I Think I Am a Verb MORE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS TOPICS IN CONTEMPORARY SEMIOTICS Series Editors: Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok Indiana University CLASSICS OF SEMIOTICS Edited by Martin Krampen, Klaus Oehler, Roland Posner, Thomas A. Sebeok, and Thure von Uexkiill I THINK I AM A VERB: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs Thomas A. Sebeok KARL BUHLER: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory Robert E. Innis THE MESSAGES OF TOURIST ART: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective Bennetta Jules-Rosette SEMIOTIC PRAXIS: Studies in Pertinence and in the Means of Expression and Communication Georges Mounin THE SEMIOTIC SPHERE Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok SPEAKING OF APES Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok I Think I Am a Verb MORE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DOCTRINE OF SIGNS Thomas A. Sebeok Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana Springer Science+Business Media, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Sebeok, Thomas Albert, 1920- I think I am a verb. (Topics in contemporary semiotics) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Semiotics. I. Title. II. Series. P99.S324 1986 001.51 86-9402 ISBN 978-1-4899-3492-5 ISBN 978-1-4899-3492-5 ISBN 978-1-4899-3490-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-3490-1 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 1986 Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1986 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher Grant on the porch at Drexel Cottage at Mount McGregor on July 19, 1885. This last photograph of him was copyrighted on the day before he died. The General's valet, Harrison Tyrrell, is peering from the shadows in the door way [Library of Congress]. For my immediate and emotional interpretants, Jessica Anne and Erica Lynn. Preface My writing career has been, at least in this one respect, idiosyncratic: it had to mark and chart, step by step, its own peculiar champaign. My earliest papers, beginning in 1942, were technical articles in this or that domain of Uralic linguistics, ethnography, and folklore, with a sprinkling of contributions to North and South American linguistics. In 1954, my name became fecklessly associated with psycholinguistics, then, successively, with explorations in my thology, religious studies, and stylistic problems. It now takes special effort for me to even revive the circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a hefty tome on the supernatural, another, in 1958, on games, and yet another, in 1961, utilizing a computer for extensive sorting of literary information. By 1962, I had edged my way into animal communication studies. Two years after that, I first whiffled through what Gavin Ewart evocatively called "the tulgey wood of semiotics." In 1966, I published three books which tem porarily bluffed some of my friends into conjecturing that I was about to meta morphose into a historiographer of linguistics. The topmost layer in my scholarly stratification dates from 1976, when I started to compile what eventually became my "semiotic tetralogy," of which this volume may supposably be the last. In the language of "Jabberwocky," the word "tulgey" is said to connote variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, the allusion seems to me apt. Arthur Stanley Eddington, the astronomer, pointed out, in The Nature of the Physical World, the affinity of "Jabberwocky" to the quantum view of the universe, where terms are applied to "something unknown" that is "doing we know not what." This is not a bad reminder of the state of semiotics and its dawning association with a certain kind of physics. All this has proved a bit confusing. I continue to get invitations from outlying districts to lecture on topics deeply buried under more recently accumu lated debris. Just a few months ago, ] received a letter from a lady colleague in ix x PREFACE another land asking me precisely how I was related to the man who had published a book on psycholinguistics thirty years ago; only by the coincidence, I wrote back, that we shared the same set of parents. There appear to be two antipodal sorts of bookmen. There are those who derive endless delight from their solitary pleasure, which they pursue like self stimulating laboratory rats, with electrodes implanted in their anterior hypo thalamus, unceasingly bar-pressing in preference to any other activity. Then there are those of us whose bar-pressing habit is rewarded solely by a change in the level of illumination-in a word, novelty. Despite its venerable pedigree, semiotics, as practiced today, continues to astonish. Behind its every revelation an abeyant illusion lurks; but behind every mirage confounding reality lies dormant. The dynamic of semiotics is immense in scope, seemingly all-encompassing; but this is so only because the essence of each happening can be dissected out, abstracted, and finally resolved into yet another instance of a simple triadic action of signs, in a word, semiosis. In the