A. a. Leontiev - Sign and Activity

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English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text “Znak ideiatel’nost’,” in Iazyk i rechevaia deiatel’nost’’v obshchei i pedagogicheskoipsikhologii (Moscow and Voronezh: IPO MODEK, 2001), pp. 33–45. Publishedwith the permission of Dmitry A. Leontiev.

Translated by Nora Favorov.Notes renumbered for this edition.—Ed.

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 44, no. 3,May–June 2006, pp. 17–29.© 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1061–0405/2006 $9.50 + 0.00.DOI 10.2753RPO10610405440302

A.A. LEONTIEV

Sign and Activity

The goal of this article is to provide an analysis of a category ofmeaning outside the system of any particular science (and cer-tainly not from the perspective of any particular scientific prob-lem), but within a more general system, suitable to an integratedapproach toward language, speech, and speech activity. The ne-cessity of such an integrated approach is increasingly evident bothon the theoretical level and in the framing and solving of appliedproblems. The external expression of this necessity is the birth ofsuch international scientific disciplines as psycholinguistics,sociolinguistics, and ethnolinguistics, among others.

The movement of scientific thought along the path of an inte-grated analysis of speech activity is hindered, however (among otherdifficulties), by the vagueness of a number of basic concepts, thelogical consequence of which is the shifting of the interpretation ofthese concepts, provided within the framework of a specific science(usually linguistics), to a more general theoretical context, and fromthis stems the limitation of their treatment. This primarily effectsthe concept of “meaning,” a concept that is central not only to lin-guistics but also to psychology, logic, and semiotics. Only once

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we have defined meaning as an object category of the science ofman will we have the right to undertake its interpretation withinthe framework of a particular field, as something to which we ap-ply scientific methods of investigation.

Such an analytical path is all the more desirable when we ad-dress psycholinguistic problems associated with meaning. As iswell known, in Soviet science, psycholinguistics from the verybeginning takes the form of a theory of speech activity. It viewsspeech as one of the types of activity (along with other types suchas labor, cognitive, and mnemonic activity, etc.), and strives toapply the study of speech to those propositions and categories thathave been developed within the general theory of activity, both inits social and psychological aspects.

In this case, our task consists in applying an approach based onthe perspective of activity theory to a more general circle of ques-tions associated with the category of meaning, and discoveringthe factors involved in the emergence and mode of functioning ofmeaning within the system of human social activity.

We encounter the concept of activity at the very start of our analysisof meaning, when we raise the question of the relationship betweenmeaning and the sign. As works by Soviet philosophers show,1 theproblem of the sign in its interpretation, from the perspective of thetheory of reflection, is inseparable from the problem of the so-calledideal, or quasi-object. As is well known, the ideal object (quasi-object) arises in social activity as the transformed form of true con-nections and relations. These connections and relations are transferredonto a material object that is alien to them by its nature, or are takeninto it, and are replaced by other relations that blend with the prop-erties of this object, and serve as its properties and features. Theapparent form of true relations takes their place; the direct reflec-tion of content in form becomes impossible. An example is themonetary form, which is the form of transformed goods. For thisreason, a tremendously important gnoseological problem arises: in


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analyzing the quasi-object as a converted form* of true connectionsand relations, how is it possible to isolate in it what arises from its“substance,” from its own uniqueness, its features and properties,from what is “transferred” onto it and has been transformed in it.

Language is the system of such ideal or quasi-objects—linguisticsigns—where real relationships are replaced with their apparentform, where the real properties and relationships of the objectsand phenomena of reality, actualized in activity involving theseobjects and phenomena, wind up being taken and moved into anew (linguistic) substance, and are filled with the materiality andproperties of language. As in a number of other cases, here themateriality of quasi-objects prompts the emergence of fancies ofconsciousness: we often immediately correlate language with theobjects and phenomena of the external world forgetting that be-tween them there is no direct and unequivocal correlation, andthat rigorous scientific analysis of the nature of any quasi-objectdemands an intermediate link, which was first introduced by Marx:the system of social activity.

