The semiotic triangle: language, mind, world and meaning

We have seen in the previous section that a number of languages, including French and English, make an important connection in their standard vocabularies between language and the world of inner conscious processes like volition, perception and intention. Other languages, by contrast, like Warlpiri, seem to bypass this connection by talking about the meaning of language in the same terms used to talk about the identity of things in the world. All of these relations are important. To describe meaning fully, we seem to have to make reference to three principal terms: language, the world, and the human mind. Following Ogden and Richards (1949: 10), these three aspects of the meaning phenomenon are often symbolized as the ‘semiotic triangle’, as shown in Figure 1.2 below.

At the top of the triangle is what Ogden and Richards called ‘thought’. This reflects the fact that language comes from human beings, and is therefore ultimately a product of processes in the mind or brain. But ‘thought’ can be a misleading label for these processes, for two reasons. First, these mental processes need not be conscious. Even though we sometimes do consciously think about what we are going to say, our speech is more often spontaneous, emerging without our being aware of any preliminary stage of mental preparation. Since it is the brain that produces language, we know that some such preliminary stage must have taken place, but since this stage is so often unconscious, the label ‘thought’ is not the most appropriate (see Chapter 11 for more discussion).

The second reason that ‘thought’ is an unfortunate label for the mental processes at the origin of speech is that it excludes the non-rational, emotional side of our inner life. The processes leading to speech should not be limited to what we would class simply as ‘thinking’, but extend to include our emotions and volition as well. This is most obviously true with exclamations: exclamations of pain, surprise or happiness often do not reflect anything we would describe as a ‘thought’, but rather reflect a particular feeling. The same is true for many other types of words, like diminutives, which may correspond to feelings of (roughly) affection; and imperatives, which may be accompanied by feelings of control, superiority, pride, etc. Evaluative words more generally, expressing the speaker’s emotional attitude, often force us to recognize a strong emotional component. Thus, ‘marvellous’, ‘wonderful’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘good’; and ‘appalling’, ‘terrible’, ‘frightful’ and ‘bad’ and their synonyms express more than the fact that the speaker approves or disapproves of whatever is being referred to: crucially, these adjectives are often associated with particular positive or negative feelings in the speaker. In order to remove the unwanted implication that the mental processes leading to speech are purely conscious and non-emotional, we can replace ‘thought’ in Ogden and Richards’ diagram with the more neutral term ‘psychology’.

QUESTION Apart from emotion, what other aspects of psychology are relevant to the production and understanding of language? Which are of the most relevance to linguistic meaning?

 The leftmost point of the triangle, the ‘symbol’, is the most straight forward. The symbol, in this terminology, is whatever perceptible token is chosen to express the speaker’s intended meaning. In the case of spoken language, the symbols will be strings of speech sounds, in the case of written language, they will be marks on the page, and in the case of sign languages, they will be particular handsigns. Since in this book we are exclusively concerned with linguistic communication, we can replace the broader term ‘symbol’ with the simple ‘language’.

The last apex of the triangle is the ‘referent’, or whatever things, events or situations in the world the language is about. Thus, the sentence the dogs bark, the caravan goes by has as its referent a particular situation: a situation in which certain dogs bark and a certain caravan goes by. Within that sentence, the expressions the dogs and the caravan also have referents: the actual dogs and caravan being spoken about. Note that someone who hears this sentence does not necessarily know what the exact referents of these nouns are; in the absence of any special knowledge about which dogs and caravans are being referred to, a hearer could only identify the dogs and caravan in question if the sentence was spoken when they were actually present (and even then they would have to assume that the hearer was talking about the dogs and caravan at hand, not some others).

 This leads to the important point that we do not have any access to the world as it actually, objectively is. The only referents we can know are ones which are perceived by our senses or imagined in our minds: ones for which, in other words, we have mental representations (see 1.6.2 below). The dogs and caravan in question are only available and known to us in so far as they can be represented, that is perceived, remembered, or other wise thought about by us. The world of referents, that is, must be considered not as a world of real external entities, but as a world of representations which are projected by the mind. Another way of putting this would be to say that the world of referents is within the domain of psychology. As humans with minds, we have no access to the world, with a definite cast of fixed, pre-established referents. All we can know, and all that can be relevant to our understanding of language, is the world as it is represented by our minds through perception, memory, imagination or other experience. And since we are all different, the ways in which we perceive, remember or imagine referents are also likely to differ in some ways.

Question What problems might the existence of differing representations of the same referent pose for understanding meaning?

 We can now consider the relations between the three points of the triangle. First, note that psychology has a causal relation to both referent and symbol. On the side of the symbol, the causal relation to psychology is explained by the fact that, as already observed, it is our minds that create language by choosing and constructing the particular linguistic expressions used. It is in our psychology that the decision to speak is made, and the particular words used are chosen. In the case of the referent (which, as we have already seen, must itself already be considered as within the domain of psychology), the causal relation comes from the fact that in using language we intend our words to have a certain referent. For example, if I point to a car parked on the street and say ‘that car has its lights on’ I intend my words to refer only to the car in question, and not to any of the others that also happen to be present. I have, in other words, chosen this car, rather than another, as the referent of my words, and I expect the hearer of my words to do the same.

In contrast to the causal relations on the psychology-symbol and psychology-referent sides of the triangle, there is no causal relation between symbol and referent. Words have no direct relation to the things they stand for. There is no inherent relation between a string of sounds and a particular referent: this is the reason that different languages use entirely different words for the same thing. The only reason dogs refers to dogs and caravan refers to a caravan is that these are the referents which English speakers have learnt to associate with them, and this is a fact about people’s psychology rather than an essential connection between the words and the objects to which they refer. Even onomatopoeic words like the names for animals’ calls (e.g. ‘cuckoo’, ‘moo’, ‘quack’ and ‘meow’), which might be thought to constitute an exception to this rule, since their sounds are similar to the calls they represent, are not in fact any different. Even though there is certainly a similarity between word and referent, this similarity is a conventional one which, just as for other words, has to be learned (that is why different languages represent these sounds differently: for example, ‘quack’ in French is coin-coin). The connection between onomatopoeic words and their referents is thus mediated by the psychology of language users. In light of these remarks, we can redraw the semiotic triangle as in Figure 1.3:

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Topic space