The Semiotic Sphere

TOP/CS /N CONTEMPORARY SEM/OT/CS

Series Editors: Thomas A. Sebeok and leaD Umiker-Sebeok
Indiana University

I THINK I AM A VERB: More Contributions to the Doctrine

of Signs
Thomas A. Sebeok

KARL BÜHLER: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory

Robert E. Innis

THE MESSAGES OF TOURIST ART: An African Semiotic

System in Comparative Perspective
Bennetta J ules-Rosette

SEMIOTIC PRAXIS: Studies in Pertinence and in the

Means of Expression and Communication
Georges Mounin

THE SEMIOTIC SPHERE

Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok

SPEAKING OF APES
Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok
The Semiotic Sphere

Edited by
Thomas A. Sebeok
and
Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Research Center far Language and Semiotic Studies
Indiana U niversity
Bloomington, Indiana

Plenum Press • New York and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under tide:
The Semiotic sphere.
(Topics in contemporary semiotics)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Semiotics - Research - Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Sebeok, Thomas
Albert, 1920- .11. Umiker-Sebeok, Donna Jean. III. Series.
P99.3.S46 1986 001.51 85-28152
ISBN 978-1-4757-0207-1 ISBN 978-1-4757-0205-7 (eBook)
DOI10.1007/978-1-4757-0205-7

© 1986 Plenum Press, New York

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 Contributors

Enrique Ballon Francesco Casetti

Manco Segundo 2617, Linc!'; Istituto Scienze della Communicazione
Lima e Spettacolo
Peru Universita Cattolica
Milan
Gianfranco Bettetini Italy
Istituto Scienze della Communicazione
Members of the Centre de Recherehes
e Spettacolo SemioIogiques
Universita Cattolica Universite de Neuchfltel
Milan Neuchfltel
Italy Switzerland
K. Boklund-Lagopoulou Anne Freadman
English Department Department of French
University of Thessaloniki University of Queensland
Thessaloniki Australia
Greece Andres Gallardo
Department of Spanish
Paul Bouissac University of Concepci6n
Department of French Concepci6n
Victoria College Chile
University of Toronto
Toronto Sanda Golopenpa-Eretescu
Canada Department of French Studies
Brown University
Roque Carrion-Wam Providence, Rhode !sland
Centro Latinoamericano de Investigaciones U.S.A.
J uridicas y Sociales Cristina GonzaIez
Faculty of Law Department of Foreign Languages
University of Carabobo Purdue University
Valencia West Lafayette, Indiana
Venezuela U.S.A.

v
vi CONTRIBUTORS

Anne Henault Meaghan Morris

Universite de Paris-X Nanterre 11 Prospect Street
2 rue de Rouen Newtown, New South Wales
92001 Nanterre Australia
France
Christopher N orris
Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo Department of English
Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales University of Wales
Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico Institute of Science and Technology
Mexico, D. F. Cardiff, Wales
Mexico Great Britain

Jorgen DinesJohansen Monica Rector

Department of Literature Department of Social Communication
Odense University Universidade Federal Fluminense
Odense Rio de J aneiro
Denmark Brazil

Roberta Kevelson Stephen Rudy

Department of Philosophy Slavic Languages and Literatures
Pennsylvania State U niversity New York University
Reading, Pennsylvania New York, New York
U.S.A. U.S.A.

A.-Ph. Lagopoulos J orge Sanchez

Department of Architecture Department of Spanish
Urban and Regional Planning University of Concepci6n
University of Thessaloniki Concepci6n
Thessaloniki Chile
Greece Jose Augusto Seabra
Faculty of Letters
Annemarie Lange-Seidl
University of Oporto
Language Center
Porto
Technical University
Portugal
Munich
West Germany Thomas A. Sebeok
Research Center for
Per Erik Ljung Language and Semiotic Studies
Institut for Nordisk Filologi Indiana University
University of Copenhagen Bloomington, Indiana
Copenhagen U.S.A.
Denmark
Sven Storelv
Richard Martin Department of French
Seminaire d'Esthetique Universitetet i Bergen
University of Liege Bergen
Liege Norway
Belgium
Pierre Swiggers
Hugo McCormick Faculty of Philosophy and Letters
Calle 41, No. 18-58 Belgian National Science Foundation
Barquisimeto, Edo. Lara Louvain
Venezuela Belgium
 CONTRIBUTORS vii
Eero Tarasti Jean Umiker-Sebeok
Department of Musicology Research Center for
University of Helsinki Language and Semiotic Studies
Helsinki Indiana University
Finland Bloomington, Indiana
U.S.A.
Tomonori Toyama
Department of Education Vilmos Voigt
Shizuoka University Folklore Tanszek
Shizuoka Eötvös Lorand Tudomanyegyetem
Japan Budapest
Hungary
 Preface

