intuitive experience he calls 'proteraesthesis'", examples of which include the hearing of a melody and experiencing a succession, one note preceding another note (cf. Chisholm 1981: 3).
16.2. On the topic of time, Jakobson often referred to Peirce's triad of icon, index and symbol. He was especially fond of the exposition of these sign types in which Peirce explains how "the word is not a thing" but a general rule that effects the conduct and thoughts of a person who knows the meaning of the word: "Thus the mode of being of the symbol is different from that of the icon and from that of the index. An icon has such being as belongs to past experience. It exists only as an image in the mind. An index has the being of present experience. The being of a symbol consists in the real fact that something surely will be experienced if certain conditions be satisfied. Namely, it will influence the thought and conduct of its interpreter. Every word is a symbol. Every sentence is a symbol. Every book is a symbol. Every representamen depending upon conventions is a symbol." (CP 4.447; also in Jakobson 1971[1965]: 358). Or more succinctly: "An icon has such being as belongs to PAST experience. An index has the being of PRESENT experience. The being of a symbol consists in [...] a potentiality; and its mode of being is esse in futuro. The FUTURE is potential and not actual." (Jakobson 1985[1975]: 253).
16.2.1. Peirce's exposition on the "being" of a sign in temporal terms is readily comparable to Susan Langer's distinction between signs and symbols: "The fundamental difference between signs and symbols is this difference of association, and consequently of their use by the third party to the meaning function, the subject; signs announce their objects to him, whereas symbols lead him to conceive their objects" (Langer 1956[1942]: 49). It would be a very short step to modify Peirce's triad to the extent that symbols help us conceive of future experience, indexes announce something in the present experience and icons help us remember something is past experience. But such one-to-one conversion is not possible as Langer notes that symbols are like "'substitute signs,' for in our present experience they take the place of things that we have perceived in the past, or even things that we can merely imagine by combining memories, things that might be in past or future experience" (1956[1942]: 24). That is, symbols involve both past and future, much like Peirce's symbols grow on the basis of icons and other symbols (see 6.3.2.2. above). She also argues, contrary to Peirce, that symbols "do not usually serve as vicarious stimuli to action that would be appropriate to their meanings; where the objects are quite normally not present, that would result in a complete chaos of behavior" (ibid, 24).
16.2.2. This problem is tackled head-on by Charles Morris, who likewise chimes in by quoting the following passage: "A term which is used symbolically and not signally does not evoke action appropriate to the presence of its object. If I say: "Napoleon," you do not bow to the conqueror of Europe as though I had introduced him, but merely think of him." (Langer 1956[1942]: 48; in Morris 1949: 50). Morris agrees that signals announce their objects and symbols lead their interpreters to conceive of their objects and tries to translate this difference into behavioral semiotic by pointing out that "a symbol is on the whole a less reliable sign than is a signal, since it is producible by the organism and hence may appear, when the organism has a certain need, in situations in which what is signified is not present" and because the signal is "more closely connected with external relations in the environment [it] is more quickly subject to corrections by the environment and hence tends to be more reliable, that is, to lose its sign status when the unreliability becomes rather great" (Morris 1949: 50).
16.2.3. So as not to move too far away from Jakobson I'll point out that he treated some of these issues is his own terms. In relation with child language acquisition he notes the decisively important emergence of the subject-predicate sentence and says that "It liberates speech from the here and now and enables the child to treat events distant in time and space or even fictitious" and this mechanism of displaced speech "is the fact the first affirmation of language's autonomy" above and beyond other sign systems that are incapable of this operation (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 90).
16.2.4. Another passage from Langer is elegantly explanatory in this regard: "Symbols are not proxy for their objects, but are vehicles for the conception of objects. To conceive a thing or a situation is not the same thing as to 'react toward it' overtly, or to be aware of its presence. In talking about things we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves; and it is the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly 'mean.' Behavior toward conceptions is not what words normally evoke; this is the typical process of thinking." (Langer 1956[1942]: 49). When Peirce writes that "The value of a symbol is that it serves to make thought and conduct rational and enables us to predict the future" (CP 4.448), the juxtaposition with Langer leads to a conclusion that symbols enable us to have a conception of the future and control our conduct with the aid of this conception.
16.2.5. To the same paragraph belongs the quote that "the most perfect signs are those in which the iconic, indicative, and symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible" (CP 4.448). If this statement is taken seriously and the icon, index and symbol are related to past, present and future, then a new interpretation may be borne out of the following quote: "In a letter dated March 21, 1955, four weeks before his death, Einstein wrote: "The separation between past, present, and future has only the meaning of an illusion, albeit a tenacious one" (in Jakobson 1985[1972]: 92).
