Cobley Randivir Intro Sociosemiotics

Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
PAUL COBLEY and ANTI RANDVIIR
What is sociosemiotics? It is not the easiest question to answer and any

response will necessarily be incomplete. However, the current special
issue of Semiotica attempts to address the question, partly derived from
a groundbreaking panel of some of the world’s leading sociosemioticians
at the ISI conference in Imatra, Finland in 2001.
To begin with, it is not clear what the name of the object in question is.
Is it ‘sociosemiotics’ or is it ‘social semiotics’? The former term tends to
be dominant in the European tradition although, ironically, it echoes the
predominantly Anglophone tradition (notwithstanding Gumperz, among
others) of sociolinguistics. The latter tends to be associated with the
Anglo-Australian, Hallidayan perspective in communication and sign
study, although not exclusively so. (One contributor to this special issue
even insists on ‘social semiotics’ as the key term because ‘sociosemiotics’
is more closely associated with Greimas and Courtés’ idea of an isolated
and subjectivist semiotics.) Since one of the aims of this special issue is to
bring together endeavors in the field from a number of locations, espe-
cially those that are infrequently acknowledged in the Anglophone world,
we have alighted on ‘sociosemiotics’ as our designation. It is possible that
this will become the preferred designation. Certainly, it is a less unwieldy
term in the sense that one seldom hears reference to ‘social linguistics’
(despite an occurrence of the term in one of the contributions in this spe-
cial issue).
1. Defining sociosemiotics
Yet, the choice of a name is one of the least troubling aspects of under-
standing what sociosemiotics is. Sociosemiotics clearly stands in relation
to ‘semiotics,’ a term that is itself infrequently defined with any great
rigor. Furthermore, it also has a close relationship with di¤erent kinds of
Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 1–39 0037–1998/09/0173–0001

DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2009.001 6 Walter de Gruyter
2 P. Cobley and A. Randviir
applied semiotics (cf. Pelc 1997) and their attempts to reconfigure sign
study as the appropriate means for closely studying the phenomena of
everyday life. Among the very few explicit definitions of sociosemiotics is
that of Lagopoulos and Gottdiener who state, simply, that ‘sociosemi-
otics is materialistic analysis of ideology in everyday life’ (Gottdiener
and Lagopoulos 1986: 14). This definition, however, may be open to ac-
cusations that it is ‘too materialistic’ in the sense that in semiotic analysis
it is impossible to escape either from everyday life and the consummation
of signs at the stage of data collection (see, for example, Danesi and Per-
ron 1999: 293). Nor is it easy to escape from the necessarily pragmatic
angle of semiotic studies (see, for example, Morris 1971: 43–54) in which
the ‘context,’ embedded in sign use, should be an important guide to
interpretation. Stressing ideology may have also encouraged Gottdiener
and Lagopoulos to distinguish sociosemiotics from so-called ‘mainstream
semiotics’ by associating the former exclusively with the analysis of con-
notative signification connected with ideological systems. Yet, one would
be hard-pressed to find a cultural phenomenon in which denotative as-
pects were deprived of connotative codes.
Frequently, sociosemiotics is left undefined, despite the fact that it
appears in the titles of numerous publications (e.g., Halliday 1978; Hodge
and Kress 1988; Alter 1991; Flynn 1991; Riggins 1994; Jensen 1995).
Clearly, it must at least be a matter of a critical sign study that is aware
of the specific and strategic ways in which signs are deployed in social
formations. The opposites of this definition are probably implicit: that
is, first, study of signs in nature (as if nature did not feature ‘sociality’)
and sign study in social formations that is not aware of the specific/
strategic deployment of signs (a straw man for some versions of socio-
semiotics that deplore the supposed apolitical nature of some semiotics).
In various ways, a good paradigm is provided by the evolution of
language study in the twentieth century, especially in relation to an-
thropology. Influential here, but by no means watertight, has been the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Along with his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf
(1897–1941), the linguist Edward Sapir pursued the argument that, in
brief, the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Concomi-
tantly, the thought processes of one culture are separated from another
by virtue of the language in which each ‘thinks’ and conceives the world.
The idea was principally derived from the huge di¤erences Whorf per-
ceived between European languages and Native American languages like
Hopi (Whorf 1956). The idea of linguistic relativism (Gumperz and
Levinson 1996; Lee 1996), in which language is seen to be responsible
for many key cultural di¤erences, clearly chimes with social specific uses
of signs.
Introduction 3
Indirectly, then, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, influenced the develop-

ment of sociolinguistics and, in turn, this influenced part of the develop-
ment of sociosemiotics. Coupland and Jaworski’s list of sociolinguistic
principles is illustrative of some of the imperatives that would be passed
on to a full-blown sociosemiotics:
– How are forms of speech and patterns of communication distributed

across time and space?
– How do individuals and social groups define themselves in and
through language?
– How do communities di¤er in the ‘ways of speaking’ they have
adopted?
– What are typical patterns in multilingual people’s use of languages?
– How is language involved in social conflicts and tensions?
– Do our attitudes to language reflect and perpetuate social divisions
and discrimination, and could a better understanding of language in
society alleviate those problems?
– Is there a sociolinguistic theory of language use?
– What are the most e‰cient and defensible ways of collecting language
date?
– What are the implications of qualitative and quantitative methods of
sociolinguistic research?
– What are the relationships between researchers, ‘subjects,’ and data?
(Coupland and Jaworski 1997: 1–2)
As can be seen, the list not only identifies the interface of signs and the
‘social,’ it also implicates methodology in the relationship. Furthermore,
that methodology is itself a hybrid, derived from various disciplines
within the human sciences.
Thus, if sociosemiotics is to be understood as a term — despite the fact
that, even as a loosely recognized term, it is able to unite an array of for-
midable scholars such as those in this special issue of Semiotica — it is
worth mentioning what is involved in any attempt to outline its bounda-
ries. To do this, it would be necessary to briefly consider the development
of the humanities, especially as these converge, crisscross, and diverge
during the tense period at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries. In this perspective, special attention would have to be paid to (cul-
tural) anthropology, semiology and semiotics, early sociology, and other
social sciences. The first step, though, would involve an examination of
di¤erent ‘subsemiotic trends’ in the context of the contemporary state of
semiotics in order to distinguish the grounds for the (re)creation of a
(new) field of sociosemiotics.
2. The contemporary field of semiotics: A very brief note
There existed a relatively long period in the humanities of the twentieth

century during which only two main authors were considered as the
founding fathers of semiotics and semiology: Charles S. Peirce and Ferdi-
nand de Saussure. Locally, in areas such as Northern European and
North American cultural studies, figures such as Barthes and representa-
tives of poststructuralism were thought to represent contemporary semi-
otics on their own. E¤ectively, though, Barthes was often made to stand
in for ‘Saussure’ or ‘semiotics’ (in truth, ‘semiology’). It is worth pausing
briefly to untangle these relations in respect of sociosemiotics.
First, the relation of semiology and semiotics has frequently been
treated as antagonistic. Singer compares semiotics and semiology in the
following manner:
Table 1. Comparison of semiotics and semiology (Singer 1984: 42)
Point of Comparison Semiotic (Peirce) Semiology (Saussure)
1. Aims at a general theory philosophical, normative, a descriptive, generalized

of signs but observational linguistics
2. Frequent subject matter logic, mathematics, natural languages,
domains sciences, colloquial literature, legends, myths
English (logic-centered) (language-centered)
3. Signs are relations, not a sign is a triadic relation a sign is a dyadic relation
‘things’ of sign, object, and between signifier and
interpretant signified
4. Linguistic signs are but also include ‘natural but appear ‘necessary’ for
‘arbitrary’ signs’ — icons and speakers of the language
indexes (Benveniste)
5. Ontology of ‘objects’ of existence presupposed by not ‘given’ but determined
signs signs by the linguistic relations
6. Epistemology of included in semiotic presupposed by but not
empirical ego or subject analysis included in semiological
analysis
Second, and more confusing still, as mentioned in relation to Barthes and

cultural studies, semiotics has often been taken to be semiology, without
any reference to the Peircean tradition. But the confusion of semiotics/
semiology as conflated or antagonistic is further compounded in the case
of sociosemiotics. Saussure’s understanding of the sign, clearly evinced in
the Course in General Linguistics, is psychologistic, based on the unity of
‘concept’ and ‘sound-image’ in the mind. Peirce, on the other hand, has a
more materialist understanding of the sign as exemplified in the ‘object’
component of his triad. For some anthropologically-oriented contributors
Introduction 5
to the general field of sociosemiotics, this was potentially a boon. Put sim-
ply, the sign could be demonstrated to have a clear e‰cacy in everyday
life and material culture. Yet, oddly enough, sociosemiotic investigations
still managed to flourish as ‘materialist’ studies using the semiological
tradition, often in blissful and hubristic ignorance of Peircean semiotics.
Barthes’ highly influential primer on Saussure, translated into English in
1967 as Elements of Semiology, re-presented the Saussurean signifiant as a
material entity, a substance in the circulation of signs.
One important branch of sociosemiotics that relied on Barthesian semi-
ology, among other things, was the Anglo-Australian tradition of ‘social
semiotics.’ Drawing, too, on the work of Halliday, general sociolinguis-
tics and, later, Foucault and contemporary studies of the media, this tra-
dition gained enormous influence especially in Northern Europe, North
America, and Australasia, augmenting a burgeoning field of discourse
theory that includes a plethora of robust journals (Discourse and Society,
Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, etc.), subdivisions such as ‘critical dis-
course analysis’ (CDA), and a defined career path for those who wish to
master and reproduce the discourse theory register.
Yet, the separation and the conflation of semiotics/semiology are, at
least in one sense, misguided. Human signs and semiosis are located in
the mind, and concepts and sound-images are in connection, on the one
hand, with sociocultural sign systems in terms of expression and, on the
other hand, with either concrete or abstract referents, such that they are
always implicated in the semiotic reality of a community. The tension of
di¤erent regimes of semiosis really arises from relations between sociocul-
tural reality and institutionalized sign systems on the one hand, and the
internalized relations and individual applications of signs on the other.
Another major figure in semiotics, although aligned most closely with
Peirce, has produced work that proposes to solve the problem of di¤erent
regimes of semiosis and di¤erent realities. Thomas A. Sebeok’s career has
consisted not just of his publishing and teaching ventures. His massive
project of promoting disciplines and bringing together its representatives
is well-known and well-documented. This included bringing together
workers in the field of Chomskyan linguistics and sociolinguistics, as
well as his work in convening biosemiotics and an impressive array of tex-
tual semiotics. Semiotics as redefined by Sebeok drew from the example
of Peirce and the reference points of John Locke. Peirce’s triadic version
of the sign, his typologies of sign functioning, and the design of his sign
theory to cover all domains, provided the groundwork for Sebeok to
make his work amount to an outline of the way that semiosis is the crite-
rial attribute of life (see Sebeok 2001; cf. Petrilli and Ponzio 2001). Semi-
otics in this formulation was not just a method for understanding some
artifacts of interest to arts and the humanities. Rather, it evolved as the

human means to think of signs as signs, whether they be part of commu-
nication in films or novels, the aggressive expressions of animals or the
messages that pass between organisms as lowly as the humble cell. To be
sure, the communication that takes place in the sociopolitical sphere is of
utmost importance and the future of the planet currently depends on it.
However, after Sebeok it is necessary to understand that human a¤airs
are only a small part of what semiotics’ proper object is.
The biosemiotics encouraged by Sebeok draws on the work of the
Estonian-born German theoretical biologist, Jakob von Uexküll. Most
importantly, perhaps, von Uexküll’s work foregrounds the theory of
Umwelt: the ‘environment’ of species according to their specific modeling
devices. For Sebeok, the closest English version of Umwelt is ‘model,’
a term that has been bestowed with specific resonance by the Tartu-
Moscow School of semiotics. The modeling device of humans for using
signs and apprehending their environment is what is understood as lan-
guage, a primary capacity of which is nonverbal. As is well-known, Tartu
semioticians were interested in the links between di¤erent levels of model-
ing, particularly the level of ‘cultural’ modeling (‘tertiary’, see Sebeok
1988), which was derived from the levels of verbal and nonverbal (‘sec-
ondary’ and ‘primary’) modeling. Already, in this division of modeling
systems, there is the schematization of di¤erent kinds of semiosis and,
possibly, the di¤erent semiotics needed to treat them. Hence, Sebeok
encouraged specialism in semiotics: partly because he understood that
academic endeavor has an aptitude for proceeding in this way, but also
because subsemiotic branches — one would include sociosemiotics among
them — were crucial to the work of semiotics as a whole.
3. Subsemiotic branches
Yet, to complicate matters, subsemiotic branches of study have a longer

