Abstract

Charles Sanders Peirce was a polymath who made significant contributions to many fields of study, from phenomenology to astronomy and from physics to metaphysics. In his writings of some 12,000 pages published, and some 90,000 manuscript pages still unpublished during his lifetime, language and linguistics are among the recurrent topics. In fact, the second paper in the chronology of Peirce’s professional writings was on the pronunciation of Shakespearean English. However, Peirce’s papers on language as well as his other linguistic insights have remained mostly unexplored until today, although there has been a growing influence of Peirce’s general semiotics in contemporary linguistics.