ABSTRACT

A conceptual distinction between linguistic resources for making typological versus topological meanings is used as part of a multimedia semiotic analysis of an episode from a problem-based learning tutorial session in medical education. A tension is identified in medical diagnostic discourse between the typological emphasis of reasoning in terms of diagnostic categories and the frequently topological-quantitative or categorially ambiguous nature of the data and phenomena under discussion. Typological meaning is the familiar kind described by most theories of linguistics and semiotics: A material form of some sort is assigned to a culturally meaningful category, and the meaning of the category arises from its systematic contrasts with other related categories. The manual sign languages of the deaf are very similar to speech in combining typologically discrete signs with topologically meaningful modes of articulation of these signs in the space between the signers.