Language, linguistics - life, biosemiotics…- On biosemiotics and its possible relevance to linguistic -- Language and biosphere: Blurry contours as a condition of semiosis -- Language as primary modeling and natural languages: A biosemiotic perspective -- Umwelt and language -- Verbal patterns: Taming cognitive biology -- Biolinguistics and biosemiotics -- Biology, linguistics, and the semiotic perspective on language -- Before Babel: The evolutionary roots of human language --  Biosemiotics, politics and Th.A. Sebeok’s move from linguistics to semiotics -- How useful is état de langue for biosemiotics? An exploration of linguistic consciousness and evolution in F. de Saussure’s works -- Darwin’s Ethology and the expression of the emotions: Biosemiotics as a historical science -- Darwin’s biosemiotics: The linguistic Rubicon in the Descent of Man -- The Bakhtinian dialogue revisited: A (non-biosemiotic) view from historiography and epistemology of humanities.

Without biosemiosis, there could be no human language. The volume presents international perspectives that have been inspired by this simple idea. The contributors open up new methods, directions and perspectives on both language in general and specific human languages. Many commonplace notions (language, dialect, syntax, sign, text, dialogue, discourse, etc.) have to be rethought once due attention is given to the living roots of languages. Accordingly, the contributors unite “eternal” problems of the humanities (such as language and thought, origin of language, prelinguistic meaning-making, borders of human language and “marginal” linguistic phenomena) with new inspirations drawing from natural science. They do so with respect to issues such as: how biolinguistics relates to biosemiotics, the history and value of general linguistic and (bio)semiotic models, and how empirical work can link the study of language with biosemiotic phenomena. The volume thus begins to unify perspectives on language(s) and living systems. Biosemiotics connects the sciences with the humanities while offering a new challenge to autonomous linguistics by pointing towards new kinds of interdisciplinary fusion.