NEW PATHWAYS IN LINGUISTICS 2008 Copyright by Stanisław Puppel, Marta Bogusławska-Tafelska ISBN 978-83-927141-0-1 Recenzent tomu: Prof. dr hab. Piotr Stalmaszczyk Projekt okładki: Aleksander Kiklewicz W projekcie okładki wykorzystano obraz W. Kandińskiego ‘Sketch For In The Black Square’: http://www.sloth.ca/kandinsky/square.html Wydawca: Instytut Neofilologii Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego w Olsztynie ul. K. Obitza 1 10-725 Olsztyn Druk i oprawa: ZAKŁAD POLIGRAFICZNY Uniwersytetu Warmińsko-Mazurskiego w Olsztynie ul. Jana Heweliusza 3 10-724 Olsztyn Dystrybucja: Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski w Olsztynie Instytut Neofilologii ul. K. Obitza 1, 10-725 Olsztyn Tel. +48 89 524 63 27 email: [email protected] http://human.uwm.edu.pl/anglistyka/index.htm I. Towards an interdisciplinary paradigm in linguistics NEW PATHWAYS IN LINGUISTICS 2008 Stanisãaw Puppel COMMUNICOLOGY: REMARKS ON THE REEMERGENCE OF A PARADIGM IN COMMUNICATION STUDIES . Introduction Communication studies have long been present in scientific research and teaching curricula in the academic centres all over the world. In fact, at present no university can afford to ignore the presence and social relevance of communication studies. This fact has been additionally prompted by the growing practical needs concentrated around the notion of ‘communication’ and shaped up by the rapidly changing sets of priorities emerging in the global human community in general, and particularly tailored by the growing diversity of practical professions which require the presence of various more or less advanced communicative skills. That is why a look at any randomly selected university catalogue of academic courses offered each year leaves no doubt as to the prevailing nature of communication studies which simply permeate the entire academic parcours and continue to accompany other more technical subjects in a variety of disciplines. As has been stated above, such a general tendency which has been demonstrated on a massive scale, coupled with a really vigorous and multifarious research work on practically every single aspect of communication, may thus be regarded as sufficient in developing the need to postulate the formation of a separate and autonomous area of communication studies, referred to as ‘communicology’. The latter may be naturally opposed to the more traditional and much narrower area of 1 Stanisãaw Puppel linguistics (i.e. ‘language studies’). Having this in mind, let me organize the paper in such a way that it will be set to reflect the present global shape of communication studies. Thus, the paper will be structured into two parts: part one is entitled ‘The scope and tasks of communicology’ and is focused on delineating the basic premises of a communicological model of human communicative interactions, while part two which is entitled ‘The applied nature of communicology’ will briefly concentrate on the specific and more practical areas and problems addressed within the paradigm of communicology outlined in part one. 2. The scope and tasks of communicology The very name ‘communicology’ is not new, for it has been around at least as early as 978, when Joseph A. DeVito wrote the first academic textbook on communicology. The term was further reestablished in Richard L. Lanigan’s important publication in 992. In these major publications the term was applied to a multi-faceted study of human discourse and communicative interactions and practices in diverse (both external and internal) environments. Thus, although the term was not in a very broad use in communication studies abounding in the burgeoning research of the following years, its very existence had not been disreputed in any way. Today, it seems appropriate to propose that its truly comprehensive domain makes the term a very convenient cover term for research work which clearly exceeds studies conducted within the narrower domain of linguistics proper, irrespective of the extension tag attached to it (e.g. pragma-, socio-, ethnolinguistics, etc.). This brings us immediately to the need of presenting a reasonable justification for the relatively young discipline of communicology vis-à- vis the firmly established and celebrated science of linguistics. Thus, a proper way of doing justice to the term would be by introducing the notion of ‘semiosphere’, first coined and proposed by Yuri Lotman who did so under the influence of Vladimir Vernadsky’s (Russian prominent mineralogist and geochemist) popularization of the notion of ‘biosphere’, first coined by Franz Eduard Suess (875). Suess’ definition of the term was the following: ‘the place on earth’s surface where life dwells’. The term, which in the original author’s rendition of it combined the concept of the earth’s