The myth of the total semiotic fact

1 Preface: “philosophy of semiotics”

A theory of signs is not simply given. It is the result of a complex process of intellectual thought and abstraction. Arguably, however, a semiotic theory is motivated pragmatically, i.e. it needs to fulfill certain (practical) purposes for those who develop and promote it. Thus, Aristotle’s realist thesis that “reality is the same for all” called for a theory of signs in which people know, on a collective level, what thing a sign (i.e. a word) “stands for” (Aristotle 1984). In turn, John Locke’s conviction that the human individual has a free will and thus an independent mind led him to the insight that signs (i.e. words) “stand for” ideas, not things (Locke 1894 [1706]). Charles S. Peirce () embraced a pan-semiotic view, i.e. signs concern every sentient being (and even non-sentient entities), which required adding a third element, i.e. the interpretant, to the traditional “surrogational” sign model: one which would fit both human and nonhuman semiosis (to whom is it a sign?). Ferdinand de Saussure (1983 [1916]) held that reality is linguistically constructed and that there is no direct link between language and the material world. Saussure’s concept of semiology was a result of this idealist worldview, which meant that signs in the human realm can only be of a linguistic kind and, moreover, must lead a metaphysical existence of a purely psychological nature. Lastly, there is the integrationist semiology developed by the linguist Roy Harris, who took the “individuality of linguistic experience” (1998: 125) as the point of departure for understanding human sign-making, leading him to the realization that signs cannot be of a surrogationalist or of a Saussurean kind, but are something else altogether (Harris 2009a).

Scholars in both semiotics and language studies have adopted various strategies when it comes to their semiotic commitments: Broadly speaking, semiotics and linguistics have followed a partisan line in favor of Peirce and Saussure, respectively, with some attempts at combining them (e.g. Jakobson 1965). Some scholars, in turn, do not bother about signs, either denying their existence or questioning their usefulness (e.g. because associated with Saussurean semiology and the outmoded language-as-structure ontology). As part of the recent “material turn” in linguistics, the interest in signs as having an intra-cranial locus has shifted to an interest in signs as endowed with materiality, as has happened in semiotic landscape studies (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), and consistent with lay linguistic usage. Saussure, on the other hand, insisted that signs are not what ordinary language use suggests to us, namely whatever is available to our perception (Harris 2009a: 67), and instead declared the psychological sign to be the hallmark of his idealist “science” of language. Contemporary movements in sociolinguistics, in turn, have gone in the opposite direction, undoing Saussurean semiology and reclaiming a materialist understanding of signs. In a similar vein, posthumanist linguistic approaches treat signs as assembled/distributed and as having material consequences (Pennycook 2018, 2024; Wee 2021).

A philosophy of semiotics, if taken seriously, would have to critically discuss the third sign ontology, the Harrisian one, and how it compares to the two prevailing sign conceptions – not in terms of which one is better suited in which context (for empirical research, or to study “linguistic” communication, etc.), but in absolute terms of what signs are ontologically and what they are not. This confrontation has not occurred in semiotics, while it has been taken up in posthumanist linguistics (Pennycook 2018, 2024).^[1] Disagreeing with Harris’s critical stance toward signhood inherent in material things, Alastair Pennycook (2024: 99) argues that “objects do have effects, do participate in the action,” contending that a black tie at a funeral is itself “doing some of the mourning and it may be a mistake to assume this depends entirely on human semiosis” (2024: 100). In other words, signs, for the posthumanist, are not the products of individual sign-makers assigning a communicational value to something – instead, signs have fragmented ontologies, and taking an external viewpoint, the ethnographer can analyze them as detached from the human sign-maker, i.e. the objects themselves are declared to act as signs irrespective of whether there is a human act of interpretation. In the specific context of a funeral, Pennycook sees the black tie as entering into a relationship with its wearer, with the other people in attendance, and with the event itself (2024: 99). Making this kind of argument is only possible once it is stipulated that inanimate objects are able “to animate, to act, to produce effects” (Bennett 2010: 6). However, it is not scientific research that lies at the base of Jane Bennett proclaiming the “vitality” of matter – it being “vibrant” and having “active qualities” and “lively powers” (Meis 2023) – that is, inanimate matter was never shown to actively contribute to meaning-making, which is unverifiable; instead, her “vitalist” approach to matter is a feat of the human imagination, namely imagining what it is like to be a thing with its own will.

