Language and biosemiosis: Towards unity?

From the ecosocial to the biosemiotic Although many pay lip-service to the view that signs are common to culture and biology, it remains unclear how such a unity could emerge. Indeed, while those working with culture usually ignore biology, biologists rarely consider how their observations bear on issues of meaning. So, when sign-making is studied, its outcomes are usually interpreted either against a cultural surround or models of how semiosis is represented in the brain. It may seem that the alternative is a biolinguistic view that syntactic computations are evidence that (internal) language has its basis in molecular biology (Jenkins, 2000). Aspects of verbal language are, on any such view, entirely separable from persons, neural processes and the sensorium. Ideally, a book entitled Language and Interaction (L&I) might propose another way of connecting the verbal with living bodies and semiosis. Eerdmans, Prevignano and Thibault however, set out a modest goal of using Gumperz’s opus to reappraise the ‘theory and practice of communication analysis’ (2003: vii). Accordingly, they juxtapose interviews with critical interpretations and open social theory to new debates. While accepting that interaction depends on indexical signs including what Gumperz calls contextualization cues, they find no consensus on what these are. This paper, therefore, scrutinizes the nature of contextualization cues and, finding the concept wanting, extends the central debate of L&I. Concurring with those who find Gumperz’s informationprocessing model inadequate, I suggest that ecosocial views cannot explain unintended sense-making either. Since much contextualizing is independent of ‘meaning potential’, we come up against the limits of analysis. Instead we need to consider how indexical sense-making is grounded in biosemiosis. Sketching such a model, I link Barbieri’s (2002) approach to semantic coding with Damasio’s (1999) view of core consciousness to show how human judgements can use the feeling-of-what-happens. During talk sensitivity to the feel of biosemiosis prompts us both to adjust to each other in real-time and to make verbal judgements about how they sound and act.