Semiotics and discourse analysis

Dialogues between Semiotics and Discourse Analysis

The second branch of general semiotics, critical logic, deals specifically with the relations between signs and their objects. "It is […] the formal science of the conditions of the truth of representations" (CP 2.229). And, the third branch of general semiotics, speculative rhetoric, aims to "study the necessary conditions of the transmission of meaning by signs from mind to mind and from one state of mind to another" (CP 1.444). Peirce, unlike in traditional rhetoric, extends his definition beyond the dialogues between speaker and listener and includes the analysis of inner dialogues in the thinking of individuals, thinking as the language of the soul, as in Plato's formulation. The sequence of our thoughts is a dialogical discourse because thinking is a process that "always proceeds in the form of a dialogue -a dialogue between different phases of the ego" (CP 4.6). Santaella and Nöth (2004) understand that speculative rhetoric is also a semiotic theory of communication, as it studies "the formal conditions of force of symbols, or their power of appealing to a mind" (CP 1.559). In addition, Nöth and Gurick (2011) also note that, since the beginning of the 20th century, under the influence of Carnap and Morris (1938), the Peircean trivium served as an inspiration in linguistics and in the philosophy of language for the establishment of a less ambitious trivium-usually without recognition of its Peircean roots. Syntax, semantics and pragmatics constitute three branches of contemporary linguistics that clearly correspond to Peirce's trivium. The expression discourse analysis is not part of the Peircean technical vocabulary, who prefers the hermeneutic term discourse interpretation or sign interpretation or reasoning (NÖTH, 2016). Peirce says: "if, by reasoning [...] we mean 'any process by which knowledge already possessed by a mind is led to greater knowledge', [...] we recognise that any interpretation of a sign is reasoning" (MS 667). Nöth (2016) highlights three characteristics of a semiotic discourse analysis: the self-generation of interpretations, its iconicity (see column 03 in Table 01 above) and the dialogism of discourse. The first characteristic refers to the listener or interpreter. Peirce again innovates when he affirms that it is not the interpreter who creates an interpretation, but it is the discourse that is interpreted, since it is the sign itself that creates its interpretation in a semiotic process. The whole purpose of a sign is to be interpreted in another sign; and his whole claim lies in the special character he attributes to that interpretation: "When a sign determines an interpretation of itself in another sign, it produces an effect outside itself, a physical effect [...] in an indisputable sense" (CP 8.191). The second semiotic characteristic of the discourse is revealed in the iconicity and indexicality (see column 03 in Table 01 above) of the process of its interpretation. Discourse consists essentially of symbolic signs, but their interpretation process is built from iconic and indexical signs. Symbols cannot produce interpretations because they are too abstract. " […] it is by icons only that we really reason, and abstract statements are valueless in reasoning except so far as they aid us to construct diagrams" (CP 4.127). Symbols, indexes and icons are the three types of signs equally "indispensable in all reasoning" (CP 1.369), but diagrams, "the icons of intelligible relations" (CP 4.531), are the signs which make speech transparent for understanding and guarantee clarity of reasoning. The third semiotic characteristic of discourse as an aspect linked to the dialogical nature of reasoning and thinking in general. Nöth (2016) reiterates the connections between speculative rhetoric and dialogism in Peirce. Any speech and any reasoning are dialogical, even when there is only one author. Even thought, which looks like an inner monologue, is a kind of internal conversation. Peirce characterizes thought as a dialogue in which the "self" seeks the consent of a "deeper" self (CP 6.338) and this is an anticipation of similar concepts that later appeared in Bakhtin's discursive semantics.

Nöth 2016also emphasizes the breadth and scope of the concept of the sign in Peirce, whose definition is not restricted to words, propositions, arguments, signs or symptoms, but also includes books, poems, essays, short stories, novels, prayers, plays, operas, newspaper articles, scientific reports and mathematical tests, etc. Therefore, a sign may be a constituent part of a more complex sign, but all parts are also rightful signs. "All words, books and other conventional signs are symbols" (CP 2.292). Libraries, literature, language or anything else composed of words are examples of signs. Even man as such is a sign, because "[…] the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life is a train of thoughts, proves that man is a sign" (CP 5.314). At the same time, the entire universe is a sign, a "great symbol of God's purpose, working out its conclusions in living realities" (CP 5.119).

