La semiosis: un regalo de Charles Sanders Peirce para el estudioso del lenguaje

Abstract

Here we sustain that Percian semiotics is a field of interest for language scholars in general but even more particularly for those who deal with intonation. In the area of supraseg-mental phonology, the theories possessing higher prestige still stem form generativist or struc-turalist focuses. They are rooted in the dual perception of the linguistic sign as proposed by Saussure, and, in my opinion, do not manage to offer a satisfactory intonation theory. In this article a new starting point is proposed: Charles S. Peirce’s semiotics. Since this perspective takes into consideration the «interpretant» element, and conceives meaning as a process like semiosis, it helps to clear the way to understand the role that intonation has in communication. We attempt to demonstrate that this return to Peirce is possible and desirable after the rereading of Teoría y análisis de la entonación by Cantero Serena (2002). One considers that intonation is a triadic event, that is dynamic, complex and that it acquires meaning from the context in which it appears.