Student: Jaime Ignacio Bautista Henao / ID: 000234130

Course: Language, Langue and Parole

Professor: Jorge Ivn Jimnez Garca
Date: April 7th, 2015.

MEANING AS SIGN:

Signs, in all of their kinds, are human productions and reproductions that emerge from
the interactions between our mind and the world we live in, creating in that dialectic what
we call reality, which is a network of encoded experiences opened for each individual
and defined by language and culture.
Language, on one hand, consists on our capacity of signifying reality and
communicating those signs according to a common code; culture, on the other, includes
the context where those signs emerge, coexist and combine with other signs to form
common patterns of meaning. In that respect, Kramsch explains that the signifier
(sound or word) in itself is not a sign unless someone recognizes it as such and relates
it to a signified (concept) and that different signs denote reality by cutting it up in
different ways (p. 15).
As a result of those interactions, language has two forms of meaning in its association
with culture: one of them is called semantics and is related to what language says or
what it refers as an encoded sign; the other one is known as pragmatics and involves
what language does as an action in context. Kramsch considers, in this chapter, the
aspects regarding semantics.
In the semantic field, as the author states, meaning can be denotative, which is when
words point to objects of the real world; connotative, which is when words are linked to
the many associations they evoke in the minds of their users; or iconic, which consists
on exclamations referred to emotions or actions as they imitate them.

According to that, signs from one language do not match, peer to peer, with the ones
from another language, neither conceptually nor phonologically. For instance, here is a
chart with some content-related signs from three different languages:

(Taken and adapted from Arango, 1980).

If we consider that the meaning of each sign covers the area on which the word
appears, we can see that the Spanish words lea, madera and bosque are included in
the meaning of the French word bois, though selva is excluded. Meanwhile, in the
meaning of the German word holz, only lea and madera are included, though bosque is
excluded, as well as selva. We can also note that the French words bois and fort are
included in the meaning of the Spanish word bosque and of the German word wald.
In line with Kramsch, signs might also have different semantic values for people from
different discourse communities (group of speakers with a special use of language for
particular activities) but from the same speech community (group of speakers with a
variety of a language or dialect inherited by birth or adoption). For instance, a biologist
and a baseball player, both monolingual English-speakers, might have different semantic
values about what a bat is; for the first one, it will certainly be a flying mammal of the
order of Chiroptera, while for the second one, we expect it will be an implement with a
handle and a surface, used for hitting a specific kind of ball.
The author also mentions some aspects about the non-arbitrary nature of signs,
stating that socialization into a given discourse community includes making its
signifying practices seem totally natural (p. 20), which means that, for language users,
the thoughts and the words they conceive are merged in such way that, from their

perspective, those two things are one and are usually motivated, as well, by their needs
and desires,
In the last paragraphs of this second chapter, Kramsch focuses on symbols, which are
conventionalized signs taken out of their original social and historical context, and
emptied of the fullness of their meaning (p. 21). That loss of their original denotative
and even connotative meanings does not reduce symbols capacity of signifying but,
instead, allows language users to recontextualize and precontextualize, with them, past
and future events into current contexts of talk.
Among symbols, the author also includes a certain kind of frozen signs called cultural
stereotypes, which are in the middle of the road between semantics and pragmatics,
where language intersects with social power. They are produced and reproduced not
only with the purpose of encoding human experiences but also with the intention of
regulating human actions. In this regard, Kramsch lays out an open question: where
does semantics end and pragmatics begin? (p. 23). An answer to that might take more
than another chapter or even the extent of her whole book.

References:
-

Arango, L. (1980). El signo lingstico en Saussure. Revista Lingstica y

Literatura, 3, pp. 39-62.

Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.