prehistory than the theoretical formalization of modeling systems. Thus,
the main way in which subsemiotic branches of research have emerged is
through the logic of information channels (e.g., the optical channel; see
Landwehr 1997, the acoustic channel; see Strube and Lazarus 1997, the
tactile channel; see Heuer 1997, etc.). Also terms like ‘visual semiotics,’
‘semiotics of space,’ and the like, similarly point at the possibility of dif-
ferentiating between objects on the basis of the channels of human per-
ception by which the world is turned into signs. However, it is doubtful
that these channels can be actually studied separately (see, for example,
Krampen 1997). Furthermore, di¤erent areas of semiosis have been
Introduction 7
articulated that lead to, and are included in, the cultural processes of
anthroposemiosis: microsemiosis, mycosemiosis, phytosemiosis, zoo-
semiosis (see Wuketis 1997). So, the problem arises once more that socio-
semiotics is always embedded in ‘general’ semiotics.
Jerzy Pelc (1997) attempts to address this question. According to Pelc,
there exist more general levels of semiotics, such as frameworks and
metastructures, and applied semiotics that also includes the field of socio-
semiotics (Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc’s argument follows the ideas of Morris
(1946) in that ‘the application of semiotics as an instrument may be called
‘‘applied semiotic’’ ’ and ‘applied semiotic utilizes knowledge about signs
for the accomplishment of various purposes’ (Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc states
that ‘. . . one may also have in mind not only semiotic methods but also
definitions and statements contained in theoretical semiotics which then
become a common basis for various applied semiotics’ (Pelc 1997: 636).
This again points at the impossibility of introducing di¤erent trends of
applied semiotics without support from, and integration with, general
theoretical semiotics. Likewise, it seems that there should always be a
ground for creating the above-named subsemiotic disciplines. Thus, it
may still be questionable to a degree whether the term ‘applied semiotics’
can be used because of a necessarily strong link with the theoretical impe-
tus (otherwise, the applications obtain such an ad hoc nature that they
start lacking common methods and principles). Pelc adds:
. . . each individual applied semiotics has its own theoretical foundations. And
since some of the applied semiotics are humanistic disciplines (e.g. semiotics of
theater), others are social (e.g. sociosemiotics), still others natural (e.g., zoosemi-
otics) or formal sciences (e.g., the study of deductive formalized systems), their
theories too di¤er as regards methodology. (Pelc 1997: 636)
But, while Pelc’s understanding of the general and the subsemiotic disci-
plines relies on attention to the intrinsically reflective nature of di¤erent
semiotic trends with regard to the general semiotic paradigm, he suggests
that sociosemiotics is ‘to a great extent characterized by features typical
of theories in the social sciences’ (Pelc 1997: 639). As such, sociosemiotic
research includes the methods of all disciplines that allow the study of the
di¤erent levels of sign production and exchange as presented by Saussure
(according to Bally and Sechehaye). These levels include psychological,
physiological, and physical processes (Saussure 1959: 11–12), and link
up with Peirce’s discourse on logical and semiotic processes, as well as
the above-mentioned areas and channels of semiosis.
One area where levels and processes of interaction brought forward
in sign creation and exchange has been considered is in late twentieth-
century communication study. The processual stages of sign exchange as

communication have been articulated by those influenced by the classical
model of communication found in Shannon and Weaver (1949). While
such processual models can principally be traced back to Saussure’s
sketch of oral speech, other types of communication models center on
the functions of interaction as presented by Roman Jakobson (1960). Yet
others focus on perceptions and events (Gerbner 1956) or on particular
occupational communication (Westley and Maclean 1957). On numerous
occasions, Sebeok argued that semiotics in general and communication
theory are the same thing. Certainly, as Dan Sperber argues, there were
many in the 1940s and 1950s who believed in and sought a unified science
of communication based on semiotics, cybernetics and information
theory (1979: 48). In light of this, it might be perceived that sociosemi-
otics is the equivalent to a more sociologically-orientated communication,
an approach that is subsemiotic (‘signs in society’) and whose methodol-
ogy is defined by its objects (‘signs in society,’ again). There is some
truth in this; however, it is not the end of the matter since sociosemiotics’
sources, influences, and correspondences are also located elsewhere than
sociology.
4. Sources and correspondences
Apart from those areas mentioned already (notably, sociology, sociolin-

guistics, and communication theory), it should be noted that sociosemi-
otics has its sources and correspondences in the following areas: cultural
anthropology (Kluckhohn 1961; Goodenough 1980 [1970]; Keesing 1972,
1974; Rosaldo 1993 [1989]), cultural semiotics, (Shukman 1984; Randviir
2004), sociology and the social sciences (Kavolis 1995; Nikolaenko 1983;
Ruesch 1972), Marxism (Ponzio 1989; Rossi-Landi 1986a, 1986b, 1990),
pragmatics (Verschueren 1999; Davis 1991; Morris 1938), pragmaticism
(EP 2: 2.371–2.397; cf. Schutz 1967 [1932] and Garfinkel 1967), as well
as constructionism (see Gergen and Gergen 2003; Gergen 1985; Potter
and Wetherell 1987) and the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). A few words
on each may help in the definition of contemporary sociosemiotics.
4.1. Cultural anthropology
In attempting to define the content of ‘culture’ for contemporary semiotic

analysis, it is di‰cult to avoid commenting on the development of cul-
tural anthropology during the twentieth century. The expanding range of
Introduction 9
cultural anthropology is related to the way in which sociosemiotics (as

well as mid-twentieth century semiotics, generally) found its objects. Eu-
ropean cultural anthropology had roots in early sociology and Saussur-
ean semiology that are revealed in structural anthropology. Furthermore,
principles of semiology, structuralism, and formalism are evident in the
parallel development of cultural semiotics. Semiology is important both
for structural anthropology (cf. Leach 1976) and for cultural semiotics
(cf. Lucid 1997), since it has directed culture studies toward the analysis
of sign systems as cognitive social systems. A gradually increasing empha-
sis on the description of cultural phenomena as the outcome of individu-
ally (or communally) articulated social sign systems led to the burgeoning
currency of schools in cultural analysis associated with cognitive trends in
cultural anthropology. Thus, there was a steady movement from the late
nineteenth century description of cultures as sets of artifacts organized
according to cultural patterns toward the interpretation of cultures as
ideational systems (Geertz 1993). This means that cultures were no longer
understood to be ‘made’ only at the meta-level, through the organization
of relations between cultural phenomena in scientific discourse. Indeed,
while cultures could be viewed as ‘theories’ in Kluckhohn’s sense (Kluck-
hohn 1961), throughout the development of the humanities there has been
an increased attention to cultures as abstractions existing at the level of
the cultural object. This has been characteristic of schools analyzing cul-
tures as ideational or semiotic systems.
Sociocultural systems are reflective systems and the overt behavior re-
vealed in cultural traits depends on the covert behavior directed by cogni-
tive structures such as image schemata, values, behavioral schemes, etc.
Thus, the aim of understanding cultures has been to describe them as
systems of knowledge, intersemiotic sign systems, reflective systems. In
the fashion of the cognitive anthropologist Ward Goodenough, cultures
can be seen as sets of decision standards, intellectual forms, perception
models, models of relating, interpretation models, preference ratings and
organizational patterns (see, for example, Goodenough 1961, 1980 [1970],
1981 [1971]). For a unified cultural anthropology, these cognitive struc-
tures would converge into sociocultural systems defined as systems that
‘. . . represent the social realizations or enactments of ideational designs-
for-living in particular environments’ (Keesing 1974: 82).
An important feature of the development of the humanities has been
the widening of the scope of culture study by new methods, a process
that is not unconnected to the development of semiotics. Rosaldo
presents an understanding of the development of ethnographic and social
thought as having its roots in the epoch of ‘the Lone Ethnographer’
deeply immersed in fieldwork, the results of which were used by armchair
theorists as information storehouses. The period of the Lone Ethnogra-

pher, according to Rosaldo, was followed by the classic period lasting in
anthropology, from approximately 1921 to 1971; this was characterized
by the objectivist research program, which viewed society as a system
and culture as a coherent set of patterns: ‘Phenomena that could not be
regarded as systems or patterns appeared to be unanalyzable; they were
regarded as exceptions, ambiguities, or irregularities’ (Rosaldo 1993
[1989]: 32). Similarly, as Kluckhohn pointed out, the sudden expansion
of the range of objects for culture analysis took place in tandem with the
arrival of new methods allowing explanations of diverse phenomena sup-
posedly outside the mainstream domain of culture, e.g., psychoanalysis
(Kluckhohn 1961).
On the other hand, categorization of certain phenomena as not repre-
sentative of a cultural system would principally allow descriptions of
given systems by way of a principle of negation. This is not dissimilar to
the predilection of both psychoanalysis and poststructuralism for the
‘marginal’ as a repository of meaning by which to understand the main-
stream. From this perspective, exceptions, ambiguities, and irregularities
gain specific significance for the analysis of both the object-level (the so-
called ‘wastebasket method’) and the meta-level. Discussions in cultural
anthropology about the range of objects for the study of culture and soci-
ety have been of great value for the social and human sciences. Whereas
one can find fault in Western scholarship for its ‘primitivization’ of cer-
tain cultures and societies until at least the turn of the nineteenth and
twentieth century, extending the range of research objects was of crucial
importance in placing Western cultures and societies under the anthropo-
logical microscope. In a critical vein, Marcus and Fischer (1986: 20) have
labeled this the ‘salvage motif ’ of ethnography.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, indigenous cultures were
taken as research objects for Western humanitarian scholarship. So-called
‘primitive’ cultures tended to be described as cultural groups rather than
societies. The Western population that lived in societies was deemed, at
the same time, too elaborate to study. Complex developments in Western
civilization at the object-level (industrialization, inventions, and discov-
eries that brought technology, medicine, natural science to levels that in-
spired confidence — modernity) induced new attitudes at the meta-level:
society became a proper object of study alongside culture. Yet, more far-
reaching still has been the self-reflexivity of anthropologists later in the
twentieth century (e.g. Cli¤ord 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986). What
became apparent to cultural anthropology was not only that the phenom-
ena studied in culture are semiotic in their bearing, but so too was the way
in which investigation of such phenomena took place, by partaking of
Introduction 11
procedures that were as equally semiotic (or, in a more limiting way, dis-
cursive) as the phenomena under question:
The primary data of ethnographic analysis consist of informants’ statements

about the code and records of their speech behavior . . . All available data, includ-
ing behavioral records, the ethnographer’s intuitions/and speech behavior, pro-
vide evidence from which an underlying cultural code can be inferred, and against
which descriptions can be tested. (Keesing 1972: 301)
What anthropology came to realize, partly influenced by sociosemiotically-

oriented ethnographers such as Hymes, was that it was dealing not so
much with the subject and object, but with the triplet of object, re-
searcher, and informant. This has been a pretty salient point within the
perspective of sociosemiotics.
4.2. Cultural semiotics
While Western cultural anthropology widened its objects of analysis and

