  thomas albert sebeok (born sebÅk, , in budapest, hungary, on november 9, 1920; died december 21, 2001 in bloomington, indiana) was a polymathcobley, paul; deely, john; kull, kalevi; petrilli, susan (eds.) (2011). semiotics continues to astonish: thomas a. sebeok and the doctrine of signs. (semiotics, communication and cognition 7.) berlin: de gruyter mouton. american semiotician and linguist.hoffmeyer, jesper (2002). obituary: thomas a. sebeok. sign systems studies 30(1): 383â385.mcdowell, j. h. (2003). thomas a. sebeok (1920-2001). journal of american folklore.marcel danesi and albert valdman (2004). thomas a. sebeok. language. vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 312-317brier s. (2003). thomas sebeok: mister (bio)semiotics an obituary for thomas a. sebeok. cybernetics & human knowing 10(1): 102-105(4)anderson, m. (2003), thomas albert sebeok (1920â2001). american anthropologist 105: 228â231. == life and work == sebeok, a professor emeritus at indiana university, expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, coining the term "zoosemiotics" and raising some of the issues addressed by the philosophy of mind. he was also among the founders of biosemiotics.kull, kalevi (2003). thomas a. sebeok and biology: building biosemiotics. cybernetics and human knowing 10(1): 47â60. as a linguist, he published several articles and books analyzing aspects of the mari language (referring to it by the name "cheremis"). his transdisciplinary work and professional collaborations spanned the fields of anthropology, biology, folklore studies, linguistics, psychology, and semiotics. he was especially renowned for his ability to bring together specialists from neighboring fields in order to generate path-breaking perspectives on, for example, the study of myth, psycholinguistics, stylistics, animal communication and biosemiotics. based on his field of competence, sebeok rejected the experiments on the putative linguistic abilities of apes, such as those described by david premack, assuming the existence of a deeper, more universal and more meaningful underlying substrate: the "semiotic function". in 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the united states. in 1941, sebeok earned a bachelor's degree at the university of chicago. he earned a master's degree at the university of chicago in 1943 and, in 1945, a doctorate at princeton university. in 1943, he arrived at indiana university in bloomington, to assist the amerindianist carl voegelin in managing the country's largest army specialized training program in foreign languages. he then crea
1920_births 2001_deaths American_people_of_Hungarian_descent American_semioticians American_skeptics Fellows_of_the_Committee_for_Skeptical_Inquiry Guggenheim_Fellows Hungarian_emigrants_to_the_United_States Princeton_University_alumni University_of_Chicago_alumni