4 On the Social Conditions for Semiotic Mediation: the genesis of mind in society
Language, Society and Consciousness - The Collected Works of Ruqaiya Hasan Vol 1 - Ruqaiya Hasan†
Ruqaiya Hasan† [+ ]
Macquarie University
Ruqaiya Hasan, who died in 2015, was a professor of linguistics who taught and held visiting positions at various universities in England. Her last appointment was at Macquarie University, Australia, from where she retired as Emeritus Professor in 1994. Throughout her career she researched and published widely in the areas of verbal art, culture, context and text, text and texture, lexicogrammar and semantic variation.
Read her obituary here
Description
The aim of this chapter is to make a contribution to the approach inaugurated by Vygotsky’s pioneering work. To achieve this end, in Section 2, a brief account of Vygotsky’s theory of the ‘genesis of human mind’ will be presented. Human mind for Vygotsky is a developing phenomenon; it moves from elementary, less evolved functions, having a biogenetic foundation, to higher, more evolved functions, with a sociogenetic foundation. The active agent in this developmental move is the process of ‘semiotic mediation’ – an expression which, in effect, captures the deep meaning of social interaction. In this way the theoretical framework lays a firm foundation for bringing together the natural and the social.