Semiotics, Centre for language and literature

The application of the narrative model to a "text" obviously implies that the latter is somehow organized in the manner of a story; and while this is easy enough to admit, in the case of some genres of verbal discourse, such as novels, short stories, myths, and folktales (but more controversial in the case of experimental reports, for which Bastide 1979 has nevertheless made a case ), and not very problematic either as far as some kinds of pictorial material , like films and comic strips, are concerned, the suggestion that the picture, in the most central, prototypical sense, i.e. the single, static picture, should contain a narrative level of construction, is difficult even to make sense of. In fact, before even beginning the quest for this sense, we have to distinguish at least five different categories of pictorial objects to which our interrogation about narrative organization would seem to apply with rather different results: a. The temporal series: The continuous series of moving pictures, as in a cinematographic film, and, often, on television.

The present essay aims at integrating different concepts of meaning developed in semiotics, biology, and cognitive science, in a way that permits the formulation of issues involving evolution and development. The concept of sign in semiotics, just like the notion of representation in cognitive science, have either been used too broadly, or outright rejected. My earlier work on the notions of iconicity and pictoriality has forced me to spell out the taken-forgranted meaning of the sign concept, both in the Saussurean and the Peircean tradition. My work with the evolution and development of semiotic resources such as language, gesture, and pictures has proved the need of having recourse to a more specified concept of sign. To define the sign, I take as point of departure the notion of semiotic function (by Piaget), and the notion of appresentation (by Husserl). In the first part of this essay, I compare cognitive science and semiotics, in particular as far as the parallel concepts of representation and sign are concerned. The second part is concerned with what is probably the most important attempt to integrate cognitive science and semiotics that has been presented so far, The Symbolic Species, by Terrence Deacon.

In order to differentiate the semiotic capacities of animals and human beings we need to understand more exactly what these properties are. Instead of identifying all vehicles of meaning with signs, we certainly have to specify the notion of sign, but it will also be necessary to provide an inventory of other kinds of meaning, starting out from perception, and going through a number of intermediate notions such as affordances, markers, and surrogates before reaching signs and sign systems. This essay proposes a phenomenological description of a few kinds of meaning, which is not meant to be exhaustive, but still should give an idea of the complexity of the task. It suggests that not only the setting up of semiotic levels and hierarchies of evolution and development, but even, to some extent, the comparison of the capacities of animals and human beings must go hand in hand with advances in phenomenological observations.

While the conceptual history of the sign, as recounted by John Deely in Four ages of understanding, is immensely enlightening, history is never enough. If, before Augustine, it had occurred to no one that such diverse phenomena as are covered by this term had something in common, and if, in the time of Aquinas, Fonseca, and Poinsot, di¤erent usages of the term were in competition, the reason is not simply intellectual confusion, but rather that meaning is of many kinds. In this essay, I have shifted the terrain from socio-history to phylogeny and ontogeny, suggesting that, in the child, as well as in the human species, perception is the primary type of meaning, whereas true signs are acquired much later, followed by signs systems and organism-independent artifacts. The whole point of having a semiotic theory, it is argued, is to be able to account for the di¤erences, and not only the similarities, of di¤erent kinds of meaning.

Prolegomena to the semiotic analysis of prehistoric visual displays 1 'The data obtained, even if then classified by a computer, must be first comprehended and assimilated by the human mind to acquire significance and to ultimately enrich our culture' (Anati 1976: 163f).

Cuando en los años sesenta del siglo pasado mucha gente empezó a hablar de la sociedad de imágenes, esto nada más podría significar que había un aumento cuantitativo de imágenes teniendo funciones importantes en la cultura. Sin embargo, los cambios que han habido después tienen una naturaleza más cualitativa. Si la fotografía constituye la primera forma de imagen mecanográfica, que, contrariamente a las imágenes chirográficas, resultan de una transformación global a partir de la realidad perceptiva, la imagen producida por una computadora combina rasgos de la chirografía con una naturaleza fundamentalmente mecanográfica. En la "realidad virtual", el límite entre la realidad y el signo queda reducido a sus rudimentos.

If we admit that, with the exception of language, human perception is predominantly visual, it is reasonable to think that all phenomena conveyed by the visual senses have something in common, but then visual semiotics/visual culture will comprehend much more than painting, sculpture, and architecture. The double coding hypotheses of cognitive psychology, as well as Lessing's classical opposition between language and painting, tell us something about this basic opposition. But to understand visual culture, we have to start from the varieties of the spectacular function, present in our everyday Lifeworld.