surface with the metaphor of the dwelling, was elegantly utilized in Lotman’s definition of ‘semiosphere’ who defined the latter in the following way (990:23): 2 Communicology: remarks on the reemergence of paradigm in communication studies A schema consisting of addresser, addressee and the channel linking them together is not yet a working system. For it to work it has to be ‘immersed’ in semiotic space. All participants in the communicative act must have some experience of communication, be familiar with semiosis. So, paradoxically, semiotic experience precedes the semiotic act. By analogy with the biosphere (Vernadsky’s concept) we could talk of a semiosphere (emphasis mine, SP), which we shall define as the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages, not the sum total of different languages; in a sense the semiosphere has a prior existence and is in constant interaction with these languages. Moreover, Lotman’s approach to the semiosphere as an ever-embracing and ever-present ‘canvas’(or the Batesonian ‘matrix’), as it were, for the entire interactive semiotic potentialities present in Nature, and particularly strongly present in man’s linguistic capacities, is supplemented in the present paper by the inclusion of the great Peircean tradition of interpreting all the signs as falling into the triadic pattern, which is also referred to here as ‘the signifying grid’, comprising the index, the icon, and the symbol. In this way, both linguistics and communicology are properly framed by the entirety of the signs. However, it should also be added as a caveat that the only and essential difference between the two disciplines lies in the ranges which both disciplines propose to consider as relevant for their research practices with regard to the signifying grid. Namely, linguistics, with its obvious emphasis on the conventional, arbitrary, and thus fully symbolic code and its uses, is vitally concerned with the symbol as the major point of reference, while the icon and the index are most naturally considered as becoming decreasingly less essential. Thus, one may venture to say that linguistics generally approaches the signs present in the signifying grid in a rather restricted manner, at the same time attributing major relevance to the symbol as such. Communicology, on the other hand, does not show any such restrictions in its approach to the signs and its interest in the universal ‘signing canvas/matrix’, that is, the semiosphere, appears unperturbed and unconditionally unlimited. One may thus at this point summarize the situation by stating that the semiosphere may from the perspective of the human observer be understood as having two extensions, the language-centred extension, with its emphasis on the symbol, and the communication- centred extension where all the signs appear to be of equal importance. In the latter sense, it should be admitted that Lotman’s semiosphere resembles Ralph Waldo Emerson’s understanding of Nature as a system 3 Stanisãaw Puppel of signs regarded as open to an infinite number of interpretations entirely dependent on the individual human observer acting as a semiotic interpreter. The entire system of linguistic-communicological interfaces, referred to as the linguistics-communicology system of interdependencies (LCSI), is shown in the diagram below. Fig. The Linguistics-Communicology System of Interdependencies (LCSI) The above diagram expresses the LCSI in the form of the structure and dynamism of interactions between the disciplines of linguistics and communicology on the one hand, and across the vertical layerings of the respective domains of linguistics and communicology, on the other. The said dynamism is expressed by means of a system of bi-directional arrows, referred to here as the Interdependency Generator (IG), which may be extracted to a schema represented by the following diagram: 4 Communicology: remarks on the reemergence of paradigm in communication studies Fig. 2 The Interdependency Generator (IG) Where ‘O’ represents the human observer whose ontological status is holistically co-determined such that it comprises both the dual status of an autonomous subject (i.e. the human observer qua communicologist) and an object of research (i.e. the human observer qua communicator) (see the Basis, Fig. 3 below). Moreover, the arrows represent the possibilities of making various trajectories within the LCSI, while the gray areas indicate the structure and range of the signifying grid. The above schema is thus regarded here as representing an algorithmic device capable of generating particular dependencies within the entire LCSI, owing to the particular moves that can be made by the human observer qua communicologist in the overall navigability network of the IG. Thus it is assumed that