What is given to our consciousness, through immediate observa-tion of and reflection on language, what in language presents itselfto consciousness, hardly begins to cover the essence of language.For this reason, a one-sided semiotic and a one-sided linguistic ap-proach to language, however subtle their analysis might be, arefundamentally incapable of discovering its essence.

The concept of the quasi-object as the converted form of real

*Merab Mamardashvili (1970) introduced the concept of converted form todenote the processes of transition of some content from one substrate to another.The features of the content change in the course of this transition according tothe properties of the substrate. An illustration can be borrowed from the psychol-ogy of art. When you try to transform a novel into a movie, even if you plan tomaintain the content as close as possible to the original work, you can’t do itwithout some important changes. Indeed, the substrate, the film, imposes somelimitations and offers some new possibilities.—Dmitry A. Leontiev.



relationships is inseparable from the Marxist interpretation of theconcept of the ideal. From this perspective, the linguistic sign, asthe quasi-object, is “the immediate body of the ideal image of anexternal thing.”2 Having its own sensory nature, the sign at thesame time serves as a component part of a system of forms, and ameans of external expression and a capturing of the ideal phenom-ena that are generally accepted, and whose meanings are gener-ally agreed upon. And here again it is important to emphasize thatthe ideal itself “has immediate existence only as the form (means,an image) of activity of the social person. . . . The ideal can underno circumstances be equated with the state of the material foundunder an individual’s cranium. . . . The ideal is a special functionof man, as the subject of social-labor activity.”3

The concept of the sign must also be introduced (as distinctfrom the concept of the quasi-object), as an implication of such anunderstanding of the ideal. If, in principle, the quasi-object has, asMarx said, its “material existence,” then being used as the “body”of an ideal image, in a certain sense, loses this “materiality.” Ac-cording to Marx, in signs, “functional existence . . . so to speak,absorbs its material existence”:4 a thing in its material existenceand functional properties “is transformed into a sign, that is, intoan object that has no meaning in and of itself, but merely repre-sents, expresses another object, with which it has nothing imme-diately in common, such as, for example, the name of a thing andthe thing itself.”5

In light of the above, it is obvious that in the practice of scien-tific research the single term “sign” serves three different purposes.First, there is the sign as a thing or—as it applies to language—asa material linguistic “body” incorporated into the activity of man;in this sense, we will refer hereafter to the sign. Second, there isthe sign as the equivalent of the real sign in everyday conscious-ness; this concept will be referred to as the sign image. Third, asign is the product of the scientific conceptualization of the struc-ture and functions of the objective sign—the model of the sign orthe sign model.

These three purposes, as a rule, have not been clearly distin-guished or have not been distinguished at all in the course of analy-


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sis, giving rise not only to terminological homonymy, but also to afundamental confusion.

Let us return now to the problem of meaning. From what wasstated above it follows that the sign (in the sense of the term justmentioned) has a material side (its “body”) and that it has an ideal“weight” that is expressed and anchored in this “body.” The idealaspect of the sign is not reducible to a subject’s subjective concep-tion of the content of the sign image, but it also does not representreal objectivity or those real properties and features of objects andphenomena that stand behind the sign (the quasi-object). The para-dox is that, existing before and beyond a particular sign, theseproperties may be regarded as meaning only after they have been“transformed,” that is, after we introduce the quasi-object with itsown content characteristics: “extralinguistic” meaning does notexist, and at the same time “sign” meaning is not a simple copy ofreal connections and relationships. The ideal aspect of a sign is theresult of transference, of “transformation,” in the Marxist sense,of connections and relationships of actual reality that take place inthe process of activity.

