Follow the Signs

Archetypes of consciousness embodied in the signs of language

Hardbound – Available
ISBN 9789027204936 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
e-Book –
ISBN 9789027261571 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00
 
In this his latest book, Sangster presents a comprehensive theory that takes the cognitive view of language in a promising new direction, based upon how linguistic signs relate to one another at different levels of consciousness. At the rational level, where signs are necessarily experienced in context, they are primarily polysemic. At the transpersonal or pre-contextual level, however, they are monosemic, constituting a dynamic and self-organizing relational structure capable of producing a potentially infinite variety of contextual applications. The two levels are united by a stochastic or somatic selection process called contextualization, where feedback from experience assures the evolution of the system. The relational structure itself is composed of archetypes of space and time consciousness that derive from the evolution of the linguistic sign from the signaling behavior of antecedent species. Detailed analyses are provided to explain how the archetypes structure meaning in both the grammatical and lexical spheres, as well as in syntax.
[Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, 79]  2020.  xiii, 175 pp.
Publishing status: Available
© John Benjamins
https://doi.org/10.1075/sfsl.79
Table of Contents
Preface
viii–xiii
Introduction: Theories of form and meaning
2–4
Part 1. General concepts
8–50
1.1. The evolution of conciousness and its neurological foundation
8–12
1.2. From primate signals to human signs
14–15
1.3. The concept of reference in a self-organizing system
18–20
1.4. Higher-order consciousness reexamined
22–24
1.5. The locus and function of monosemy in human consciousness
26–32
1.6. The ultimate nature of meaning
34–37
1.7. The role of metaphor in higher-order consciousness
40–41
1.8. The place of sign theory in neurolinguistics
44–50
Part 2. Archetypes of meaning
54–94
2.1. The archetypes of time-consciousness
54–60
2.2. Evidence of time-consciousness in prepositions
62–69
2.3. Comparing time- and space-consciousness in prepositions
72–75
2.4. Further evidence of space-consciousness in prepositions
78–79
2.5. Plurality as the defining characteristic of one-dimensional phenomena
82–85
2.6. Further evidence of space-consciousness in grammatical relations: Aspect in Russian
88–91
2.7. The space-time continuum in human consciousness
94
Part 3. Syntactic structure
98–146
3.1. The syntactic structure of sign relations
98–101
3.2. The modification relation in English
104–111
3.3. The structure of the English predicate
114–119
3.4. The modification relation in French
122–131
3.5. The archetypal structure of the French verb
134–146
Part 4. The structure of the lexicon
150–161
4.1. Transition to lexical meaning
150
4.2. Archetypes in the nominal lexicon
152–157
4.3. Archetypes in the verbal lexicon
160–161
Epilogue: Towards a quantum theory of meaning in language
164–168
Bibliography
169–172
Index
References

