This book, with a forward by M. A. K. Halliday, is mainly concerned with the role of the body and brain in our social meaning-making practices. It draws on the systemic-functional theory developed by Halliday. Thibault’s ecosocial semiotics of human meaning-making activity is a transdisciplinary theory involving linguistics, semiotics, biology, and psychology. According to Thibault, the brain is not a symbolic processor, but a regulator of sensorimotor activity, a meaning-making organ, while the human body is the locus where meaning is made through the working of the brain and the semiotic interface with the two planes of language: the content plane and the expression plane. The proto-meanings stored in the brain are made up of neural activities in the form of neurophysiological entities called “impulses,” which enable communication to take place between neurons by means of biochemically based neurotransmitters. In this sense, meanings do not travel through air to the speaker. It is the hearer’s own reconstruction in her own brain on the basis of a similar language system that generates the meaning.

This book consists of three parts. Part I (Chapter 1) is an introduction to the ecosocial semiotics of human meaning-making activity. Part II, composed of two chapters, focuses on the expression stratum of spoken language, the scalar heterogeneity in the semiotic system. Chapter 2, entitled “Sensori-motor activity, movement, and social meaning-making,” adopts both Hjelmslev’s insights about the stratified nature of language and Lemke’s scale heterogeneity. Chapter 3, “Body dynamics, meaning-making, and scale heterogeneity,” deals with the ways in which action and meaning interlink across diverse space–time scales. Part III, composed of three chapters, addresses how the brain functions to make meaning on multiple timescales. Chapter 4, “The semiotic basis of consciousness,” discusses the relationship between subjective experience and brain processes and develops an alternative to the theory of mind. Chapter 5, “The metafunctional character of consciousness,” deals with the metafunctional pattern of semiosis, which implicates networks of relations when people talk about the space–time grounding of consciousness. Chapter 6, “Brain, meaning, and consciousness,” concentrates on the physical-biological and social-cultural dimensions of our existence. Consciousness is a structured system of meaning involving all levels of modalities of semiosis. As a semiotic interpretation of our experience of phenomena, it is mediated at all levels. Meaning-making activity is the result of the dynamic interaction of the body-brain system and the ecosocial semiotic environment.