Linguistic Umwelten: The Polysemiotic Species

The paper formulates the concept of linguistic Umwelten out of Uexküll’s definition of Umwelt in terms of a closed unity of perceptual and agentive worlds. Linguistic Umwelten must be plural because language cannot explain the unparalleled cumulative or historical aspect of human culture, if language is abstractly construed as a faculty that is distinct from the traditions in which it manifests. Relying on authors like Peirce, Tullio De Mauro, and Marcello Barbieri, I argue that each human being dwells in a minimum of two Umwelten, namely the world of perceptual objects and at least a world of words. Employing Giorgio Prodi’s insights and the idea of distributed languaging, I translate Saussure’s circuit de la parole in terms of a Funktionskreis connecting the speaker’s effector organ with the hearer’s perception organ: individual organisms A and B, namely the speaker and the hearer, are organically entangled during their conversation and a linguistic Umwelt emerges as a pairing of A’s effectual world with B’s receptive world as much as a pairing of B’s effectual world with A’s receptive world. To show the explanatory potential of the new concept of linguistic Umwelten, I use it to account for polysemiosis (the fact that human communication always employs at least two semiotic systems). Eventually, I derive the concept of personal Umwelt from the previously introduced notions of the world of perceptual objects and the linguistic Umwelt: the personal Umwelt is the individual perceptual world as affected by the intersubjective linguistic Umwelt.