James D. Benson

Glendon College, York University

Saussure and Peirce: complementary semiotic perspectives on relational clauses

Intra-clausal relations between nominalizations are a hallmark of written language (Halliday 1989, Halliday and Martin 1993). Linguists in the Systemic Functional Linguistics tradition have suggested similarities between relational clauses and the Saussurean linguistic sign (Martin 1992, Mattheissen 1995, Thibault 1997). Further exploration shows that the uni-directional schema-instance relation of attributive clauses grammaticalizes instantiation, and that the bi-directional Token and Value relation of identifying clauses grammaticalizes the two orders of difference (signifier and signified) of the linguistic sign. The icon-index-symbol hierarchy of Deacon’s (1997) interpretation of Peirce provides a complementary way of understanding the grammaticalization of the linguistic sign by relational processes. The attributive relational clause is a symbolic resource for producing and recognizing symbols, and the identifying clause is a symbolic resource for producing and recognizing indices. The Saussurean and Peircian perspectives on the grammaticalization of the act if semiosis itself are shown to be complementary rather than competitive, and to illuminate a fundamental resource in literacy.

References:

Deacon, Terrence W. 1997. The symbolic species: the co-evolution of language and the brain. London and New York: W.W. Norton.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1989. Spoken and written language. New York: Oxford University Press.

Halliday, M.A.K. and J. R. Martin. 1993. Writing science: literacy and discursive power. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Martin, James R. 1992. English Text: system and structure. Philadelphia/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Matthiessen, Christian. 1995. Lexicogrammatical Cartography: English Systems. Tokyo: International Language Sciences Publishers.

Thibault, Paul J. 1997. Re-reading Saussure: the dynamics of signs in social life. London and New York: Routledge.