16.2.6. In relation with the excerpt, "Whatever is truly general refers to the indefinite future; for the past contains only a certain collection of such cases that have occurred. The past is actual fact. But a general (fact) cannot be fully realized. It is a potentiality; and its mode of being is esse in futuro. The future is potential, not actual." (CP 2.148), Jakobson writes that "Here the thought of the American logician crosses paths with the vision of Velimir Khlebnikov, the most original poet of our century, in whose commentary of 1919 to his own works one reads: 'I have realized that the homeland of creation lies in the future; thence wafts the wind from the gods of the word" (in Jakobson 1971[1965]: 458-359).
17. Translation
17.1. Jakobson writes that "one of the most illuminating of Peirce's theses propounds that the meaning of a sign is the sign it can be translated into" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 566). Now what he seems to be referring to here is the following passage in discussing quantitative algebra: "Suppose we make i neither positive nor negative. 'But there is no such thing,' some rule-of-thumb man says. Really? In that respect it is just like all the other objects the mathematician deals with. They are one and all mere figments of the brain. 'But to say that a quantity is neither positive nor negative means nothing,' objects the thumbist. I reply, the meaning of a sign is the sign it has to be translated into." (CP 4.132; emphasis added). Thus it turns out that Peirce not so much "propounds" a "thesis" but replies to a straw man rule-of-thumbist mathematician. He continues: "Now in mathematics, which is merely tracing out the consequences of hypotheses, to say a thing has no meaning is to say it is not included in our hypothesis" (ibid). By "the meaning of a sign" Peirce actually seems to signify "value of a variable".
17.1.1. Another instance of thesis occurs in a discussion on selecting hypotheses, wherein he proposes that in order to approach the question of what theories and conceptions we ought to entertain we "should begin with searching for the end of thinking. What do we think for? What is the physiological function of thought? If we say it is action, we must mean the government of action to some end. To what end? It must be something, good or admirable, regardless of any ulterior reason. This can only be the esthetically good. But what is esthetically good? Perhaps we may say the full expression of an idea? Thought, however, is in itself essentially of the nature of a sign. But a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed. Thought requires achievement for its own development, and without this development it is nothing. Thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations, or it proves itself not to be genuine thought." (CP 5.594; emphasis added). I have quoted these two passages in length in order to show that Peirce's ideas about the translation of signs is far removed from Jakobson's discussion of translation within, between and outside language. Here he is talking about thoughts as signs that must develop, grow and translate themselves into further thoughts in order to qualify as genuine thoughts.
17.1.2. To push this point even further, I will have to quote another lengthy passage: "It may be that I shall finally come to a belief which is a motive for action directly without the intervention of a more special belief. In this case how does the belief address itself to a sign? When a person is said to act upon a certain belief the meaning is that his actions have a certain consistency; that is to say, that they possess a certain intellectual unity. But this implies that they are interpreted in the light of thought. So that even if a belief is a direct motive to action it still is a belief only because that action is interpretable again. And thus the intellectual character of beliefs at least are dependent upon the capability of the endless translation of sign into sign. An inference translates itself directly into a belief. A thought which is not capable of affecting belief in any way, obviously has no signification or intellectual value at all. If it does affect belief it is then translated from one sign to another as the belief itself is interpreted. And therefore this character of signs that they must be capable of interpretation in every sense belongs to every kind of cognition. And consequently no cognition is such or has an intellectual significance for what it is in itself, but only for what it is in its effects upon other thoughts. And the existence of a cognition is not something actual, but consists in the fact that under certain circumstances some other cognition will arise." (CP 7.357; emphasis added).
17.1.3. Thus we can see that when Jakobson claims that "Peirce incisively defined the main structural principle of language, [that] any sign is translatable itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 566) we are once again dealing not with Peirce but with Jakobson's Peirce. If we consider the contexts of these well-known tidbits of Peirce, we see that the actual Peirce was not talking about language but about mathematical hypotheses and variables, thought, action, belief, and cognition generally. One can of course argue that what Peirce says about signs in these quotes are thought-provoking and inspirational in themselves and it is possible to apply these grand ideas on any type of semiotic theorizing. That much may be true, but then we should without a doubt recognize, as Elizabeth Bruss did, that Jakobson was indeed a selective reader of Peirce and did use Peirce to supply additional support for his own positions. What is bothersome about this, for me, is not that Jakobson translated some of Peirce's propositions into his own linguistic theory (which actually makes them, in Peirce's own words, genuine thoughts) but that the original contexts of these propositions are much richer in semiotic potential than one might expect. Understanding thought as essentially of the nature of a sign did not fly with Charles Morris and apparently it didn't fly with Jakobson, too.
