Reassessing the Foundations of Semiotics

1995

2012

When the Managing Editors of this journal asked us to undertake this special issue on the position of semiotics in the vast domain of contemporary cultural studies, we accepted with great pleasure, given our personal involvement with structuralism and semiotics during nearly half a century. While we ourselves work within the tradition of semiotics defined by Ferdinand de Saussure in the early years of the 20 century as the study of how sign systems function in the life of society, we did not limit the scope of this volume to classical Saussurean semiotics (or semiology, as it is also known). In our Call for papers we asked for submissions “on all aspects of semiotics, focusing on analysis informed by a reflexive theoretical and methodological awareness” and it is our hope that readers will find these qualities in the papers selected. It has become something of a ritual in introductory courses, handbooks and papers on semiotics to pay respects to the two founders of the discipline, F...

Bloomsbury Semiotics, Vol. 3, 2023

This is the third of four volumes constituting The Bloomsbury Companion to Semiotics, a state-of-the-art survey of semiotic inquiry, proposing developments and research priorities, as though responding to Sebeok (1991: 97-9) when à propos semiosis and semiotics he asks, 'what lies in their future?'. The nature of the project is implementation of the 'detotalizing method', thus denominated by Rossi-Landi (1985). Uniting different disciplines, universes of discourse, a multiplicity of voices in an open dialogical totality, the detotalizing method presupposes alterity of signs, language and communication beyond the separatism of specialisms and universalisms, and as such is a dialectical-dialogical method. A global survey, diachronic and synchronic, historical and transdisciplinary, this project also recalls Morris and his appeal for 'unity of semiotic' ([1938] 1971: 55-64); a detotalized unity corresponding to the detotalized and dialogic nature of its object of study in its manifold manifestations-signs and sign systems, semiosis. The aim is not to juxtapose multiple special semiotics syncretically, nor to propose a totalizing transversal language of unified science, nor for semiotics to prevail over different disciplines in the name of philosophical omniscience. Instead, a general and global semiotic vision can perform a detotalizing, critical function towards all claimed totalities, thereby fostering dialogue among specialized disciplines. In this sense semiotics is unique, not merely 'a science among sciences, but an organon or instrument of all the sciences' ([1938] 1971: 67-8). Based on listening to the other, the detotalizing method favours deconstruction of the larger totality, evidencing interrelationship among its constitutive totalities, alias alterities. Otherness and dialogism are intrinsic to the sign, condition of interconnectiveness and interdependency among signs, sign systems and dimensions of semiosis in which human experience is articulated, its sense, meaning and significance. Regarding the arts and social sciences, attention is on verbal and nonverbal semiosis, before and beyond the word. Contrary to reductionist oversimplification, meaning cannot be encapsulated in definitions, pseudo-scientific jargon and improbable typologies. Technical terminology of special languages aside, signifying ambiguity is irrepressible. Alterity, dialogicality and listening are structural to the life of signs and enable semiotic research beyond prescribed boundaries of academic disciplines with their commonplaces and stereotypes, beyond institutionalized listening. Such propensity characterizes literary speech genres, and indeed artistic discourse generally.

International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation , 2022

Human communication, often defined as the transfer of information between human beings, is better understood as the exchange of meaning between them. It has been discovered that meaning hardly makes sense outside the context of communication. Efforts to make sense of meanings date back to the classical times from the metaphysical postulates of Plato and Aristotle, which establish basic paradigms for the interpretation of the relation between 'ideas' and 'individual forms' as correlates of linguistic signs through Locke's postulates of a fully-fledged system of ideas pre-existent to language, Condillac's acknowledgement of the constitutive role of signs, which allow a level of cognitive organization beyond that of animals to the modern realization of the dependence of the mind on language and its social character which lead directly to Humboldt's linguistic relativism. One of the most dynamic breakthroughs in the understanding of human communication and the meanings exchanged therein is semiotics which is often defined as the science, doctrine, or study of signs and has become one of the traditions used in the study of communication. Combining historical inquiry and content analysis as methodological tools, this study explores the trajectory of semiotics, its nature, and dynamics and posits that because signs are socially and culturally polysemous, the use of semiotics requires exposure to diverse disciplines or at least more than one discipline in order to be able to properly underscore its multimodal tenor.

The present article gives an overview of different approaches on semiotics as science, its objects of investigation, methods and genesis (where, how and

RUDN Journal of Language Studies, Semiotics and Semantics

The study discusses the fundamental issues of semiotics. Semiotics still involves no broadly agreed upon theoretical assumptions, models, or empirical methodologies. Faced with much disagreement among notable semioticians about what semiotics actually entails, the study opens up the way to its theoretical re-thinking. Starting from the analysis of the discussions of scientists it indicated that the signs are not identical to what they represent this studies the issue through a theoretical concepts analysis, literature review, combined with comparative analysis of the main classical theoretical parameters of signs. The basic approach of this study is that signs, whether it is symbolic, iconic, or indexical, are not what they mean. The nature of the sign, whether it is symbolic, iconic, or indexical, determines the way it is used, and the same signifier can be used in different ways in different contexts. The role of an interpreter should be taken into account. A sign meaning is not i...

Journal of Pragmatics, 1993

After various phases in the development of semiotics, commonly tagged 'code semiotics' or the 'semiotics of decodification' and 'interpretation semiotics', the boundaries of this science are now expanding to include studies that focus more closely upon the relation between signs and values. In truth, this relation is already inscribed within the make-up itself of semiotics, within its very history: whereas Ferdinand de Saussure founded his sign theory on the theory of exchange value taken from marginalist economics, Charles S. Peirce, in his sign model, breaks the equilibrium of the logic of equal exchange with his theory of unlimited semiosis, or, if we prefer, of infinite deferral from one sign to the next. This approach allows for an opening toward otherness, for the concept of signifying surplus. Charles Morris explicitly emphasized the need to theorize about the relation between signs and values, and in fact oriented a large part of his own research in this direction. However, official semiotics has largely emerged as a predominantly cognitive science, as a descriptive science with claims to neutrality. Our proposal is that we recover and develop that particular bend in semiotics which is open to questions of an axiological order and consequently to studies focusing on a more global understanding of man and his signs. The expression 'ethosemiotics' (proposed by August0 Ponzio) captures the sense of such an orientation with its focus on the relation between signs and sense, and therefore on the question of significance as value; but if we go back to the end of the last century, we soon discover that Victoria Welby had already introduced the term 'signifies' for the same purpose, thus marking her distance from what was commonly intended at the time by both 'semantics' and 'semiotics'. When considering the philosophical question of 'communication' with reference to semiotics and to the contribution that may come from it, presentday experts think less and less in terms of 'sender', 'message', 'code', 'channel', and 'receiver', while practitioners of the popular version of the science of signs still tend to cling to such concepts. This particular way of presenting the communication process derives from a certain type of semiotics (best called 'semiology', owing to its prevalently Saussurean matrix), currently identified as 'semiotics of decodification' (criticized by Rossi-Landi (1968) as

Language, 1999