2 Rationale and aim

This paper takes a Harrisian conception of the sign (Harris and Hutton 2007; Harris 2009a) to be the only viable one in the context of human communication and sign-making. It does so not out of ideological partisanship, but because personal linguistic experience tells us that it must be this way. Equipped with this semiological creed, the present paper suggests that the stipulated “total semiotic fact” (Pennycook 2023) derives directly from a view of semiosis as distributed and assembled. It argues that the search for the “total semiotic fact” in sociolinguistic studies is a phantasy goal which results from denying the privacy of signs and adopting a view of language based in practice as well as a belief in ethnography as a higher-order substitute for individual linguistic experience. The proponents of the “total semiotic fact” admit that it is an impossible goal, but the mere fact of stipulating its existence already suggests a belief that complexity can be approached ethnographically, albeit always incompletely, using “semiotic ethnography” as a research tool. Not having to worry about signs as products of mental activities, linguistic ethnographers working within a materialist paradigm postulate that signs are distributed among the human and nonhuman “actors” in the social contexts under scrutiny. By speaking of the “totality” of facts, one affirms that there is much more going on than individual sign-makers engaging in activities and acting toward certain goals in continuously changing contexts as made possible by their unique personal histories. Indeed, the total semiotic fact as construed in ethnographic explorations of complexity does not amount to the single sign-makers’ communicational experiences added together in the here-and-now: the “total communicative context” (Zhu et al. 2017: 390) is not simply the sum of all individuals, each with their “self-contained competencies that they bring to an interaction” (Zhu et al. 2017: 390): semiotic complexity is a matter of how the available resources (e.g. language, artifacts, objects, gesture, smells, touch) come together (or “meet”) in particular ways and at particular moments. In a sociolinguistics of complexity, there are no longer externally fixed boundaries and internally fixed relations between components (Wee 2021: 18), i.e. semiotic complexity is not the product of human minds contained in human bodies. Exploring complexity, for the posthumanist, means moving beyond the humanist interest in human semiosis.

Grounded in the theory of Roy Harris’s integrational linguistics (Harris 1998), this paper takes as the main point of reference for its critique of the notion of a “total semiotic fact” the ethnographic studies by Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji on everyday routinized metrolingual practices and the semiotic resources deployed in confined urban spaces such as corner shops, restaurants, and city markets (e.g. Pennycook and Otsuji 2014a, 2014b, 2017).^[2] My critical comments will not be directed at the methodology of their work, i.e. the transcriptions of the complex multilingual interactions involving the various participants, but rather at their philosophy of language, i.e. the very fact that there is an attempt to capture the complex sign-making activities through observation and recordings. It is not that integrationists shy away from engaging in linguistic research “in the field” as a matter of principle (see Pablé 2009 for an example), but the problem lies with the observing researchers doing their best to be only minimally involved and being able to speak as “experts” on behalf of the sign-making agents whose (linguistic) behavior they scrutinize. In fact, the integrationist acknowledges complexity on the basis of personal linguistic experience, not by studying it qua disinterested researcher as it manifests itself in so-called “social” activity. The complexities at the center of metrolingual ethnographic research and integrational inquiry are thus not the same: for the latter, the semiological complexity characterizing human semiosis makes it impossible to focus on the alleged complexity that the former takes an interest in. I say “alleged” because from an integrational point of view, “metrolingual multitasking,” i.e. the ways in which “language use is […] caught up in a fast-paced multiplicity of activities” (Pennycook and Ostuji 2014a: 258), shows how individual human beings manage complex interactive tasks precisely because their semiological abilities qua individuals are astoundingly complex, and not because the complexity emerges once the observer applies the right research tools to the social contexts under scrutiny.