Although semiotics has, in one guise or another, ftourished uninterruptedly since pre-
Socratic times in the West, and important semiotic themes have emerged and devel-
oped independently in both the Brahmanie and Buddhistic traditions, semiotics as
an organized undertaking began to 100m only in the 1960s. Workshops materialized,
with a perhaps surprising spontaneity, over much ofEurope-Eastern and Western-
and in North America. Thereafter, others quickly surfaced almost everywhere over
the litera te globe. Different places strategically allied themselves with different lega-
eies, but all had a common thrust: to aim at a general theory of signs, by way of a
description of different sign systems, their comparative analysis, and their classifi-
cation. More or less permanent confederations were forged with the most diverse
academic disciplines, and amazingly varied frameworks were devised-suited to the
needs of the times and the sites-to carry the work of consolidation forward. Bit by
bit, mutually supportive international networks were put together.
Today, it can truly be asserted that semiotics has become a global enterprise.
This, of course, is far from saying that the map is uniform or even that world-wide
homogeneity is in the least desirable. While our conjoint ultimate goal remains steadily
in focus, the multiplicity of avenues available for its realization is inherent in the
advent ure of the search itself. The contents of this book will bear witness to this
uniformity of ends coupled with the variety of means currently being used to achieve
them. At the present, still formative, stage of semiotics, this seems to the editors to
be a good thing; it was, in fact, the primary purpose of this compilation to reftect
the state of our art and science around the world. We scrupulously avoided imposing
on the contributors either our own conception of semiotics or our terminological
preferences.
Every collection, when reviewed, is judged "uneven," and this charge will be
found true here. When stones are dropped into apond, the waves emanating from
their point of contact encounter obstacles which might deftect them from propagating
evenly, as they might in an ideal space free of natural and man-made obstructions.
The 27 chapters of this volume mirror the uneven evolution of semiotics as a scholarly
discipline and as a doctrine of signs. This is due both to the situation in a particular
country and to the predilections of the author(s) asked to delineate it. Although all
authors were requested to discuss the his tory of semiotics in the political entities

IX
x PREFACE

assigned them as weil as the institutional structures within which semioticians there
are called upon to operate, some contributors have seen fit to dweil at much greater
length than others on the political and ideological battles, both inside and outside
academia, accompanying the introduction and spread of semiotics in their area. Both
the similarities and differences between such accountings provide a fascinating-if
sporadic-glimpse of the often turbulent social setting of science in the process of
paradigmatic change. Across the chapters yet another impressionistic picture begins
to emerge-namely, that of the spread of competing doctrines within semiotics itself,
influenced by the usual human problems of language barriers, conflicting cultural
traditions, and the like.
Certain countries, where we know that semiotics has made powerful inroads,
are omitted, as, for instance, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Israel. Without wishing
to specify the reasons for this seeming neglect, we want to assure our readers that
such omissions are due to miscellaneous but compelling causes beyond our control.
We also regret the underrepresentation of Third World nations, which may be attrib-
uted variously-depending on the country in question-to factors such as lack of
sufficient semiotic activity to warrant a chapter, insufficient professional organization
or cooperation to enable an author to produce an adequate survey, or unfavorable
political or economic conditions. We are keenly aware of the recent, dramatic emer-
gence of semiotics in Africa, as weil as of the fact that the 1985 International Winter
Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies met in Mysore, India, just recently.
We hope to fill these and other gaps in future editions, undoubtedly with more
flexible format and production techniques to keep pace with the anticipated rapid
progress in semiotics in the coming years, as it continues to spread and mature much
as it has over the past quarter of a century. Although the present volume was meant
to serve as a straightforward documentation of semiotic activities in representative
countries, it will also, we trust-by providing scholars with the data necessary to
compare and contrast local and global trends in research-help to bring about a
greater degree of understanding and collaboration among the present and emerging
semioticians of our world.

Bloomington, Indiana THOMAS A. SEBEOK

JEAN UMIKER-SEBEOK
Contents

• Semiotics in Australia ......................................... .

ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS

2 • Semiotics in Belgium 19
RICHARD MARTIN

3 • Semiotics in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 47
MONICA P. RECTOR

4 • Semiotics in Canada 59
PAUL BOUISSAC

5 • Semiotics in Chile 99
ANDRES GALLARDO ANDJORGE SANCHEZ

6 • Semiotics in Denmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 115

J0RGEN DINESJOHANSEN

7 • Semiotics in Finland 145

EERO T ARASTI

8 • Semiotics in France ............................................ 153

ANNE HENAuLT

9 • Semiotics in East and West Germany and Austria ................ 177

ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEID!.

xi
Xli CONTENTS

10 • Semiotics in Great Britain ...................................... 229

CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

11 • Semiotics in Greece ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 253

K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULou AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS

12 • Semiotics in Hungary 279

VU.MOS VOIGT

13 • Semiotics in Italy 293

G IANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI

14 • Semiotics in Japan ............................................. 323

TOMONORI ToyAMA

15 • Semiotics in the Low Countries ................................. 343

PIERRE SWIGGERS

16 • Semiotics in Mexico 359

REG INA] IMENEZ-OTT ALENGO

17 • Semiotics in Norway 369

SVEN STORELV

18 • Semiotics in Peru 387

ENRIQUE BALLON

19 • Semiotics in Portugal 407

]OSE AUGUSTO SEABRA

20 • Semiotics in Romania .......................................... 41 7

SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU

21 • Semiotics in Spain ............................................. 473

CRISTINA GONzALEZ

22 • Semiotics in Sweden ........................................... 485

PER ERIK LJUNG

23 • Semiotics in Switzerland 505

MEMBERS OF THE CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES,
UNIVERSITE DE NEUCHATEL
 CONTENTS XIII

24 • Semiotics in the United States .................................. 519

ROBERTA KEVELSON

25 • Semiotics in the U.S.S.R . ....................................... 555

STEPHEN RUDY

26 • Semiotic Research on the Law in Venezuela ..................... 583

ROQUE CARRION-WAM

27 • Semiotics in Venezuela: Critical Revision of the Notion of the

Unconscious and Its Effects in the Second Semiology Field ....... 599
HUGO MCCORMICK