early 1960s, I undertook an ambitious global editorial project, Cur rent Trends in Linguistics. the first volume of which appeared in 1963, and the fourteenth of which, containing a complex of indexes, came out in 1976. In between lie nineteen other tomes (that is, fourteen volumes in twenty-one tomes) comprehending close to 17,000 large-format pages. Semiotics proper occupies a mere 415 of these, or something short of 3%. My own chapter (Sebeok 1974b: 121211-264), "Semiotics: A Survey of the State of the Art," which I wrote between 1969 and 1971, and which was designed to be an overall presentation of the state of the "art," took up 53 pages, or slightly more than one-eighth of the latter. With Current Trends behind me, and two collections of my own selected writings-one on animal communication (Sebeok 1972), the other on verbal art (Sebeok 1974a)-also published, I began, in the mid-1970s, to think earnestly about preparing a series of essays on diverse semiotic topics, some theoretical, others applied, some broadly historical, others focusing on the assessment of past and a few contemporary figures, several of whom I prejudicially labeled "ne glected" (a tag which, as it turned out, has since become affixed to many a butcher and baker and candlestick maker). I conceived of these papers as eventually congealing into a reasonably integrated trilogy, an expectation which, measured by its reception (e.g., cf. Adams 1983, Baer 1981, Bouissac 1979, Buczynska-Garewicz 1981, Deely 1978a, Howard Gardner 1982, Golopenlia Eretescu 1977, Lindemann 1980, Therien 1982, and by dozens of others), had indeed been realized: Vol. 1 became Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), Vol. 2 became The Sign & Its Masters (1979), Vol. 3 became The Play ofMusement (1981). This book-the one you are flipping through right now-is an unplanned fourth offspring, so that, were I compelled to preserve the idea for PREFACE xi a trilogy, I would retrospectively demote (some might judge with justification) my Contributions to Vol. O. I might add that I am fully aware of Gore Vidal's whimsical dictum (1976:363), ..... I have a deep mistrust of writers who produce trilogies (tetralogies are beyond the pale) ... ," for which I have good precedent, to wit, his own tripartite sequence of novels, Burr, 1876, and Wash ington, D.C. It should surprise no reader of a book wherein the author mentions his male parent right in the first sentence that numerous themes sounded in his previous writings recur, though with variations, often elaborated, and sometimes thor oughly transmogrified. Familiar drama tis personae will enter from behind the arras, have their say on stage, only to fade out afterwards. Like the famous ghost who haunted the royal castle of Elsinore, the ghosts of former kings, the spirits of my forefathers appear and reappear demanding not to be avenged but to be remembered and to be heard: "Whither wilt thou lead me? ... Speak, I am bound to hear .... And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain. " The axis of my work has shifted over time, but not so radically as to put the continuity of the whole project in doubt. In this introduction, for instance, I attempted to augment "The Semiotic Self" (Sebeok 1979, Appendix I), where I proposed to discriminate between two apprehensions of the self, (a) the immunologic or biochemical self, with, howev er, semiotic overtones, and (b) the semiotic or social self, with, however, biolog ical anchoring. In a nutshell, I was concerned with showing that the self is a joint product of both natural and cultural processes, and the kinds of complementary interactions that are played out in a very special arena. As was later argued by the distinguished oncologist, Prodi (1981), the recognition of the non-self by the immune system is, in effect, a way of reading reality according to one's own idiosyncratic frame of reference. "To read" refers here to the formation of a unique complex between the reader, or the subject, and what is read, or the object. This modus is not, in principle, different from our perception and in terpretation of spoken or written sentences or of any other nonverbal string of signs. To make my point, I chose to analyze a short, concrete text, somewhat in the manner in which I decomposed a fragment from the Histories of Herodotus in 1979 (Chapter 8), or examined certain structural features of a Steven Spielberg epic later (1981b:7-11) (except that I had intended this latter exercise to be parodic, a failure because not a few of my readers mistook the spoof for the genuine article). Still other dimensions of the fuzzy notion of "intertextuality" are prospected in this book (Chapter 15), with reference to yet another Spielberg film, apropos of which I should like to repeat my answer to a question I was asked after I presented this material as a lecture. A student at the University of Frankfurt wanted to know why my contributions to film semiotics involved strictly juvenile pictures. I confessed that I ordinarily viewed films only under two conditions: either when accompanying my pre-teen children, or on long,