Against the backdrop of this recent scholarly interest in “total facts” of a (socio)linguistic or semiotic kind (Blommaert 2017; Pennycook 2023), it is significant that Roy Harris (2009b: 46) argued against the idea that there are independent linguistic facts at all, claiming that “there are as many linguistic facts as there are different contextualizations of linguistic signs by particular speakers and hearers in particular communication situations.” For Harris, the “linguistic facts” are established when situations arise in which the lay participants feel the need to monitor the communicational process, and hence, using the metalinguistic resources at their disposal, they may ask the others “to repeat, to clarify, to explain, to amplify, to agree or disagree, and so on” (Harris 1998: 145) until the “facts” are established to the participants’ satisfaction. In other words, it is the participants who are in possession of the linguistic facts, and the linguist who wishes to have access to them has “no option but to try to recover them from the participants” (Harris 1998: 145). Harris focuses on speakers and hearers in relation to the facts and thus on the “linguistic” aspect of what someone has said and what someone else has heard him/her say. This doesn’t necessarily exclude the other senses contributing to the (first-order) construction of the “total meaning.” However, in order to establish any “facts” retrospectively, this has to be expressed linguistically. The example Harris (1998: 145) gives is A asking “Did you say bat?” and B responding “No, I said hat.” What was said is thus always in relation to the speaker and the hearer(s), but there is no original (i.e. first-order) “fact” that exists independently of subjective experience.

3 Segregational vs. integrational semiologies

In a materialist semiotics, the Saussurean sign is disavowed as an idealist abstraction. Pace Saussure, signs do not serve the goal of achieving mutual understanding between speakers of the same language, which Pennycook (2018: 103) identifies as a “humanist dream”; rather, meaning has to be negotiated, which means that Saussure’s collectively available fixed-code is no longer theoretically viable because not grounded in a practical theory. As it turns out, however, sociolinguistics and posthumanist semiotics conjure up contextual codes which, mirabile dictu, happen to overlap partially between sign-makers without, however, constituting collectively shared codes as construed by Saussure. It is not clear how these circumstantially defined codes are the result of a practical theory other than being practical when it comes to justifying the empirical orientation of sociolinguistics and posthumanist linguistics. According to Lionel Wee (2021: 22),

[…] different individuals are likely to have different collections of signs in mind and the same individual may even have different collections of signs in mind at different times. There will likely be overlaps across these different collections of signs and often these overlaps are sufficient that the differences in understanding what constitutes the assemblage [i.e. ‘English’, ‘Malay’] don’t matter.

It is not clear how exactly speaker A’s “English” and hearer B’s “English” manage to overlap to such an extent that the differences in their language are no longer of concern. The Saussurean community code is thus confuted and replaced by “collections of signs” that differ between individuals, who are nevertheless all under the impression they are speaking “English.” So “English” does not exist as a macrosocial semiological reality in Saussure’s sense of langue, but individual speakers still have internalized, momentarily stable “collections of signs” which are similar enough to enable one sign-maker to communicate with another sign-maker. Blommaert (2013: 23) termed this “creative coding,” i.e. speakers continuously produce new codes (in Pennycook 2024: 73). We have thus moved from collective semiological creativity (the ability of human collectivities to create abstract linguistic structures) to individual semiological creativity (the ability of human individuals to perpetually create codes). Postulating the partial overlap between signs is significant in a sociolinguistic context, as social activities require some degree of “sharedness.” As Pennycook (2024: 79) makes clear, there is no place for “idiolects” (intended as fully-fletched internal systems in individuals’ heads) in an expanded sociolinguistics, as language emerges locally as a social practice, and internalized systems (collective or individual) couldn’t possibly cope with the complexity and heterogeneity of activities required for getting things done “on the spot.”

