We began with a simple observation:
Red means stop.
But a traffic light is more than a system in which colours have meanings.
Its meanings are simultaneously ideational and interpersonal. STOP construes a material process, but it also functions as a command. The traffic light can therefore function as Speaker, addressing a driver as Addressee.
Ideationally, the traffic light can also function as Sayer in a verbal process:
The traffic light signals [STOP].
What is projected is not the wording Stop!
The traffic light has no lexicogrammatical stratum. Its own semiotic system consists of content and expression:
red → STOP
A driver, however, has language. The driver can construe the traffic light's content through linguistic wording:
Stop.
The wording belongs to the driver's language, not to the traffic light.
This resolves the apparent paradox with which we began.
A traffic light can say STOP without having a word for stop.
It does not need to be a linguistic system in order to participate in a linguistic social world.
Its signal can function as a command. Its content can be projected in a verbal process. Its meaning can be directed towards another participant. And the other participant can respond.
The traffic light therefore participates in an exchange without becoming a human conversationalist.
It does not need consciousness.
It does not need language.
It does not need a grammar of its own.
It needs only a semiotic system whose meanings can enter into a socially organised exchange.
That may be the more general lesson hidden inside those three familiar colours.
A semiotic system can do more than represent the world.
It can participate in the organisation of social action.
And sometimes the thing that says STOP does not need to know the word at all.
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