adopted a more interpretative bent, sociosemiotics also drew inspiration
from work carried out in more constricting circumstances. Indeed, it
may have been such circumstances that prevented cultural semiotics as
developed by the Tartu-Moscow school from being overly transparent,
despite the clarity and breadth of its principle theses (Ivanov et al. 1973).
What is central, however, is the conceptual floating of the elementary
notions of metalanguage (see Levchenko and Salupere 1999). Cultural
semiotics as a discipline developed in the context of a totalitarian regime,
also involving other, explicitly political spheres. Under totalitarian con-
ditions it was largely impossible to present the kind of breadth to ap-
proaching research objects that might have been achieved in less con-
straining regimes. Whereas it might be possible to openly promote
philology or literature studies, it was simply not possible to promulgate
semiotics as an individual field of scholarship with an identifiable struc-
ture and featuring the usual academic paraphernalia such as research
projects, monographs, and textbooks. Any monolithic semiotic paradigm
having to do with the analysis of society and culture would sooner
or later have to get involved in the examination of power and ideology,
social and cultural structure, and political developments. Scholarship via
articles (as in the case of Sign Systems Studies, the oldest journal of semi-
otics in the world) was fruitful but prevented the development of a unified
metalanguage even by members of the same school of scholarship. Of
course, this is not uncharacteristic of textbooks and anthologies in dif-

ferent disciplines that have developed in free societies and in the tradition
of long-term institutionalization (e.g., psychology, sociology). Yet, in
those cases, variation at least worked within a certain established frame-
work; adjustments and innovations served to make the paradigmatic and
methodological boundaries of a discipline continuous more exact. The
circumstances of cultural semiotics’ gestation forced it to be wary of so-
cial and political structures when it might have been self-reflexively defin-
ing its parameters and methodologies (see, for example, Cherednichenko
2000).
Problems in terminology and methodology that concern the definition
and study of cultural phenomena under the label of cultural semiotics are,
on the other hand, related not only to the unfavorable political environ-
ment in which the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school was to operate, but also
to the relatively complicated and rapid development of the social sciences
and humanities in general. The evolution of cultural semiotics represents
an interesting dynamism in which multiple scholarly traditions were in-
volved. Distinctions can be made between the several predecessors of cul-
tural semiotics according to certain political, geographic, and possibly
also linguistic factors. There is an added complexity to the case, of course,
in that the representatives of cultural semiotics were largely isolated from
trends in scholarship that directly pertained to their study at the object
and meta-levels (e.g., Western cultural studies, cultural anthropology,
etc.). Thus, ‘structuralism’ in relation to the Tartu-Moscow school cannot
be really considered on the same terms as, say, the French tradition. Nev-
ertheless, French structuralism, Tartu-Moscow cultural semiotics, and
(American) cultural anthropology, could be said to be at least analogous
in their ideals and range of objects, and prefigure the principle method-
ological standpoints of sociosemiotics. The main importance (if not
appeal) of cultural semiotics probably consists of individual notions and
concepts that can be used to describe semiotic systems, while, at the
same time, the multiplication of these ideas sometimes renders cultural
semiotics confusingly diverse. It features descriptive concepts familiar to
most of sociosemiotics, such as textuality, intertextuality, code, secondary
modeling systems, and so forth; but it lacks a consistent, unified method-
ology for the study of sociocultural phenomena. One problem which
seems to have prevented cultural semiotics from metamorphosing into a
fully-fledged sociosemiotics is the generality of its objects of analysis
(e.g., ‘semiosphere’; cf. Randviir 2004: 67–70). Sociosemiotic studies —
particularly the successful ones — have seemed to benefit from their insis-
tence on specificity of objects, a quality shared with disciplines within the
social sciences.
Introduction 13
4.3. Sociology, the social sciences, and social psychology
As with cultural anthropology, the seemingly straightforward discovery

that humans are semiotic beings has had a profound impact on the whole
topic of empiricism in all walks of scholarship. The interpersonal and so-
cial nature of signs in culture and the communicatively competent logical
procedures applied to their syntagmatic organization now goes without
saying. The classificatory study of signs is now e¤ectively untenable.
However, the ‘rate of empiricism’ in the social and human sciences, and
in all scholarship eventually, has to do with the relation of humans, their
sociocultural reality and the so-called reality ‘out there.’ If human semi-
otic systems filter human semiotic reality in communication, then human
cognition is, to a large extent, defined through language and language-
based sign systems. If the human’s perceptual abilities have been shaped
by those very systems, then, what is called ‘reality’ is always inevitably
mediated and arbitrated.
This does not lie at odds with the biosemiotic paradigm convened by
Sebeok, by way of von Uexküll, in which the human Umwelt consists of
the unique combination of verbality and nonverbality. Yet, the realiza-
tion of the semiotic determination of the human relation to ‘reality’ is
part and parcel of a pragmaticist understanding that has penetrated into
various fields from linguistics to sociology. Indeed, it has altered the posi-
tion of several disciplines in their relation to ‘objectivity’ (in the sense of
empirical study of ‘reality’). What is empirical in the characterization of
the human and his/her sociocultural environment can be analyzed in
terms of semiotics and other disciplines studying sign systems. The same
goes for the investigation into the reality surrounding human beings as
unique in their social essence. Thus, the disciplines commonly regarded
as ‘hard’ or devoted to the research of the physical and chemical features
of the Earth gain the position of being speculative, if not hypothetical.
They attempt to characterize the human and his/her reflective abilities
rather than those structures and phenomena that cannot be switched into
the chain of communication (cf. Russell 1948: ch. 3 and 7). Mead seconds
this: ‘The whole tendency of the natural sciences, as exhibited especially
in physics and chemistry, is to replace the objects of immediate experience
by hypothetical objects which lie beyond the range of possible experience’
(Mead 1938: 291).
From this standpoint, then, the social sciences — and semiotics, espe-
cially, if it is, through sociosemiotics, placed within the social sciences —
must be seen as the empirical paradigm par excellence. Its objects and
its empiricism are rooted in the mediatedness of physical and socio-
cultural reality and, while studying the mediation of these realms in
communication, such study does go as far as possible in its search for

‘objective empirical reality.’ The context-sensitivity of sociocultural phe-
nomena on the one hand, and the very same complementarity in the or-
ganization of semiotics on the other, point at the need of understanding
social and cultural entities in terms of processes and functions that vary
in space and time. In the era of striving towards a ‘unified science,’ this
awareness was made explicit in works by numerous eminent scholars
who are nowadays considered as the founding fathers of quite diverse dis-
ciplines that they would not have identified themselves. Instead, they dealt
with sociocultural topics and phenomena as such without any disciplinary
restrictions. The above-mentioned connections between disciplines such
as sociology, semiotics, psychology, anthropology are not coincidental.
Similarly, the social sciences have come to recognize and develop many
of the pragmatic/semiotic principles inherent in these disciplines at their
inception. The first fifty years of the twentieth century witnessed the
growth of pragmatism (and pragmaticism) within several disciplines; as
such, traces of semiotics and its vocabulary can be identified in the major-
ity of contemporary paradigms studying culture and society. At the same
time, though, the acceptance of the social nature of sign systems, and the
pragmatic dimension of semiotics along with the semantic and syntactic
aspects of study, is sometimes lost in the focus on ‘objects.’ The compre-
hension of society and culture in terms of processes has often been
replaced by a stress on structures. In this respect, it is unfortunate that
contemporary semiotics is repeatedly associated with structuralism, a
‘false consciousness’ that dissipates with a more informed return to
the sources of semiotics, especially pragmatic aspects of research. The
‘socio-’ as a prefix in the comprehension of some practices of ‘semiotics’
may serve the purpose of returning to the sources. Although there are
clearly sign systems in nature, all sign systems recognized as such are
social, all ‘texts’ are created in a social context, their sociality bound to
physical or semiotic subjects by virtue of the fact that it is humans who
are researchers.
Therefore, and taking into account that no propositions have been
made for ‘semiotics of society,’ arguably there seems to be no utility in
the term ‘social semiotics’ — at most, this expression is simply tautologi-
cal and hence of no heuristic value. ‘Sociosemiotics,’ on the other hand,
implies sociality, but must simultaneously entail reference to the prag-
matic aspect of semiotic studies that orients semiotics to the social
sciences (and e¤ects methodological control as one of its most important
facets). On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics indicates the role of
sociosemiotics as a metadiscipline in the sense that sociosemiotics can
serve as a methodological toolkit enabling researchers to outline the
Introduction 15
boundaries of any study of sociocultural phenomena and sign systems.

The fact that ‘social behavior’ or ‘sign systems’ can be and are metaphor-
ically found in extremely wide areas concerning both living and inorganic
systems, does not–from the viewpoint of sociosemiotics–guarantee their
semiotic essence or features. The scientific analysis of social behavior
‘. . . must survive direct tests, if practicable, or any tests of derived propo-
sitions no matter what their domain’ (Nicholson 1983: 79). The recent ex-
tension of semiotic vocabulary to the whole biosphere has been fruitful
but not without risk: namely, the animation and anthropomorphization
of species and phenomena that are ultimately outside the scope of human
understanding and frequently outside the parameters of testing in terms
semiotically and communicationally graspable by the perceptive and cog-
nitive powers of homo sapiens.
Even within the limits of human societies, metaphorical extrapolations
are fraught with danger:
There are . . . important homologies between the personality and the social system.
But these are homologies, not a macrocosm-microcosm relationship — the dis-
tinction is fundamental. Indeed, failure to take account of these considerations
has lain at the basis of much of the theoretical di‰culty of social psychology,
especially where it has attempted to ‘extrapolate’ from the psychology of the
individual to the motivational interpretation of mass phenomena, or conversely
has postulated a ‘group mind.’ (Parsons 1952: 18)
Individual behavior cannot be explained by the extrapolation of truths per-

taining to social psychology; likewise neither can societies nor social groups
be described in the generalized terms of individual characteristics and be-
havioral regularities. Society is not a ‘giant human,’ human beings are not
‘small societies.’ On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics is derived
from the very definition of the sign (as the object of any semiotic study),
and represents the caution to be borne in mind in the study of ‘reality.’
While pragmatic and semiotic principles constituted the social sciences
from the outset, philology, conversely, pronounced its sociality. Saussure
positioned the study of language alongside social psychology. Thus, it is
no coincidence that the study of language, having been associated with
the study of speech (e.g., Austin 1961), had to conclusively embed itself
in the study of sign systems in sociocultural contexts. The study of
sociocultural environments and institutions, on the other hand, has been
bound — with fluctuations — to the analysis of language and speech
(from Vygotskian to Bakhtinian perspectives). The realities in which hu-
mans live are socially, culturally, linguistically constructed, and are funda-
mentally semiotic. This deceptively simplistic proposition has generated
complex studies, inter- and transdisciplinary, involving the improbable
task of clustering individual scholars according to specific areas of study,

along with the di‰culties inherent in drawing disciplinary boundaries (to
mention just a very few: Berger and Luckmann 1972 [1966]; Grace 1987;
Wertsch 1991; Searle 1995; see, also, Gergen and Gergen 2003).
Understanding human environments as (semiotically) constructed, or
at least accessible via signs, has lead to a common conception of the
‘whole’ of research objects. While the expressions used for the holistic
web of mutually dependent and connected objects of study are often
pretty diverse, they represent very similar treatments of humans, culture,
and society. Consider ‘social world’ (Schutz 1967 [1932]), ‘social system’
(Parsons 1952), ‘culture’ (Kluckhohn 1961), Lebenswelt (Garfinkel 1967),
‘semiosphere’ (Lotman 1984), ‘mundane reason’ (Pollner 1987), ‘semiotic
reality’ (Merrell 1992), even the ‘semiotic self ’ (Wiley 1994) or ‘signifying
order’ (Danesi 1998). These notions indicate that despite the disintegra-
tion of the social and human sciences into diverse ‘individual disciplines’
that happened alongside socio- and geo-political developments attendant
on the end of World War II, the study of ‘social structure(s)’ always tends
to be ‘functional’ in one sense. In the discussion above, certain types of
objects (gender, media, etc.) frequently associated with ‘sociosemiotics’
were mentioned. The features of the analysis of culture and society out-
lined here suggest that, through the process of socialization, social struc-
tures become functional in respect to the meta-level. Ideological fluctua-
tions that spotlight certain developments in society and culture (e.g.,
feminism, the emergence of transvestism, actualization of (in)di¤erences
between races, social groups, sex-roles, etc.), can — and have — lead to
insular fields of research. The sociosemiotic understanding of the study of
culture and society, however, calls for the holistic complex perspective
that some scholars have striven for in the last hundred years.
4.4. Marxism
In contrast to the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics where