The shift from the abstract community code to “resources,” “repertoires,” and “registers” which assemble locally every time anew according to the interactants’ communicational needs is thus not meant by its promoters as a disavowal of the social dimensions of language and communication. While discarding the notion of collectively internalized fixed-codes as mythical concepts of an idealist pseudo-science, a sociolinguistics of complexity endorses the idea of codes that are brought into being through practice (e.g. routinized, repeated linguistic behavior), thus aligning it with a more practice-oriented metaphysics. The question, however, is why we need to postulate “codes” at all in order to explain communication situations in which the “same things” are supposedly done again and again. Blommaert (2017), with his interest in subjective linguistic trajectories, comes close to Harris’s integrationist position, as does Pennycook (2024: 91) when declaring that individuals have their “own history of linguistic activity.” However, Pennycook also talks about them having to choose from “linguistic options” (2024: 80), “sets of communicative possibilities” (2024: 91) and “available linguistic possibilities” (2024: 106). Blommaert and Backus (2013: 15) speak of “individual, biographically organized complexes of resources,” i.e. the codes differ depending on one’s biography or personal history, but Pennycook and Otsuji (2014a: 259) hasten to add that this does not mean that repertoires “only resid[e] in the individual.” In other words, the available “sets of possibilities” that go with the appropriate social contexts and spaces cannot originate in the individuals themselves alone; they are triggered through social activity and are thus not to be attributed to the individuals’ sign-making abilities, but to the totality of resources, people, objects, and spaces locally combined/assembled.

The Harrisian semiological conception starts from very different assumptions about human sign-making. We are sign-makers in the sense that we create signs – not codes – in given circumstances by integrating our past (remembered) experience and our future (anticipated) experience with what is presently going on. The signs are of our own making, and thus personal and private, and have nothing to do with the material signs of the external world or with mental signs characterized by similarity to, or difference from, some underlying abstraction. The signs we make cannot be decontextualized because their creation always serves a communicational purpose here and now. To repeat or to analyze “what was said” is to put it into a new context and thus to create a new sign. From the point of view of first-order sign-making activities, we can never say or do the same thing twice (through speech, gestures, facial expressions, etc.). For Harris, signs are radically indeterminate in form and meaning (Harris 2009a), i.e. our signs are made against the background of our personal linguistic experience, always in relation to the activities we and others are engaging in. The only existence (and justification) the signs have is in relation to their capacity to integrate activities of various types for someone, i.e. simultaneous solo activities (e.g. the activity of thinking and the activity of reading), sequentially ordered solo activities (e.g. I put my head out of the window, see dark clouds looming in the sky, and decide to close all windows in the house); or to integrate sequences of activity at the interpersonal level (e.g. A says “How are you?” B replies “Fine, and you?” and A, in turn, responds “I’m doing ok,” while typing something on his phone), each of them cotemporally embedded in their respective activities (thinking, speaking, listening, typing, reading, etc.).^[3] The integrationist conception of the sign relativizes the need for understanding ethnographically how language works in social contexts, since the semiological creativity lies “within” each and every sign-maker, which is why our observations of others are always interpreted according to our own sign-making, however much we try to understand the others “on their own terms.” Since linguistic items can be treated as “segregated” from the human activities in which they occur, the segregational mind (which is developed in the course of engaging with language intellectually) considers them to have socially established forms and meanings (e.g. as recorded in dictionaries and thesauri) and thus forgets that semiologically speaking we are sign-makers, not sign-users. Nothing is a sign unless we “make” it into one (understood as creating it “ex nihilo”).

