Semiosis as Form of Life: Interactions in a Signed Conversation

Abstract

Face-to-face interactions can be characterized as a privileged domain for the study of the emergence of semiotic processes conceived of as a form of life. From the analysis of parts of a conversation carried out in Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), we have explored the idea that all organisms inhabit one another’s actions (INGOLD, 2000), throughout dynamic processes in which meaning emerges as a means to advance the activities of life itself. This dwelling perspective is manifested through co-operative actions, defined as the reuse, with transformations, of elements available in the ongoing interaction or retrievable from the interactants’ past interactions (GOODWIN, 2018). In the course of a face-to-face interaction, the co-operative actions are defined in terms of the mutual co-constitution of the activities of different body parts of one of the interactants (intra-embodied actions), with the synchronized activities of the bodies of the other interactant(s) (inter-embodied actions), leading to the emergence of ever novel meanings, which have a local, temporal, embodied and contingent nature, as any form of life.