17.1.4. Returning to the original meaning of translation of signs in Peirce, the next logical step would be to review Jakobson's further statements about translation (at least as far as he implicates Peirce in his own positions). For example, in commenting "The cardinal property of language noted by the initiator of semiotics [Peirce], namely the translatability of any verbal sign into another, more explicit one, renders an effective service to communication in that it counteracts ambiguities caused by lexical and grammatical homonymy or by the overlapping of elliptic forms" (Jakobson 1985[1972]: 87), he is not only substituting thoughts as signs with verbal signs but also implying that the more developed sign must be a more explicit or redundant one (see 2.3.3. above for the relation between explicitness and redundancy). In Peirce's own writings, the more developed sign is not at all related to stating something clearly and in detail so as to leave no room for confusion or doubt but with the formation of thought habits and the formation of future thought from previous ones. E.g. "thought is what it is, only by virtue of its addressing a future thought which is in its value as thought identical with it, though more developed" (CP 5.316). Once again: Peirce is discussing cognition not communication.
17.1.5. "Peirce casts light upon the ability of every sign to be translated into an infinite series of other signs which, in some regards, are always mutually equivalent (II.293)" (Jakobson 1985[1974]: 206). Here Jakobson is most likely referring to the illustration Peirce gives of a symbol as a law or a regularity of the indefinite future: "a constituent of a Symbol may be an Index, and a constituent may be an Icon. A man walking with a child points his arm up into the air and says, 'There is a balloon.' The pointing arm is an essential part of the symbol without which the latter would convey no information. But if the child asks, 'What is a balloon,' and the man replies, 'It is something like a great big soap bubble,' he makes the image a part of the symbol." (CP 2.293). Here it is apparent that Jakobson read this illustration, a child asking "What is a balloon?" and man replying with a more explicit circumlocution, as an example of the metalingual function in operation. It can indeed be read in such manner, but that would be to disregard the complexity and logical beauty of Peirce's semiotic. Moreover, the original context of this illustration proves to contribute something quite valuable to our understanding of the metalingual function: that there is a "metaphorical" component to it that includes the image - in trying to explain to the child what a balloon is the man actually first translates the word-sign "balloon" into an image-sign of "something like a great big soap bubble" and proceeds to explain it by way of analogy with this imagery. If anything, reading Peirce in light of Jakobson's interpretations of Peirce, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of Jakobson himself and translate his thoughts with more developed thoughts.
17.2. Jakobson writes that "the cognitive level of language not only admits but directly requires recoding interpretation, i.e., translation" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 265). Here he would be correct in referring to Peirce's translation of cognitive signs into more developed cognitive signs. But then again what is the "cognitive" level of language? Is it merely semantics or something more? He goes on to add that in everyday verbal mythology (jest, dreams, magic) and poetry "the grammatical categories carry a high semantic import" (ibid, 265), as if indicating that in case of texts with dominant poetic function "recoding interpretation" is more necessary. Jakobson's most notable contribution to translation theory involves the three dimensions of recoding interpretation: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. In the following we will examine these in detail.
17.2.1. The earliest suggestion towards this distinction comes from Mukařovský, who writes that "The subject matter of a work of poetry is thus its largest semantic unit" (Mukařovský 1964[1932]: 23). That is, the subject matter of poetry is on the level of the "General intention of the text" (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 67). Mukařovský continues that the poem has certain properties based on the "independence of any specific signs, or sets of signs, so that the same subject matter may without basic changes be rendered by different linguistic devices, or even transposed into a different set of signs altogether, as in the transposition of subject matter from one art form to another" (Mukařovský 1964[1932]: 23).
17.2.2. Jakobson of course is not interested in the general intention of the text and reduces these forms of rendition to "three ways of interpreting a verbal sign: it may be translated into other signs of the same language, into another language, or into another, nonverbal system of symbols" or rewording, translation proper and transmutation (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 261).
