69249454-chandler-semiotics

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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
print more than three centuries earlier. Michel de Montaigne wrote in
1580: ‘Speaking is half his that speaks, and half his that hears; the last
of which ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its motion
and rebound. Like tennis players, he that receives the ball, shifts and
prepares, according as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and
according to the stroke it self’ (Essays, trans. Charles Cotton, 1685:
‘Of experience’ III, 13). The anticipation involved is clearly ‘active’:
you could never return a serve if you simply stood still waiting for the
ball. Saussure’s ‘speech circuit’ was based on the notion that comprehension
on the part of the listener is a kind of mirror of the speaker’s
initial process of expressing a thought (ibid., 11–13; Harris 1987,
22–5, 204–18). The shortcomings of this isomorphism would perhaps
have been clearer if Saussure had been attempting to account for a
broader range of forms of communication than speech alone. A
dyslexic student once asked me, ‘Why is it so important to read so fast
when the writer spent so long writing it’ The answer, of course, is
that a significant part of the power of the written word lies in this asymmetry
(for the shortcomings of the mirror model for the medium of
film, see Larry Gross’s critique in Worth 1981, 9–11). Given the
prominence of the concept of the code in Saussurean-inspired semiotics,
it is also surprising that in Saussure’s model there is only the
briefest of allusions to the speaker’s use of ‘the code provided by the
language’, together with the implicit assumption that a fixed code is
shared – a very monolithic conception (Saussure 1983, 14; Harris
1987, 216, 230).
In 1960 another structuralist linguist – Roman Jakobson
(drawing on work by Bühler dating from the 1930s) – proposed a
model of interpersonal verbal communication which moved beyond
the basic transmission model of communication (see Figure 6.3;
cf. Eco 1976, 141). Using the somewhat programmatic language
mentioned earlier, Jakobson outlines what he regards as the six
‘constitutive factors . . . in any act of verbal communication’ thus:
The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be operative
the message requires a context referred to (‘referent’ in another,
somewhat ambivalent, nomenclature), seizable by the
addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized, a