Follow the Signs
Archetypes of consciousness embodied in the signs of language
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
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.
Andrews, Edna
(2014) Neuroscience and Multi-lingualism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 
Bateson, Gregory
(1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind: A Revolutionary Approach to Man’s Understanding of Himself. New York: Ballantine Books.
Bateson, G.
(1980) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Bantam Books.
Bickerton, Derek
(2009) Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans. New York: Hill and Wang.
Birnbaum, Henrik
(1984) Review of Sangster, Roman Jakobson and Beyond. Language 60 (2): 412–16.
Bolinger, D.
(1971) The Phrasal Verb in English. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
(1977) Meaning and Form. London: Longman.
Bouchard, Denis
(2013) The Nature and Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bybee, Joan
(2010) Language, Usages and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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.
Capra, F.
(1996) The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Doubleday.
Chomsky, Noam
(1996) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Comrie, Bernard
(1976) Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Corballis, Michael
(1991) The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Damasio, Antonio
(2010) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Vintage Books.
Diessel, Holger
(2011) Review of Bybee, Language, Usage and Cognition. Language 87 (4): 830–44.
Donald, Merlin
(2001) A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: Norton.
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.
Edelman, Gerald
(1987) Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books.
Edelman, G.
(1989) The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.
(1992) Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. New York: Basic Books.
Edelman, G. and Giulio Tononi
(2000) A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. New York: Basic Books.
Fagan, Brian
(2010) Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Forsyth, J.
(1970) A Grammar of Aspect: Usage and Meaning in the Russian Verb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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.
Gladwell, Malcolm
(2000) The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Boston: Little Brown and Co.
Goldstein, Jeffrey
(1999) Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues. Emergence 1(1): 49–72.
Goswami, Amit
(1993) The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: Putnam Books.
Grof, Stanislav
(1985) Beyond the Brain : Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy. Albany: SUNY Press.
Grof, S.
(1993) The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape our Lives. San Francisco: Harper Collins.
(1998) The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
(2000) Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Hansen, Maj-Britt
(2016) The Structure of Modern Standard French. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jackendoff, Ray
(2012) A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jakobson, Roman
(1958) Morphologic Observations on Slavic Declension (The Structure of Russian Case Forms). In Waugh, Linda and Morris Halle, eds. 1984, 105–134.
Jakobson, R.
(1961) Linguistics and Communication Theory. In Jakobson, Roman 1971, 570–579.
(1971) Selected Writings: Volume 2. Berlin: Mouton.
Jaszczolt, K. M.
(2009) Representing Time: Essays on Temporality as Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jespersen, Otto
(1938) Growth and Structure of the English Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jung, Carl
ed. (1964) Man and his Symbols. New York: Doubleday.
Kahneman, Daniel
(2011) Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Kristeva, Julia
(1989) Language the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson
(1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Landsberg, Marge E.
ed. (1995) Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langacker, R.
(2013) Essentials of Cognitive Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Larson, Richard and Frank Marušič
(2004) On Indefinite Pronoun Structures with APs: Reply to Kishimoto. Linguistic Inquiry 35: 268–87.
Laughlin, Charles and Eugene d’Aquili
(1974) Biogenetic Structuralism. New York: Columbia University Press.
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.
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.
Leakey, Richard and Roger Lewin
(1992) Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes us Human. New York: Doubleday.
Lewis-Williams, David
(2002) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art. London: Thames and Hudson.
Lieberman, P.
(2006) Towards an Evolutionary Biology of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Luhmann, Niklas
(1990) Essays on Self-Reference. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mahaney, Robert
(2014) Artifactual Symbols: The Catalytic Role of Material Culture in the Emergence of Symbolic Thought. Time and Mind (3):279–295.
Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela
(1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dortrecht: D. Reidel.
Mayer, Elizabeth Lloyd
(2007) Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind. New York: Bantam Books.
Menand, Louis
(2001) The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Ferar, Straus and Giroux.
Molotki, Ekkehart
(1983) Hopi Time. Berlin: Mouton.
Muses, Charles and Arthur M. Young
eds. (1972) Consciousness and Reality: The Human Pivot Point. New York: Outerbridge and Lazard.
Nabokov, Vladimir
(1989) Speak Memory. New York: Random House.
Oudot, Simone
(2008) French Verbs: Essentials of Gammar, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw Hill.
Peat, F. David
(1990) Einstein’s Moon: Bell’s Theorem and the Curious Quest for Quantum Reality. Chicago: Contemporary Books.
Peirce, Charles S.
(1897) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vol.1, Sec. 171.
Poeppel, D. and G. Hickok
(2004) Towards a New Functional Anatomy of Language. Cognition 92: 1–12.
Price, Glanville
(1971) The French Language: Present and Past. London: Edward Arnold Publications.
Rose, S. P. R.
(1992) The Making of Memory. London: Bantam Press.
Rovelli, Carlo
(2017) Reality is Not What It Seems. New York: Riverhead Books.
Ruhl, Charles
(1989) On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sabar, Nadav
(2018) Lexical Meaning as a Testable Hypothesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sacks, Oliver
(2012) Hallucinations. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Saeed, John I.
(1997) Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sangster, Rodney
(1982) Roman Jakobson and Beyond: Language as a System of Signs. The Hague: Mouton.
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.
(2013) Reinventing Structuralism: What Sign Relations Reveal About Consciousness. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.
(2014) Language, Time-Consciousness, and Image-Making in the Human Mind. Time and Mind 7(2): 155–182.
Sebeok, Thomas
(1991) The Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Simone, Raffaele
ed. (1995) Iconicity in Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tyler, Andrea and Vyvyan Evans
(2003) The Semantics of English Prepositions: Spatial Scenes, Embodied Meaning and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Schooneveld, C. H.
(1978) Semantic Transmutations: Prologomena to a Calculus of Meaning. Bloomington: Physsardt.
van Vliet, Edward
(1983) The Disappearance of the French Passé Simple: A Morphological and Sociolinguistic Study,” Word, 34, 2: 89–113.
Waugh, Linda
(1976) The Semantics and Paradigmatics of Word Order. Language 52, 1, 82–107.
Waugh, L. and Morris Halle
eds. (1984) Roman Jakobson. Russian and Slavic Grammar. Studies 1931–1981. Berlin: Mouton.
Weinreich, Uriel
(1966) Explorations in Semantic Theory. In Sebeok, Thomas A., ed., Current Trends in Linguistics 2: Theoretical Foundations, 395–478. The Hague: Mouton.
Westen, Drew
(1999) The Scientific Status of Unconscious Processes. Journal of the Psychoanalytic Association, 47.
Wheeler, Brandon and Julia Fischer
(2012) Functionally Referential Signals: A Promising Paradigm Whose Time Has Passed. Evolutionary Anthropology 21(5): 195–205.
Wilcken, Patrick
(2010) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory. New York: Penguin Press.
Yang, Charles
(2015) Negative Knowledge from Positive Evidence. Language 91(4): 938–953.
Zeleny, Milan
ed. (1980) Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, and Spontaneous Social Orders. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press.
Subjects
Consciousness Research
BIC Subject: CFA – Philosophy of language
BISAC Subject: LAN009000 – LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019052317