This monograph argues that the structuralist movement in linguistics was curtailed prematurely
before its contribution to cognitive science could be fully realized. Building upon Roman
Jakobson's pioneering work on the nature of the linguistic sign a new and detailed
appreciation of the role of sign relations in the ultimate structuring of consciousness is
presented proving that the structural approach has as much to contribute today as any current
cognitive theory. This study takes the view that the structure which linguistic signs
themselves evince should be treated as an organic property of mind in its own right as the
device by which the ultimate differences in meaning in the human cognitive sphere are realized.
Adherence to this principle assumes not only that the linguistic sign must be fundamentally
monosemic but also that the level of abstraction at which the relations between signs function
must lie beyond the logical or rational level where polysemy is the rule. The study
demonstrates that while the conceptual relations or categories uncovered at such a higher-order
level of consciousness are of necessity highly abstract and hidden from normal awareness they
are nevertheless neither ineffable nor devoid of content. Rather the categories identified and
defined in this study are shown to have verifiable correlates at the supra-rational level where
transpersonal rather than ego-oriented psychology operates the level that Jung termed the
collective unconscious. It is here that we find corresponding properties in reports from
altered states of consciousness in the structure of myths worldwide as well as in studies of
the image-making capacity of the human mind. Ultimately when the structure of actual
linguistic signs is treated as an ordered set of conceptual relations one necessarily arrives
at the conclusion that the sign relations of different languages are anything but Whorfian but
are all pointing to the sameuniversal set of conceptual properties. This set of properties is
then shown to be able to account for the relations between signs in all areas of linguistic
structure from the grammatical to the lexical and the syntactic. The monograph goes on to
provide a detailed account of the process of making reference of how speakers are able to
contextualize the truly abstract conceptual relations inherent in the structure of signs in
their language to produce a potentially infinite variety of polysemous meanings in actual
speech situations at whatever level of concreteness they choose and how the feedback from such
acts of communication determines the evolutionary trajectory of a system of signs conceived as
a living organism specifically as a neuronal structure inherent in the human brain operating
as a fundamentally probabilistic or stochastic system.
