5 - Building Complex Meaning and Action with a Three-Word Vocabulary

Summary

By using “No No. No:.” to object strongly to something another speaker has just said, Chil is able to construct an utterance that performs two very consequential operations on the talk of the prior speaker: 1) despite his impoverished lexicon his utterance indexically incorporates her rich language structure; he is not heard to say No, as an isolated self-contained unit, but instead to be including what she said within the scope of his objection. 2) The symbolic power of No as a conventionalized sign transforms the proposition inherited co-operatively from the prior speaker by negating it. Indexical incorporation constitutes a powerful supplement to the accumulative practices of decomposition and reuse examined in earlier chapters. Chil’s symbols, though very limited, enable him simultaneously to transform what is being incorporated. Peirce’s model of the sign, which encompasses both indexical and symbolic practices, is used to diagram this process. Insofar as each next sign incorporates what it is operating upon, chains of accumulative transformations occur. Chil becomes a powerful speaker, able to produce complex propositions, by co-operatively incorporating with transformation into his own actions rich language structure created by others.

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