Ksenia Elisseeva - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

Language as a Sign System and the Game of Chess 1 .
I. I. Revzin
Chapter 7
Language is a system that has its own
arrangement. Comparison with chess will
bring out the point. In chess, what is
external can be separated relatively
easily from what is internal. The fact that
the game passed from Persia to Europe
is external; against that, everything
having to do with its system and rules is
internal. If I use ivory chessmen instead
of wooden ones, the change has no
effect on the system; but if I decrease or
increase the number of chessmen, this
change has a profound effect on the
“grammar” of the game.
F. de Saussure
1.1 It will be beneficial for the development of semiotic theory to pursue
Saussure's analogy (Saussure 1933: 45). This is all the more timely because
cybernetic model-building has encountered fundamental difficulties in relation
not only to the game of chess but to linguistic tasks such as machine
translation, apparently for similar reasons: in both cases man essentially uses
his intuition, while model-building in terms of complete mastery has been
unsuited to solving such problems.
1.2. We have proposed the following comparisons on the basis of
structural, not external, traits. It would have been possible in particular to regard
the chess match as a dialogue or even an argument, in which each pair of
sentences is linked by an adversary relationship, but we do not do this.
1 This article also appeared in Russian as «K razvitiû analogii meždu âzykom kak
znakovoj sistemoj i igroj v šahmaty» in Tezisy dokladov IV Letnej školy po vtoričnym
modeliruûŝim sistemam: 17-24 avgusta 1970. (Tartu: Tartu University Press, 1970), 177-185.
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