Guest column

So often, in language origins discussions, the ‘target to be explained in evolutionary terms is ‘language’ in the sense of the highly abstracted and idealized system that typically constitutes the object analyzed in linguistics. Although, indeed, an account of the development of such a system is needed, if the circumstances and manner of utterance production by actual human beings in concrete occasions of interaction is overlooked, important pieces of the puzzle we are trying to understand will almost certainly be missing. Two issues of importance with respect to this are outlined in what follows. […]

Semiotics has to do with texts, that is, with the inscription, transformation and interpretation of organized sets of signs. In this contribution I shall contend that the genealogy of lexicography represents an ideal standpoint to address a central issue for semiotics, namely, how the manipulation of signs and meanings may determine the shaping of cultural objects. I shall begin by introducing the revolution that lexicography undertook during the nineteen century, discussing why this process required the availability of a specific set of concepts, as the one of “meaning” as something mutable and historical, and then how it led up to the emergence of new techniques of the self, to the coming into being of a new kind of people (the professional lexicographer) and to the introduction of new practices of sign-observation and inscription. I shall then consider how the lexicographer, being entitled to select certain definitions instead of others, acquired the power to fix the meaning of terms involving moral and religious content (“marriage”, “conversion”, etc.), to influence scientific and philosophical dispute (defining key-concepts as “continuity”, “belief”, “soul”, “ether”, etc.) and to impact the culture of distant populations by exporting new signs into their language (as the word “God”). Finally, I shall confront the historical development of lexicography with the project of the dictionary of Newspeak that George Orwell described in 1984. […]