The present essay aims at integrating different concepts of meaning developed in semiotics, biology, and cognitive science, in a way that permits the formulation of issues involving evolution and development. The concept of sign in semiotics, just like the notion of representation in cognitive science, have either been used too broadly, or outright rejected. My earlier work on the notions of iconicity and pictoriality has forced me to spell out the taken-forgranted meaning of the sign concept, both in the Saussurean and the Peircean tradition. My work with the evolution and development of semiotic resources such as language, gesture, and pictures has proved the need of having recourse to a more specified concept of sign. To define the sign, I take as point of departure the notion of semiotic function (by Piaget), and the notion of appresentation (by Husserl). In the first part of this essay, I compare cognitive science and semiotics, in particular as far as the parallel concepts of representation and sign are concerned. The second part is concerned with what is probably the most important attempt to integrate cognitive science and semiotics that has been presented so far, The Symbolic Species, by Terrence Deacon.

In his recent work, Eco abandons his conventionalist theory of pictures, which was heavily censored by, among others, the present author. In so doing, however, Eco now goes to the other extreme, claiming that television images are like mirrors, which are no signs. It is my contention that Eco fails to come up with a more acceptable theory of iconicity. Since Eco is one of the few semioticians concerned with the basic issues of semiotics, it is always useful to try to understand what is wrong with his conception. In this essay, we set out to show, against Eco, that the mirror has all the properties of a genuine sign, and that, independently of that conclusion, the television image remains different from the mirror, since it is not only a sign, but a pictorial sign. Zusammenfassung: In seinen neueren Arbeiten gibt Eco seine konventionalistische Theorie der Abbildungen, die unter anderen vom Verfasser dieses Artikels ernsthaft kritisiert wurde, auf. Dabei geht Eco jedoch jetzt zur anderen Äußerlichkeit, indem er behauptet, dass Fernsehbilder den Spiegeln, die gar keine Zeichen seien, ähnelten. Damit ist es Eco meines Erachtens nicht gelungen eine Theorie über die Ikonizität, die annehmbarer wäre, auszuarbeiten. Da Eco einer der sehr wenigen Semiotiker ist, die sich mit den grundsätzlichen Fragen der Semiotik beschäftigen, ist es natürlich von großem Wert zu untersuchen, in welcher Hinsicht seine Auffassung fehlerhaft sein könnte. Ziel dieses Artikels ist es , entgegen Ecos Auffassung, zu beweisen, dass der Spiegel alle Eigenschaften eines echten Zeichens hat und dass, unabhängig davon, das Fernsehbild sich sehr vom Spiegel unterscheidet, da es nicht nur ein Zeichen ist, sondern sogar ein bildhaftes Zeichen.

A sense can be given, in qualitative rather than quantitative terms, to the three-part distinction, within the semiotics of culture, of Culture, Non-culture, and Extra-culture, by having recourse to the analysis of pronouns into two binary correlations, personality and subjectivity, originally proposed by Benveniste. The present communication will address two related themes: the possible relationship, which is not straight-forward, to Peirce's early presentation of his famous trichotomy in terms of personal pronouns, and its parallel, which is not a strict one, in the late work of Cassirer; and, in the second place, the curious opposition between the parts assigned to Ego and Alter, within the correlation of subjectivity, in the theories of Bakhtin and Peirce, respectively.

Although the well-known models of the Tartu school oppose Culture to Nature, they really concern relations between cultures, one of which is conceived as if it were nature. The inspiration for Lotman's late conception of the semiosphere, however, derives from the received opposition between mental (that is, semiotic) facts, which is the domain of the social and human sciences, and physical facts, which are studied by the natural sciences. Taking my point of departure in the earlier framework, and adding insights from such thinkers as Peirce as Bakhtin, as well as Cassirer and Husserl, I have already tried, in my recent work, to rephrase such classical issues of the human sciences as the possibility of knowledge about different kinds of facts, the access to the other, and the constraints imposed on the subject by extraneous entities. In this wide sense, the domain of alterity goes beyond what I have in earlier works qualified as the symmetrical and asymmetrical other, and the inner and outer other. It contains not only reality, in the sense of material facts, but also the domain of signs itself, that is, the semiosphere 16

Unlike in much of the contemporary discussion of embodiment, phenomenology is really involved with the body as a kind of meaning appearing to consciousness; and it does not only attend to the body of the biological organism, but also to the kind of organism-independent artefacts which are required by some sign systems. Because it is concerned with meaning, phenomenology is akin to semiotics. From the point of view of the latter discipline, however, signs must be distinguished from other meanings, and clear criteria are needed for doing so. At least one such criterion can by found in the work of Piaget: differentiation. Meaning in the more general sense of organisation and selection is at the basis of the common sense world, and thus accounts for what is known in Cognitive Linguistics as "image schemas". Cognitive Linguistics, just as biosemiotics, ignores this important distinction. Moreover, some cognitive linguists seem to deny the distinction between organism and environment, which must prevail if "image schemas" are to be acquired, along the lines of earlier conceptions of schematisation. On the basis of these considerations, a developmental sequence can be suggested going from schemas to signs and organism-independent artefacts.