Concerning the use of language and ancillary codes in ritualized communication

This essay employs some ethnographic exemplars of the communicative use of spitting to illustrate a semiotic investigation of the formal relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic sign systems in face‐to‐face communication. It argues that elements from various sign strata not only interact in certain ways in the communicative constitution of reality, but that they may also signify one another. This potential is especially important in situations of uncertain outcome, for through their experiential immediacy nonlinguistic signs contribute to the ritualization of the communication situation. Such signs, iconic in character, emphasize the performativity or eventness of the communication process in which they function as metapropositional elements.