Notes on Contributors 613

Index of Names ............................................... 619

Subject Index ................................................. 643

 CHAPTER 1
Semiotics in Australia
Anne Freadman and Meaghan Morris
Early in February 1981 the first conference in
Australia to have the word "semiotics" in its
(sub)title was held in the grounds of the Uni-
versity of Sydney. This event should not be taken
as "progress," the "arrival" of semiotics in Aus-
tralia, or the arrival of Australia on the semiotics
map; for it is none of these. Just how to take it
is the question to which we shall address our-
selves: it is our opinion that the conference title,
"Foreign Bodies: Semiotics inland Australia," is,
in a number of ways, symptomatic of "semiotics
in Australia." It is emphatically not represen-
tative of work being done as semiotics in Aus-
tralia, of which there is precious little. Weshall
use it to pivot part of our discussion.
To find out what "semiotics in Australia"
might be, we shall do a reading of this expres-
sion; in order to prepare for this reading, what
we have done is to send a questionnaire (see
Appendix A) and to analyze the replies. We must
start with "in Australia," because the term
"semiotics" in "semiotics in Australia" is unin-
terpretable otherwise; and this is no place to be
Anne Freadman • Department of French, University of
Queensland, Queensland, Australia, 4067. Meaghan
Morris • ll Prospect Street, Newtown, New South Wales,
Australia, 2042. We wish to thank the Department of French,
University of Queensland, for its generosity in making avail-
able funds from its University Research Grant to help with
the preparation and typing of this chapter. . ical entity to be taken for gran ted.
1
writing adefinition of the term "semiotics" as if
it were not a cultural artifact constrained by the
socio-intellectual codes that provide the condi-
tions for its interpretation and use. How these
codes have located "semiotics" first outside
themselves ("Foreign Bodies"), then hesitantly
in contact with and bearing upon them (semiot-
ics "inland Australia"), land then "where"
semiotics has been located (in terms of what
other discourses and disciplines, taught by whom
and in what parts of wh at sorts of institutions)
can be described by the double metaphoric con-
tructs of postcolonial migratory patterns and
the importation of manufactured goods, luxury
items, and the technology by which to define our
own incompetence. Did it want to come? or do
we need it? will it take our jobs? Our first ques-
tion will be Where has it settled? What does "in
Australia" mean? Only then can we talk about
how it is being used.
A map of Australia is presented in Figure 1.
The areas defined by the four circles are known
as the "South Eastern States." Note that the
boundaries do not correspond with state bound-
aries, but with cities, and that the term "south
'Here and throughout this article we shall be taking "Aus-
tralia" to be a complex sign rather than a simple geograph-
2 AN NE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
,
\ NORTHERN
I TERRITORY
\
\ I
, I
WESTERN 1 - - - - - - L -1
AUSTRALlA
I I
, SOUTH
\ AUSTRALlA
I
Figure 1 Outline map of Australia.
eastern" does not include Tasmania. The south-
eastern corner is the center of intellectual and
political life. The extreme southeast, the north-
east, the north and the west, as weIl of course
as the dead center, are marginal. In Rome, Paris,
or N ew Y ork, "in Australia" means "in the
desert"; but in Sydney and in Melbourne "in the
desert" means "in the north" or "in the west."
So the "Foreign Bodies" conference was held in
Sydney, and the paranoid northern or western
interpretation of this might have been that Syd-
ney was claiming thereby to "bring" semiotics
to Australia or to bring any outlying semioticians
to where it iso However other interpretations were
produced by the conference about the relations
between the various spaces of Australia-and
the authoritative otherness of intellectual move-
ments in other parts of the world.
As far as we can determine, there is so me
activity relating to semiotics in Adelaide, Bris-
bane, Hobart, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, and
Sydney, and instituted undergraduate courses
either on or drawing on semiotics in so me explicit
way in most of these cities; postgraduate semi-
nars are more rare, but we have been told of
one, on literary semiotics, in Sydney. There are
no majors in semiotics as such, although there
QUEENSLAND
Brisbane
TASMANIAM t
""Hobar
are in "communications," and there are several
Ph.D.s currently in preparation. A number of
people hold tenured positions, in universities and
in colleges of advanced education, for which
semiotics was a specificed area of appointment;
and achair in Communication Studies has been
advertised, specifying semiotics as the frame-
work of the program of the school to which the
appointment would be made.
The history of the establishment of universi-
ties is closely tied to the semiotics of Australian
urban geography as sketched above, as weIl as
to the demographic and economic factors that
are both cause and effect of that geography. The
oldest university in Australia is Sydney (1850),
followed by those in Melbourne (1853), Adelaide
(1874), Hobart (1908), Brisbane (1909) and
Western Australia (1911). The Australian
National University in Canberra was established
much later (1946). Provincial universities were
established in New South Wales (1954, 1965,
1975), Queensland (1970) and Victoria (1974)
under the inftuence of decentralized population
press ures and distance from the capital cities;
most of these had been colleges of universities
in the capital cities, and their academic organ-
ization followed the pattern set by the older
 AUSTRALlA
campuses. The exception is Deakin (Victoria).
The first of the second series of metropolitan
universities was the University of New South
Wales (1948); and the postwar baby boom cre-
ated the need for further universities in the cap-
i tal cItles: Monash (Meibourne ) (1958),