Queiroz, Emmeche and El-Hani (2010) analyse another important aspect in Peirce's dialogue with post-modernity and highlight how the plasticity of Peircean semiotics fits into several models of research on meaning in different areas of knowledge involving research today about language and communication between sentient and non-sentient beings. Peirce defined semiosis (signification process) as "an irreducible triadic relationship between sign-object-interpretant (S-O-I)" (see Table 01 above) (PEIRCE, 1998, p. 487). The authors point out that one of the most notable features of Peirce's theory of signs is its dynamic nature. Its focus is not on content, essence or substance, but on the dynamic relationships between signs. As a scientist interested in natural processes, Peirce conceived his semiosis basically as a process in which the triads are systematically linked to each other in order to form chains. Table 01 above shows how categories and classes are combined, interchanged and exchanged to generate 10 signs from 09 classes, according to the perspective of the sign, the object and the interpretant. It is important to distinguish between the interpreter, the system that interprets the sign, and the interpretant, the meaning of the sign. The interpreter is described by Peirce as a "quasi-mind" (CP 4.536), a description that requires a clear recognition that Peirce's broad concept of mind treats language as an ability present not only in beings endowed with rational intelligence. Biosemiosis, for example, can be found in the complex cell transcription machinery that synthesizes RNA from a DNA chain or in a membrane receptor that recognizes a certain hormone or an in ant that recognizes a leaf among several other objects in a garden (QUEIROZ; EMMECHE; EL-HANI, 2010).

Semiotics and Literature: dialogues between Peirce and Pignatari

Among the most fruitful dialogues between Peirce and post-modernity, we find the insightful contributions of Décio Pignatari 2 on the relationship between semiotics and literature. Pignatari, poet, publicist, writer, translator and semiotician, analyses the importance of semiotics for the study of literature, since it transits between the universes of textual and non-textual signs. Semiotics, "a science that helps to read the world" (PIGNATARI, 2004, p. 9), allows the understanding of the non-verbal sign universe, as well as the very nature of verbal signs in relation to other signs. Peirce conceived his semiotic theory as a study of language as logic, the result of a labour of more than 40 years that, unfortunately, has gone a long time without recognition. His semiotics was developed from a dialectic logic, unlike Saussure, who defended an Aristotelian positivist logic. Differently from saussurean restrictive dichotomies (signifier/ signified), Peirce develops his work based on a complex triad (sign, object and interpretant) and its multiple interlacements and possibilities.

Pignatari 2004points out that Peircean semiotics begins by overcoming the classic conflict between form and content by including the pragmatic notion of interpretant, allowing for a better understanding of the processes of signification in language. Peirce describes the icon as a sign of the possible qualities of verbal and non-verbal universes, the index is described as a sign of the relations between verbal and non-verbal objects, whereas the symbol is used primarily in the organisation of verbal systems -it is the sign of generalisation and the norm. Certain signs "tend to favour discreet and specific forms and articulations" (2004, p. 113). The icon tends to create paramorphisms articulated by parataxisparonomasia and puns articulated by coordination. The symbol, on the other hand, requires metonymy organised by hypotaxis -relationships and substitutions articulated by subordination. Pignatari points to a predominance and a greater prestige of the verbal written code over other codes and attributes this phenomenon to the invention of the press during the Industrial Revolution. The mechanised word strongly contributed to establish the hegemonic code of the written word as a translator of the other codes. However, at the same time, the industry began to peripherally generate means of producing iconic, non-verbal signs from the end of the 17th century such as lithography, photography, metallic structures (bridges, towers and skyscrapers), the phonograph, and culminating in the emergence of new technologies such as cinema, radio, television and holography. Today, it is the written language that retreats before the advance of iconic codes and other sign systems. Machado de Assis and Edgar A. Poe worked in typography and journalism related activities; Raul Pompéia was a writer, cartoonist, and draftsman; Manuel Bandeira and Mário de Andrade studied music; Oswald de Andrade had connections with the cinema; João Cabral's poetry includes elements of architecture and painting; and the exploits of Poesia Concreta 3 are already "deliberately intersignic" (2004, p. 115). 4 Pignatari (2004) understands that, although under a verbal disguise, all poetry and literature are in fact intersignic and that the symbolic function in poetry, as Jakobson 5 has well observed, depends on a superposition of the paradigm over the syntagma.

