Corporal discipline is often called the most frequent form of violence against children. This conclusion comes from an extensive body of research that supposedly shows that corporal discipline is both harmful and pervasive. But this research is biased by three ideologies of language and signs—or semiotic ideologies—that distort the collection and interpretation of data: assumptions that speech functions mainly to refer; views of signs and the physical world as distinct; and interpretations of force signs as indices of deviant relationships. In contrast, in a village in the Marshall Islands reported force has multiple functions, people combine multiple different types of signs in disciplinary interactions, and force signs often index not deviance but healthy relationships. The harms to children and families created by these misinterpretations of signs go far beyond producing incorrect estimates of the frequency of corporal discipline. On the one hand, these ideologies pathologize people who frequently produce force signs as well as the kinship systems associated with them; on the other hand, misunderstood communicative patterns may lead researchers to miss harms that people do experience. Researching corporal discipline requires an analysis of force signs in context—an ethnography of communication of force.