17.3. Intralingual translation or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. This may involve bothy types of linguistic redundancy: pleonastic redundacy (repetition of the same sense in different words) and explicitness (stating something clearly and in detail so as to leave no room for confusion or doubt) (cf. Jakobson 1971[1960]: 571). These may involve some form of metalingual operations - a tenet that will be investigated separately later. qcqc
17.3.1. Given that intralingual translation or rendering the same subject matter in different linguistic devices, as Mukařovský put it, was seemingly borne from discussing the recoding of poetry, we can once again include Susanne Langer in this discussion. She writes that such interpretation in art is vicious "because art - certainly music, and probably all art - is formally and essentially untranslatable" and she does not agree with the statement that interpretation of poetry is the determination of what poetry says; most importantly, she submits that "a character of such interpretation is that it is always carried out in non-poetic terms or in less poetic terms than the thing interpreted" (Langer 1956[1942]: 190). That is, if the subject matter of a poem, or what it says, is recoded in different words or more clearly, then it will - if not always, then certainly in most cases - be less poetic. In other words, the artistic meaning of a poem is not equivalent to the literal meaning of the same poem.
17.3.2. Langer adds that artistic symbols"are untranslatable. Their sense is bound to the particular form which it has taken and always implicit, incapable of being explicated by any interpretation. "This is true even of poetry, for though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations in words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or the familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm" (Langer 1956[1942]: 211-212).
17.3.3. This view is actually very much in line with Jakobson's own thoughts about the autonomy of poetic language (e.g. the poetic function of language) and a parallel may be found in his writings: "a close, faithful translation of poetry is a contradiction in terms" but "What remains possible is a congenial transposition - a free, creative response of an English poet to a Russian or Japanese author, and vice versa - a performance essentially similar to an artful, ingenious transposition of a poem or novel into a painting, motion-picture, ballet, or a piece of music" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 111). Here he seems to suggest that an interlingual translation of poetry is impossible; it is merely possible to transpose the poem into another language. That is, intelingual translation of poetry is comparable to intersemiotic translation.
17.4. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language or, in Mukařovský's terms, transposition into a different set of signs altogether (if "a different set of signs" is here understood as a different language). As we have learned above, a poem cannot be translated as such, but can be transposed into another language. The case is different with non-poetic texts: "The outlined difficulties almost come to naught when translating a scientific work written clearly, unambiguously, and with lucid contextual meanings of all its verbal constituents" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 111).
17.4.1. Jakobson does not neglect to highlight the importance of translation for linguistics: "Any comparison of two languages implies an examination of their mutual translatability" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 262). One such instance of the problematic of translatability comes to the fore in suggesting that "If we venture to translate Albert Einstein's or Bertrand Russell's book into Bushmen or Gilyak languages, this task is perfectly achievable, whatever the grammatical structure of the given vernacular [but] Only its vocabulary must be enriched and adapted to the needs of a new scientific terminology" (Jakobson 1985[1967]: 105).
17.4.2. In another instance, Jakobson points to the possibility of defining information in terms of translation: "The semiotic definition of a symbol's meaning as its translation into other symbols finds an effectual application in the linguistic testing of intra- and interlinguistic translation, and this approach to semantic information concurs with Shannon's proposal to define information as 'that which is invariant under all reversible encoding or translating operations', briefly, as 'the equivalence class of all such translations'" (Jakobson 1971[1960]: 578). Here Shannon is curiously close to Peirce's definition of a proposition: "Of course, I have not fully defined a proposition, because I have not discriminated the proposition from the individual sign which is the embodiment of the proposition. By a proposition, as something which can be repeated over and over again, translated into another language, embodied in a logical graph or algebraical formula, and still be one and the same proposition, we do not mean any existing individual object but a type, a general, which does not exist but governs existents, to which individuals conform" (CP 8.313). In other words, in the meaning of a proposition or "information" is, in this view, a type that can be translated interlingually into the tokens of another language or intersemiotically into a formalized system of notation (logical graph or algebraical formula).
17.5. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems or, in Mukařovský's terms, transposition of verbal subject matter to another form of art. Here it must be noted that Mukařovský's phrase "from one art form to another" does not imply translating verbal signs; it is once again Jakobson who brings strictly linguistic matters into the discussion. It is also the case that intersemiotic translation in Jakobson's strict sense is oriented from verbal to nonverbal and not in the opposite direction; in other words it really is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of nonverbal signs. In this regard an illustration is in order: "Instead of an intralingual method, we may use an interlingual way of interpretation by translating the word pork into another language" and "The method would be intersemiotic if we would resort to a non-linguistic, for instance, a pictorial sign [of pork]" (Jakobson 1971[1953]: 566).
