Signs unsigned and meanings not meant: linguistic theory and hypothetical, simulated, imitation and meaningless language

Standard linguistic theory assumes that meanings are attached to linguistic artefacts by some semantic component during their production yet prior to their material realization, and it is those meanings that are decoded by the recipient/interpreter of the realized signs according to the same mental machinery/semantic component inside their brain. Rather than theorizing a single sign that is encoded, materialized, transmitted and then decoded, integrationism assumes that signs are created not only by speakers/writers but also by hearers/readers. This paper looks at linguistic artefacts that are not created to mean anything but to do something. The successful accomplishment of those actions depends entirely upon the recipient recreating them as meaningful linguistic signs, no matter what the meaning assigned to them. Examples of such linguistic artifacts to be examined are simulated language as a product of “user-friendly” software, whether programmed as potential aids for human use of technical systems (e.g. Google’s “Did you mean…? and machine translation) or as deceptions (spam and texts inserted into emails to “fool” anti-spam programs), and utterances whose meanings have no relation to what the standard theory regards as lexical meaning nor to interpretative rules (e.g. glossalalia). Of particular interest are the hypothetical language of examples in linguistic theory (Bill is a farmer but John is not; Colorless green ideas sleep furiously) in which nothing is meant other than “this text represents a certain structure,” and the reproduction of texts that would be meaningful in one context but whose sole meaning is reduced to technical manipulation. In all of these cases a linguistic sign is produced (or its production programmed) by someone intent on accomplishing a certain end not through the recipient’s comprehension of a sign and its lexical or discourse meaning but by the human recipient’s creation of a linguistic sign on the one hand, or software unable to distinguish meaningful signs from meaningless textual strings on the other.