“Language and body semiotics”. Grigory E. Kreidlin’s research on embodied semiotics

The interaction between the body and the environment through non-verbal signs and the assignment of linguistic designations to these signs determines the transition from mere existence to the semiotic level. One of the basic principles of this approach is the following: the body as a tool in interaction with the environment and other subjects serves as a basis for evaluating all contexts and events primarily as favorable (for the existence and development of the body), unfavorable and neutral, as well as for determining the importance of individual events. In this way, the body becomes the source of the meanings inherent in signs. The body as a source of symbolic meanings has been considered in a wide range of fields, from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and art theory to studies in anthropology and cognitive science. The knowledge accumulated at the present stage allows us to study in more detail how body movements and, in general, the presence of the body and its parts in the communicative space are embedded in symbolic communication. The two-volume “Language and semiotics of the body”, written by a team of authors led by G. E. Kreidlin (2020), considers movements, body parts and their linguistic designations as a coherent and consistent sign system, which corresponds to the approach adopted within embodied semiotics, in which communicative events acquire their meaning based on the experience of their existence in the surrounding world and bodily interaction with it. This article considers the text of the collective monograph “Language and semiotics of the body” and modern approaches to the study of the symbolic representation of the body language as a culturally specific phenomenon. Although G. E. Kreidlin himself speaks of his field as non-verbal semiotics or multimodal linguistics, the publication of the book “Language and Semiotics of the Body” can be said to mark a significant contribution to the representation of embodied semiotics in the Russian-speaking linguistic space.