17.5.1. All three ways of translating verbal signs involve substituting signs. In intersemiotic translation, the substitute signs are nonverbal. Here Langer's wisdom is again on point: "although the different media of non-verbal representation are often referred to as distinct 'languages,' this is really a loose terminology" because "Language in the strict sense is essentially discursive; it has permanent units of meaning which are combinable into larger units; it has fixed equivalences that make definition and translation possible;" and, ultimately, "In all these salient characters [language] differs from wordless symbolism, which is non-discursive and untranslatable, does not allow of definitions within its own system, and cannot directly convey generalities" (Langer 1956[1942]: 78). The illustration of using a pictorial sign of pork instead of the word pork is touched upon in the following: "It is relevant here to note that 'picture language,' which uses separate pictures in place of words, is a discursive symbolism, though each 'word' is a presentational symbol" (Langer 1956[1942]: 79; footnote 13).
17.5.2. There are several quite complex theoretical and terminological issues involved in this. At the core of it is the question: what does Jakobson mean by "signs of nonverbal sign systems"? We have seen above that Jakobson does discuss "other symbolic patterns" such as "the system of gestures" described by Ray Birdwhistell, yet Birdwhistell himself says that "We do not, as yet, know enough about words or gesture or their association to know the shapes and sizes of the presently only vaguely conceptualized semiotic or communicational units" (Birdwhistell 1971: 96). That is, even for the pioneer of the study of nonverbal communication the concept of "nonverbal sign system" was vague. Moreover, Jakobson himself described visual sign patterns such as gestures and facial expressions as parasitic formulations.
17.5.2.1. Thus, nonverbal communication does not constitute a single, whole or unitary sign system and as Langer argues, "picture language" that uses separate pictures in place of words, as well as the conventional gestures of deaf-mutes and the drum communications of African tribes constitute discursive systems (Langer 1956[1942]: 79; footnote 13). This is why, for example, the sign language of the deaf-mutes is not considered a nonverbal sign system but precisely a verbal sign system, that is, a language. In the final analysis, substituting verbal signs with pictorial signs of the verbal sign's denotata, or intersemiotic translation in the strictest sense, occurs only in picture books for child language acquisition in which the word pork is indeed illustrated with a picture of pork.
17.5.2.2. How then should we conceptualize intersemiotic translation? There is a possibility that has not been actualized by anyone as far as I know. This concerns one of the more cryptic aspects of Jakobson's thought, that of "nonverbalization", which will be dealth with more thoroughly in relation with the context component of his communication model, below. Here we must again repeat Jakobson's view that all forms of communication "are accompanied by some verbal and/or other semiotic performances" which, "if non-verbalized [...] are verbalizable, i.e. translatable into verbal messages" (Jakobson 1971[1967]: 663). It is apparent that these other semiotic performances must have "fixed equivalences that make definition and translation possible" (Langer 1956[1942]: 78). Langer does allow for this possibility: "Many presentational symbols [such as the pictorial sign for pork] are merely proxy for discourse; geometric relations may be rendered in algebraic terms - clumsy terms perhaps, but quite equivalent - and graphs are mere abbreviated descriptions [that] express facts for discursive thinking, and their content can be verbalized, subjected to the laws of vocabulary and syntax" (Langer 1956[1942]: 211-212).
17.5.2.3. But, still, the pictorial sign of pork, logical graph and algebraical formula are not strictly "nonverbal performances". For such a performance we must turn to a quality of language that I previously left out of Langer's definition. Aside from fixed equivalences language also has connotations which "are general, so that it requires non-verbal acts, like pointing, looking, or emphatic voice-inflections, to assign specific denotations to its terms" (Langer 1956[1942]: 78). Jakobson himself has a good illustration to work upon: "Mere pointing will not teach us whether cheese is the name of the given specimen, or of any box of camembert, or of camembert in general, or of any cheese, any milk product, any food, any refreshment, or perhaps any box irrespective of contents" (Jakobson 1971[1959]: 260). Conversely, the mere uttering of the word camembert will not teach us that it designates a specific variety of cheese; there must also be nonlinguistic acquaintance with camembert.
