ABSTRACT

Let us consider four-year-old William playing with his Uncle George. Uncle George wrestles him to the Roor and pins him firmly. The little boy tries to escape, stops smiling, begins to look dismayed, bursts into tears. Uncle George lets him up, calling him a sissy. An observer might note an odd glitter in Uncle George's eye. William is trying to master a complex interpersonal play; he is either a bad sport or he is being abused by his uncle. To make that distinction requires the development of semiotic skill; that is, skill in the entire range of symbolic exchanges. He must know custom; distinguish such rhetorical devices as irony, teasing, satire, and sarcasm; read nonverbal cues. As a further complication, semiotic messages may be, not mystified, inasmuch as that implies a purposeful process, but simply confused. The uncle may be teasing-deliberately misrepresenting the message-or he may honestly believe that he is playing with the child. In this sense he is promulgating and passing on his own confusion about levels of abstraction and metamessage.