Thomas Sebeok

Thomas Albert Sebeok (born Sebők, Hungarian: [ˈʃɛbøːk], in Budapest, Hungary, on November 9, 1920; died December 21, 2001 in Bloomington, Indiana) was a polymathAmerican semiotician and linguist.

Sebeok, a professor emeritus at Indiana University, expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, coining the term "zoosemiotics" and raising some of the issues addressed by the philosophy of mind. He was also among the founders of biosemiotics. As a linguist, he published several articles and books analyzing aspects of the Mari language (referring to it by the name "Cheremis"). His transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics. He was especially renowned for his ability to bring together specialists from neighboring fields in order to generate path-breaking perspectives on, for example, the study of myth, psycholinguistics, stylistics, animal communication and biosemiotics.

Based on his field of competence, Sebeok rejected the experiments on the putative linguistic abilities of apes, such as those described by David Premack, assuming the existence of a deeper, more universal and more meaningful underlying substrate: the "semiotic function".

In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1941, Sebeok earned a bachelor's degree at University of Chicago. He earned a master's degree at University of Chicago in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at Princeton University. In 1943, he arrived at Indiana University in Bloomington, to assist the Amerindianist Carl Voegelin in managing the country's largest Army Specialized Training Program in foreign languages. He then created the university's department of Uralic and Altaic Studies, covering the languages of Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia. He was also the chair of the university's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies, retiring in 1991.

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