Marxism was not too flavorsome an adoption for a semiotic discourse, it
is well-known that Marxist ideas have been quite popularly ‘semiotized’
in Continental and even in Anglo-American semiotic circles (some of the
most well-known include Lefebvre 1968 [1939], Althusser 1975; and, the
most explicitly semiotic in orientation and knowledge, Rossi-Landi 1990
[1982]; see, also, Posner 1988 and Ponzio 1989). Semiotized Marxism has
sometimes been studied as ‘structural’ Marxism (e.g., Benton 1984); it has
also been associated with the analysis of dynamism between culture and
society as holistic units, and labeled as belonging to the social systemic
Introduction 17
approach to culture in cultural sociology (see Kavolis 1995: 4–6). Of

course, it is not di‰cult to discern meaningfulness in any system of (hu-
man) communication, be it communication accomplished by immaterial
or material sign-vehicles. The semiotic nature of material phenomena is
evident in communication systems in Marxist terms, but just as well in
anthropological analysis or in the study of material culture (for example,
early study of the Kula ring, Mauss 1969; Malinowski 1999 [1922]). It is
also detectable in any material phenomena forming the context for com-
munication and everyday life (see, for example, Riggins 1994). Further-
more, the material environment that both forms and is being formed by
sociality does follow a certain logic that is grounded in semiotic consid-
erations (see, for example, Gottdiener 1985; Hillier and Hanson 1993
[1984]; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]).
Rossi-Landi asserts that ‘Karl Marx made a remarkable contribution
to the study of symbolism in general and to the theory of social commu-
nication’ although he qualifies this by adding that ‘he made it in a most
indirect way’ (Rossi-Landi 1986a: 482; cf. Ponzio 2001). Too mechanistic
a relation between Marxism and semiotics presents fairly obvious perils.
In particular, it might promote a search for the true meanings behind the
appearances, the return of the Era of the Lone Ethnographer (Rosaldo
1993 [1989]: 32) and so-called armchair scholarship. Such work has had
its influence, indeed an enormous one. Identified chiefly with the ‘myth
criticism’ of Roland Barthes, designed to expose the naturalizing influ-
ence of bourgeois culture (with connotation being the foremost bourgeois
weapon), this perspective still has a hold in areas where international
semiotics is insu‰ciently well-known. Such a hold has been superseded;
indeed, Barthes’ Mythologies (1973), with its undermining of the tenets
of 1950s French cultural artifacts, was e¤ectively laid to rest by Barthes
in 1971 when he lamented how facile ‘myth criticism’ had become in the
intervening years, calling, instead, for a more comprehensive ‘semio-
clasm’ (1977). Notwithstanding this, Barthes’ semiotized Marxism is still
widely taught and Mythologies remains a popular paperback book. This
is largely because it is undeniable that signs do have connotations and
that they are enforced connotations. But, as with structuralism, the
‘actual meanings’ revealed in work from this perspective are invariably
just as arbitrary as those enforced by bourgeois culture.
Semiotized Marxism’s main problem has been its instrumental vision.
Sign systems cannot operate through some clear-cut and unambiguously
explicable rules or grammars. Moreover, this is not in direct causal rela-
tionship with the ways governments, political orders, and social institu-
tions are willing to manipulate their citizens. Nor can the functioning of
sign systems be altered rapidly and neither can ideologies run at the same
pace as semiotic systems (for example, Soviet Russia, even as an ideology

in power was forced to co-habit with traditional semiotic/ideological sys-
tems: Russian orthodoxy and Tsarism continued to exist in lieu of the
enforcing of a ‘proper’ Soviet discourse geared to balancing denotative
and connotative codes). Nevertheless, in the first instance, semiotized
Marxism has informed sociosemiotics by being forthright in drawing at-
tention to the existence of a very strong relation of ideology and culture,
even though that relation is not quite as it first seemed.
There is another major bequest from semiotized Marxism to sociosemi-
otics. This is the argument that all sign systems are, in one way or an-
other, material. Lévi-Strauss’s (1968) treatment of homologies between
settlement space, social structure, cooking, and worldview constitutes an
early example of both the close relation of ideology and culture plus the
materiality of sign systems. To some extent, this kind of reasoning has
cemented the relation of structuralism with the study of symbolic dis-
course in the Marxist sense, in turn giving an impression of the proximity
of semiotics and Marxism (for example, De George and De George 1972;
cf. ‘materialistic semiotics’ in Rossi-Landi 1986b, Ponzio 1989: 394–396,
cf. Heim 1983). Sign systems (if not the individual sign) can be under-
stood as material even in Saussure’s division of the sign process into three
levels: psychological, physiological, and physical (Saussure 1959: 11–15).
Sign systems are often materialized in normative and/or descriptive
grammars; this is not unconnected to the understanding of sign systems
as formal or informal institutions (cf. Ruesch 1972: 277–298). Another
important area concerning the materiality of signs has rather to do with
neuropsychology, an insu‰ciently explored domain in semiotics. Ideas as-
sociated with memory traces, synaptic transfer, and the like, up to cere-
bral dynamism (also on the sociocultural level), apparently have direct
connection with sign processes in terms of Peirce’s category of Firstness
(cf, however, e.g., Lotman 1983; Nikolaenko 1983; Jorna 1990; Davtian
and Chernigovskaya 2003).
Apart from the possibility of discussing the materiality of the neurons,
‘materialistic semiotics’ shares most of the principles of sociosemiotics
that have been discussed above. Rossi-Landi sums the matter up con-
cisely, although he introduces another problem:
The program, then, is that of a semiotics founded on social reality, on the actual
ways in which members of the human race interact among themselves and with
the rest of the living and inanimate world. Such an approach cannot examine
sign systems apart from the other social processes with which they are functioning
all along. It cannot make everything rest on signs by themselves. (Rossi-Landi
1986b: 486)
Introduction 19
This o¤ers a seductive definition of sociosemiotics as a matter of analyz-

ing signs (possibly seemingly trivial ones such as those attached to toys
for infants or those in arithmetical textbooks) and revealing their em-
beddedness in relations to ‘non-signs’ (inescapably important forces such
as the relations of production and the exercise of power through institu-
tions). This would be a good working rule to allow the conclusion that
sociosemiotics is simply semiotized Marxism, were it not for the simple
fact that the relation of signs to non-signs always already renders the lat-
ter as signs. Sociosemiotics, then, is not merely the study of the relation of
signs to non-signs, nor is it sign study plus context.
4.5. Pragmatics
The ‘relation to’ context in sociosemiotics is more a matter of its prag-

matic heritage, especially the initial division of linguistics made by one
of semiotics’ key conveners. The semiotician Charles Morris, in an influ-
ential formulation, suggested that the study of language could be split
into syntactics (the study of the relation of signs to other signs), semantics
(the study of the relationships of signs to their objects), and pragmatics
(the study of the relationships of signs to their interpreters or users) (Mor-
ris 1938). Taking the third of these, the project of pragmatics has fre-
quently been thought to be devoted to series of topics or categories in
linguistics such as propositions and ‘principles’ in speech, interactive im-
plicatures, deixis, politeness, speaker roles, ‘speech acts,’ and ‘context.’
Many of these interests overlap with sociolinguistics and for some prag-
matics is a part of sociolinguistics in the same way as discourse analysis
or CDA are (e.g., Coupland and Jaworski 2001). Verschueren (1999,
2001) argues that pragmatics appears to have no real object of study
and that, in truth, it is more sensible to treat it as a ‘perspective.’ What
this perspective focuses on, for Verschueren, is choice, variation, and
adaptation, a set of phenomena that actually allies pragmatics to Anglo-
Australian sociosemiotics in particular, especially in respect of the latter’s
systemic-functionalist heritage. What Verschueren calls for, then, is an
understanding of pragmatics as an interdisciplinary perspective compris-
ing the study of cognition, society, and culture.
Following Verschueren’s argument, then, one could say that the per-
spective of pragmatics su¤uses sociosemiotics in the same way in which
it has been present in, and since the inception of, the social sciences. In-
deed, one could argue this is what positions semiotics among the social
sciences. Sociosemiotics is not so much a matter of signs plus non-signs,
then; nor is it a matter of signs plus context. Rather, its principles and
methods of analysis, across all its schools, either wittingly or unwittingly,

are a matter of relations between signs and sign users, the latter of which
are thoroughly semiotized by virtue of their existence in a comprehen-
sively semiotic environment, observed by analysts of signs who inhabit
an analogously semiotic environment.
4.6. Pragmaticism
Having made these general statements about the relation of sociosemi-

otics and the pragmatic perspective it is necessary, nevertheless, to make
one qualification regarding an intellectual tradition that has been impor-
tant for semiotics. ‘Pragmaticism,’ as is well known, was introduced by
Peirce in his later writings to distinguish his concept of pragmatism from
those of James and others. In 1905, he wrote
No doubt, Pragmaticism makes thought ultimately apply to action exclusively —

to conceived action. But between admitting that and either saying that it makes
thought, in the sense of the purport of symbols, to consist in acts, or saying that
the true ultimate purpose of thinking is action, there is much the same di¤erence
as there is between saying that the artist-painter’s living art is applied to dabbing
paint upon canvas, and saying that that art-life consists in dabbing paint, or that
its ultimate aim is dabbing paint. Pragmaticism makes thinking consist in the
living inferential metaboly of symbols whose purport lies in conditional general
resolutions to act. (CP 5.402)
With this perspective on action considered, and if the human’s world is

semiotically created and maintained, then the meta-level must concen-
trate on the study of methods people use to build the sociocultural envi-
ronment. Ultimately, one could argue, pragmaticism gave rise to ethno-
methodology (Garfinkel 1967), and in more particular ways, through
so-called verstehen-methodology (Schutz 1967 [1932]), also to studies of
the resolution of social situations under the conceptions of Conversation
Analysis (Sacks 1992) and discourse analysis (originating with Harris
1952). Discourse analysis constantly brings sociocultural studies back to
notions of representation. Although it developed separately from ethno-
methodology, ‘discourse analysis,’ particularly in its later developments,
is similar in its aims to Conversation Analysis. Works in discourse analy-
sis share a commitment to the general idea that meaning and social roles
are produced in interaction. Similarly to pragmaticism, forms of commu-
nication between humans are not simply a matter of attempting to ‘re-
flect’ the world; rather, they are forms of social action.
Introduction 21
In addition to its roots in pragmaticism, the social constructionist posi-

tion of much discourse analysis can be traced back to Vološinov, another
key figure for sociosemiotics in di¤erent ways, whose 1920s critique of
Saussure and Marr in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973)
emphasized at length that verbal communication is much more a matter
of what people want to get out of a situation than a matter of pure infor-
mation exchange. In this respect, there is a clear line forward to discourse
analysis generally and Conversation Analysis specifically as well as more
emphatically constructionist methodologies still, such as discursive psy-
chology (e.g., Potter and Wetherell 1987). The idea that words do things
rather than merely describing things, of course, was the focus of the
celebrated discussion in Austin’s How to do Things with Words (1961),
an intervention whose broad influence in the world of communication
and sign study is not to be underestimated (see Cobley 2006).
What might be the central dilemma of sociosemiotics, then, is the ex-
tent to which it is pulled towards a conception of ‘signs in relation to
non-signs’ and/or ‘signs and action versus signs as action.’ Many would
not wish to subscribe to the extreme constructionist position that every-
thing is ‘constructed in discourse,’ an outgrowth of the much vaunted ‘lin-
guistic turn’ (Rorty 1967); however, equally, it is the case that there is a
recognition of the semiotic nature of the environment in which humans
find themselves and through which they make observations. Metaphors
such as ‘language’ or ‘text’ have been heuristic extrapolation devices serv-
ing sociosemiotics. As with the machinery of science, designed to capture
phenomena that it has hitherto been impossible to observe, it is never
guaranteed that machinery provides the observer with meaning or mean-
ingfulness, as opposed to mere physical information (see Russell 1948:
chapters 3 and 7; Pelc 1992: 33). Thus a vital distinction has to be made
between the existence of an entity as a sign, on the one hand, and the
existence of something as being interpretable as a sign, on the other (see
Pelc 1992: 26). In short, what is understood by the ‘sign’ has direct impact
on what can be studied under the general label of ‘culture’ or ‘society.’
5. Sociosemiotic terms
The di‰culties of establishing what exactly a sign is are most manifest in

sociosemiotics’ insistence on a fairly uniform repertoire of combinations
of signs and the (sometimes considerable) di¤erences between schools in
approaching them. The main examples of combinations of signs and sign
functioning repeatedly employed by schools of sociosemiotics can be
listed as follows:
– social structure
– representation
– dialogue
– the other
– multimodality
– discourse
– motivation (in signs and in combinations of signs)
– identity
– genre (routinization of communicational forms)
The list might be extended but it would be di‰cult to shorten it. Above
all, though, even more than a relation of signs to ‘non-signs,’ what this
list implies is a set of terms in which signs are subject to social forces
(which may be semiotic in themselves) or ‘signs in society.’ That is, the
compound of individual, society, sign systems, and sociocultural reality.
Unsurprisingly, the concept of the ‘self-in-society’ is also implied in these
terms. In the study of culture and society, developments at the object-
level have usually gone hand in hand with the meta-level. In other words,
the search for the sources of sociosemiotics has to take into account the
situation of the inception of contemporary disciplines at the turn of the
nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In this light, ‘self-in-society’ as a
concern of sociosemiotics has developed out of a number of binaries that
characterized the early social sciences. These were the oppositions of
– developed cultures versus primitive cultures