4 Language practices and object-orientedness

Pennycook and Otsuji’s work takes an interest in everyday metrolingual practices and in “lived experience of diversity in specific locations” (2014b: 164), such as the local produce market, the restaurant kitchen, or the urban corner shop, aiming toward an “understanding of what may be available to people in this place at this time” (Pennycook 2023: 606) in terms of resources. Pennycook and Otsuji refer to these entanglements of people and places as “spatial repertoires,” which change constantly, for instance with the coming and going of customers in the urban corner shop. The “total semiotic fact” is thus “the totality of linguistic or semiotic resources available” (2023: 607) in any given place momentarily shared by any number of people. Pennycook and Otsuji seek to understand how assemblages of people, sensory effects, objects, language, semiotic resources, activities, and spatial relations come together in contextually unique ways to make possible the kinds of heterogeneous interactions typically encountered in those multicultural and multilingual places, the complexities of which more traditional and code-based analyses would fail to account for due to their structuralist commitments and too narrow an attention to “linguistic” resources (e.g. bilingualism, code-switching). According to Pennycook and Otsuji, the focus on spatial repertoires makes empirical sense, for these repertoires derive from the participants’ “repeated and regularized language practices” (2014a: 259), and thus from “repeated experience,” which requires “available and sedimented resources” associated with “sets of activities related to particular places” (2014b: 166). In other words, Pennycook and Otsuji (2014b: 167) are not interested in “all and every instance of language use in a place,” but in language use as “iterative activity,” or “ritualized behaviour” (Pennycook 2023: 604): language practices come into being because people “do the same things over and over” (Pennycook 2024: 77), which thus become established practices. Iterative activity takes us out of the humanist realm in which an individual is supposedly in control of his/her thoughts which (s)he aims to convey verbally to another individual. The latter situation, for Pennycook and Otsuji, does not depict language as practice; it is a theoretical construct based on Saussure’s idealized ‘talking heads’ model of communication, which does not describe practice and does not draw on an understanding of language derived from practice (Pennycook 2024: 69). Instead, “the doing of language as a material part of social and cultural life” emerges in situations of routine and ritual, when we are no longer in control of the signs we (mentally) make, but the signs are distributed among various sentient and non-sentient “actors” (people, artifacts, objects), thus materializing in such places as the restaurant kitchen or the corner shop, where conversations have their raison d’être in things and in getting things done (e.g. buying and selling fish) – not in conveying ideas. This is what Pennycook (2023: 598) means by “locating language within an understanding of social practices,” in which language is only a part of the semiotic assemblage. At the same time, language is no longer construed in any traditional sense, but as “intertwined with a broader set of semiotic resources” (2023: 603).

Adopting an object-oriented ontology, Pennycook and Otsuji (2017: 447) argue that objects have “an active role” to play, and hence have agency, and that they need to be treated as “equal participants” in any account of interactional complexity. Objects are thus part of an “interactive whole” (Pennycook 2023: 608). This view commits Pennycook and Otsuji to stating that individual people are not so much “making various linguistic choices in the context of Bangladeshi corner shops” (2017: 448), but rather that various actants, both sentient and non-sentient, are brought together at a particular time in a particular place. To the posthumanist, this “being brought together” of objects, things, and human bodies is what makes up the “total communication,” not the individual persons engaging with one another in a confined space, each experiencing the current communication against the background of their own unique semiological biographies, and thus each constructing different semiological realities (based on how they integrate the various activities as perceived by them). These realities, the integrationist argues, may be subject to recontextualization (as when I realize that the shop assistant wasn’t actually talking to me, or when I’m made aware of it by someone else), but as first-order realities in the here-and-now, they are inscrutable to others. Just as by extending agency to things and objects the materialist “displace[s] responsibility and accountability from humans to artifacts” (Hornborg 2021: 753), by focusing on locally available resources (s)he denies human creativity its full force, merely conceding that signs are “further interpretable” (Wee 2021: 32) and thereby acknowledging only indeterminacy of meaning – not indeterminacy of form.

5 The integrational view on iterativity

Routinized semiotic behavior and repeated language practices are phenomena we can all relate to from personal experience: at the workplace, when we interact daily with the same people we work with; when we go to the coffee shop and make the same order every time to the same person behind the counter; at the sports club, when we train and play with our teammates using the same game-related jargon, etc. As we all know from experience, practices related to particular places and situations are not restricted to multilingual and multicultural settings. The reason why Pennycook and Otsuji confine their interest to interactions involving speakers with plurilingual linguistic abilities has to do with their rejection of languages as enumerable objects and with their supportive stance toward translanguaging, respectively. In other words, studying interactions between, say, white locals is not of interest to them, because that would suggest indirectly that they accept both the reality of geographically defined varieties (and thus of languages as predefined entities) and the notion of culturally homogeneous communities (which is tantamount to committing a humanist fallacy).