Objectively, the sign stands before the subject as a real signwith all that underlies it, including all its functional characteris-tics, which are determined by the special features of activity intowhich this sign is incorporated. But, subjectively, a sign is per-ceived as a sort of psychological formation in which actual socialcontent of this sign is blended and transformed. The conscious-ness of the subject in this case remains a contemplating con-sciousness, and from his perspective the sign appears as a signimage, and meaning, as the form in which he fixes and experi-ences his own social experience, without assigning himself thetask of penetrating its true roots and true nature. This is the pathtaken by most researchers regarding meaning, working not withthe real sign, but with the sign image, and not reflecting, or onlyreflecting in part, those sign properties “in which the sociallyconditioned manner of its functioning is expressed, its ‘functionalexistence’”6 onto the corresponding sign model.

Thus, several interconnected, but by no means identical, cat-egories are correlated with what is intuitively understood as mean-



ing. First, there is the system of connections and relationships be-tween objects and phenomena of reality that exists beyond andbefore the individual sign; we will call this system the objectivecontent of the sign. Second, the ideal “weight” of the sign, theideal aspect of it, which is the converted form of the objectivecontent, we will call the ideal content of the sign. Third, there isthe social experience of the subject, projected onto the sign im-age, or, as we will refer to it, the subjective content of the sign (thesign image).

Until now, stretching things somewhat, we have kept to thelevel of the isolated sign. Obviously, this is a mere convention:both signs objectively—in a person’s activity—and subjectively—in his consciousness—serve as an integrated system, as a signsystem.

The first question this raises is the following: to what extent dowe have the right to talk about the existence of an objective-socialsystem of signs? To put it another way, to what extent does theconcept of a sign system correlate with the concepts of objectiveand ideational sign content that we introduced above? It is com-pletely obvious that as it applies to objects and phenomena of ac-tual reality—taken in the abstract, extra-activity existence—wehave no basis for talking about a system in the sense that concernsus here. It arises only when these objects and phenomena are in-corporated into activity that arises as a “system of content-basedsocial connections,” subsequently transferred onto quasi-objectsand “transformed” in them and as the structure of activity withthese objects and phenomena. In the process of such a transfer-ence and transformation, this system converts into a system ofquasi-objects in which the system itself undergoes a radical change.This happens primarily due to the fact that in and of themselves,taken in their own content-based (and formal) characteristics, quasi-objects cannot form a system. As it applies to linguistic signs andother quasi-objects—in which, according to Marx, “material ex-istence” is absorbed by their “functional existence”—this thesistakes on a somewhat different appearance: it is as if the content-based interconnections between these quasi-objects descend to a


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lower “level” and become their formal connections; dislodged bythe “system of content-based social connections” that are trans-ferred onto them and transformed in them. These formal relationslink up in this system to form a new, systemic, functional whole.

The difference between activity that generates a “quasi-object”system and activity that generates an “object” system is that theformer is for the most part cognitive activity, a reflective activity,while the latter is primarily an activity of social interaction. Andthe systematicity of linguistic signs is specifically that “equal ef-fect” that permits them to hold—in the taken, converted form, ofcourse—both “the system of content-based social connections,”and the system of operations that we can potentially realize withthese signs in the activity of communication, correlating them withspecific objects and phenomena; referring to them, and substitut-ing them, generating the selection of the most appropriate signs(in particular, appellation), and combining them into a meaning-ful whole—an utterance.

Correspondingly, it is possible to identify two sides, two as-pects of the ideal content of the sign. One of them is the correla-tion of the ideal content with cognitive activity. The other is itscorrelation with activity of social interaction, with the use of signsfor communication. The first dominates in those cases where weuse signs in the process of communication. Neither aspect is astatic component of content or abstract isolated units. It is as ifsign content is “poured out” to the side where we “lean” our sign.The immediate reason for this is the incorporation of the sign intodifferent systems, while the reason itself is rooted in the differentnature of goals and objective problems that are solved in the pro-cess of activity, in the differences between problem situations thatarise during that activity.

