Thomas Sebeok

Thomas Albert Sebeok (born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920; died December 21, 2001 in Bloomington, Indiana) was a American semiotician and linguist. He expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, coining the term "zoosemiotics" and raising some of the issues addressed by the philosophy of mind. He was also a creator of biosemiotics. As a linguist, he published several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Cheremis. His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics. He was especially renowned for his ability to bring together specialists from neighboring fields in order to generate path-breaking perspectives on, for example, the study of myth, psycholinguistics, stylistics, animal communication and biosemiotics.

Based on his field of competence, Sebeok rejected the experiments on the putative linguistic abilities of apes, such as those described by David Premack, assuming the existence of a deeper, more universal and more meaningful underlying substrate: the “semiotic function”.

In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1941, Sebeok earned a bachelor's degree at The University of Chicago. He earned a master's degree at The University of Chicago in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at Princeton University.

Sebeok was the editor-in-chief of the journal "Semiotica", the leading periodical in the field, from its establishing in 1969, until 2001. He was also the editor of several book series and path-breaking encyclopedias, including "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 100 volumes), "Current Trends in Linguistics", and the "Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics".

In the early 1980s, Sebeok composed a report for the US Office of Nuclear Waste Management titled "Communication Measures To Bridge Ten Millennia," which proposed a "folkloric relay system" aimed at preventing future civilizations from entering geographic areas contaminated by nuclear waster. The report also proposed establishing an "atomic priesthood" of physicists, anthropologists, semioticians to preserve the true nature of hazardous site.^[1]

In addition to his steady intellectual contributions to a number of fields over more than sixty years, Sebeok was a quintessential entrepreneurial scholar, organizing hundreds of international conferences and institutes, playing a key role in organizations such as the Linguistic Society of America, International Association for Semiotic Studies and the Semiotic Society of America, and in supporting the creation of linguistic and semiotics teaching programs and scholarly associations throughout the world.

After Sebeok's death, his rich book collection on biosemiotics was transferred to Estonia, and belongs to the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu.

Sebeok is survived by his wife, Jean Umiker-Sebeok, and his three daughters, Veronica Wald, Jessica A. Sebeok and Erica L. Sebeok.

Sebeok award

The "Sebeok fellow" award is the highest honor given by the Semiotic Society of America. The complete list of Sebeok fellows (with year of awarding): 1. David Savan (1992) 2. John Deely (1993) 3. Paul Bouissac (1996) 4. Jesper Hoffmeyer (2000) 5. Kalevi Kull (2003) 6. Floyd Merrell (2005) 7. Susan Petrilli (2008)

References

External links

• Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Press Release: Thomas A. Sebeok, Senior Fellow at SLIS, Passes On Obituary
• The Estonian connection by Thomas A. Sebeok
• Thomas Albert Sebeok: "Biologist Manqué" by John Deely

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