Linguistic Problems in Light of General Semiotics

Abstract

This article is based on several primary postulates. Here is the leading one: A science, called semiotics, which is rapidly developing before our eyes, has not yet developed a standard and acceptable scientific paradigm for most of its followers. It is interpreted in various ways by schools that have arisen in different countries, relying on completely different positions. The school from the Estonian city of Tartu, for example, is guided by the fact that all signs arose in inanimate nature and continued in the life of plants and all living beings, including humans. Thus, any cause leading to the same effect is a sign for this effect. The semiotic school in Gothenburg (Sweden) defends the thesis that images are the basis of all other sign formations. Many semioticians, following de Saussure, are convinced that linguistic signs are the leading and initial ones, and all other sign constructs follow them. The author of this work proceeds from the assumption that the symbolic storehouse contains signs for very different content and of very different origins. From natural signs that came to us from nature (we see smoke, it means something is burning; we hear thunder, it means that it is raining somewhere), to signs in mathematics, which all came from the human mind. Language constructions are included in this system along with signs of other types. None of these types is the leading and decisive one; all of them were born in the course of the development of human civilization, as the human spirit strengthened and developed. And each of them performs its own function – for example, images underlie all arts, and languages are called upon to explain everything and everyone. Therefore, each type of sign is specific, and all together they make up a complete set of tools with which we can understand the events taking place around us and influence them. A complete and deep explanation of the entire sphere of signs and sign systems is available only to general semiotics – it determines the place of each specific sign topic. This article is devoted to the definition of the possibilities of linguistic signs – it seems to be objective enough and it presents linguistic manifestations familiar to us in a new way. What is a word? What is grammar? What is lexicography? etc. But it presents them from a different point of view, from the point of view of semiotics.