The subjective content of the sign image is not identical withitself in different problem situations of sign usage. However thiscontent might be modified for a speaker of a language, which re-mains, on the one hand, a “cognitive invariant,” which is dictatedby the sign content, in correlation with the “system of content-based social connections” fixed in the sign;7 and on the other hand,



its “communicative invariant,” the system of operations with thissign that is fixed in it and comprises the rules of its use within theframework of more complex communicative structures.

The “cognitive invariant” of the subjective content of the signimage, as follows from what was stated above, is that in the contentthat stems from social activity is fixed in the sign, while “its com-municative invariant” is what stems from activity that uses the sign.It appears that the former is closest to what is usually called a con-cept and the latter is exactly what is most often called meaning.

In the most general sense:

behind linguistic meanings are hidden socially developed manners(operations) of action, in the process by which people come to knowand change objective reality. In other words, in meanings something isrepresented—transformed and condensed in the material of language—the ideal form of existence of the objective world, its properties, con-nections, and relationships, discovered through the entirety of socialpractice. Therefore, meanings in and of themselves, that is, abstractedfrom their functioning in individual consciousness, are just as“unpsychological” as the socially known reality that underlies them.8

Because of this they develop in accordance with sociohistorical lawsthat are an outside individual consciousness. But, at the same time,reality is presented to human consciousness as signified reality.Meaning is a form of presentation of reality in consciousness.

In their second life, meanings become individualized and “subjectified,”but only in the sense that their movement within the system of rela-tionships of society are no longer immediately contained in them. Theyenter into a different system of relationships, into another movement.But here is what is remarkable: at the same time they do no lose any oftheir sociohistorical nature, their objectivity.9

One of the most important features of the “second life” of mean-ings is their interrelatedness with sensory stimuli. In its role as theideal content of the sign, meaning remains extrasensory, since,although the converted form of objective content presumes thematerial of the sign, it is taken as an extra-individual, abstract for-mation. But as soon as we switch to meaning as subjective contentof the sign, it turns out that its existence in activity and its presen-


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tation in the consciousness of the individual is inextricably tied tomaterial (sensory-material) interrelatedness. Meanings do not ex-ist for every one of us outside of the subjective reflection of mate-riality, for example, in the form of visual images or any image ofperception. But at the same time it would be a mistake to thinkthat such images precede meanings, and that meanings do nothingbut “tag” (Lenneberg) cognitive processes. As numerous studiesby Soviet psychologists demonstrate, uniquely human object per-ception is not possible without the participation of socially devel-oped references primarily based in language, and “the process ofverbal signification in recognition . . . is understood not as a sepa-rate process—isolated from perception—which then processes itsproduct through thought, but as a process that is incorporated intothe very activity of perception.”10

These references, which are stored in the visual system and arenot possible without language (or some other means of social an-choring), nonetheless have a sensory nature. Experiments by V.P.Zinchenko, for example, showed that “names were assigned onlyafter the collation and selection of references that correspond toimages.”11 Here we are dealing with what M.S. Shekhter fortu-itously labeled “secondary images,” that is, images forming as aresult of generalization, usually mediated by language. We “see”a triangle, we recognize it because a generalized image of a tri-angle has been formed in our consciousness, but the image itselfarises only as a consequence of an operation with immediate sen-sory data and on the basis of abstract features of any triangle thathave been fixed in its linguistic form and reflected in the meaningof the word triangle.

This materiality, this sensory nature of meaning, taken as thesubjective content of the sign, is particularly clear in the processof meaning formation in child language acquisition. This is whereone of the components of meaning comes from, one that is reduc-ible neither to a cognitive nor a communicative invariant: the ele-ment in it that comes from psychological processes that stand“behind” the sign in various forms of its usage in activity, specifi-cally, the extent and means of interrelatedness between content and



