Semiotics put to the test (book review)

Experimental Semiotics (ES) is the study of "novel forms of communication which people develop when they cannot use pre-established communication" (Galantucci 2012). Thus, it tackles pragmatics in a “pure”, radical sense, capturing the process of creating the relation between signs and their interpreters as biological, psychological, and social beings (see e.g. Morris 1938 or the notion of “intermediary pragmatics” in Bar-On 2021). Broadly defined ES has arguably become the most prolific experimental approach in language evolution research. In our paper we report the results of a study on the scope of recent ES research concerned with the emergence of novel communication systems and evaluate the ways in which it is relevant to the study of pragmatics from an evolutionary perspective. We have coded for multiple levels across 13 dimensions related to the properties of the emergent communication systems or properties of the study designs – such as coordination versus referent...

World Wide Web

In this paper we present an overview of semiotics with particular emphasis on those concepts that offer promise to psychologists. We make no pretense that we are able to represent semiotics as that term is always used. We believe that most semioticians would agree, however, that semiotic theory offers the position that a wide variety of problems in modern inquiry, taken from a number of different disciplines, are actually special cases of one general set of problems: What is a sign? How does it work? How can I use it? Once the commonalities among all these inquiries are recognized, a substantial bonus is realized: researchers from a variety of disciplines who adopt a semiotic viewpoint become able to communicate across those disciplines and share valuable insights. We conclude with a series of short reviews of books on semiotics.

1977

Explicates the Semiotic Paradigm and devotes a chapter to each subparadigm, such as Philosophy of Semiotics; Experimental Semiotics; Search for Invariant Patterns; Theoretical Semiotics; Applied Semiotics; Mathematical Semiotics; and New Ways of Thinking - New Worldviews.

1979

A well-known academic semiotician in the 1970s, Umberto Eco, later achieved a degree of popular fame with his novel In the Name of the Rose ,, a remarkable commercial exploitation of esoteric critical theories. Here, he outlines his basic approach to semiotics. His interest in forms of human communication is broad: this selection includes an annotated list of the possible subjects of semiotic study. Eco's writing is only indirectly applicable to film, but his influence on other semioticians writing about film has been great.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2012

The quantitative increase in recent years of research into semiotics, among other methods of reading works of art, is notable. Since semiotics is the act of reading as based on a metalanguage that is constructed and grounded in logic, understanding the methods applied by the field requires time and experience. In addition, the application of models that differ in relation to each other under different schools of thought and under different names makes its yet more difficult to comprehend the field of semiotics. Despite the different models that are available, approaches display certain commonalities as they are born of the same foundations and objectives. This study will aim to pinpoint the common aspects of the intellectual foundations, methods, objectives and research limitations of the different schools of thought and the models that are involved in the study of semiotics.

Prin ted in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3634-1 (cloth) ISBN 0-8020-8472-9 (paper) Prin t on acid-free paper Toronto Studies in Semiotics and Communication

Communication Studies currently undergoes a crisis of paradigms that requires an ontological review that must begin with a debate about the conditions of possibility of every communicational phenomena. In this article we argue that semiosis offers a conceptual framework that allows for the study of communication as qualitative action. Semiosis, or the action of the sign, is here defined as a fundamental process based on perception that models the world of species, creating cognition and culture. At the core of semiosis are dynamic structures that the authors have defined as 'ontological diagrams'. The first purpose of Semiotics of Communication is to understand how these modeling systems evolve ontologically and phylogenically, producing, in the case of human culture, means of communication ever more varied and technologically advanced.