Semiotics has had a profound impact on our comprehension of a wide range of phenomena, from how animals signify and communicate, to how people read TV commercials. This series features books on semiotic theory and applications of that theory to understanding media, language, and related subjects. The series publishes scholarly monographs of wide appeal to students and interested non-specialists as well as scholars. AAS is a peer-reviewed series of international scope.

Part of a series that offers mainly linguistic and anthropological research and teaching/learning material on a region of great cultural and strategic interest and importance in the post-Soviet era.

My writing career has been, at least in this one respect, idiosyncratic: it had to mark and chart, step by step, its own peculiar champaign. My earliest papers, beginning in 1942, were technical articles in this or that domain of Uralic linguistics, ethnography, and folklore, with a sprinkling of contributions to North and South American linguistics. In 1954, my name became fecklessly associated with psycholinguistics, then, successively, with explorations in my thology, religious studies, and stylistic problems. It now takes special effort for me to even revive the circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a hefty tome on the supernatural, another, in 1958, on games, and yet another, in 1961, utilizing a computer for extensive sorting of literary information. By 1962, I had edged my way into animal communication studies. Two years after that, I first whiffled through what Gavin Ewart evocatively called "the tulgey wood of semiotics." In 1966, I published three books which tem porarily bluffed some of my friends into conjecturing that I was about to meta morphose into a historiographer of linguistics. The topmost layer in my scholarly stratification dates from 1976, when I started to compile what eventually became my "semiotic tetralogy," of which this volume may supposably be the last. In the language of "Jabberwocky," the word "tulgey" is said to connote variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, the allusion seems to me apt."

This book is designed to usher the reader into the realm of semiotic studies. It analyzes the most important approaches to semiotics as they have developed over the last hundred years out of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and biology. As a science of sign processes, semiotics investigates all types of com munication and information exchange among human beings, animals, plants, internal systems of organisms, and machines. Thus it encompasses most of the subject areas of the arts and the social sciences, as well as those of biology and medicine. Semiotic inquiry into the conditions, functions, and structures of sign processes is older than anyone scientific discipline. As a result, it is able to make the underlying unity of these disciplines apparent once again without impairing their function as specializations. Semiotics is, above all, research into the theoretical foundations of sign oriented disciplines: that is, it is General Semiotics. Under the name of Zei chenlehre, it has been pursued in the German-speaking countries since the age of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century, the systematic inquiry into the functioning of signs was superseded by historical investigations into the origins of signs. This opposition was overcome in the first half of the twentieth century by American Semiotic as well as by various directions of European structuralism working in the tradition of Semiology. Present-day General Semiot ics builds on all these developments."

My writing career has been, at least in this one respect, idiosyncratic: it had to mark and chart, step by step, its own peculiar champaign. My earliest papers, beginning in 1942, were technical articles in this or that domain of Uralic linguistics, ethnography, and folklore, with a sprinkling of contributions to North and South American linguistics. In 1954, my name became fecklessly associated with psycholinguistics, then, successively, with explorations in my thology, religious studies, and stylistic problems. It now takes special effort for me to even revive the circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a hefty tome on the supernatural, another, in 1958, on games, and yet another, in 1961, utilizing a computer for extensive sorting of literary information. By 1962, I had edged my way into animal communication studies. Two years after that, I first whiffled through what Gavin Ewart evocatively called "the tulgey wood of semiotics." In 1966, I published three books which tem porarily bluffed some of my friends into conjecturing that I was about to meta morphose into a historiographer of linguistics. The topmost layer in my scholarly stratification dates from 1976, when I started to compile what eventually became my "semiotic tetralogy," of which this volume may supposably be the last. In the language of "Jabberwocky," the word "tulgey" is said to connote variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, the allusion seems to me apt.

This book is designed to usher the reader into the realm of semiotic studies. It analyzes the most important approaches to semiotics as they have developed over the last hundred years out of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and biology. As a science of sign processes, semiotics investigates all types of com munication and information exchange among human beings, animals, plants, internal systems of organisms, and machines. Thus it encompasses most of the subject areas of the arts and the social sciences, as well as those of biology and medicine. Semiotic inquiry into the conditions, functions, and structures of sign processes is older than anyone scientific discipline. As a result, it is able to make the underlying unity of these disciplines apparent once again without impairing their function as specializations. Semiotics is, above all, research into the theoretical foundations of sign oriented disciplines: that is, it is General Semiotics. Under the name of Zei chenlehre, it has been pursued in the German-speaking countries since the age of the Enlightenment. During the nineteenth century, the systematic inquiry into the functioning of signs was superseded by historical investigations into the origins of signs. This opposition was overcome in the first half of the twentieth century by American Semiotic as well as by various directions of European structuralism working in the tradition of Semiology. Present-day General Semiot ics builds on all these developments."

Although semiotics has, in one guise or another, ftourished uninterruptedly since pre Socratic times in the West, and important semiotic themes have emerged and devel oped independently in both the Brahmanie and Buddhistic traditions, semiotics as an organized undertaking began to 100m only in the 1960s. Workshops materialized, with a perhaps surprising spontaneity, over much ofEurope-Eastern and Western and in North America. Thereafter, others quickly surfaced almost everywhere over the litera te globe. Different places strategically allied themselves with different lega eies, but all had a common thrust: to aim at a general theory of signs, by way of a description of different sign systems, their comparative analysis, and their classifi cation. More or less permanent confederations were forged with the most diverse academic disciplines, and amazingly varied frameworks were devised-suited to the needs of the times and the sites-to carry the work of consolidation forward. Bit by bit, mutually supportive international networks were put together. Today, it can truly be asserted that semiotics has become a global enterprise. This, of course, is far from saying that the map is uniform or even that world-wide homogeneity is in the least desirable. While our conjoint ultimate goal remains steadily in focus, the multiplicity of avenues available for its realization is inherent in the advent ure of the search itself."

A Critical Anthology of TwoWay Communication with Man.

"Portraits of Linguists" is a standard biographical work in the history and theory of linguistics and a resource for all scholars of 18th, 19th and early 20th-century Western linguistics. Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, this text contains articles by eminent scholars in English, French and German. Ninety-one biographies are featured, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Sir William Jones and Max Muller. They constitute a mass of information on the leading figures in linguistics, and include bibliographical information in addition to revealing the authors' thoughts on the various schools of linguistics. Arranged chronologically by subjects' year of birth, this two-volume work is also indexed at the end of volume 2 and is a valuable storehouse of information on the seminal figures in the mainstream of Western linguistics.