Macquarie (Sydney) (1964), Latrobe (Mel-
bourne) (1964), Flinders (Adelaide ) (1966).
Perth and Brisbane established their second
universities in the early seventies; these two ins ti-
tutions, together with Deakin, contrast with their
forerunners of the new generation by breaking
with the organization into faculties and depart-
ments which the 1960s group had faithfully
reproduced. In its place: transdisciplinary or
interdisciplinary schools. Although the older
universities imported semiotics principally
through their departments of modern languages
("recent trends in French thought," or "a new
theory of literature") , these two institutions-
Griffith in Brisbane, Murdoch in Perth-assume
semiotics as one of the disciplines providing either
a framework for teaching and research activities,
or an object of analysis for those activities. The
work of the Griffith School of Humanities will
be discussed later. 2
The middle seventies also saw the prolifera-
tion of colleges of advanced education: tertiary
institutions designed to bridge the gap between
the vocational technical colleges preparing stu-
dents to enter various skilled trades, and the
universities offering academic qualifications to
an increasing number of students with uncertain
employment prospects. Several of these new
colleges-such as the New South Wales Institute
of Technology in Sydney-established voca-
tional courses in media studies and communi-
cations, permitting some to introduce semiotics
as atheoretical component. Others, such as the
Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Edu-
cation, and the Sydney College of the Arts, have
2We received no answer to our questionnaire from Murdoch
by the time of writing (February 1981). The reader must
understand that the immense distances involved-espe-
cially between the east and west coasts of the continent-
make effective communication quite difficult. The hand-
books of Murdoch University are of course available in
Sydney. But these provide me re lists of course titles, not
detailed accounts of content and method. As our method
required a text for analysis these were insufficient for our
purposes and were not included. However this situation has
now been rectified (September 1982). The Murdoch infor-
mation appears in extenso in Appendix D.
3
introduced some semiotics as part of a training
in the visual arts (including film and electronic
media). Here, however, the inclusion of semiot-
ics has usually been a function of the interests
of particular teachers and student groups at a
given time, rather than a formally constituted
and regular part of a structured program.
Thus if we confine our attention to the place
of semiotics in the tertiary institutions of Aus-
tralia, it al ready emerges that "semiotics" can
exist as a "given" aspect of anational culture
("French studies"); as a discipline which it is
possible to invoke in an interdisciplinary context
defined by addressing problems rather than by
the preexistence of the disciplines themselves; as
a professional prerequisite for media work; or as
source of potential inspiration in the practice (or
theory) of the visual arts.
The "Foreign Bodies" conference, however,
made it clear that the shifting settlement of
semiotics in Australia cannot be defined by a
"place" within these institutions, but rather by
a number of relationships to institutions (semiot-
ics and "Australia"). The papers given ranged
from readings of texts on Australian his tory and
literary criticism, to discussions of Feyerabend
and epistemological anarchism, to video work
on media representations of local political strug-
gles. 3 Only two of the contributors were full-time
tertiary academics; the others were undergrad-
uates and postgraduates from the universities
and colleges of the eastern cities, and people
whose work lies outside the academy altogether-
poets, journalists, artists. Most stressed that their
3The full conference program was: Paul Foss, "Theatrum Mun-
dum Cognitorum, or the Limbo of the Castaways-Terry Blake,
on matters foreign-Peter Costa, paper, "The Kuranda
Shooting," and presentation of video made by Barry Mel-
ville and Cathy Beitz-Terry Counihan, "Practical Criti-
cism: Law and Reflection-Peter Botsman, "From Deserts
Structuralists Came: A Reading of J ohn Lechte's Politics and
the Writing of Australian History"-John Forbes, on Australian
poetry-Anne Freadman and Meaghan Morris, "Import
Rhetoric: 'Semiotics inland Australia' "-Ted Colless, "The
Lost Wave: Semiotics and Cultural Vanguardism"-Video:
on types of feminist politics/discourse indicative of films
made in the last few years in Australia-Jeff Minson, "The
Assertion of Homosexuality: Problems of Personal Politics"-
Tom O'Regan, "K. S. Pritchard: The Construction of a
Literary Political Subject"-Tony Thwaites, "Speaking of
Prowlers: Patrick White and Teaching Literature"-Tom
O'Regan, Video: "Monday Conference (The Last
Tasmanian) "-George Alexander, "Aus-land" a pirate radio
play."
4 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
work had either a noninstitutional status, or an
oppositional status-within existing depart-
ments and practices-for which "semiotics"
might or might not be a convenient term. Some
stated that their work had nothing to do with
semiotics at all. The unifying theme of the first
conference in Australia to allude explicitly to
semiotics was, in fact, "the foreign"-as defined
not by the participants themselves (who were all
in some way concerned with the complex sign
Australia), but by the possibility of having their
work-and their persons-so defined at some
point by existing institutions. Although the con-
ference itself was held at the University of Syd-
ney, it was not held under its auspices in any
way.
"Semiotics," then, can be in Australia the name
for a play of institutional inclusions and exclu-
sions. Rather than an institutionalized profes-
sional area in its own right, "semiotics" is a hotly
disputed territory which is occupied only briefty,
and for tactical reasons. One journal publishing
