The Semiotic Stance

Journal of Pragmatics, 1993

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...

Language, 1999

As a branch of theoretical semiotics which aims to contribute to the development of the theory of both semiotics and education, edusemiotics must also problematize the most foundational semiotic conceptions of sign and semiosis. The biosemiotic notion, that a sign relation is necessarily dependent on learning restricts semiotics to the biological sphere, to living beings. This fits well with education which can be seen as transition from the zoosemiotic sphere to the anthroposemiotic sphere. However this radical discontinuity between living and non-living spheres makes it difficult to understand how signs and semiosis are viable at all and what their basic nature is. Ontologically we can imagine that sign relations must also be somehow based on the features of non-living beings. In this article I will analyse how a concept of a sign can be seen as a general model of interaction between any beings. This paper develops the conception of semiosis and signification with regard to the competence (or habits) of the subject experiencing the meaning. Such task requires the explication of the ontological basis of semiosis-a step often perceived as dangerous by semioticians or ignored by educators.

Language, 1996

2021

I originally wrote this document in French as a supplement to an academic course I taught in the first semester of the academic year 2020 - 2021. The main goal was to lead students to see the link between semiotics, semiology, and linguistics, as well as some of their main terms and how they evolved over time. While semiology is stable, semiotics is presented in different forms: Briefly under philosophy to highlight how ancient it is, and as a generality to spark curiosity and encourage students to learn more about the topic, then according to the first account of C.S Peirce with an eye toward the three types of signs and some ideas that were ahead of their times in his era, and later as an art after it was a science as an introduction to some of the post-structural ideas which will be needed thereafter to understand the raison d’être of fields that fall into it. This course is more suitable for license students following an LMD course and its equivalent in the anglosphere, bachelor’s degree.

Multimodal Artefact Analysis in Ancient Studies. Investigating intersemiotic relations in pictorial and verbal communication in ancient Egypt, the Near East and beyond, 2021

Cultural semiotics (also called semiotics of culture) investigates the role of signs and sign systems in human culture. Influential theories in this area have been developed by Roland Barthes, Juri Lotman and Roland Posner, among others. While traditionally meaning had primarily been located in signs and sign systems such as language, images, or religious symbols, cultural semiotics has developed various approaches that connect the material aspects of cultures with the layers of meaning and interpretation that permeate our cultures. They complement the more specific approaches to artefact semantics developed in archaeology, anthropology, and art history, by outlining the general principles explaining how meanings are attributed to human-made (or even natural) objects, making them into signs. The contribution first presents Roland Posner’s semiotic theory of culture. While this theory offers a precise terminological approach to cultural processes, it offers only limited insight into artefact semantics. This gap is filled by an approach developed by the author which postulates a range of different but interacting principles for meaning attribution. The semiotic theory of artefact semantics considers both processes on the social level (e.g. artefact meanings based on function or defined by convention) and individual meaning attribution (e.g. objects acquiring meaning through our lived experience).

UOB, 2019

The relation between semantics and semiotics is likely to be direct. Since semiotics is the science of signs while semantics is the study of the linguistic meaning of morphemes, words, phrases, and sentences .Through investigating the nature of words, for example, they are regarded as representatives of ideas and concepts. They are linguistic signs which are associated with non-linguistic entities via a bond. In an attempt to understand the essence of this relationship and the nature of bond, it is necessary to have an overview of semantics ,semiotics, the distribution of signs and the association between the two. Moreover, a brief view to the domain of semiotics and its impact on other methods of communication will be discussed.

A Theory of Signs’ Meanings and References, 2024

Abstract This work in its content belongs to semiotics. Semiotics, by its brief definition, is the science of signs. A sign is something material (it can be seen, heard, felt), which, in addition to itself, represents something else, which is its deep essence. This something is the meaning of the sign. Therefore, most definitions of semiotics state19 that semiotics is the science of the meaning of signs. If you open the Internet and ask the question: “What is semiotics?” or “What is the meaning of a sign?”, you will find definitions like this: “Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes and meaning-making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign's interpreter”. I started working on semiotic problems in the early 1990s of the last century. Intuitively, I defined a sign as a carrier of meaning from the very beginning, but only now do I feel the need, or rather, my readiness to clearly define what the “meaning of signs” is, and how to clearly decipher it. This is what this article is devoted to.