[Lecture] “Learning language, learning through language, learning about language”: the historical roots of a social semiotic approach to language studies, 25 Mar.

Last updated:2015-03-17

Topic: “Learning language, learning through language, learning about language”: the historical roots of a social semiotic approach to language studies
Speaker: Edward McDonald from University of Sydney

Time: 8:00 - 9:30AM, Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Venue: Lecture Hall 315, School of Foreign Languages Building, South Campus, Sun Yat-sen University
Organization: School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University

Introduction:
Ideas guide action, but action gives rise to ideas. This seeming paradox sums up the promise as well as the challenge of understanding social behaviour. For millennia, language was seen as one of those unimaginably intricate behaviours, like its close sister music, which are an inextricable part of every human society but at the same time seem far too complex ever to have been created by humans. It was the study of ancient texts, and the acknowledgment of their historicity and hence textuality, that first gave scholars the tools for recognizing different levels of patterning in language; and it was the emerging disciplines of historical-comparative linguistics in Europe and historical phonology in China that then began to come to grips with the sheer intricacy of that patterning. However it was the Swiss scholar Saussure, a virtuoso practitioner of historical linguistics, who at the very end of his life laid out in bold strokes a model of how language could be part of a new discipline of “semiotics” – or as he called it “semiology” – which he famously defined as “a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life”, and so suggested how the social behaviour and the semiotic patterning could be understood as two sides of the same coin. This talk will explore the development of one tradition of linguistics that has attempted to understand the social in the light of the semiotic, and vice versa, an ambition declared explicitly in the seminal 1978 work of M.A.K. Halliday Language as Social Semiotic. It will show how this kind of model gives us the best way of understanding what is involved in “learning language”, and in “learning about language” – thus illuminating the language-centred fields of language pedagogy and translation studies, alongside linguistics – but also in “learning through language” and thus enabling us to understand the role of language in the whole of human endeavour.