The clock and its triadic relationship KOICHIRO MATSUNO Introduction Despite its superficially constructivistic nature, time is deeply rooted in our linguistic institution in the sense that it is impossible to unlearn time and to eliminate it from our vocabulary. This implies that time is closely related to other notions also found in the vocabulary. One of them is a concrete material manifestation called a clock. Inevitable association of time with a clock in one way or another now raises the serious issue of how time as a purely linguistic construct could be related to the material configuration in the form of a clock concretized in the empirical domain. Any clock materialized in our empirical world is local at least in its spatial extension. Time associated with such a local clock is also local in its outlook. The local characteristic of time is contrasted with time as a global notion, since time as a linguistic construct has been taken to permeate any- where and everywhere (Matsuno and Salthe 1995). The contrast between local and global time emerges when clocks in the empirical domains are referred to (Baker 1993; Riva 1994). Empirical elucidation of this contrast between global and local time asks us to figure out how we could approach global time as a linguistic construct while starting from material configurations called 'clocks' and local time read out of them, in which local time is taken to be a concom- itant of material interactions. This perspective suggests to us a possibility of conceiving local time as an attribute of interpretive interactions, which is semiotic by all standards. My agenda will focus on whether time could be semiotic in general or biosemiotic in particular in that we humans who can read the clocks in whatever way are necessarily biological. In this regard, we can raise somewhat sweeping questions. What are the clocks in nature, who read them, and how? I shall come back to these questions at the very end of this article. In the present article, I examine how local time associated with each local clock could be transformed and extended into global time. To begin Semiotica 127-1/4 (1999), 433-452 0037-1998/99/0127-0433 © Walter de Gruyter Brought to you by | University of Californ Authenticated Download Date | 6/12/15 7:04 PM