17.5.2.4. Thus, in the strict sense of intersemiotic translation, interpreting the verbal sign camembert can be achieved by the nonverbal act or performance of pointing to camembert on the table. The act of pointing or of looking at or even holding the cheese in hand while uttering its name is not perhaps a sign of a nonverbal sign system but it is definitely a nonverbal sign. Moreover, it is indeed, in Jakobson's terms, concomitant and subsidiary, even parasitical. Nevertheless, this interplay between verbal and nonverbal signs does occur often in everyday life and it can perfectly well be implemented into Jakobson's metalingual function. E.g. in Peirce's example of a man pointing his arm up into the air and saying, "There is a balloon.", he recognizes quite righly that "The pointing arm is an essential part of the symbol without which the latter would convey no information" (CP 2.293).
17.5.3. Despite my best efforts this does not solve all the problems of intersemiotic translation but resolves only the strictest sense of it. Long since Jakobson first formulated intersemiotic translation, this term has taken on a much broader and looser definition of any kind of translation between two different semiotic codes. We must also solve the question: what is transmutation, really?
17.5.3.1. A possible answer comes yet again from Langer. She reports on Jean D'Udine's L'art et le Geste (1920) that music is "a kind of gesture, a tonal projection of the forms of feeling, more directly reflected in the mimic 'dance' of the orchestral conductor" (Langer 1956[1942]: 183); "And these rhythms are the prototypes of musical structure, for all art is but a projection of them from one domain of sense to another, a symbolic transformation" (Langer 1956[1942]: 184); concluding with the quote: "Every artist is a transformer; all artistic creation is but a transmutation" (U'Dine 1920: xii; in Langer 1956[1942]: 184).
17.5.3.2. But in this sense all artistic creation is a projection, transformation or transmutation of something internal. For example, a form of feeling we call emotion is, according to Wolfgang Kohler's gestalt theory, a "physiological picture" (ibid, 184) that is consequently transformed into an external duplicate, while we are in fact searching for the transposition of subject matter from one art form to another - a transformation from one type of external form to another. The matter is complicated further by transmutatio signifying, in classical rhetoric, "rearrangement" (Lausberg 1960: 251 ff; in Gorp 2004: 62). In this sense transmutation does not at all imply transposition from one form of art or semiotic system to another but rather something like intrasemiotic translation.
17.5.3.3. Intersemiotic translation is widely considered synonymous with adaptation. Umberto Eco names some common examples as cases "when a novel is 'translated' into a film, for example, or a fairy tale into a ballet" and adds that "Jakoboson also proposed to call this form of translation 'transmutation,' and the term should give us food for thought" (Eco 2001: 67). Eco himself treats transmutation under the rubric of change of continuum and seems to prefer the notion of transposition: "what would happen if someone wanted to transpose 'The Raven' from a natural language to an image, 'translating it into a picture" (Eco 2001: 95). His revised scheme of translation types also poses some problems by considering translations "with marked variation in the substance" (such as interlinguistic translation, rewriting and translation between other semiotic systems) distinct from translations "with mutation of continuum (parasynonymy and adaption or transmutation), implying that it is possible to translate between continuum without at the same time altering the substance (cf. Eco 2001: 100).
17.5.3.4. A much more true to form approach can be found from the writings of a member of OPOYAZ, Grigory Vinokur, who writes that "The specific tendency of poetry [...] in the last analysis comes down to breaking up the structure of language into its elements which are then reconstructed [in such a way that] the correlations of parts are transposed, shifted, and consequently, there is laid bare and precisely calculated the actual significance, valency, linguistic value of these component parts" (Vinokur 1923: 105; in O'Toole & Shukman 1997: 23). Speaking in fact of the poetic function of language, he comes very close to the classical sense of transmutatio, that is, the rearrangement of everyday language into a poetic form with an autonomous poetic meaning.
17.5.3.5. Thus we also have at our hands the difficult problem of differentiating between transmutation and transposition. In classical rhetoric, (e.g. in Philo of Alexandria and Quintilian) transposition (μετάθεσις) meant changing the relative position, order or sequence of the letters of a word and transmutation (ἀλλοίωσις) the change into another nature, substance, form or condition. Our current use of these terms is obscured most likely due to some idiosyncracies of Roman Jakobson's approach to semiotics. For example, he writes that "We can refer to the possibility of transposing Wuthering Heights into a motion picture, medieval legends into frescoes and miniatures, or L'apres-midi d-un faune into music, ballet, and graphic art" because "certain structural features of their plot are preserved despite the disappearance of their verbal shape" (Jakobson 1981[1958]: 19). Once again it really boils down to viewing forms of art as semiotic systems and discussing not the transposition and transmutation of "certain structural features", "subject matter" or "general intention of the text" into different types of signs and sign systems.
