The Semiotics Of Walker Percy Through Systemic Functional Linguistics

Edelman (1992: 245):

[Walker] Percy was aware that generative or transformational grammar did not explain language and that it was merely a formal description of competence: No relationship is necessary between this collection of algorithms and what goes on in a person's head. He also understood that individual awareness is symbolic as well as intentional. Higher-order consciousness, as I have called it, is a "knowing with" (con-sciousness). Percy faulted both behaviouristic and semiotic approaches to language that do not pay attention to the intersubjective character of any linguistic act. He also faulted the philosophy of phenomenology for "leaving out the other guy." He insisted that all symbolic exchanges involving meaning show a tetradic relationship between symbol, object, and at least two humans. In a dense and resonant sentence, Percy put it thus: "The act of consciousness is the intending of the object as being what it is for both of us under the auspices of a symbol." He describes Helen Keller's rapture when she learned that water was "water" and her urgent desire to know then what other things "were." Language, as Percy put it creates a world, not just an environment. That world is loaded with intentionality, with projections, with feelings, with prejudice, and with affection.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistic Theory, the 'intersubjective character of any linguistic act' and 'the other guy' are modelled in terms of the interpersonal metafunction of language, through which interactants enact themselves and intersubjective relations as meaning.

'All symbolic exchanges' involve instances of expressions (symbols) of meaning construed of experience of the non-semiotic domain.  Helen Keller's rapture derived from her identification of perceptual meaning tokens with linguistic meaning values.

The world is meaning construed of experience of the non-semiotic domain by processes of consciousness, mental and verbal.