its “sensory” aspect, the interrelatedness of subjective content withsecondary images, with “visuality.” This aspect of subjective con-tent can in certain cases (for example, in the child) take on anuncharacteristic significance: it is as if the subjective content ofthe sign image is projected onto sensory images that are related tothe sign, and which becomes deformed to the extent of their lim-ited (in comparison with the sign) psychological capabilities. Forthe subject, the sign seems to lose its ideal content, preservingonly the part of it that is fixed in the and extracted from it. Andsince the sensory image, to a large extent, depends on the subject’sindividual experience, the objective content of the sign is in a cer-tain sense subjectivized, in a certain sense. A person begins toevaluate a sign in terms of his own individual experience, to give itthose features that reflect, in essence, only the relationship of thatperson to the sensory image that represents for him represents aclass of some real objects and phenomena. Below, when we speakof sensuous coloring of subjective content, this is what we referto. This sensuous coloring is potentially greater in some signs thanin others.

The second component of meaning is that within the subjectivecontent of the sign image, which comes from various levels ofawareness and various levels of semantic explication of this con-tent in the subject’s consciousness, in the speaker of the language.Undoubtedly, in the final analysis, both of these depend on factorsthat lie beyond individual consciousness. A person is aware of andexplicates the content of a sign to the extent he needs. But theopposite direction is also critical—in certain situations the use ofa sign is limited by the ability to explicate it (as happens, for ex-ample, with scientific terminology). We will call this aspect ofsubjective content its potential for explication, including the po-tential “depth” at which it is cognized. This can also differ fordifferent signs.

The third component of meaning is that within the subjectivecontent of the sign image that derives from personal meaning andcan be called semantic coloring of this content. Here, various formsof distortion are especially common; particularly characteristic isthe substitution of objective (ideal) content with personal mean-


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ing. The degree of semantic coloring, evidently, is largely tied tothe degree of sensuous coloring and potential explicability of thesign: the greater the sensuous coloring and the less potential forexplication, the greater the likelihood that the meaning of a signwill diverge from its ideal content.

The fourth component of meaning is what can be called thesensuous coloring of the sign image’s subjective content. In thehistorical development of the system of linguistic meanings, all ofthese aspects of subjective content take on the status of factorsthat effect its change.

Concerning the communicative invariant of subjective content,it can be presented in scientific analysis as a system of types ofrules that set the boundaries of sign usage in the activity of com-munication. What are these rules? What operations with a sign arefixed in the sign image (however vaguely, as potential) and, con-sequently, must be viewed as forming the subjective content ofthis image?

1. Operations that are directly dictated by cognitive invariance,that is, signs’ cognitive-typological features that are brought intotheir usage. These are primarily rules that are warranted for a givensign concerning situational indication and substitution. There aretypes of signs (deictic signs) for which these operations almostexhaust the communicative invariant of their subjective content.

2. Interrelation and interchange operations among signs as ele-ments of a sign system, that is, semantic elements, in the narrowsense of the word. As I.S. Narskii notes, they form “a sort of permis-sible circle of cases within which subject operations [that use signs—A.L.] correspond, despite all their individual differences—to aparticular meaning.”12 Operations of this sort are realized in themechanism of sign interchange, primarily in the rules for select-ing semantic units for communication purposes. Specifically inthis sense the psychological structure of meaning is determinedby a system of interrelations and contrasts between words in theprocess of their use in activity. It is this “network of oppositionsthat, through interdiction, limits and directs the process of select-ing appropriate meanings.”13

3. Operations that combine signs into quasi-objects (signs) of a



higher order, that is, within a sign’s semantics that is connectedwith the semantics of the utterance and represents compressed rules(that are attributed by us to the sign in question) of transition be-tween sign and utterance.14

Operations of the second and third type can, in turn, be fixed indifferent ways in the sign. They can be content based, that is, theycan enter the subjective content of the sign image of the speaker(or listener). For example, in isolating-type languages, rules forsign organization within an utterance are reduced to the organiza-tion of the corresponding semantic classes. But they can also beformal. In languages such as Russian, operations on formally gram-matically marked classes of signs dominate the rules of utterancestructuring. This characteristic is marginal for their subjective con-tent and is relatively independent in relation to this content.