work related to semiotics from time to time is
Random Issue, edited by a group of people con-
nected to the English, Fine Arts, and General
Philosophy Departmen ts of the U niversi ty of
Sydney. The second issue contained a dossier of
interpretations of the recent history of the Gen-
eral Philosophy Department-an "alternative"
radical philosophy department formed after a
strike over the teaching of women's studies, which
became predominantly Marxist, and which threw
up in turn its own internaIopposition. The fol-
lowing quotation from this dossier highlights the
way in which "semiotics" in Australia can mean,
firstly, the activities of those excluded from and
by a given academic status quo; and secondly
(and in consequence), the activities of an inter-
nal opposition to that status quo:
1978 ... two temporary appointments, one a senior tutor-
ship, the other a tutorship, are allocated to feminism and
the more ]ringe areas of Eastern philosophy, aesthetics and
psychoanalysis. A joint first year course with T & M' is
forced upon the department, with Armstrong contributing
one core course. In the meantime, a theoretical interest had
4"T & M"; the Department of Traditional and Modern Phi-
losophy, led by Professor Armstrong, was the second phi-
losophy department formed when the women's strike split
the former single Department of Philosophy. Professor Arm-
strong had opposed the women's studies course, and some
years earlier had opposed the teaching of options in Marxism.
developed for some, mainly feminist, members of the depart-
ment in radically unconventional andformally excluded discourses,
which could be characterized as philosophies of non-systematicity
and anti-totalitarianism, but which were seen by others as largely
anti-marxist. An interdisciplinary seminar on semiotics took
place and a demand for a F'oucault course was filled, although
by someone antagonistic to his work [emphasis added).'
Here, "semiotics" is part of a paradigm of the
"non," the "un-" and the "anti"; and it is in this
sense that the juxtaposition (which might other-
wise seem strange) of Eastern philosophy, aes-
thetics, psychoanalysis, semiotics and Michel
Foucault needs to be understood. "Semiotics" is
produced in the ftuidity of the "fringe areas," in
opposition to the fixity of "core courses"-the
core being occupied, in this case, by an odd com-
bination of liberal philosophy "forced upon" the
department from outside, and the Marxist ortho-
doxy held to dominate the inside. The meaning
of "semiotics" is thus established by its function
in a binary political dynamic.
In making a preliminary survey of the range
of activities associated with "semiotics" in this
country, from courses in French literature to phi-
losophies of "non-systematicity," it is tempting
to say that in Australia, "semiotics" is an empty
signifier: it does not denote. But in analyzing the
replies to our questionnaire, certain patterns did
emerge which make it seem more accurate to say
that "semiotics" in Australia is a plural signifier-
denoting a diversity in which no two "semioti-
cians" occupy exactly the same position.
The same must be said of the two writers of
this article.
The question of the location of "semiotics"
vis-a-vis other discourses and disciplines is best
raised in the first place by the answers sent to
us by some of the linguists whom we contacted:
One always feels uncertain about the definition of
semiotics ....
Does [my work in semanties] count as semiotics? I don't
know. It depends on how one defines semiotics.
Yes, I do consider myself a semiotician, because (a) I am a
linguist, and language is a semiotic system .... [etc.]
These responses reveal a "semiotics" which is
not a set of specifiable practices and objects,
but rather, an inclusive term in a presupposed
'Random Issue, No. 2 Uune 1980), p. 11.
 AUSTRALlA
taxonomy of the "human sciences." Semiotics is,
or is not, a way of describing the place occupied
by linguistics in such ascherne.
By contrast with this, none of the other
responses posed the problem of the definition of
the term as such, and did suppose that semiotics
was a specific field of activities. People as far
apart as anthropologists, photographers and lit-
erary critics had no hesitation in claiming some
form of relation with semiotics (although what
form this relation takes varies quite consider-
ably), but rare among this group ofreplies is the
claim to work within the field. Thus, with very
few exceptions, nobody "is" a semiotician:
semiotics is for something else.
We rely on two distinctions to analyze our
replies: the first, between a tree-structure dia-
gram representing a taxonomy, and a Venn-
diagram representing overlapping fields. As a
dictionary item, "semiotics" functions tautolog-
ically: semiotics studies semiotic systems, thus,
the semiotic is the overarching category within
which linguistics takes its place. But as that to
which anthropology, photography and literary
studies all allude, semiotics functions as a co m-
mon stock of terminology which by no means
exhausts the conceptual lexicon of any one of
these fields. The lexical items of semiotic ter-
minology are thus available rather in the same
way as the register of potential employees in an
employment agency, available for any job that
comes up. In no way, therefore, can this ter-
minology guarantee the conceptual unity of the
group of fields that use it.
The second distinction is between "being in"
and "not being in" the field of semiotics, that is,
between "doing it" and "using or knowing about
it." Note that the difference between "not being
in" and "being out of'-though perhaps forced-
is intended to capture the distinction between
"knowing about" and "not knowing about,"
because this latter falls outside of our scope; and
because the category of people who know about
semiotics, and/or use it as an adjunct to activities
otherwise defined, is by far the most significant
group who replied to our questionnaire.
This group is to some extent identified by the
use in so many replies of words such as "method"
