Principles of Semiotic by D.S. Clarke

Author:D.S. Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

4.3 Signals

Our focus so far has been on the problems of distinguishing comsigns from natsigns and of specifying features that serve to demarcate conventional comsigns. We consider now the internal structures of comsigns and the logical features of their use and interpretation. Complete sentences are those comsigns with a subject-predicate structure and whose reference is provided by subject terms as distinct constituents. The next chapter will be devoted to these relatively complex comsigns. Here our topic is comsigns lacking subject-predicate structure, or what we shall term signals. Examples of signals would be the signs of the previous section – the seating gesture, an animal warning cry, a hissing sound as a sign of a snake, and a drawing. Included also would be incomplete single-word sentences such as ‘Red’, ‘Tree’, or ‘Mama’ of the kind used and interpreted by infants in the early stages of language acquisition. A complete sentence must obviously be a conventional sign, with its elements having conventional meaning and combined by the syntactic rules of a language. A signal can be either conventional, as for ‘Red’, or non-conventional, as for the hissing sound and drawing.

Care must be taken to distinguish our use of the term ‘signal’ from that with which it is often employed. Many writers regard the term as standing for a display, vocalization, or chemical emission which when produced by a lower animal elicits a reflex response on the part of others. Thus Sebeok says: ‘When a sign token mechanically or conventionally triggers some reaction on the part of the receiver, it is said to function as a signal.’22 For Hinde the ‘message’ of a signal is the state of the central nervous system which causes the signal to be produced; its ‘meaning’ is identified with the responses the signal evokes.23 As has been emphasized in 3.4, any event which elicits a reflex response is not a sign as an object of interpretation. It is furthermore not a proper comsign if not intentionally produced and if recognition of the communicator’s intention is not a reason for the intended effect being produced. Sebeok and Hinde’s signals are thus not comsigns, and hence not within the extension of the term ‘signal’ as we are employing the term. As we have emphasized, the extent to which signals function within animal communication is partly an empirical question, partly a decision about extending such terms as ‘intend’ and ‘recognize’ to non-human behavioral patterns. The term ‘signal’ is also used within information theory to refer to the physical medium (e.g. sound wave or light irradiation pattern) by which semantic information is conveyed,24 while it is taken here to stand for an event as an object of interpretation. Finally, the term is sometimes used for non-linguistic signs formed from a code, e.g. a sequence of dots and dashes of a message in morse code, the semaphore flags of a ship at sea, or the puffs of smoke or drum beats used for communication within primitive societies. But all such encoded signs are

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