Schizophrenia as a semiotic disorder.

Lanin-Kettering and Harrow (1985) argue the traditional position that schizophrenia is a thought disorder. Chaika and Lambe (1985) counter that it is a speech disorder at the syntactic-discursive level, and not a thought disorder. On the basis of state-of-the-art research in linguistics, it is suggested that the symptoms of schizophrenia are evidence of neither a thought disorder nor a syntactic-discursive disorder but a semiotic disorder. Semiotic structures have the form of saying something about something to someone and involve speech act, reference, pragmatics, and interpretation. Therefore, it appears that schizophrenic disorder is located in this structure.