Thomas Sebeok

Thomas Albert Sebeok (born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920; died December 21, 2001 in Bloomington, Indiana) was an 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 linguist he published several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Cheremis.

Based on his field of competence Sebeok tended to reject 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.

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 the book series "Approaches to Semiotics" (over 100 volumes), and the "Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics".

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

ebeok 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)

External links

* [http://www.slis.indiana.edu/news/story.php?story_id=364 Indiana University School of Library and Information Science Press Release: Thomas A. Sebeok, Senior Fellow at SLIS, Passes On] Obituary
* [http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss/articles/sebeok_26.htm The Estonian connection] by Thomas A. Sebeok
* [http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/sebeok.html Thomas Albert Sebeok: "Biologist Manqué"] by John Deely