Volume 17, Issue 4 - Special issue: Thomas A. Sebeok for the 21st century; Guest Editor: Hongbing Yu

The present issue of Chinese Semiotic Studies is published in memory of Thomas A. Sebeok. Sebeok was not only a master semiotician, but more importantly a grand artist in semiotics. As one of the most important contemporary figures in semiotics, linguistics, ethnology, and cultural studies, Sebeok made profound contributions to the progress of global semiotics through his distinguished theoretical achievements and promotional activities. His works have proven to be so relevant that they continue to exert a determinative influence and provide directions for the development of semiotics and its many subdivisions, especially biosemiotics, beyond the 20th century. Now, 21 years into the present century, during which semiotic studies around the world have made remarkable progress, it is about time to highlight some specific ways in which his contributions will continue to shape and guide semiotic studies, demonstrating the relevance of these contributions to the 21st century challenges. To this end, this special issue presents some up-to-date and informed studies that explore Sebeok’s contributions to semiotics and their vital implications for fundamental problems relevant to humanity as a semiotic animal in the present day and in the rest of this century and beyond.

Thomas A. Sebeok has left semiotics a comprehensive theoretical apparatus for studying semiosis across species and across systems (biological and artificial). Uniting the notions of form , sign , and model into an integrative purview of meaning-making, known as modeling systems theory, Sebeok has provided a conceptual and terminological apparatus for studying all forms of meaning in terms of the fundamental “standing-for principle” that undergirds all semiotic theories. This essay revisits the Sebeokian perspective, delineating its main components in a retrospective way, highlighting its value not only to semiotics but to computer science as well. Above all else, Sebeok has made it possible concretely to establish specific interconnections between semiotics and cognate disciplines in ways that are relatively free of terminological complexities and ambiguities which have beset semiotics in the past.

Thomas A. Sebeok’s name became all but synonymous with semiotics during the last half of the twentieth century. Sebeok located neglected semioticians in antiquity, and convinced many contemporary scholars that they were semioticians. One of his most fruitful encounters was with Juri Lotman of the Tartu–Moscow School of Semiotics, who had published in 1967 an ambitious model of human sign systems in which language would constitute a primary modeling system, and cultural phenomena a secondary modeling system. We inspect how Sebeok amended Lotman’s system, inserting another primary modeling system before language. This brings biological precursors to human language as a syntactic and learned faculty that builds on many nonsyntactic and sometimes nonconscious senses, including emotion, affect, and memory. We note how, in Sebeok’s final book in 2000 on modeling systems theory, co-authored with Marcel Danesi, there is a suggestion that the three layers of modeling systems may be colored by Peircean notions of firstness, secondness, and thirdness; we clarify how these layers are analogue. Finally, the fundamentals of the primary modeling system leak into languaging, as better understood through post-Sebeok cognitive and neurological sciences, and rendering less mysterious some of the strange effects of the COVID-19 pandemic’s proxemics crisis.

Sebeok started his career as an ethnographer, focusing on the verbal art of anthropology to describe the cultures associated with then-called “primitive” languages. He followed Bloomfield’s linguistics to study Boas’ anthropology of primitive art to investigate man as a civilized member of a native indigenous community with art-like speech habits. Sebeok’s earliest articles were ethnographic descriptions of non-Western folktales from the Cheremis people, which he reformulated into Saussure’s phonetic system to involve literal but culturally free translations. Later, Sebeok developed Peirce’s ethnosemiotics by explaining Sapir-Whorf’s two-way differentiation of linguistic-and-cultural texts. The coded interplay of anthroposemiotics moved Sebeok from language-and-culture to language-with-culture, thence to build up the merged compound of linguïculture.

The paper pays tribute to Thomas A. Sebeok with an inquiry into the place of the semiotics of nature within his system of “global semiotics” and of natural signs within his typology of signs, which distinguishes “six species of signs.” It complements Sebeok’s theory of natural signs with a historical study of semiotic definitions of natural signs in four chapters. The first, “Natural signs from Plato to the Scholastics” focuses on Plato’s Cratylus , Aristotle’s “On Interpretation,” Augustine of Hippo, and the Scholastics, in particular Roger Bacon’s distinction between natural and “given” signs. The second, “Natural signs in 20th century analytical and cognitive philosophy,” discusses Rollin’s Natural and conventional meaning as well as the definitions of natural signs proposed by Jerzy Pelc, David S. Clarke, Laird Addis, and in Ruth Garret Millikan’s teleosemiotics. The third, “Structuralist strategies of excluding natural signs from semiotics” discusses how natural signs were excluded from cultural semiotics in the writings of Roland Barthes ( Mythologies ), Algirdas J. Greimas, and in Umberto Eco’s early semiotic writings. The fourth investigates how C. S. Peirce overcomes the dualism of nature and convention in his general theory of signs founded on evolutionary principles. The paper concludes with reflections on Sebeok’s theory of modeling as the distinctive feature of human semiosis.

We briefly sketch some characteristics of Thomas A. Sebeok’s program to develop semiotics and relate them to the approaches in the Tartu circle. It is not a historical, but effectively a paradigmatic insight into research in contemporary Tartu semiotics, where we can see the inevitability of cooperation between the large branches of semiotics such as bio-, socio-, and cultural semiotics that were, consciously or not, preceded by Sebeok. We take a closer look into Sebeok’s arguments in between the times when he re-introduced semiotics to contemporary audiences and when he seemingly departed from the conceptual realm of the Tartu–Moscow School of semiotics. Likewise, we aim to show how his practical engagement in “radwaste” is already acute today and demands realization of the connection between the biological and the cultural as mediated by the social.