(or "technique" or "tool"), and "approach":
My essential aim is to ... employ semiotic tools to approach
"texts" ....
5
I am interested in the application of semiotics to the analysis
of written texts ....
Semiotics provides an approach ... as weil as more specific
techniques and strategies for the analysis of a variety of
phenomena ....
The reference to semiotics forms a substantial part of my
approach to photography ... I use semiotics for other pur-
poses otherwise defined: e.g. semiotic reading of photo-
graphie images, experimental films, and other art works in
relation to social apparatus.
I'm ... interested ... in using it for specific studies in lit-
erary or cultural criticism, or for pedagogical purposes.
A common feature of workers in this grouping
is that they tend to rely on the distinction between
"theory" and "application," and to fight shy of
the former. Thus, from the same replies as the
passages quoted above:
Yes, I am vaguely interested in the theory of semiotics (no
definite allegiance, ... ).
I'm not so much interested in theory of semiotics as in using
it ....
I cannot separate semiotics from the philosophical consid-
erations that are incurred as one looks at photographs with
another approach other than in a totally aesthetic or psy-
chological light ....
N otice, in this last, that semiotic theory is
"incurred"; it is taken to be a necessary conse-
quence of adopting the approach. But it is
important to understand that at least two quite
different things are meant by the term "theory,"
and that these differences are able to be corre-
lated with what we might call the sociallocation
of the disciplines to which it is being applied.
On the one hand, "theory" is taken to me an the
strict epistemological apparatu~ designed for the
production of a methodology and a discipline.
This is the sense in which the term is used by
those defining their work in terms of the tradi-
tional institutional disciplines (e.g., literature,
linguistics); and curiously enough, these are the
people who are shyest of semiotic theory. The
disciplines retain their boundaries: semiotics is
presumably practiced by others, elsewhere,
another strictly defined discipline with a recog-
nizable institutional territory upon which we dare
not make incursions, but from which we
acknowledge our borrowings with the right kind
of academic courtesy. On the other hand, "the-
ory" is taken to mean the implications the con-
ceptual framework of semiotics might have for
6 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
a philosophy of the human or social sciences that
could situate studies with no traditional insti-
tutional base. This is the sense in vyhich we should
read "philosophical considerations" in the last
quotation; and it helps to und erstand the sense
of "theory" in the following, also written from a
visual arts college, about plans for future courses
in media:
It is hoped (meaning, I hope) that there will be the reality
of courses in the theory of semiotics in the first year of this
degree, as I consider it very useful (if not essential) to an
understanding (and self-situating) of other theoretical and
empirical methodologies.
This separation of theory from method can be
understood (in part) in the light of a point that
should be made about the location of literary
semiotics (poetics, narrative theory, semiotics of
the theater) in departments of literature in the
universities. For reasons largely connected with
the "colonial heritage" formative of what is nor-
mally known as the Australian intellectual tra-
dition, the geography of Australian semiotics has
an English Channel in it, dividing off the "Con-
tinental" from the rest. Semiotics was first
imported by (some of) the French departments,
and was followed in predictable ways in other
departments of modern languages, such as Ital-
ian, German, and Russian. Although the obvious
reasons for this obtain in Australia and else-
where (the appearance in France of an intellec-
tu al movement identifiable in part through the
publication of astring of important program-
matic texts in theory and method and the phil-
osophical essays that explored their implications),
there are some speciaf factors which made the
French departments particularly ready to relate
with this movement, and the English depart-
ments particularly unready.
A dominant school of French studies in Aus-
tralia, specifically but not exclusively connected
with Sydney and Melbourne,6 had some inter-
national reputation for work on symbolist poetry,
"Useful information about the early history of these two
French departments can be found in Margaret Kerr, "Two
Approaches to the Teaching of French Literature--G. G.
Nicholson in Sydney and A. R. Chisholm in Melbourne,"
Australian Journal of French Studies 12(2), 1975, pp. 241-258.
The most significant influence in French literary studies
during the 1960s and the early 1970s was Ross Chambers,
who can properly be said to have made literary semiotics
happen in Sydney. His name does not appear in our list
since he left Australia to teach in the United States in 1975.
being largely inspired by the work of A. R.
Chisholm, himself a student of Christopher
Brennan. Chisholm taught and practiced a per-
sonal form of the explication de texte (which he
called "analytical criticism") which aimed at
demonstrating the coherence of the metaphoric
structures of a text, and their interconnection
with syntactic and prosodie forms. A number of
the practitioners of this method (though by no
means all) were to take up the methods of lit-
erary semiotics when they emerged. The early
work of Barthes, however exciting and new, was
essentially intelligible from the point of view of
what can be taken to be the base assumptions
of this method-that is, the assumption of tex-
tual immanence and the respect for language,
and the in ability of the methods of literary his-
tory to account for interpretation. It is remark-
able that among the practitioners of this method
who were not to take up "semiotics, " some showed
