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Sign systems: The dawn of earliest mankind

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Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 15. Juni 2019

Abstract

The early Pleistocene hunt scene was instant: when an antelope jerked in the water edge, the first “drivers” of the hunt were already in motion; the moment of outburst after a long ambush lasted less than second. The sudden hunt movements were typical of every prey-abundant landscape since even earlier geological periods. The analysis of Laetoli footprints made by our evolutionary ancestors more than three millions years ago indicates that in a randomly chosen moment, the landscape was full of animals of different species. The language used in the attack moment has to be agitative, only vowels in clausure between two consonants. During the process of further development, those consonants became more and more similar to delimitators, the borders where intrasemiotic realities translate extrasemiotic environment. Speech is an old Paleolithic tool for directing hunters to the useful positions. It was rather an instrument of a leader than grooming “clicks” of kin’s females.

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Published Online: 2019-06-15
Published in Print: 2019-07-26

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Artikel in diesem Heft

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Spontaneous emergence of language-like and music-like vocalizations from an artificial protolanguage
  3. A sociological analysis of moves in the formation of Iranian epitaphs
  4. Sign systems: The dawn of earliest mankind
  5. L’ambigüité structurale et l’acquisition des compétences linguistiques en français en passant par la langue maternelle
  6. The corporeal meaning of language: A semiotic approach to musical glossolalia
  7. Bringing back the image into its frame: Barthes’ soldier and the contextual frame of human perception and interpretation of signs
  8. Context-based analysis of an advertising poster
  9. Semiotic approaches to “traditional music”, musical/poetic structures, and ethnographic research
  10. The theory of synesthesia according to the Pythagorean tradition and Nabokov’s revisiting of Pythagorean synesthesia
  11. “Do you understand these charges?”: How procedural communication in youth criminal justice court violates the rights of young offenders in Canada
  12. Between the institution and the individual: What walking in a place that includes institutional heritage discloses
  13. Finite semiotics: Cognitive sets, semiotic vectors, and semiosic oscillation
  14. The “Fiat 500L” commercial: A journey into Italian style
  15. Epiepistemology/neuro-semantic programming
  16. Diagrams and mental figuration: A semio-cognitive analysis
  17. Perelman’s phenomenology of rhetoric: Foucault contests Chomsky’s complaint about media communicology in the age of Trump polemic
  18. Semiotic and discursive consequences of the cybertextual condition: The case of tragedy
  19. Signizing: The root of the functions of the intentional sign
  20. Review Article
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Heruntergeladen am 31.10.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2018-0006/html
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