Dalla scienza dei segni alla semiotica del testo. Il campo semiotico e le teorie della significazione
Semiotics, as a scientific discipline, has its roots in the nineteenth century. Stefano Gensini recalls that the effort to define its boundaries was undertaken by two scholars destined to shape its future development: Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure. Peirce, an American philosopher of pragmatist orientation, conceived semiotics as a general theory of human…
Le strutture semio-narrative costituiscono la competenza semiotica generale presupposta da ogni produzione discorsiva. Esse ritraducono, in un quadro semiotico più articolato, il concetto di langue di Saussure o di sistema di Hjelmslev. Ogni enunciatore, nel momento in cui produce un discorso, si trova davanti una base semio-culturale preesistente che deve attivare per poterla trasformare in testo. Il passaggio dal livello delle strutture semio-narrative a quello…
La semiotica, come disciplina scientifica, trova le sue radici nell’Ottocento. Stefano Gensini ricorda che l’esigenza di definirne i contorni fu sostenuta da due studiosi destinati a orientarne lo sviluppo: Charles Sanders Peirce e Ferdinand de Saussure. Peirce, filosofo statunitense di orientamento pragmatista, considerava la semiotica una teoria generale della conoscenza umana. Egli attribuiva all’attività interpretativa un ruolo centrale:…
In his 1976 essay, Umberto Eco retraces the long and fragmented history of reflections on signs, highlighting how semiotics—despite its ancient roots—was persistently marginalized by the scientific establishment. The idea of a science dedicated to the production, exchange, and interpretation of signs is far from new: even pre-Socratic poetry and philosophy had shown an interest…
In Semiotics in Ethics and Caring, Susan Petrilli affirms that an ethical dimension is implicit in every form of human semiosis. Yet only recently has it become a consistent object of semiotic inquiry. Drawing on Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of global semiotics, she argues that reconnecting semiotics with the life sciences allows the discipline to extend beyond…
According to Per Aage Brandt, a sign is an act or artifact performed by an agent—human or animal—addressed to other agents with the purpose of showing, telling, or signifying something. This very article, he notes, qualifies as a sign. As such, every sign is inherently deictic: it contains an enunciative component, meaning that it points—through its…
Patrizia Magli e Maria Pia Pozzato aprono la loro prefazione (La grammatica narrativa) a Del senso 2 di Greimas richiamando una domanda che lo studioso si era posto nell’“Introduzione” al primo volume di Del senso: come sia possibile “parlare del senso e dire su di esso qualcosa di sensato”. La risposta, osservano, si radica nel progetto di…
Cognitive semiotics addresses a fundamental question: How can we come to know the world through signs and languages? This question lies at the heart of several debates in semiotics, philosophy, and cognitive science, especially those concerning subjectivity, representation, belief, perception, imagination, social cognition, mind, and language. The term “cognitive” is not intended to contrast with emotion or…
The semiotic investigation of myth often returns to two key notions that attempt to capture its smallest meaningful components: the mythologeme and the mytheme. Both terms appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, each emerging from a different intellectual tradition. Their comparison reveals two distinct ways of thinking about the inner organization of myth — one…
European structuralism finds its roots in the theoretical horizon opened by Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet, as Anne-Gaëlle Toutain and Ekaterina Velmezova observe, this origin is as much historical as it is problematic: “while such a conception corresponds to a historical reality, it nevertheless constitutes a theoretical and epistemological error.” The structuralists, they explain, misunderstood the content…