– developed specimens of the human race versus others
– societies, or social orders, or civilized orders versus cultures, or cul-
tural orders
– processes versus structures
– consciously intentional versus instinctive
– rational thought, or reflection versus unconscious motivation, or nat-
ural program
– human emotions versus ritualistic routine
– sign-based behavior versus signal-based behavior
Most of the first elements in each of these oppositions have been a matter
for philosophy; yet, they have been adjusted to a meta-level when consid-
ered in the frame of the self and society. At the same time, it is possible to
see these oppositions within the frame of an overarching opposition —
tackled at length in more recent semiotics — that of humanity versus the
animal kingdom; although, clearly, this overarching opposition also par-
takes of that social science staple between developed cultures/societies
and individuals versus primitive cultures and individuals.
Introduction 23
The relation of animal and human worlds in understanding the devel-

opment of the self in sociosemiotics is worth commenting on here. Much
of the groundwork on modern theory of the self was laid down by Cooley
(1902, 1909, 1918) and, in turn, Mead’s treatment of the self as a dynamic
process resulting from social communication (1907, 1913, 1922, 1930)
was comprehensively based on Cooley. There is little di‰culty in recruit-
ing Mead into the ranks of (socio)semioticians (cf. Wiley 1994 and, espe-
cially, Kilpinen 2000). If Saussure’s placing of ‘semiology’ alongside
social or general psychology, or Peirce’s equation of semiotics and logic
is taken into account, not to mention Mead’s adoption of Peirce’s triadic
logic and his influence on Morris (see Mead 1934, 1938), Mead’s position
in semiotics is further strengthened. Understanding the self as a product
of social communication, Mead relates to the paradigm of the Frankfurt
school and the topic of socialization and the social construction of real-
ity (Berger and Luckmann 1972). However, in his social behaviorism,
Mead’s position is close to that of Morris, which is far from ‘common be-
haviorism,’ since the social in this case concerns the behavior of the self in
the mind. Mead realized that humans as biological beings live in the
world(s) of sign systems, and modeling takes place already on the level
of perception, since perceptual objects are results of interaction between
man and his environment (Mead 1938: 81). Sebeok’s discussion of model-
ing after the Tartu-Moscow school (Sebeok 1988), a discussion that ulti-
mately crystallized Modeling Systems Theory and biosemiotics, clearly
developed out of this tradition. Moreover, Sebeok was a student of Mor-
ris and thus at least indirectly acquainted with Mead. As has been men-
tioned, the theory of Umwelt (Uexküll 1982) is crucial here. Yet, while
sociosemiotic studies have not always adopted this term, they have, in
Mead’s wake, figured the self in relation to some key processes or entities
that determine the self ’s ‘social reality’ (as opposed to any ‘individual
reality’ that may be perceived to exist independently).
As a result, it is possible to draw up a list of the key entities that make
up the concerns of sociosemiotics in its discussions of the self ’s relation
to/constitution by social reality:
– organization
– intentionality
– exchange
– communication
– interaction-communication
– process-structure
– praxis
– agency
– socialization
– culture (and multiculturalism)
– ideology
– institution
– modernity
– globalization
This is not an exhaustive list, by any means. But it should o¤er an idea of
the ways in which the issues of sign combinations and fundamental socio-
cultural oppositions produce a concern with a fairly specific set of entities
or processes. To put it another way, it gives a sense of what are the fore-
most preoccupations in the discussion of signs in relation to the supposed
‘non-signs’ of the social.
6. The places of sociosemiotics
In addition to his countless contributions to semiotics, Sebeok was also

instrumental in guiding its meta-analysis. Adopting from Czsikszentmi-
hali the terms ‘field’ and ‘domain,’ his work is always sensitive to the
ways in which semiotic endeavor is constituted by a set of symbolic rules
and procedures but also comprises various personages — journal or book
series editors, professional organizations, compilers of widely-used refer-
ence material, conference organizers, leaders of important research cen-
ters or ‘schools,’ popular lecturers, and so forth — located in specific
areas around the globe and in specific institutions whose work and inter-
actions determine a domain (see Sebeok 2001: 163–164). Certainly, given
the fragmentary nature of sociosemiotics that this special issue has at-
tempted in a small and preliminary way to ameliorate, there at least needs
to be an outline sense of the field and domain.
One way to e¤ect this sense is to o¤er some brief comments on the
‘places’ of sociosemiotics, particularly as they are represented in the es-
says that follow. This special issue does not o¤er the definitive, compre-
hensive picture of contemporary sociosemiotics but it does attempt an
overview, comprising the ‘Anglo-Australian school,’ the ‘Bari school,’
the ‘Finnish school,’ Tartu sociosemiotics, the Greek ‘school’ centered in
Thessaloniki, the ‘Vienna school,’ as well as contributions beyond these
schools. Each contribution from each school has a di¤erent take on the
issues of sign combinations, fundamental sociocultural oppositions, and
the crucial entities or processes in sociosemiotics. These should become
clear in the papers that follow, but comment on the places of sociosemi-
otics is written here to o¤er some further orientation.
Introduction 25
In brief, the Anglo-Australian school does not have a definitive place

beyond the United Kingdom (and North America) and Australasia in
general. However, it does center on the teachings of the British linguist
Michael A. K. Halliday, a well-traveled scholar influenced by Russian
(including Vygotsky and Luria) as well as British (Firth and Bernstein)
thinkers and influencing scholars in the UK and Australia while living in
those places (for example, the German-Australian, Gunther Kress). The
Anglo-Australian school has seen much movement and contains its own
diversity, featuring scholars who have moved between the UK and Aus-
tralia (e.g., Van Leeuwen, Threadgold). In this special issue, the Dutch
scholar Van Leeuwen (Sydney) and the erstwhile particle physicist Lemke
(Michigan) are the most prominent, ‘card-carrying members’ of this
‘school,’ Lemke, of course, being located not in the UK or Australia but
in the US. Fairclough has been su‰ciently influential in his own right as
the promulgator of CDA, generating projects and supporting students at
the University of Lancaster, but belongs here by virtue of his intellectual
nurturing by some of the same forces as those such as Kress and other
representatives of this school. Hess-Lüttich on the other hand, has not
been directly connected with Anglo-Australian sociosemiotics and works
in Bern; nevertheless, he gives an account that is very much cognate with
the school. Finally, one of the editors of this special issue, while coming
to semiotics from a very di¤erent route and in a later generation, has been
encouraged by the work of the school as well as by some of its members.
The Bari school is distinctive for its marrying of influences from Se-
beok, Rossi-Landi, Levinas, and the Bakhtin school. Revolving around
the key concept of ‘dialogue,’ the school’s commitment to a critical socio-
semiotics, especially in the face of global communication, has most re-
cently led to the development of a ‘semioethics’ and, in collaboration
with Deely, the notion of the ‘semiotic animal’ (Deely, Petrilli, and Pon-
zio 2006). The key representatives of the Bari school, Petrilli and Ponzio,
although frequently collaborating with each other and with other schools,
most notably the Vienna school and the Rossi-Landi network, also pur-
sue their own projects of great pertinence, for example Petrilli’s major
unearthing of the formidable work of Victoria, Lady Welby.
There are three contributions from the University of Helsinki that
make up the ‘Finnish school’ in this special issue, although it should be
mentioned that semiotics and sociosemiotics are conducted at a number
of universities in Finland and in collaboration with international col-
leagues. Semiotics has a strong tradition in Finland, partly because of
Sebeok’s input in Fenno-Ugrian studies but also because of the work of
indigenous scholars such as Oscar Parland. One such indigenous figure
is Eero Tarasti, a major convener of semiotics through the International
Semiotics Institute since the 1980s (which hosted the original week-long
sociosemiotics panel upon which this special issue is based), through his
synthesis of ‘existential semiotics’ (Tarasti 2000) and now as president of
the IASS. The strong pragmatist and Peircean tradition in Finnish semi-
otics, coupled with logic — evident also in the work of the Finnish philos-
opher Jaako Hintikka and, arguably, in that of his countryman, Henrik
von Wright — can be detected in the essays of Kilpinen (a specialist on
Mead) and Heiskala, below.
Amid the influences of Greek sociology one can find the sociosemiotics
or social semiotics of Lagopoulos and his collaborator in Thessaloniki,
Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, as well as an important body of work car-
ried out with Lagopoulos’ frequent US collaborator, Mark Gottdiener.
Gottdiener and Lagopoulos have been described as ‘the two writers most
involved in translating social semiotics into a study of space’ (Peet 1998:
120). This is a fair comment. Lagopoulos’ work has been influential in
both the definition and dissemination of sociosemiotics while also bring-
ing the sociosemiotic nature of space to the very fore of semiotics.
Although Tartu is rightly associated with the school founded by Lot-
man during the Soviet period, it should not be forgotten that the project
of cultural semiotics is taught in the Semiotics Department there along-
side a specifically designated sociosemiotics. One of the editors teaches
this but, also, one of the special issue’s contributors, Drechsler, was, until
recently, a scholar at Tartu and remains in Estonia. As has been discussed
above, cultural semiotics featured descriptive concepts familiar to most of
sociosemiotics, but lacked a consistent, unified methodology to deal with
the generality of its objects of analysis (e.g., ‘semiosphere’; cf. Randviir
2004: 67–70). Tartu sociosemiotics has been dedicated to rectifying this
situation.
The sociosemiotics of the Institute for Sociosemiotic Studies in Vienna
is strongly influenced by Rossi-Landi’s work and has been responsible for
important collaborations with the Bari school. Yet, it is also appropriate
that it retains an interest in (especially the later) Wittgenstein’s input
to semiotic perspectives. This is appropriate not just because of Witt-
genstein’s association with Vienna but because of Rossi-Landi’s well-
known association with Wittgenstein. Taking up one of the key themes
mentioned above in ‘Sources and correspondences,’ Bernard’s essay, be-
low, presents a complex schema based on all of Vienna sociosemiotics’
interests.
Lying outside more or less distinct sociosemiotic schools, but neverthe-
less influential, are a number of scholars, exemplified in this special issue
by James Wertsch and Thomas Luckmann. In fact, Wertsch’s work bears
close a‰nities with that of the Bari sociosemiotians in its invocation of
Introduction 27
Bakhtin, with parts of the Anglo-Australian tradition in its use of Vygot-

