Charles Sanders Peirce and the Mind-Body-World Relation

structural relations in functional terms, as a kind of “technology of mind” 7 . Languageis able to facilitate an opportune and steady generation, enunciation and interpretationof linguistic (and other) signs in any kind of social or cultural context. Linguisticsigns contribute, in the context of a wider communicative community (whetherspeakers or users of the language acknowledge the importance of the role of thiscommunity or not) the self-organisation of a sense of “self”, or “personality”, bothfrom the user’s own, and other’s point of view. However, in the final analysis, this“personality” is corporeally context-dependent, in the sense that it must be continuallymanifested, developed and maintained by the physiologically determined agility ofthe articulatory apparatus – of which the tongue is the most obvious organ (ormodule).Now it is clear that there are other aspects to language and language use than speech –a considerable part of our everyday interpersonal communication depends veryheavily indeed on the unhindered exchange and interpretation of various kinds of nonverbalmessages, as the study of kinesics, proxemics, facial expression, gaze, eyemovements and gesture have clearly shown. The technology of writing represents thelanguages we use in another medium, and with a type of grammatical organisationthat is different in a number for ways from that of spoken language (see Halliday1995).In a longer time-scale, our general behaviour in relation to other people and the worldin general, when seen in relation to what we say and do not say, also “counts” inmeaning-making terms. We tend to construe and evaluate other people’s“personalities” from moment to moment and from situation to situation on the basis ofall of these things. So in this sense, merely considering the activity of the tongue asthe seat of the “personality” is not enough. Speech, talk, dialogue or conversation is initself a multimodal 8 form of a much broader “genre” of communicative activity, oftenreferred to as communicative action 9 , and in this wider picture of things there aremany, many externally visible aspects of the more general “articulatory system” tiedto language production and use that count at least as much as what our tongue isdoing, in order for successful communication to occur, and consequently too, for theconstruction of “personality”.And indeed, it is also the case that there are languages where the activity of the tongueis of subsidiary importance, and where the whole articulatory apparatus of language is“externalised”, and where all the “internal” motions of this apparatus are consequentlyvisible to interlocutors and others. Here I am thinking quite specifically of the signlanguages of deaf people, where phonological, morphological, syntactic and semanticproduction processes take place in what is generally known by sign language linguistsas “signing space”: a three-dimensional zone in front of the body largely defined bythe specific range of motions which are possible for any given signer’s head, arms andhands.As can be seen in Figure 1 below, signing space also includes a certain well-definednumber of articulation points or zones on the front of the body of the signer,7 The designation “technology of mind” was, as far as I am aware, coined by anthropologist Jack Goody inconnection with his considerations of individual and socio-cultural functional aspects of writing. See for exampleGoody 1987.8 The notion of multimodality has been delineated in different ways, According to Australian linguist Martin(2001), multimodality in communication involves verbiage, image(ry), sound and action. Social linguistics, heclaims, needs models of multimodality, coupled with those of multilinguality (encompassing language, dialect,register and code) and multifunctionality (encompassing ideational, interpersonal and textual meaning in languageand text) to meet what he refers to as “the challenge of hybridity – the multi-voicing of our post-colonial world”(Martin 2001: 311). See also Martin 2000.9 See for example the Theory of Communicative Action of sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1997)