The integrational position has no such ideological underpinnings and is based on two simple semiological universals: (i) all human beings are sign-makers, and (ii) all human signs serve to integrate activities of various kinds and orders. For this reason, the integrationist sees no need to study the language practices of underprivileged groups (e.g. minority speakers, migrants) to provide empirical evidence of the non-existence of languages in the structuralist sense. The non-existence of languages follows from adopting an integrationist semiology grounded in personal experience, not from ethnographic work on metrolingual practices. That speakers are found to engage in “translanguaging” in communicative situations bringing together heterogeneous groups of speakers (e.g. in border regions, or in a Bangladeshi-run corner shop in Tokyo) is a curiosity for both the professional linguist observing such scenes and any lay bystander (“I heard her use words from four different languages in one sentence”), but from a perspective of first-order sign-making activities, these metrolingual practices are not more complex than any other communications between human individuals in the sense that they do not require a higher form of communicational proficiency. The interactions between the Japanese customer and the Bangladeshi shop owners require certain proficiencies from both parties for a successful communicational outcome, but so do the interactions between the local white customer and the local white shop assistant. From an external perspective, metrolingual practices seem like a phenomenon warranting special ethnographic attention, but that is only so because linguists treat the interactions as being based on linguistic facts, i.e. recording and transcribing an exchange in a “metrolingua franca” is much more gratifying to the sociolinguist than an exchange in a single dialect variety. However, if there are no independent linguistic facts, then one is dealing with conversations experienced by the individual sign-making participants, and the ethnographer’s final analysis is just one such linguistic experience, albeit of a special order (e.g. because the exchange has been video-recorded by the observers, thus allowing them to play the recordings time and again).

From a decontextualized perspective, everyday communications occurring in set places seem to feature a great deal of repetitions and thus “sameness”: the same linguistic formulas (e.g. greetings), the same pointing to specific things, the same social relations, the same activities, the same objects, the same situations. According to Pennycook (2024: 77), these language practices show how “humans do the same things over and over,” although he concedes that practices are “continuously being rewritten, as unusual circumstances arise” (Thrift 2007: 8 in Pennycook 2024: 77). However, from the point of view of an integrationist semiology, it is misconceived to think of practices as being subject to changes whenever “unusual circumstances” occur. For the integrationist, every circumstance is a new one, which is why we are always subject to the “circumstantial parameter” of communication (Harris 1998: 29). There is no “objective” measure on when the circumstances change, even though as sign-making participants we can safely say that they do change (e.g. A and B are talking about C in the absence of the latter, when C unexpectedly joins them). But if signs are radically indeterminate, as integrationists claim, nothing ever said or done is “the same” as anything else: two utterances might be deemed comparable by the participants or determined to be “the same” for the communicational matter at hand, but qua first-order signs these utterances are radically different. Saying “Good morning” to customer A today is not “the same” as yesterday’s “Good morning” to her (if this is what I remember saying, or she remembers me saying). And thus “sameness” is a matter of personal assessment: for instance, “Good morning!” may be deemed “the same” as “Morning!” or maybe not. What matters from an integrational perspective is that the signs I am making now have a communicational function now, while the signs I was making yesterday had a communicational function in those precise moments yesterday, which means the signs made in those respective contexts cannot be “the same” in either form or meaning. So even if the analyst determines that the same words were uttered in the same situations between the same people on different occasions, that statement is subject to massive decontextualization, since it is not clear in what way one utterance may be “the same” as another utterance. The integrationist starts from an understanding of communication derived from personal linguistic experience, not one derived from practice, the reason being that practices can be treated as semiological abstractions, namely, when what is said and done is “segregated” from the unique circumstances in which it is said and done as a result of adopting an external viewpoint. This is not to deny the everyday communicational relevance of metalinguistic notions such as “repetition,” “sameness,” “similarity,” “difference”: it is simply to affirm that these concepts are themselves contextualized signs with no higher-order meaning. When A asks B to repeat a word, B, by complying with A’s request, is not making “the same” sign, since the word repeated happens in a new context. At the same time, whether B complied with A’s request to the latter’s satisfaction depends on the purpose for which A made the request in the first place: because he didn’t hear what B said, because he wasn’t sure he heard it correctly, because he wanted to point out to B that his pronunciation or word-stress is old-fashioned, or perhaps because he wanted to see if B would pronounce the word differently when he was more conscious of his speech, etc. Thus, while the integrationist resolves that no two signs are ever the same semiologically speaking, the communication participants may have a different opinion on the matter: for example, as far as B is concerned, he may be of the opinion that he repeated the “same” word, and for the communicational purposes at hand, it may not matter to him whether he pronounced the word identically both times. A may have a different view on whether the words uttered by B were “the same.” It all depends on what kind of “sameness” A was looking for in relation to the purpose of his request (i.e. “repetition”). Generally speaking, the linguistic facts thus cannot be detached from the sign-makers and their communicational goals, and hence from the communicational activities in which the signs are embedded. In some (rare) cases, the “facts” will be established by an expert third party, for example a professional linguist, which requires treating personal utterances as impersonal sentences.