skian perspectives and with the constructionism that runs through much
sociosemiotics. Like Wertsch, Luckmann’s influence has been great with-
out him adhering to any particular sociosemiotic school. Indeed, one
could argue that sociosemiotics owes much to Luckmann as one of the
founding fathers of the sociology of knowledge. Like Wertsch, his influ-
ence on sociosemiotics derives from the ways in which he has shown that
social construction takes place in a complex way involving specific rela-
tionships ‘from below’ and ‘from above.’ His phenomenological work
bears close a‰nities with the Finnish school and the sociosemiotics of
Tartu, particularly in relation to pragmatist principles running through
each.
Not all the contributions betray all the sources and correspondences
mentioned above, but some of them betray a few at once. Thus it is easy
to see the influence or dilemmas of cultural anthropology (Van Leeuwen,
Heiskala, Wertsch, Fairclough, Tarasti, Petrilli, Lemke), cultural semiot-
ics, (Petrilli, Heiskala, Lagopoulos, Wertsch, Hess-Lüttich, Luckmann,
Drechsler), sociology and the social sciences (all of the contributions),
Marxism (Ponzio, Petrilli, Lagopoulos, Bernard), pragmatics (Fair-
clough, Hess-Lüttich), pragmaticism (Kilpinen, Luckmann, Tarasti), as
well as constructionism (Luckmann, Tarasti). Nevertheless, to o¤er a
more defined sense of this special issue as an overview of contemporary
semiotics, as well as some orientation, a few summarizing comments fol-
low on the essays taken in turn.
7. From foundations to global communication
To highlight some of the unifying thematic concerns of sociosemiotics, this

special issue is divided into four (unequal) parts: politico-philosophical
foundations of sociosemiotics; space, identity, and memory; genres and
literacies; and, probably the largest issue facing sociosemiotics today,
global communication. Indeed, the first contribution in the opening sec-
tion takes a highly theoretical look at a micro-phenomenon but is suf-
fused by the zeitgeist of ‘globalism.’ Tarasti’s essay focuses on ‘resistance’
and the role that semiotics has to play in it. Exemplifying some of the
oppositional stance of sociosemiotics (oppositional, at least, to the myth-
ical ‘mainstream’ semiotics), Tarasti posits resistance through the lens of
his ‘existential semiotics,’ based on Greimas but also a lineage comprising
Bergson, Aron, von Wright, Ricoeur, and Elias, and ultimately back to
Hegel in its mapping of the logics of ‘transcendence.’ As an illustra-
tive case, Tarasti focuses on the aesthetics of resistance in painting, print
fiction, and music, making points about resistance that are not dissimilar
from those of one French theorist he does not cite, Alain Badiou (see
Badiou 2001).
Given the implicit, but frequently explicit, trajectory of sociosemiotics,
Drechsler’s essay that follows could not be any more direct. Entitled, sim-
ply, ‘Political semiotics,’ the essay laments the regression of the full-blown
political potential of semiotics. Certainly, from outside semiotics, it might
be easy to join in with these lamentations, and Drechsler is a political sci-
entist. However, the essay shows he is very well versed in the literature of
contemporary semiotics, to which, with his essay, he makes an incisive
contribution. The essay pointedly distinguishes four of the customary ap-
proaches to political semiotics:
1. political statements by semioticians
2. political work based on semiotics
3. specifically political semiotics (akin to political philosophy, say)
4. semiotic theory that may be used in political analysis
He notes that there have been fusions of di¤erent classifications and dis-
cusses the previously most viable of the categories (number 2). Then he
goes on in a forward-looking way to suggest futures for political semiotics
based on number 3. His selection of oeuvres on which to base such futures
— Cassirer, Jung, Uexküll — is curious, but very persuasive.
In politics, as in other places traversed by signs, one of the issues that is
crucial to sociosemiotics and recurs in this special issue is routinization —
in communication, in practices, and in social actions. Erkki Kilpinen gets
to the root of this matter by providing an extended meditation on the
term ‘habit’ that has been so central to pragmatism and to semiotics, as
well as, in the di¤erent ways he shows, to sociology. Kilpinen refracts his
meditation through a focus on the work of Stephen Turner, particularly
the fortunes of ‘habit’ in his work, as Turner moved through the ‘practice
turn’ towards a cognitive science view of the world. As Kilpinen points
out, in Peirce’s thinking ‘habit’ is ‘the foundational mode of action, both
descriptively and logically (rationally) conceived’ and was key to all the
pragmatists’ subsequent work, especially that of Dewey. What is found
in Turner’s theorizing is an attempt, in one sense, to overturn ‘habit’ in
relation to the sociologically more mainstream (after Parsons) notion of
‘action.’ Kilpinen’s essay therefore provides the theoretical grounds for
sociosemiotics to decide whether habit should be a basic notion (with
action a residue) or whether action should be the basic notion (with habit
a residue).
Ponzio’s essay likewise considers a basic notion that is attendant
on the composition of the sign and the e¤ect of it: dialogue. Clearly, if
Introduction 29
the ‘social’ of sociosemiotics is to be realized, dialogue must be an in-

herent concept. However, Ponzio’s dialogue is not merely a to-ing and
fro-ing between sign users as Saussure tended to envisage. Indeed, for
Ponzio, an accurate picture of what dialogue entails is to be found
in three bodies of knowledge. The first of these is Peircean sign theory,
especially in the mutual demands of the interpreted and interpretant
relationship. Although the Peircean sign is resolutely triadic and dy-
namic, Ponzio demonstrates that, through the integral feature of the
interpretant, it is nevertheless dialogic: the sign is first a response. The
use of ‘response’ and a seemingly bilateral relation does not amount
to neo-behaviorism, however. Ponzio demonstrates this with a second
body of knowledge, that of Bakhtin, in whose work ‘dialogue’ is the result
of constant compulsion by the other rather than liberal initiatives towards
a common ground. In general, this is exemplified by the distinction be-
tween ‘formal dialogism’ (the deliberate meeting of two entities within a
given discourse genre) and ‘substantial dialogism,’ which pervades all
communication with its demands. The third body of knowledge upon
which Ponzio draws is biosemiotics, particularly the work of Jakob and
Thure von Uexküll. Derived from the latter, Ponzio identifies the three
realms of semiosis, in each of which, as he explains, dialogue subsists:
1) semiosis of information or signification; 2) semiosis of symptomatization;
3) semiosis of communication. As with Petrilli’s essay, below, Ponzio’s
argument is redolent of the richness of one part of Bari sociosemiotics
in its marriage of principles from Peirce, Bakhtin, and contemporary
biosemiotics.
Continuing the theme of basic processes internal to and the result of
the workings of signs, Je¤ Bernard’s essay is concerned with perception.
It presents a complex theoretical schema of sign actions as work. Work,
of course, was a central concept in the semiotic investigations of Ferruc-
cio Rossi-Landi, an important figure in Bari sociosemiotics as well as the
Viennese semiotics from which Bernard’s essay hails. Bernard’s essay
shows how ‘work’ can be translated into ‘sign work’ to elucidate the idea
of ‘perception’ (which is so often defined in a vague way, inside and
outside psychology). Crucial to this is the Rossi-Landian perspective on
‘internal’ and ‘external’ signs, the relation of which is the key factor in
another matter of paramount import to sociosemiotics: social reproduc-
tion. Interestingly, Bernard pursues this with further reference to the
work of a ‘crypto-semiotician,’ Wittgenstein. Through Bezzel’s inflection
of Wittgenstein, the essay thus draws out the ‘game’ relations in the
‘work’ of looking and seeing.
Following this essay on perception, the next section, fittingly, focuses
on space, identity, and memory, and features three essays on precisely
those topics. Of course, perception has a bearing on everything in semi-

otics, as well as in many other established disciplines. Moreover, it in-
creasingly su¤uses one of the key concepts of contemporary semiotics,
mentioned above, that of Umwelt (from Jakob von Uexküll). However,
space, identity, and memory — not just because they are key contempo-
rary topics in other disciplines — are arguably the most powerful vectors
in sociosemiotics.
As Lagopoulos shows, built space, like many other objects of study in
sociosemiotics, is a matter of economic, technological, social, and politi-
cal processes. However, as such, the extent to which it is also a semiotic
process is vastly underestimated, both in the academy and in the wider
socio-political sphere. Thus, sociosemiotics is necessary and crucial; as
Lagopoulos writes, it ‘constitutes an independent, free-floating approach
within the social sciences.’ It also enables a broad approach: Lagopoulos
uses three extended examples in his discussion: (precapitalist) Dogon cul-
ture, Western modernist post-Enlightenment culture, and Western post-
modernism (the cultural formation of late capitalism). What the essay
demonstrates is that the precapitalist world view performed an anthropo-
morphic and cosmic metaphorization of space, creating an experiential
collective place. The modernist intervention in space, on the other hand,
was characterized by Fordism (and, presumably, Taylorism), the meta-
phor of identity (cf. Ponzio) as well as post-Romantic metaphors of na-
ture. Late capitalism developed a major metaphor of consumerism (which
can be seen in Disneyfication or Las Vegasization), marrying space and
consumerist identity.
The identity that is the focus of Risto Heiskala’s essay is gender. The
essay gives an exceptionally clear account of the problems of gender as
considered by sociology — but it does not stop there: it also o¤ers some
invaluable analysis from the perspectives of both semiotics and biology.
Typically in sociosemiotics, the account of gender describes how it over-
determined by motivation — both semiotic and, in this case, biological.
As Heiskala reinforces, social semiosis still reproduces the gender distinc-
tion even if the biological motivation for it has been loosened. Although
tyrannies associated with gender distinction are increasingly removed
from Western legislation, the essay shows how gender now constitutes
a semiotic system sustained by sociocultural intuitions. Adroitly using a
number of sociological and semiotic perspectives — including the frame
analysis of the semiotic sociologist/sociological semiotician Erving
Go¤man — the essay cuts a path through radical constructionism and bi-
ological determinism, presenting a very contemporary semiotic perspec-
tive that can embrace and analyze the contradictions in the coexistence
of order and chaos.
Introduction 31
Wertsch’s essay on collective memory acts both as a cogent introduc-

tion to this burgeoning and innovatory field of inquiry as well as a dem-
onstration of its foundations in semiotics and its importance for socio-
semiotics. Wertsch identifies a number of parameters for discussing
collective memory: memory versus remembering; collective versus indi-
vidual remembering: collective remembering versus history: and strong
versus distributed versions of collective remembering. However, he
chooses to focus on distributed versions of collective remembering, utiliz-
ing the idea of ‘semiotic mediation’ to show the good reason for this. In
the classic accounts of Halbwachs and Bartlett, as Wertsch shows, the
latter criticized the former for implying that the memory of a group
(strong version) should be studied as opposed to memory in the group
(distributed version in which there is no notion of ‘collective mind’).
Implementing, also, Assman’s distinction of ‘history’ and ‘memory,’
Wertsch asks what sorts of signs are involved in distributed memory that
distinguish them from those in mechanism of memory identified by psy-
chology in ‘individuals.’ The essay finds answers for sociosemiotics in
the distinction of local dialogue and generalized dialogue from Bakhtin,
the latter of which, unsurprisingly recalls Ponzio’s arguments regarding
substantial dialogue.
Having mentioned the process of routinization, the section on genres
and literacies provides a little more focus. Ernest Hess-Lüttich’s essay
gives an excellent overview of some of the key questions with which lan-
guage study has been concerned since the heyday of sociolinguistics and
since a (socio)semiotic viewpoint became increasingly important to rescu-
ing linguistics from its moribund state. The essay specifically asks how it
might be possible to ascertain the social meaning of linguistic structures.
To this, it adds the question of the social meaning of certain expressions
at di¤erent linguistic levels of description. The answers Hess-Lüttich
pro¤ers are largely Hallidayan in orientation; however, the virtue of his
overview is that it is not just based on Anglophone, Anglo-Australian
perspectives, but on a more comprehensive grasp of the literature. The
crux of the essay is in the final case study on prestige. The essay draws
out the way in which linguistic signs are an ‘expression of the self: the
speaker conveys to others his identity in terms of a ‘person’ or a ‘social
subject.’ ’ This is by no means a new insight or area of inquiry; however,
in tracking the distinction of signification from expression back to Bühler,
Hess-Lüttich provides a new lineage and orientation for language-based
sociosemiotics.
Luckmann’s essay directly considers the issue of routinization in com-
munication. It argues that, like institutions, genres are a universal element
in human communication; a part of communicative practice in all human
societies, although he stresses that not every process of human communi-