Bibliography

Allen, Peter M. and Michele Sanglier
(1980) Order by Fluctuation and the Urban System. In Zeleny, Milan, ed., 1980.Google Scholar
Andrews, Edna
(2014) Neuroscience and Multi-lingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bateson, Gregory
(1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself. New York: Ballantine Books.Google Scholar
Bateson, G.
(1980) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek
(2009) Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Birnbaum, Henrik
(1984) Review of Sangster, Roman Jakobson and Beyond. Language 60 (2): 412–16. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bolinger, D.
(1971) The Phrasal Verb in English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
(1977) Meaning and Form. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Bouchard, Denis
(2013) The Nature and Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bybee, Joan
(2010) Language, Usages and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Calvin, W. H. and G. A. Ojemann
(1994) Conversations with Neil’s Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing.Google Scholar
Capra, F.
(1996) The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Doubleday.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam
(1996) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Comrie, Bernard
(1976) Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Corballis, Michael
(1991) The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Damasio, Antonio
(2010) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Diessel, Holger
(2011) Review of Bybee, Language, Usage and Cognition. Language 87 (4): 830–44. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Donald, Merlin
(2001) A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Donald, M.
(2004) The Definition of Human Nature. In Rees, D. and S. Rose, eds. The New Brain Sciences: Perils and Prospects. Cambride University Press: 34–58. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Gerald
(1987) Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Edelman, G.
(1989) The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
(1992) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Edelman, G. and Giulio Tononi
(2000) A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Fagan, Brian
(2010) Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press.Google Scholar
Forsyth, J.
(1970) A Grammar of Aspect: Usage and Meaning in the Russian Verb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Gallese, Vittorio and George Lakoff
(2005) The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensori-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge. Cognitive Neuropsychology 22: 455–479. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gladwell, Malcolm
(2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little Brown and Co.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Jeffrey
(1999) Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues. Emergence 1(1): 49–72. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, Amit
(1993) The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: Putnam Books.Google Scholar
Grof, Stanislav
(1985) Beyond the Brain : Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Grof, S.
(1993) The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape our Lives. San Francisco: Harper Collins.Google Scholar
(1998) The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
(2000) Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Hansen, Maj-Britt
(2016) The Structure of Modern Standard French. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray
(2012) A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman
(1958) Morphologic Observations on Slavic Declension (The Structure of Russian Case Forms). In Waugh, Linda and Morris Halle, eds. 1984, 105–134.Google Scholar
Jakobson, R.
(1961) Linguistics and Communication Theory. In Jakobson, Roman 1971, 570–579.Google Scholar
(1971) Selected Writings: Volume 2. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Jaszczolt, K. M.
(2009) Representing Time: Essays on Temporality as Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto
(1938) Growth and Structure of the English Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jung, Carl
ed. (1964) Man and his Symbols. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Kahneman, Daniel
(2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia
(1989) Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
(1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Landsberg, Marge E.
ed. (1995) Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Langacker, R.
(2013) Essentials of Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Larson, Richard and Frank Marušič
(2004) On Indefinite Pronoun Structures with APs: Reply to Kishimoto. Linguistic Inquiry 35: 268–87. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Laughlin, Charles and Eugene d’Aquili
(1974) Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Laughlin, Charles D., John McManus and Eugene G. d’Aquili
(1990) Brain, Symbol and Experience: Toward a Neurophenomenology of Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Laughlin, Charles D. and C. Jason Throop
(2008) Continuity, Causation, and Cyclicity: A Cultural Neurophenomenology of Time-Consciousness. Time and Mind 1(2): 159–186. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Leakey, Richard and Roger Lewin
(1992) Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes us Human. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Lewis-Williams, David
(2002) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P.
(2006) Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Luhmann, Niklas
(1990) Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Mahaney, Robert
(2014) Artifactual Symbols: The Catalytic Role of Material Culture in the Emergence of Symbolic Thought. Time and Mind (3):279–295.Google Scholar
Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela
(1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dortrecht: D. Reidel. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd
(2007) Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Menand, Louis
(2001) The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Ferar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Molotki, Ekkehart
(1983) Hopi Time. Berlin: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Muses, Charles and Arthur M. Young
eds. (1972) Consciousness and Reality: The Human Pivot Point. New York: Outerbridge and Lazard.Google Scholar
Nabokov, Vladimir
(1989) Speak Memory. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Oudot, Simone
(2008) French Verbs: Essentials of Gammar, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw Hill.Google Scholar
Peat, F. David
(1990) Einstein’s Moon: Bell’s Theorem and the Curious Quest for Quantum Reality. Chicago: Contemporary Books.Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S.
(1897) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol.1, Sec. 171.Google Scholar
Poeppel, D. and G. Hickok
(2004) Towards a New Functional Anatomy of Language. Cognition 92: 1–12. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Price, Glanville
(1971) The French Language: Present and Past. London: Edward Arnold Publications.Google Scholar
Rose, S. P. R.
(1992) The Making of Memory. London: Bantam Press.Google Scholar
Rovelli, Carlo
(2017) Reality is Not What It Seems. New York: Riverhead Books.Google Scholar
Ruhl, Charles
(1989) On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Sabar, Nadav
(2018) Lexical Meaning as a Testable Hypothesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sacks, Oliver
(2012) Hallucinations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Saeed, John I.
(1997) Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sangster, Rodney
(1982) Roman Jakobson and Beyond: Language as a System of Signs. The Hague: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Sangster, R.
(1994) Autopoiesis and Language: A Chapter in the Development of Phenomenological Structuralism. In Gribble, Charles, Richard Pope, Charles Townsend, Ronald Feldstein, and Cornelis van Schooneveld, eds. James Daniel Armstrong: In Memoriam. Columbus OH: Slavica, 175–189.Google Scholar
(2013) Reinventing Structuralism: What Sign Relations Reveal About Consciousness. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
(2014) Language, Time-Consciousness, and Image-Making in the Human Mind. Time and Mind 7(2): 155–182.Google Scholar
Sebeok, Thomas
(1991) The Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Simone, Raffaele
ed. (1995) Iconicity in Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans
(2003) The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
van Schooneveld, C. H.
(1978) Semantic Transmutations: Prologomena to a Calculus of Meaning. Bloomington: Physsardt.Google Scholar
van Vliet, Edward
(1983) The Disappearance of the French Passé Simple: A Morphological and Sociolinguistic Study,” Word, 34, 2: 89–113. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Waugh, Linda
(1976) The Semantics and Paradigmatics of Word Order. Language 52, 1, 82–107. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Waugh, L. and Morris Halle
eds. (1984) Roman Jakobson. Russian and Slavic Grammar. Studies 1931–1981. Berlin: Mouton.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel
(1966) Explorations in Semantic Theory. In Sebeok, Thomas A., ed., Current Trends in Linguistics 2: Theoretical Foundations, 395–478. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Westen, Drew
(1999) The Scientific Status of Unconscious Processes. Journal of the Psychoanalytic Association, 47.Google Scholar
Wheeler, Brandon and Julia Fischer
(2012) Functionally Referential Signals: A Promising Paradigm Whose Time Has Passed. Evolutionary Anthropology 21(5): 195–205. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Wilcken, Patrick
(2010) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. New York: Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Charles
(2015) Negative Knowledge from Positive Evidence. Language 91(4): 938–953. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Zeleny, Milan
ed. (1980) Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, and Spontaneous Social Orders. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Subjects

Consciousness Research

Consciousness research

Linguistics

Evolution of language
Syntax
Semiotics
Semantics
BIC Subject: CFA – Philosophy of language
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2019052317