Dalla scienza dei segni alla semiotica del testo. Il campo semiotico e le teorie della significazione
From the science of signs to the semiotics of the text. The semiotic field and the theories of signification.
From May 27 to 29, 2026, the University of Bologna will host Inheriting Eco. Umberto Eco, the University of Bologna and all the knowledge in the world, a major international conference devoted to the theoretical, philosophical, narrative, and semiotic legacy of Umberto Eco. Organized by the “Umberto Eco” International Centre for the Humanities together with several…
In contemporary discussions of signs, the distinction between “semiology” and “semiotics” is not merely terminological. John Deely shows that this divergence involves two different ways of conceiving the sign, language, and the relation between culture and nature. Deely first reconstructs the lexicographical history of the two terms. “Semiology” appears in English dictionaries as early as…
Semiotics has defined itself from its very beginnings as the discipline of signs. Yet, as Anna Maria Lorusso observes, the notion of the sign has never been either simple or univocal. Dictionaries offer very different definitions: a sign may be “a clue,” “a gesture,” “an act or a word,” or a “graphic expression” capable of…
The project announced by Umberto Eco is to explore “the theoretical possibility and the social function of a unified approach to every phenomenon of signification and/or communication.” The ambition concerns every case of sign-function, understood as the result of “underlying systems of elements mutually correlated by one or more codes.” What is at stake is the design…
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli introduces what she calls a detotalizing method as a necessary epistemological and ethical stance for contemporary semiotics. This method emerges from a critique of totalizing models of knowledge and communication, particularly those associated with globalization, technicism, and disciplinary separatism. Against these tendencies, Petrilli proposes a mode of inquiry capable of accounting for…
Susan Petrilli develops the notion of semioethics by grounding it in a specific conception of the human being: the human as semiotic animal. This expression, introduced in the volume Semiotic Animal co-authored with John Deely and Augusto Ponzio, designates a life form endowed not only with the capacity for semiosis, but with a distinctive aptitude for metasemiosis—the ability to reflect on…
Semiotics belongs to that intermediate area of knowledge that constitutes the field of the human sciences: disciplines that are not founded on theorems or experiments, but neither on subjective opinions. It is a science of meaning, which investigates the ways in which human beings produce, interpret, and share meanings. As Ugo Volli reminds us, from…
In existential semiotics, Eero Tarasti introduces the notion of the zemic world as the fundamental structure of empirical existence. This model articulates Dasein into four interconnected entities: body, person, praxis, and values, which Tarasti designates respectively as Moi1, Moi2, Soi2, and Soi1. The zemic world is not a static configuration but a dynamic field in which meaning…
In existential semiotics, the notion of transcendence emerges as one of the most challenging and innovative contributions to contemporary semiotic theory. Eero Tarasti presents transcendence as “perhaps the most provocative new issue which existential semiotics tries to launch for theoretical reflection,” and develops a framework in which transcendence assumes three distinct forms: empirical, existential, and…
Halliday describes how, for many years, writings on linguistic “behaviour” opened by criticizing linguists who limited themselves to the “code.” This limitation, he notes, had been “accepted as a fact of life,” even though it resulted from a specific historical phase in which code and behaviour were “rigorously held apart.” Only recently had the two…