Thomas Sebeok is a major representative of contemporary semiotics who dedicated his entire academic career to weaving his semiotic web, aware from the outset of the interdisciplinary nature of the field. On the belief that wherever there is life there are signs , he extended the scope of the discipline well beyond verbal language and culture. The sign–life relationship is vital for all lifeforms on Earth, human and nonhuman, and demands close attention. Current developments in communication studies globally tend to have an exclusive focus on human signs, losing sight of communication understood in a broad sense as converging with life, with respect to which in reality human communication is only a part. Sebeok’s biosemiotic approach to semiosis, his “global semiotics” offers a foundational critique and response to anthropocentric and phonocentric tendencies that in language and communication studies have insistently exchanged the part for the whole. Today, in the world of global and globalized communication, such shortsightedness does not only indicate a characteristic limitation in sign and communication studies, but represents a generalized attitude that is putting life in danger over the planet. As “semiotic animals” we are called to take responsibility for the health of semiosis globally.

Thomas Sebeok coined the term zoosemiotics and defended it and its eventual successor biosemiotics consistently. These terms revolutionized semiotics by expanding its scope and moving it theoretically closer to Peirce and away from semiology. In this spirit, I would like to introduce the concept of xenopedagogy , or the process of teaching and learning applied to extraterrestrials. While there is a body of work around astrobiology, xenobiology, and xenocommunication, there is nothing on record about xenopedagogy. Given an obvious kinship between edusemiotics and xenopedagogy, there is value in moving forward with the purely speculative work (so far) of exploring the dynamics and challenges of how humans and extraterrestrials might create educational opportunities for each other. An outline of potential key issues and possible directions will then be presented.

It was never a secret that Thomas A. Sebeok was born in Hungary, and he always referred to his Hungarian background. He emigrated from Hungary (1936) to England and later (1937) to the United States, where he Americanized his family name, Sebők. As a scholar, he started Finno-Ugric studies (not only in Hungarian, but also in Cheremis). Sebeok continued as a general linguist, and then as a communication expert. From the 1960s, he became a semiotician, a key figure in building an international semiotic network. Sebeok often visited Hungary in connection with his research activities. He was a foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and became Honorary Professor at Loránd Eötvöspapers University in Budapest. Such was the respect he garnered that an international congress was organized in Budapest in honor of his 70th birthday, and his papers and books were also translated into Hungarian. From his very wide range of interests, I mention here only the Hungarian context of studying animal signs. Prolific writer, excellent organizer, and eloquent speaker, Sebeok is unforgettable as a world-renowned person – with many ties to his home culture, which he referred to as his “Hungarian frame.”

This paper provides an integrative and updated view of modeling in semiotics. It postulates that the essence of modeling is supersession. In any act or instance of modeling, the model supersedes and is brought to the front for salience, accessibility, and operability, whereas at the same time the modeled recedes and exists in the background, inaccessible and inoperable. The paper goes on to differentiate between two major types of modeling, the underlying “existential modeling,” functioning as the fundamental scaffold and the genuine foundation of all other types of modeling as we know them, and the overlaying “semiotic modeling,” designating the process of creation and use of “forms of meaning,” a process that underlies both cognition and communication. By focusing on semiotic modeling, the paper features an unconventional view that casts a new light on the relation between a model and a sign and thus the relation between semiotic modeling and semiosis. Endorsing an embodied approach to meaning-making as semiotic modeling, the paper finds it important to stress the appropriateness and necessity of understanding the term “model” as a verb rather than as a noun, in that modeling is never static and should be properly regarded in terms of embodied action.

The conceptual paradigm of Thomas Sebeok’s modeling systems theory builds a theoretical foundation that modeling and knowing converge and coexist in the process of life evolution, and affords multiple narrative spaces for foreign language education, allowing us to address living and learning concurrently in the process of meaning modeling. The present paper argues that the concept of modeling has elevated us above the long-standing emphasis on the most valuable knowledge with the same (target) language standards and the same discourse power, and has captured the interest of language educators to establish a semiotic connection between knowledge content and knowledge representation through a representation model, the English textbook, which is generally considered as an important carrier of language knowledge. The study of the concept of English textbooks promotes sustainable regeneration of semiotic information on multi-level spatial interpretability so that learning can be regarded as exploration and growth of experience. Based on what these analyses reveal, the paper concludes by confirming that the textbook can effectively construct a diverse cultural signification order, considering the learner’s greater flexibility and social responsibility and providing the curriculum with a modeling nature for meaning negotiation among all parties involved.

This paper is an attempt at evaluating the advancement of the conceptual and methodological framework of semiotics across its neighboring disciplines as launched and promoted by Thomas Albert Sebeok on a worldwide scale. Writing in a first-person account, the author describes, firstly, his own road to the semiotic study of linguistics, owing to the acquaintance with editorial outputs as well as with the professional proficiency of this founding father of global semiotics as a visiting scholar with an affiliation in the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies of Indiana University at Bloomington. And secondly, he also tries to assess the power of Sebeok’s influence on the career progress of his contemporaries, scholars, followers, and pupils. Some of them, including the author himself, acted soon after as distinguished masters of particular semiotic disciplines or organizers of international enterprises. Finally, the author provides an epistemological evaluation of semiotic thresholds in the research activities of scientists.