I Think I Am a Verb: More Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs

Abstract

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 circumstances under which I came to publish, in 1955, a hefty tome on 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 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 last. In language of Jabberwocky, word tulgey is said to connote variability and evasiveness. This notwithstanding, allusion seems to me apt.

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