cation is determined by genre. Furthermore, genres are indispensable be-
cause they eliminate the need for ‘laborious step-by-step planning.’ This is
the case in a number of codes: linguistic, paralinguistic, mimetic, gestural,
etc. Luckmann does make the important point that genres are socially
distributed — some people within certain classifications and identities
will have access to some genres; other people, from di¤erent classifica-
tions and identities will not have access to these genres. Yet, the essay is
keen to emphasize the huge number of genres (akin to Bakhtin’s ‘speech
genres’) and the ‘specific social function’ of genres (cf. the Toronto
School). Thus, each society will have genres relating to collective mem-
ory, didactic genres, and moral(izing) genres with similarities in historical
forms. Given the social and ideological consequences of routinization it is
hardly surprising that genre maintains a central position in sociosemiotic
studies.
In addition to genre, one of the shibboleths of the ‘discourse study’
branch (especially CDA) of sociosemiotics in recent years has been ‘mul-
timodality.’ However, the touting of multimodality has not necessarily
lived up to its promise. In a post-linguistic environment, it seems that
CDA has simply been announcing that there are some pictures to look
at in everyday communication nowadays, as well as words, as though
‘mainstream’ semiotics had never noticed this. However, the brief histori-
cal survey of kinds of multimodal text which appears in the initial stages
of Lemke’s essay goes some way to correcting the banality of such CDA
perspectives. The essay draws attention, in particular, to the relations of
text and image in scientific discourse, noticing key turning points in the
seventeenth century. Within a specific scientific text (including writing
and images), there may be certain expected trajectories (e.g., from writing
to image and back) in reading; the same is true especially on websites
which provide hypertext links to di¤erent areas of that same website.
However, Lemke is interested in the moment when such a trajectory be-
comes a ‘transmedia traversal’? When reading moves from di¤erent web-
sites, and across boundaries of genre, language, culture, and institutions.
In one sense, it could be argued that the sign user is caught in a web of
routinizations of the kind discussed by Luckmann. Yet, Lemke also points
out that there is a degree of choice in the traversal, a possibility of escape
from the institutional limitations of each separate genre. Of course, the
industry of marketing is well up on this: thus, as the essay points out, it
has become adept in developing transmedia franchises that cross genres
and media. Work on fandom and ‘participatory culture’ has, to some ex-
tent, demonstrated the existence of the ‘cracks in the carefully constructed
and conventionalized facades of transmedia unity’ that Lemke identifies.
Introduction 33
Genre literacy is clearly ubiquitous but, as the term ‘literacy’ suggests,

there is a process by which it is attained. As sociosemiotics repeatedly
shows, learning how to communicate is simultaneously a matter of learn-
ing how to classify the world. Van Leeuwen’s innovative essay looks at
toys for very small children, an object of study that has been pursued in
psychoanalysis (by Freud and Erikson, for example), but all too infre-
quently in semiotics. Specifically, Van Leeuwen analyses the social roles
and identities called into play by the highly successful Playmobil figu-
rines. In the Hallidayan tradition, the investigation foregrounds the im-
portance of roles and actors in semiosis, paying close attention to roles/
actors that are excluded as well as those that are included. As the essay
attests, ‘Semiotic systems are always a mixture of a¤ordance and con-
straint.’ Playmobil (in contrast to Lego, for example) is shown to be
stronger on constraints than a¤ordances, however. As a global brand
and genre, the figures of Playmobil have the potential to influence nascent
perceptions of the way that social actors operate.
As Van Leeuwen’s essay shows, sociosemiotic microanalysis commonly
constitutes an investigation of signs locally within a frame of thinking
globally. The final two contributions in this special issue are more direct
in dealing with global issues. Norman Fairclough considers discourse in
processes of globalization. He finds that genres (once again) are crucial,
particularly in the way they are ‘specialized for trans-national and interre-
gional interaction’ (e.g., CNN). He also points out that there is the pro-
cess of globalization, which is demonstrable and economically visible, but
that this is a concomitant discursive construction of the process that goes
by the same name. The essay argues that there is a need to closely analyze
the relationship between the process and the representation, which Fair-
clough proceeds to do, focusing on strategies of globalization emanating
from governmental and non-governmental agencies, how processes of
globalization impact upon spatial ‘entities’ such as nations, people’s ordi-
nary experience of globalization, and, finally, with war and terrorism.
What the essay shows is that integral to the processes of globalization is
a ‘language dimension.’ Indeed, Fairclough’s approach to the issues at
hand serves to significantly reinflect the globalization debate associated
with the likes of Beck, Giddens, Schiller, et al. in a more semiotic direc-
tion without losing their insights.
Where Fairclough analyses verbal discourse in global communication,
Petrilli calls for an even broader push. She makes the point in her essay
that globalization is commonly understood as a socio-economic phenom-
enon, but that it is also a semiotic phenomenon. As with Ponzio’s essay,
the synthesis of Peircean sign theory, Bakhtinian dialogue, and biosemi-
otics (especially, Sebeok) is typical of the core of Bari sociosemiotics.
Based on the idea of the ‘semiotic animal’ as elucidated by Petrilli, Pon-

zio, and Deely, she presents an outline of ‘semioethics,’ an imperative
that is not merely discursively constructed but, instead, is the result of
the ‘concrete’ demands of the other (Levinas, as well as Bakhtin, is a key
figure, here). One impediment to the realization of dialogue (cf. Ponzio’s
‘substantial dialogue’) has been the liberal notion of dialogue as the result
of an initiative to be taken in discourse. Without announcing a pro-
gramme, Petrilli shows that semioethics entails not just the constant
demands of the other but, also, a perspective that reaches beyond the
glottocentrism of liberal dialogue to embrace the semiosis of the entire
semio/biosphere. The essay concludes with theses. E¤ectively, these are
theses for a projected sociosemiotics, so central are their concerns to those
we have outlined as somehow characteristic of this putative subfield.
However, in consonance with Sebeok’s repeated statements to the same
e¤ect, the theses are for, more plainly, semiotics. And, although Petrilli
o¤ers only ten theses (from the ‘Bari-Lecce school’), it is clear that her
essay is most inspired by an eleventh thesis from elsewhere: that of Marx
on Feuerbach.
Note
* Anti Randviir’s collaboration on this article has been supported by Estonian Science
Foundation grant 6729.
References
Alter, Jean (1991). A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-

vania Press.
Althusser, Louis (1975). For Marx, Ben Brewster (trans.). New York: Pantheon.
Austin, John L. (1961). How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Badiou, Alain (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Peter Hallward (trans.).
London: Verso.
Barthes, Roland (1967). Elements of Semiology, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (trans.).
London: Cape.
Barthes, Roland (1973). Mythologies, Annette Lavers (trans.). London: Paladin.
Barthes, Roland (1977). Change the object itself. In Image — Music — Text, Stephen Heath
(ed. and trans.), 166. London: Fontana.
Benton, Ted (1984). The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Louis Althusser and His Influ-
ence. London: Macmillan.
Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas (1972 [1966]). The Social Construction of Reality:
A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Introduction 35
Cherednichenko, Igor (2000). Teorija strukturno-semioticheckogo metoda: postroenie termi-

nosistemy, kriticheskij analiz konceptov, interpretacija metodiki (Avtoreferat). Krasnodar:
Troika.
Cli¤ord, James (1988). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Litera-
ture, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cobley, Paul (2006). General introduction. In Communication Theories, 4 vols., P. Cobley
(ed.), 1–34. London: Routledge.
Cooley, Charles H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Scribner’s.
Cooley, Charles H. (1909). Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York:
Scribner’s.
Cooley, Charles H. (1918). Social Process. New York: Scribner’s.
Coupland, Nikolas and Jaworski, Adam (1997). Introduction. In Sociolinguistics: A Reader
and Coursebook, N. Coupland and A. Jaworski (eds.), 1–3. London: Macmillan.
Coupland, Nikolas and Jaworski, Adam (eds.) (2001). The Discourse Reader. London:
Routledge.
Danesi, Marcel (1998). Sign, Thought, and Culture: A Basic Course in Semiotics. Toronto:
Canadian Scholars’ Press.
Danesi, Marcel and Perron, Paul (1999). Analyzing Cultures: An Introduction and Handbook.
Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Davis, Steven (ed.) (1991). Pragmatics: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davtian, Stepan and Chernigovskaya, Tatyana (2003). Psychiatry in free fall: In pursuit of a
semiotic foothold. Sign Systems Studies 31 (2), 533–546.
De George, Richard T. and De George, Fernande M. (eds.) (1972). The Structuralists: From
Marx to Lévi-Strauss. Garden City, NY: Anchor.
Deely, John, Petrilli, Susan, and Ponzio, Augusto (2006). The Semiotic Animal. Ottawa:
Legas.
Flynn, Pierce J. (1991). The Ethnomethodological Movement: Sociosemiotic Interpretations
(¼ Approaches to Semiotics 95.) Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Garfinkel, Harold (1967). Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cli¤s, NJ: Prentice-
Hall.
Geertz, C. (1993). Thick description: Toward an interpretive theory of culture. In The Inter-
pretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, 3–30, London: Fontana.
Gerbner, George (1956). Toward a general model of communication. Audio-Visual Commu-
nication Review 4, 171–199.
Gergen, Kenneth J. (1985). The social constructionist movement in modern psychology.
American Psychologist 40, 266–275.
Gergen, Mary and Gergen, Kenneth J. (eds.) (2003). Social Construction: A Reader.
London/Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Goodenough, Ward H. (1961). Comment on cultural evolution. Daedalos 90, 521–528.
Goodenough, Ward H. (1980 [1970]). Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goodenough, Ward H. (1981 [1971]). Culture, Language, and Society. Menlo Park:
Benjamin/Cummings.
Gottdiener, Mark (1985). The Social Production of Urban Space. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Gottdiener, Mark and Lagopoulos, Alexandros (1986). Introduction. In The City and
the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, M. Gottdiener and A. Lagopoulos (eds.),
1–22. New York: Columbia University Press.
Grace, George W. (1987). The Linguistic Construction of Reality. London/New York:
Croom Helm.
Gumperz, John J. and Levinson, Stephen C. (eds.) (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Relativity
(¼ Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 17). Cambridge/New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, Michael A. K. (1978). Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of
Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Harris, Zellig Sabbetai (1952). Discourse analysis. Language 28 (1), 1–30.
Heim, Robert (1983). Semiologie und historischer Materialismus. Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein.
Heuer, Herbert (1997). Der taktile Kanal. In Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheore-
tischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, vol. 1, Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, and
Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 300–306. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Hillier, Bill and Hanson, Julienne (1993 [1984]). The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hodge, Robert I. V. and Kress, Gunther (1988). Social Semiotics. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Ivanov, V. V., Lotman, Ju. M., Pjatigorskij, A. M., Toporov, V. N., and Uspenskij, B. A.
(1973). Theses on the semiotic study of cultures (as applied to Slavic texts). In Structure of
Texts and Semiotics of Culture, Jan van der Eng and Mojmı́r Grygar (eds.), 1–28. The
Hague/Paris: Mouton.
Jakobson, Roman (1960). Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics. In Style in Language,
Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn (1995). The Social Semiotics of Mass Communication. London: Sage.
Jorna, René J. (1990). Knowledge Representation and Symbol in the Mind: An Analysis of
Representation and Symbol in Cognitive Psychology (¼ Probleme der Semiotik 10). Tübin-
gen: Stau¤enburg Verlag.
Kavolis, Vytautas (1995). Civilization Analysis as Sociology of Culture. Lewiston: Edwin
Mellen Press.
Keesing, Roger M. (1972). Paradigms lost: The new ethnography and the new linguistics.
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 28 (4), 299–332.
Keesing, Roger M. (1974). Theories of culture. Annual Review of Anthropology 3, 73–97.
Kilpinen, Erkki (2000). The Enormous Fly-Wheel of Society: Pragmatism’s Habitual Concep-
tion of Action and Social Theory (¼ Department of Sociology Research Reports 235).
Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
Kluckhohn, Clyde (1961). Mirror for Man: A Survey of Human Behavior and Social Atti-
tudes. Greenwich: Fawcett.
Krampen, Martin (1997). Models of semiosis. In Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichen-
theoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, vol. 1, Roland Posner, Klaus Robering,
and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 247–288. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Landwehr, Klaus (1997). Der optische Kanal. In Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichen-
Leach, Edmund (1976). Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols are
Connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lee, Penny (1996). The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (¼ Studies in the
History of the Language Sciences 81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lefebvre, Henri (1968 [1939]). Dialectical Materialism. London: Jonathan Cape.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991 [1974]). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Levchenko, Jan and Salupere, Silvi (eds.) (1999). Conceptual Dictionary of the Tartu-
Moscow Semiotic School (¼ Tartu Semiotics Library 2). Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1968). Structural Anthropology 1, Claire Jacobson and Brooke
Grundfest Schoepf (trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lotman, Y. M. (1983). Asimmetria i dialog. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 16, 15–30.
Lotman, Juri M. (1984). O semiosfere. Trudy po znakovym sistemam 17, 5–23.
Introduction 37
Lucid, Daniel P. (ed.) (1997). Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology. Baltimore/London: Johns

