Department of Management, Society and Communication

Since my postdoctoral dissertation ”Mental Grammar” I have been working on a new communicative typology of languages based on a mixture of semiotic, perceptual, cognitive and communicative parameters: (1) Reality-oriented languages such as Russian, German, French and Polish; (2) Speaker-oriented languages such as Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew; and (3) hearer-oriented languages such as English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. Using this framework, I have studied verbal and nominal categories within a single language and across languages, for instance, verbal gender, aspect, mood, case, adverbials and particles.

The analysis of English data from production tests, reception tests and association tests involving 275 participants from Russia, China, Japan, Denmark and UK (the so-called The GEBCom Project, see below) enabled me to develop a new communication process model called the Communicative Wheel as well as three varieties of the so-called Pragmatic Wheel to account for the use of imperative, declarative and interrogative sentence forms as directives. Moreover, together with Stine Bentsen I have made a new three-sided model for the word, which combines semiotic, linguistic and psychological perspectives.

By employing this model, the CogSens Model, it has been demonstrated that the American-English linguaculture is idea-based, whereas the Mandarin-Chinese linguaculture is image-based. At present, I try to find out how people having different supertypes as their mother tongue resolve conflicts by using apologetic expressions, how the concept of face can be understood as first person, second person and third person, and how the three communicative supertypes relate to different pedagogical styles.

Recently, I have summarized what 40 years of research taught me, namely that three different kinds of moving physically, looking at reality, understanding time, and presenting arguments have three indexical correlates, viz. signal, symptom, and model, corresponding to Peirce’s firstness, secondness, and thirdness, respectively. The correlations found among spatial, temporal, perceptual, logical, and indexical categories and subcategories clearly underline the notion of interdisciplinarity and stress the importance of transdisciplinarity. At present, I am writing a book on semiotics with emphasis on its methodology.

The GEBCom Project (2013-2018) was supported by The Carlsberg Foundation, cf. mention on the foundation website.