Signifying and Understanding. Reading the Works of Victoria Welby and the Significs Movement

The theory of meaning formulated and introduced by Victoria Welby for the first time in 1890s, Significis, is at the basis of the ideas of many centrally important authors in linguistics and semiotics as well as other language and communication sciences such as sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, translation theory. To limit ourselves to scholars who benefited from her ideas directly or confronted their position with hers, let us evoke such high profile scholars as Charles S. Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Charles K. Ogden, Herbert G. Wells, Ferdinand S. C. Schiller, Michel Bréal, André Lalande, the brothers Henry James and William James, together with less renowned but just as important scholars such as Frederik van Eeden, Mary Everst Boole, Ferdinand Tönnies, Giovanni Vailati, to name but a few. Welby had intense epistolary relations with each of these figures. Inaugurated by van Eeden and developed by such authors as Gerrit Mannoury, the Significs Movement in the Netherlands, important for psychologinuistics, linguistics and semantics, is directly inspired by Welby from the title itself of that movement. Her correspondence with Charles S. Peirce was published in a volume of 1977. Some of Peirce’s most innovative writings, for example those on existential graphs, are effectively letters to Lady Welby. Indirectly, approaches, methods and categories elaborated by analytical philosophy, Wittgenstein himself, anglo-american speech act theory, and pragmatics can all be largely reconducted to Victoria Lady Welby. Significs develops at the intersection between linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, ethics. This volume is a monograph on Welby as well as containing an introduction and commentary on her writings. It presents a selection from her published and unpublished writings delineating the whole course of her research through to developments with the Significs Movement in the Netherlands and still other ramifications, contemporary and subsequent to her. A selection of essays by first generation significians contributing to the Signific Movement in the Netherlands completes the collection, testifying to the progress of significs after Welby and even independently from her. This volume contributes to the reconstruction on both the historical and theoretical levels of an important period in cultural expressions, concerning not only Victoria Welby and her ideas, significant in their own right, but more extensively all those personalities that had anything to do with her significs (directly or indirectly), and were somehow influenced by her ideas (declaredly or not). The ambition of this volume is to convey a sense of the theoretical topicality of significs and its developments, in particular its thematization of the question of values and the connection with signs, meaning, and understanding, therefore with human verbal and nonverbal behaviour, with language and communication. What does it signify? is a question that people of any age or profession ask on different occasions and in different senses, as they research both the meaning of a word, expression, a proposal of some sort, and their importance or value. The pervasiveness of communication today in its multiple aspects underlines the importance of this question in both private and public life. This book does not aim to give definitive answers but to help formulate problems adequately and to avoid misunderstanding.