Hopkins University Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1999 [1922]). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Na-
tive Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London:
Routledge.
Marcus, G. E. and Fischer, M. J. (1986). Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimen-
tal Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mauss, Marcel (1969). The Gift Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Lon-
don: Cohen and West.
Mead, George H. (1907). Concerning animal perception. Psychological Review 14, 383–390.
Mead, George H. (1913). The social self. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific
Methods 10, 374–380.
Mead, George H. (1922). A behavioristic account of the significant symbol. Journal of
Philosophy 19, 157–163.
Mead, George H. (1930). Cooley’s contribution to American social thought. American Jour-
nal of Sociology 35, 693–706.
Mead, George H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society, C. W. Morris (ed.). Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Mead, George H. (1938). The Philosophy of the Act, Charles Morris et al. (eds.). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Merrell, Floyd (1992). Sign, Textuality, World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Morris, C. (1938). Foundations of the Theory of Signs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morris, C. (1946). Signs, Language, and Behavior. New York: George Braziller.
Morris, C. (1971). Writings on the General Theory of Signs (¼ Approaches to Semiotics 16).
The Hague/Paris: Mouton.
Nicholson, Michael (1983). The Scientific Analysis of Social Behavior: A Defense of Empiri-
cism in Social Science. London: Pinter.
Nikolaenko, N. N. (1983). Funkcionaljnaja asimmetria mozga i izobrazitleljnye sposobnosti:
1. Problema risunka; 2. Vosprijatie i oboznachenia cveta. Trudy po znakovym sistemam
16, 84–98.
Parsons, Talcott (1952). The Social System. London: Tavistock.
Peet, Richard (1998). Modern Geographical Thought. Oxford: Blackwell.
Peirce, Charles S. (1931–1966). The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hart-
shorne, P. Weiss, and A. W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Refer-
ence to Peirce’s papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number.]
Peirce, Charles S. (1992). Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2, Nathan
Houser and Christian Kloesel (eds.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. [Reference
to Essential Peirce will be designated EP followed by volume and paragraph number.]
Pelc, Jerzy (1992). The methodological status of semiotics: Sign, semiosis, interpretation and
the limits of semiotics. In Signs of Humanity: Proceedings of the Fourth International Con-
gress, International Association for Semiotic Studies, Michel Balat and Janice Deledalle-
Rhodes (eds.), 23–34. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pelc, Jerzy (1997). Understanding, explanation, and action as problems of semiotics. In
Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur,
vol. 1, Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 617–667. Berlin/
New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Pollner, Melvin (1987). Mundane Reason: Reality in Everyday and Sociological Discourse.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ponzio, Augusto (1989). Semiotics and Marxism. In The Semiotic Web 1988, Thomas A. Se-
beok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), 387–414. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ponzio, Augusto (2001). Marx. In The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics,
Paul Cobley (ed.), 220–221. London: Routledge.
Ponzio, Augusto and Petrilli, Susan (2001). Thomas Sebeok and the Signs of Life. Cam-
bridge: Icon.
Potter, Jonathan and Wetherell, Margaret (1987). Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond
Attitudes and Behavior. London/Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Posner, R. (ed.) (1988). Semiotik und Marxismus. Special issue, Zeitschrift für Semiotik 10
(1–2).
Randviir, Anti (2004). Mapping the World: Towards a Sociosemiotic Approach to Culture
(Dissertationes semioticae Universitatis Tartuensis 6). Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Riggins, Stephen H. (ed.) (1994). The Socialness of Things: Essays in the Sociosemiotics of
Objects (Approaches to Semiotics 115). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rorty, Richard M. (ed.) (1967). The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method with
Two Retrospective Essays. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press.
Rosaldo, Renato (1993 [1989]). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio (1986a). Marx, Karl (1818–1883). In Encyclopedic Dictionary of
Semiotics (¼ Approaches to Semiotics 73), vol. 1, Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), 482–483.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio (1986b). Materialist semiotics. In Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiot-
ics (Approaches to Semiotics 73), vol. 1, Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), 485–487. Berlin/New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio (1990 [1982]). Marxism and Ideology. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ruesch, Jurgen (1972). Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations (Approaches to Semiotics
25). The Hague: Mouton.
Russell, Bertrand (1948). An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. London: George Allen and
Unwin.
Sacks, Harvey (1992). Lectures on Conversation, vols. 1 and 2, Gail Je¤erson (ed.). Oxford:
Blackwell.
Saussure, Ferdinand de (1959). Course in General Linguistics, Wade Baskin (trans), Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye (eds.). New York: Philosophical Library.
Schutz, Alfred (1967 [1932]). The Phenomenology of the Social World, G. Walsh and F.
Lehnert (trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1988). In what sense is language a ‘primary modeling system’? In Henri
Broms and Rebecca Kaufmann (eds.), Semiotics of Culture, 67–80. Helsinki: Arator.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (2001). Global Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Shannon, Claude E. and Weaver, Warren (1949). The Mathematical Theory of Communica-
tion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Shukman, Ann (ed.) (1984). The Semiotics of Russian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan.
Singer, Milton B. (1984). Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sperber, Dan (1979). Claude Lévi-Strauss. In Structuralism and Since, John Sturrock (ed.),
19–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Strube, Gerhard and Lazarus, Gerda (1997). Der akustische Kanal. In Semiotik: Ein Hand-
buch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur, vol. 1, Roland Posner,
Klaus Robering, and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 294–300. Berlin/New York: Walter de
Gruyter.
Tarasti, Eero (2000). Existential Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Introduction 39
Uexküll, Jakob von (1982). The theory of meaning. Semiotica 42 (1), 25–82.
Verschueren, Jef (1999). Understanding Pragmatics. London: Edward Arnold; New York:
Oxford University Press.
Verschueren, Jef (2001). Pragmatics. In The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguis-
tics, Paul Cobley (ed.), 83–94. London: Routledge.
Wertsch, James V. (1991). Voices of the Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Westley, B. and MacLean, M. (1957). A conceptual model for communication research.
Journalism Quarterly 34, 31–38.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1941). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In
Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir, Leslie Spier, A.
Irving Hallowell, and Stanley S. Newman (eds.), 75–93. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings. Cam-
bridge: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wiley, Norbert (1994). The Semiotic Self. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Wuketis, Franz M. (1997). Anthroposemiose. In Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichen-
Paul Cobley (b. 1963) is a Reader at London Metropolitan University 3p.cobley@

londonmet.ac.uk4. His research interests include semiotics, the work of Thomas A. Sebeok,
subjectivity, and communication theory. His publications include The American Thriller
(2000); Narrative (2001); The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (ed., 2001);
and Communication Theories (ed., 2006).
Anti Randviir (b. 1975) is a Senior Researcher at the University of Tartu 3randviir@ut.ee4.
His research interests include sociosemiotics, theory of semiotics, and comparative meth-
odology of humanities and social sciences. His publications include Mapping the World:
Towards a Sociosemiotic Approach to Culture (2004); ‘Spatialization of knowledge: Carto-
graphic roots of globalization’ (2004); ‘Sociosemiotic perspectives on studying culture and
society’ (2001); and ‘Cultural semiotics and social meaning’ (2005).

Cobley Randivir Intro Sociosemiotics

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Cobley Randivir Intro Sociosemiotics

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?

PAUL COBLEY and ANTI RANDVIIR

What is sociosemiotics? It is not the easiest question to answer and any

Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 1–39 0037–1998/09/0173–0001

Indirectly, then, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, inﬂuenced the develop-

– How are forms of speech and patterns of communication distributed

2. The contemporary ﬁeld of semiotics: A very brief note

There existed a relatively long period in the humanities of the twentieth

Table 1. Comparison of semiotics and semiology (Singer 1984: 42)

Point of Comparison Semiotic (Peirce) Semiology (Saussure)

1. Aims at a general theory philosophical, normative, a descriptive, generalized

Second, and more confusing still, as mentioned in relation to Barthes and

artifacts of interest to arts and the humanities. Rather, it evolved as the

Yet, to complicate matters, subsemiotic branches of study have a longer

century communication study. The processual stages of sign exchange as

4. Sources and correspondences

Apart from those areas mentioned already (notably, sociology, sociolin-

4.1. Cultural anthropology

In attempting to deﬁne the content of ‘culture’ for contemporary semiotic

cultural anthropology is related to the way in which sociosemiotics (as

theorists as information storehouses. The period of the Lone Ethnogra-

The primary data of ethnographic analysis consist of informants’ statements

What anthropology came to realize, partly inﬂuenced by sociosemiotically-

4.2. Cultural semiotics

While Western cultural anthropology widened its objects of analysis and

course, this is not uncharacteristic of textbooks and anthologies in dif-

4.3. Sociology, the social sciences, and social psychology

As with cultural anthropology, the seemingly straightforward discovery

communication, such study does go as far as possible in its search for

boundaries of any study of sociocultural phenomena and sign systems.

Individual behavior cannot be explained by the extrapolation of truths per-

task of clustering individual scholars according to speciﬁc areas of study,

In contrast to the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics where

approach to culture in cultural sociology (see Kavolis 1995: 4–6). Of

pace as semiotic systems (for example, Soviet Russia, even as an ideology

This o¤ers a seductive deﬁnition of sociosemiotics as a matter of analyz-

The ‘relation to’ context in sociosemiotics is more a matter of its prag-

methods of analysis, across all its schools, either wittingly or unwittingly,

Having made these general statements about the relation of sociosemi-

No doubt, Pragmaticism makes thought ultimately apply to action exclusively —

With this perspective on action considered, and if the human’s world is

In addition to its roots in pragmaticism, the social constructionist posi-

The di‰culties of establishing what exactly a sign is are most manifest in

– developed cultures versus primitive cultures

The relation of animal and human worlds in understanding the devel-

6. The places of sociosemiotics

In addition to his countless contributions to semiotics, Sebeok was also

In brief, the Anglo-Australian school does not have a deﬁnitive place

Bakhtin, with parts of the Anglo-Australian tradition in its use of Vygot-

7. From foundations to global communication

To highlight some of the unifying thematic concerns of sociosemiotics, this

the ‘social’ of sociosemiotics is to be realized, dialogue must be an in-

those topics. Of course, perception has a bearing on everything in semi-

Wertsch’s essay on collective memory acts both as a cogent introduc-

societies, although he stresses that not every process of human communi-

Genre literacy is clearly ubiquitous but, as the term ‘literacy’ suggests,

Based on the idea of the ‘semiotic animal’ as elucidated by Petrilli, Pon-

Alter, Jean (1991). A Sociosemiotic Theory of Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-

Cherednichenko, Igor (2000). Teorija strukturno-semioticheckogo metoda: postroenie termi-

Lucid, Daniel P. (ed.) (1997). Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology. Baltimore/London: Johns

Paul Cobley (b. 1963) is a Reader at London Metropolitan University 3p.cobley@

Potrebbero piacerti anche