In our previous analysis we purposely ignored, or at leastavoided, the fact that a meaning of a sign appears not simply in thespeech activity of a particular individual and in a particular situa-tion (or, correspondingly, in a particular activity, which is not cen-tral here, as use of language in any nonspeech activity has as itsnecessary prerequisite actual or potential communicative use). Thesign is a part and a condition of the processes of communicationas one of the aspects of social interaction among people as mem-bers of a class or society overall. Contemporary psycholinguistics,as a rule, loses sight of that aspect of the problem, something thatis associated with the treatment of communication itself by for-eign (and Soviet, in some cases) science usually as interindividualcommunication aimed at conveying information.15 For this veryreason, [in psycholinguistics today] speech is usually treated inthe spirit of K. Bühler’s famous scheme,16 according to which thetask of the speaker consists in conveying information about someobjects and phenomena of the real world in a form allowing thisinformation to be appropriately received by the listener.

Be that as it may, only an approach based on the perspective ofthe psychology of communication can give us the key to correctlyinterpreting the nature of meaning and its interrelation with otherphilosophical and psychological categories. V.N. Voloshinov wascorrect when he wrote almost a half century ago, “Meaning is not


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in the word or in the soul of the speaker, and not in the soul of thelistener. Meaning is the effect of the interaction between the speakerand the listener on the material of the given sound complex. . . .Only the flow of speech communication sheds light of meaningon a word.”17

Notes

1. See E.V. Il’enkov [Ilyenkov], “Ideal’noe,” in Filosofskaia entsiklopediia,vol. 2 (Moscow, 1962); A. Poltoratskii and V. Shvyrev, Znak i deiatel’nost’ (Mos-cow, 1970); A.M. Korshunov, Teoriia otrazheniia i tvorchestvo (Moscow, 1971);M.K. Mamardashvili, “Forma prevrashchennaia,” in Filosofskaia entsiklopediia,vol. 5 (Moscow, 1970), and “Analiz soznaniia v rabotakh Marksa,” Voprosyfilosofii, 1968, no. 6.

2. Il’enkov, “Ideal’noe,” p. 224.3. Ibid., pp. 220–21.4. K. Marks [Marx] and F. Engel’s [Engels], Sochineniia, vol. 23, p. 140.5. Il’enkov, “Ideal’noe,” p. 224.6. Korshunov, Teoriia otrazheniia i tvorchestvo, pp. 180–81.7. This system is not always fully reflected in the subjective content of the

sign. It would be more accurate to say that it is never adequately reflected in it.8. A.N. Leont’ev, “Deitel’nost’ i soznanie,” Voprosy filosofii, 1972, no. 12,

p. 134.9. Ibid., p. 136.

10. A.N. Leont’ev and Iu.B. Gippenreiter, “O deiatel’nosti zritel’noi sistemycheloveka,” in Psikhologicheskie issledovaniia (Moscow, 1968), p. 19.

11. V.P. Zinchenko, “Produktivnoe vospriiatie,” Voprosy psikhologii, 1971,no. 6, p. 40.

12. I.S. Narskii, “Kritika neopozitivistskikh kontseptsii znacheniia,” inProblema znacheniia v lingvistike i logike (Moscow, 1963), pp. 15–16.

13. A.A. Brudnii, “Znachenie slova i psikhologiia protivopostavlenii,” inSemanticheskaia struktura slova (Moscow, 1971), p. 22.

14. This is how we arrived at a system that on the surface coincides with theknown differentiation between semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic meanings.However, our content-based interpretation of this differentiation is entirely dif-ferent from its traditional interpretation.

15. See A.A. Leont’ev [Leontiev], Psikhologiia obshcheniia (Tartu, 1974).16. K. Bühler, Sprachtheorie (Jena, 1934).17. V.N. Voloshinov, Marksizm i filosofiia iazyka (Leningrad, 1929), p. 123.

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A. a. Leontiev - Sign and Activity

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