Signs can be associated by similarity, by analogy, that is, around a paradigmatic axis, characterized as icons. They can also be associated by contiguity around a syntagmatic axis and represented as symbols. The poetic phenomenon consists in the transformation of symbols into icons or a more iconic treatment of the verbal sign. Only semiotics is able to break the linearity of speech and reveal its nature and logic in the form of an iconic-diagrammatic syntagma or phrase. Pignatari's statements about the close links between semiotics and literature are further illustrated through the semiotic cracking of the ciphers and encryptions present in Poe's works such as The Gold Bug. Pignatari (2004) draws a striking analogy between the manual composition of words and phrases in the work of the typographer and the logical-aesthetic composition in the writer's craft. Recalling that Poe, besides being a writer, poet and literary critic, was also an editor and, therefore, familiarised with typographic processes. His poetic function is pervaded by anagrammatic processes, as in the short story William Wilson (I am Wilson), and hypogrammatic as in the poem The Raven. We owe to Jakobson's extraordinary analysis the discovery that Raven is the mirror image of never, as the single and repeated response of the grim bird to the constant questions of its tortured interlocutor.

Pignatari attributes to David Hume the distinction between two basic forms of association: contiguity and similarity. However, he observes that the association by contiguity receives a privileged treatment for creating an illusion mainly in the western linguistic systems due to the greater prestige of the written word. The classical Aristotelian logic itself is linear, that is, a logic based on the Greek language and organised by contiguity. Our alphabet, "the most powerful logical machine, a discrete and highly abstract source of signals, […]" (PIGNATARI, 2004, p. 166), is an open system of combinatorial permutations that allows the formation of words syntagmatically, linked essentially by logical principles. The predicates, in turn, are organised hierarchically by connecting elements, such as subordinate or coordinating conjunctions (hypotaxis) or, alternatively, by simply juxtaposed clauses and without conjunctions (parataxis).

Although the western mind leans towards the contiguity of verbal language and the word is taken as the central code that offers the best translation of the sign, Pignatari defends the possibility that there is another type of logic organised by similarity and argues that European semiology is still very much linked to semantics, which prevents a clearer demarcation between semantics and pragmatics. The author also points to unavoidable differences in orientation on the relationship between semiology and linguistics. While Roland Barthes states that the former is a branch of the latter, Cobley (2001) argues that it is linguistics that is part of semiology and justifies his claim based on the fact that we need a theory of the sign capable of covering the almost unimaginable extent different types of sign activity present in nature, far beyond the narrow limits of the natural languages investigated by linguistics.

The core of Pignatari's (2004) argument about the affinities and symmetries between semiotics and literature is in the operations and interactions between Hume's paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Peirce calls them "primary principles of association" (CP 7.391) and defines similarity (paradigmatic axis) "as a mode of association by the inward nature of ideas and of mind" (CP 7.392). And Peirce defines contiguity (syntagmatic axis) "as the suggestion by an idea of another associated with it, not by the nature of thought, but by experience or the course of life" (CP 7.391). Peirce thus maintains that contiguous association depends on how our direct and immediate experiences are organised as parts within a whole. The process of association by similarity, on the other hand, is much more complex because it involves the perception and organisation of essences, qualities and sensations in independent blocks, "that which is equal to itself" 6 and not part of something. Similarity association requires the use of memory and reflection to remember, compare and contrast. "All the suggestions of pure mathematics, of which there is a vast body, are associations by resemblance" (CP 7.392).

The table below presents different perspectives, possibilities and combinations of the interactions between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Pignatari (2004, p. 186).

The processes of language signification are built from the joint or alternate work of these two axes. However, Pignatari maintains in his analyses that the relations between semiotics and literature are predominantly organised according to similarity paradigms.

Semiotics and Pragmatics: dialogues between Peirce, Austin and Grice

We find this particular section of great interest for fellow discourse analysts because it contributes with significant historical references for our conceptual map and helps to point out the origins and trace the movements of what we call today the Linguistic Turn in ordinary philosophy. In addition, according to Rorty (1967;1992), besides ordinary language philosophy, the Linguistic Turn also includes Ideal Language. Bernstein (2010), Hookway (2011), Misak (2017) and Silva (2021) argue that a Pragmatic Turn preceded and informed the development of the Linguistic Turn and that the influence of Peirce can be seen in the works of the later Wittgenstein and other ordinary language philosophers. Due to the limited space of this paper, we turn our attention to Grice and Austin. Pietarinen (2006) argues that many of the pragmatic notions that are commonly attributed to Grice or are related to his work on pragmatics, such as assertion, implicatures, cooperation, shared knowledge and conversational strategies, have their origins in the logic or theory of signs of Peirce. Both Grice and Peirce, states Pietarinen, based their theories on normative rationality, antipsychologism and on the relevance of assertions. With respect to the post-Gricean era of pragmatics, theories of relevance can be seen as having been guided, albeit unconsciously, by Peirce's pragmatic agenda.