6 Conclusion: toward semiological complexity

This paper’s engagement with Roy Harris’s integrational semiology has brought to the fore the limitations of both traditional and contemporary approaches to signs, particularly those that adopt overtly idealist or overtly materialist perspectives. The integrational conception of the sign, in turn, takes as its point of departure the mental lives of human individuals, from which emerges an understanding of signs informed by personal linguistic experience. At the heart of this discussion lies a fundamental tension: whether signs are inherently private constructs tied to individual experience or distributed entities embedded within socio-material assemblages. The integrationist perspective asserts that signs are personal and contextualized, made possible through the unique linguistic biographies and present communicative needs of sign-makers. This position stands in contrast to posthumanist views, which attribute agency and semiosis to objects and artifacts and situate signs within complex assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. Adopting a distributed view of communication, posthumanist semiotics falls short of acknowledging the immediacy and individuality of first-order sign-making.

The Harrisian critique of the “total semiotic fact” points to a critical epistemological divergence. Sociolinguistics, particularly in its expanded or posthumanist forms, seeks to account for semiotic complexity through ethnographic methods that prioritize the external and material dimensions of communication. However, as this paper has argued, an ethnographic understanding of language overlooks the primacy and irreducibility of individual sign-making activities, handing the facts over to the linguistic experts. The integrationist position challenges the idea of the “totality” of semiotic phenomena, emphasizing instead that linguistic facts are participant-dependent. Semiotic inquiry thus becomes the study of communication as semiologically integrated activity to which only the participants themselves can grant access through their metalinguistic discourse. While it is true that by rejecting Saussure’s notion of langue as a fixed community code and instead positing “collections of signs” that vary across individuals and contexts contemporary sociolinguistics moves toward a more fluid understanding of language, the integrationist approach takes this critique further by questioning the necessity of codes (personal or assembled) altogether. For Harris, signs are not pre-existing entities or abstractions but phenomena tied to specific acts of integration. This perspective effectively resists the externalization and materialization of form and meaning, situating signs firmly within the individual’s semiological activity.

The exploration of iterativity in communication from an integrational point of view introduces an important counterpoint to the “segregational” account leaning on notions like the “resource,” “register,” or “repertoire,” namely one drawing on the lessons of personal experience. While posthumanist scholars like Pennycook and Otsuji (2014a, 2014b) frame routinized practices as evidence of distributed semiosis, the integrationist perspective reveals a deeper complexity: no act of communication, however repetitive it may seem, is ever identical to another. Each utterance, gesture, or interaction is shaped by the specificities of the here-and-now, influenced by the participants’ unique histories and immediate communicational purposes. This recognition of radical indeterminacy challenges the notion of “sameness” in semiotic practices, reframing them as perpetually novel acts of sign-making. This shift has profound implications for both theoretical and applied linguistics. Grounded in the individual’s semiological reality, the integrationist “lay-oriented” approach reclaims the agency of sign-makers in contexts where materialist and posthumanist paradigms often obscure their contributions. Moreover, it calls for a reevaluation of empirical-methodological approaches in contemporary sociolinguistics, while emphasizing personal linguistic experience as the only intellectually honest point of departure for the study of communication.

Lastly, this paper has emphasized the relevance of integrational semiology in contemporary debates about the nature of signs. By challenging the paradigms prevailing in sociolinguistic and posthumanist approaches, it hopes to pave the way for a renewed focus on the individual’s creative capacity for sign-making. This perspective not only leads to a radical paradigmatic shift in our understanding of human semiotics, but also underlines the necessity of philosophical inquiry in the study of language and communication.