The myth of the total semiotic fact

Abstract This paper critically engages with contemporary semiotic and sociolinguistic theories, focusing on Pennycook’s concept of the “total semiotic fact” and its ontological implications. Drawing on Roy Harris’s integrational semiology, this study challenges the materialist paradigms aligning with a sociolinguistics of complexity. It critiques the externalization and abstraction of signs in ethnographic approaches that endorse a distributed view of agency and prioritize semiotic assemblages of human and nonhuman actors, as exemplified in the works of Pennycook and Otsuji on language in multicultural urban spaces. Through a Harrisian lens, the paper asserts the primacy of individual sign-making activities, emphasizing the radically indeterminate, i.e. contextualized, nature of the sign. The paper argues against the notion of “semiotic totality,” as it obscures the irreducibility of individual agency in sign-making. Instead, it highlights how signs integrate various communicational activities within unique temporal and spatial contexts. The paper thus advocates for an integrational perspective that only recognizes the participant-dependent nature of linguistic “facts” and rejects the need for pre-existing codes (repertoires, resources, idiolects) or externalized meanings. The Harrisian approach offers an understanding of complexity which derives not from “language practice” but from personal linguistic experience.