Signs, language and miscommunication: an essay on train wrecks

The movement of trains in the United States is coordinated by the use of a small number of standard codes of operating rules and variations upon them as well as various systems of signs, including railroad signs directed at railroad employees and highway signs directed at pedestrians and motorists. These signs, their intended meanings and the responses appropriate to them have been established by railroads and railroad associations, as well as federal, state and local agencies and laws. Nearly 200 years of accidents involving railroads has revealed that the interpretation of both train operating rules and signs associated with the railroad does not always follow the prescribed meanings. Understanding the reasons for these interpretations at variance with the prescribed meanings has been the object of extensive research over the past two decades and what has been learned has considerable importance for understanding all manner of signs, including linguistic signs.

► Linguists erroneously assume linguistic sign interpretation involves reversed production processes, decoding what was encoded.
► Railroad accidents reveal railroad sign interpretation doesn’t always follow meanings assigned during production.
► People’s understanding of railroad sign meanings are determined by key factors which are discussed in the article.
► When a sign matters to someone, the interpretation matters and a multitude of factors will be taken into account.
► When a sign does not matter—as in most examples in linguistic treatises—any interpretation is as good as any other.