In this dialogue between Peirce, Austin and Grice, Pietarinen (2006) serves as a mediator and asks whether Grice, recognised for his fundamental contributions to the pragmatic discipline, would not have developed his work from Peirce's original formulations. The central concept about the relationship between assertion and energy is a recurring theme in the thinking of these three authors. Peirce's semiotics, Austin's theory of speech acts and Grice's pragmatics describe orbits around this logical axis. For Peirce, each statement has a degree of energy, that is, there is no assertion or judgment unless there is someone for whom such statements or judgments can be accepted as propositions. If that someone accepts a proposition, it becomes a judgment, and if that one is accepted, we will finally have the assertion of a proposition. Peirce thus describes the logical process of signification in the energy exchanges that organise discourse between speakers and listeners. Pietarinen (2006) interprets Peirce's categorical statement about the energy degree of the statements as a definite and meaningful idea. The act of affirming or asserting must be considered analogous to actions between objects in a physical sense. Assertions are statements about the validity of a given situation, system or model and exert a kind of force on the listener, mainly because such validity is mutually testable and verifiable. Thus, statements become binding because they represent commitments and assume responsibility. Both Peirce and Grice, understand that the different energy levels in the assertions determine their usefulness, success and failures in the contexts of language exchanges. Pietarinen (2006) further argues that, in the specific case of assertions, Peirce anticipated several formulations that appeared much later in speech acts theory.

Including Austin in the dialogue, Pietarinen reports that Austin found Peirce's semiotics to be overly ambitious and vague: "With all his 66 sign divisions, Peirce does not, I believe, distinguish between a phrase and a statement" (PIETARINEN, 1960, p. 87). Austin embarked on his own project to develop a more practical and formal performative version of his theory of speech acts in the form of a dichotomy between illocutionary and perlocutionary forces. These notions of force, beyond any semantic analysis of meaning, made it possible to characterise pragmatics as an autonomous discipline separate from the aims of semantics. Pietarinen (2006) opportunely clarifies that Peirce developed, decades earlier, a broader and more in-depth discussion of the relationship between language and energy in terms of its effects and consequences and assumed commitments and responsibilities.

Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment [...] and a judgment is something that ripens in the mind, [...] the ripe judgment, at least, involves an element closely analogous to assertion. But what is that? [...] we can select for examination a very formal assertion [...] If a man desires to assert anything very solemnly, he takes steps to go before a magistrate or notary and take a binding oath to it. Taking an oath [...] is not mere saying, but is doing. The law, I believe, calls it an "act". It would be followed by very real effects, in case the substance of what is asserted should be proved untrue. This ingredient, the assuming of responsibility, which is so prominent in solemn assertion, must be present in every genuine assertion. For clearly, every assertion involves an effort to make the intended interpreter believe what is asserted, to which end a reason for believing it must be furnished. (CP 5.546, italics and bold in the original).

As we know, this concept of asserting is doing forms the backbone of Austin's speech act theory: "We were to consider, you will remember, some cases and senses (only some, Heaven help us!) in which to say something is to do something; or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something" (AUSTIN, 1955, p. 12, italics in the original).

As for Grice, recognised in the late 20th century for having virtually redefined the pragmatic discipline, Pietarinen (2006) warns us that this historical mistake does not take into account Peirce's legacy. Pietarinen supports his argument based on two passages. In the first, he draws our attention to the following statement by Peirce:

[...] honest people, when not joking, intend to make the meaning of their words determinate, so that there shall be no latitude of interpretation at all. [...] the character of their meaning consists in the implications and non-implications of their words;

and they intend to fix what is implied and what is not implied. They believe that they succeed in doing so, and if their chat is about the theory of numbers, perhaps they may. But the further their topics are from such precis, or "abstract," subjects, the less possibility is there of such precision of speech. (CP 5.447). Pietarinen (2006) contrasts the above passage with Grice's text:

I wish to represent a certain subclass of unconventional implicatures, which I will call conversational implicatures, as being essentially connected to certain general characteristics of the discourse; […] Our conversations usually do not consist of a succession of disconnected comments […] they are characteristically cooperative efforts; and each participant recognises in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes. […] We can then formulate an approximate general principle that participants (ceteris paribus) are expected to observe, namely: make your conversational contribution as expected, at the appropriate time, within the logic of the information exchange in which you are involved. We can call this the Cooperative Principle (GRICE, 1989, p. 26). Pietarinen (2006) highlights the affinities between the two quotes. Both Peirce and Grice attribute the success of communication to the common purposes shared between the speaker and the interlocutor, who are responsible for starting a process of analysing the meanings of a sign. In addition, the notion of honest people defended by Peirce seems to be the origin of Grice's quality maxim, consisting of principles such as: "Try to make a contribution that is true", "Don't say what you believe to be false" and "Don't say what you lack adequate evidence for" (GRICE, 1989, p. 27). Pietarinen (2006) notes yet another intriguing identification between Grice's pragmatics and Peirce's pragmatism. In Utterer's meaning and intentions, Grice refers to a three-way characterisation of correlation modes, which he describes as the terms "iconic", "associative" and "conventional" (GRICE, 1989, p. 113). This categorisation of Grice's corresponds almost exactly to the categoriology of the sign in relation to its object in Peirce, where the terms used are icon, index and symbol (column 03, Table 01 above). The author, however, considers the possibility that the convergences between Peirce and Grice's thinking occurred for the simple reason that both shared mutual interests in the processes of signification in language. Nevertheless, he argues that there is evidence of a more direct influence by Peirce on Grice, including the use of typically Peircean terms as in the case of interpretant, which appears 11 times in Grice's text (1989, p. 34, 36, 131, 301, 302). Although the term interpretant is of Peircean origin, Grice does not quote Peirce and does not reveal where the term was taken from. Pietarinen (2006) considers the hypothesis that part of the terms used above by Grice came from Morris, an author clearly inspired by Peirce's theories, but not quoted by Grice either.

We subscribe to Pietarinen's thesis that perhaps this confluence developed in the direction of Peirce's pragmatism and, later, taken up by Morris and Grice's pragmatics, point to a common origin, this time duly cited by Grice (1989), that is, Kant's treatises on moral philosophy. This view is also shared by Koyama (2011) who defines Peirce and other ordinary language philosophers as Neo-Kantians. Grice's implicatures, assumptions and maxims seem to have emanated from Kantian concepts of rationality and reason. The principle of honesty in Grice, for example, reminds one of Kant's categorical imperative as a compass and moral justification for the need for a pragmatics of communication built around ethics in discourse.

Final considerations

For Nöth (2000), Peirce is better known today as the creator of general semiotics than a researcher concerned with questions of language. Ironically, the growing advances in the fields of cognitive linguistics, diachronic linguistics, linguistic semantics and pragmatic and textual linguistics are largely due to his insights. The problem is that Peirce or the Peircespeak needs first to be translated and then discussed within familiar vocabularies, to use Rorty's expression. Thus, the purpose of this paper was to rescue and establish dialogues between Pierce and postmodern thinking to (re)discover bridges between different disciplines that, despite their different agendas, contexts and circumstances, share common interests such as the relations of meaning and language. Bernstein (2010) states that the conventional divisions that separate different movements and disciplines often obscure common themes of investigation. However, when we pay attention to what different thinkers are saying and doing, a new panorama emerges where it is possible to identify what Dewey expertly called "continuities and relations" (1998a, p. ix). We believe that it makes more sense to try to understand Peirce in comparison and contrast to divergent approaches. Noth (2000) analyses Peircean categoriology in contrast to what we currently call discourse analysis and describes the main characteristics of Peirce's semiotic approach. Pignatari (2004) uses Saussurean dichotomies to explain Peircean trichotomies and highlights the predominance of the paradigmatic axis (similarity) over the syntagmatic axis (contiguity) and, therefore, of iconicity and indexicality, in the construction of symbolism in literature. Pietarinen (2006) reveals a significant dialogue between Peircean semiotics and Austin's speech acts theory and Grice's pragmatics. This is the science that Fiorin (2008) called participation, not exclusion regime. The participation regime is based on the comparison between the equal and the unequal to identify convergences and confluences that, in the final analysis, can contribute to the development of new, better-founded categories of semioticpragmatic discourse analysis which are required for the study of language as a more encompassing phenomenon that goes well beyond natural languages.

Table 01 : Categories and Classes of Signs

Table 02 . Sign and its Axes