When Other Semiotic Systems Met Language: II. When Language Supplied the Grammar

In the first post, we saw that a traffic light can make meaning without having a grammar of its own.

But we also noticed something curious.

When a driver sees red, it is almost irresistible to put the meaning into words:

Stop.

The traffic light supplies the meaning.

Language supplies the wording.

That distinction is easy to overlook because the two events can happen so quickly that they seem like one.

The traffic light expresses STOP.

The driver construes that meaning through language as Stop!

The grammar belongs to the driver.

This gives us a rather different way of thinking about the relation between language and other semiotic systems.

We don't necessarily need to imagine that a non-linguistic system contains a grammar corresponding to the wording we can give to its meanings. The language user may simply be bringing the resources of language to bear on another semiotic system.

The same thing happens whenever we put something non-linguistic into words.

A diagram can be described in a sentence.

A gesture can be glossed verbally.

A piece of music can be described as sad, urgent or triumphant.

A map can be explained in language.

In each case, language can provide a grammatical construal of something that does not itself have to possess a grammatical stratum.

The important question, then, is not necessarily:

What is the grammar of this other semiotic system?

It might instead be:

How does a language user construe what this other system means?

The distinction is subtle, but it changes what we are looking for.

Consider the traffic light again.

Its system gives us:

red → STOP

The driver's language can turn that into:

Stop!

But we should not work backwards from the wording and conclude that Stop! must therefore be structurally present inside the traffic light.

The wording is an achievement of the linguistic system.

This also explains how the traffic light can function as a Sayer without becoming linguistic.

The traffic light can project STOP.

The driver can supply the wording.

The two semiotic systems therefore cooperate without having the same organisation.

And perhaps this is one of the things that language makes possible for linguate beings.

We can take meanings from other semiotic systems and bring them into language. We can describe them, interpret them, classify them, argue about them, and respond to them in words.

Language does not merely provide another mode of meaning-making.

It can provide a grammar for talking about meanings made elsewhere.

That possibility may be easy to miss when we ask whether other semiotic systems have grammars of their own.

Perhaps sometimes the grammar we are looking for is not there.

Perhaps it is ours.