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SEMIOTICS: THE BASICS
to him. In Peirce ‘there is no reflection at all, to speak of, on the
system to which any individual sign belongs or on the process that
produces it . . . His interest is neither in the construction of the
message nor in the larger code from which its components are drawn’
(Bruss 1978, 93). The Peircean model does not incorporate a code
at all. Peirce’s influence is nevertheless evident in another key aspect
of Jakobson’s model of communication.
All codes are social in the sense that their conventions have
no existence apart from their application in the social world, but as
we have seen Saussure declined his own challenge to study ‘the role
of signs as part of social life’ and proceeded to exclude social life
from his monolithic linguistic code. Jakobson’s reference to ‘speech
communities’ is one indicator that he did not share Saussure’s desire
to exclude reference to the social world. However, his model does
not account for acts of communication purely in terms of encoding
and decoding. Crucially, it highlighted the importance not only of
systemic codes but also of the contexts involved. Jakobson noted
that ‘there are two references which serve to interpret the sign – one
to the code, and the other to the context’ (Jakobson 1956, 75; cf.
1963b, 114), and insisted that ‘it is not enough to know the code in
order to grasp the message . . . you need to know the context’
(Jakobson 1953, 233). We have already seen in Chapter 4 that the
identification of irony requires reference to contextual factors in the
form of perceived intent and truth status. Like ‘meaning’, ‘context’
can be a slippery term and as a linguist Jakobson was initially wary
of trespassing too far beyond the notion of linguistic contexts into
the more philosophical territory of referentiality. For instance, he
noted that ‘truth values . . . as far as they are . . . “extralinguistic
entities,” obviously exceed the bounds of . . . linguistics in general’.
Nevertheless, unlike Saussure, it was clear that he would not seek
to exclude from his concerns ‘the question of relations between the
word and the world’ (Jakobson 1960, 351). ‘Speech events’ take
place in the social world, and Jakobson was a linguist who emphasized
the social functions of language. He quickly recognized the
importance of both ‘the place occupied by the given messages within
the context of surrounding messages . . . and . . . the relation of the
given message to the universe of discourse’ (Jakobson 1968, 697).