符號與言談：比較詩學的實踐（簡體書）

Professor Vachek is right about the functional divisionof labour in a cultured community and about the writtenlanguages growing autonomy from the spoken one becauseof its characteristics of stability, preservability, and closer linkswith the standard languages. All these are empirically true.However, there still seems to be room for elaboration on theconceptual level. What is at work here is the familiar but alreadyproblematised classical concept of linguistic sign which servesonly the secondary function of representing or constructingreality at the expense of languages irreducible originality.Furthermore, we need to account for the semiotic process oftranscoding, from writing mapping onto speech to writingmapping onto reality, i.e. from the second-order to the first-order semiosis. Clearly, there should be qualitative changes onboth the expression and the content levels. Such a structuralistcritique would curiously put Vachek in his enemies camp-Iam referring to those who have denied writing a proper place inlinguistic studies, including Saussure and Jakobson.From the perspective of sociolinguistics, Professor Vacheksobservation is true and his argument valid if they are confinedto a synchronistic phase close to our times-which incidentallyconforms to the reorientation of linguistics proposed byMathesius and Havranek in the late 20s and early 30s after theSaussurian revolution. But the assumption that reality givesrise to speech and speech gives rise to writing is not a languageuniversal, let alone a semiotic one. At other times and in otherplaces, people learn how to do things with words differently.Theoretically speaking, there is no reason why there cannot be a"primitive" society in which writing and speech have developedindependently of each other before they get married out ofconvenience. In such a society, writing, like speech, has been afirst-order semiotic system from the very beginning. I am notsaying that literacy is born together with speech, such a bizarrestory would be unthinkable to homo loquens, although therehave been several attempts at it, by linguists as well as creativewriters.