Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, p.47).
In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak' or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing, designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of themselves, within the system of their own symbolism" (Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23). Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous. Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity, an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd. Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987.
Luciano Canepari. L'internazione linguistica e paralinguistica,
Napoli: Liguori, 1985.
Canepari insists on prosodic elements.
The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).
Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention of semioticians because codes other than those of language are at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities in the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of how much of the language experience is continued where language is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor), Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.
Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book appeared eight years after this chapter was written.)
As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites (sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as -; ér as -
; san as -
.