no unwillingness to consider the validity of the
results of semiotic analyses. But taken in con-
trast with those for whom semiotics was and
remained irreducibly other, this fact can be read
as the incapacity of the use of semiotics as a
method in literary studies to prevent its own
re cu pera tion.
In those French departments which can be
characterized, however sketchily, as having
adapted semiotics in the way outlined above,
there is to be found a discernible (though cer-
tainly not universal) resistance to the theoretical
possibilities of semiotics (in either of the two
sens es glossed earlier)-as instanced in the fol-
lowing comments, all from the one reply. The
first is part of adescription of the writer's own
research practice, whereas the second two com-
ments are from descriptions of various und er-
graduate courses:
I do not believe in the existence 01' a universally applicable
semiotic method.
I do not consider either of these two course to be in or on
semiotics in the narrow sense of the ward. ["In" or "on"
semiotics was the formulation usen in our question.]
Information regarding the Brennan-Mallarme-Chisholm
nexus can be found in Meanjin Quarterly 29(esp. No. 3), 1970,
in wh ich there are published a number of articles for the
Brennan centenary. There are also articles on Chisholm in
previous volumes of the same journal. Cf. also Wall ace
Kirsop, "Brennan as Exegete. Some Documents from the
Mallarme Corpus," AJFS 16(Part 11), Studies in Honour of
R. F. Jackson, 1979, pp. 223-243.
 AUSTRALlA
In these courses I try to avoid the systematic use of a con-
ceptual framework, and only use semiotic terminology when
absolutely unavoidable.
Such comments demonstrate more clearly than
any assertion we might make that the status of
semiotics as hand maiden or tool depends on an
absolute separation of theory and method on the
one hand, and the retention of discipline bound-
aries and their concomitant objects on the other.
It should not be surprising that a not infrequent
reaction to such resistance-again within French
departments, but not only there-takes the
form of strong insistence on the importance of
theory:
The way I construct the relation of theory and method in
semiotics is to do readings of theories (texts) and to theorize
my reading practice.
At about the same period, on the other side
of the "Channel," the big English schools of Syd-
ney and Melbourne had just come through, rel-
atively scathed, their Leavis controversy.7 The
memory of theoretical debate was in both places
inextricably bound up with political divisive-
ness, with the effect that in Sydney, as elsewhere,
the problems that can be caused by a focus on
theory were for a time evacuated with the
inevitable shift to "just getting on with the job,"
whereas in Melbourne the Leavis position was
consolidated. Either way, there was no room
for a new debate; and the English schools'
deep-rooted mistrust of French "apriorism,"
"schematizing" /"abstraction," attempted-on
encounter-to naturalize poetics as a mere alter-
native to, indeed the same thing as, "elose read-
ing," which, in the Leavis tradition, is merely
preparatory to the work of establishing great
traditions. The peculiarly colonial position of
departments of English in Australia is, of course,
reinforcing of the position that asks the char-
acteristic tradition questions-whether these be
the attempt to define anational literature, or
the alternative attempt to find a place in the
'Traces of the upheaval caused can be read in Nation, No.
177 (September 4, 1965) pp. 11-12 (see also the letters col-
umn in the following number) and in Current Affairs Bulletin
Oune 1965). An account of more general problems in this
connection can be found in Stephen Knight, "The Hidden
Methodology of English Studies," Random Issue No. I, (Ocl.
1979), pp. 12-34.
7
universals of art. 8 These questions can be
described as the "why?" of English literature in
Australia, the "why?" of Australian literature in
English departments, and the "why?" of liter-
ature studies in a philistine community. In no
way can they raise the "how" and "what" of
textuality.
This applies to the period of the early and
middle sixties. But the political and cultural
upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies
(the Vietnam debate,9 feminism, gay liberation)
produced a renewed demand-primarily among
students rather than staff-for a socially con-
scious and/or politically committed practice of
literary criticism. Alongside attempts to develop
new methods of reading (expressed for example
in questions about what a "feminist criticism"
could and should be) there was a revival of inter-
est in the "literature and society" debates of the
twenties and thirties. So Leavisism was opposed
to Marxism, and a place was found by the syn-
thesizers for semiotics to playa role in the con-
struction of a materialist theory of literature. lO
In the same way as it can be said that literary
semiotics is intelligible from the point of view of
poetic exegesis in French departments, so it can
be said that the theory of literature debate is
intelligible and able to be participated in on the
basis of the question of literature-and-society
posed equally, but each in their own way, by the
Marxist critics and by Scrutiny. But note that
where the French departments had found in
poetics and semiotics a method for doing what
they had always done, better and more self-
consciously, the English departments for their
part had found in it a theory---that is, a new way
of reformulating those very questions by which
"Cf. John Docker, "University Teaching of Australian Lit-
erature," New Literature Review (McAuley College, Qld.), No.
6 (1980), pp. 3-7 and idem, "The Politics ofCriticism: Leon
Cantrell and the Gloom Thesis," ibid., pp. 20-33. Docker
shows in these articles how the "textual immanence" posi-
tion in the English departments becomes a question of con-
tent, and is not assimilable in any way to the Chisholm
method described above.
9 Australia was the principal ally of the United States in
Vietnam; and there was, here as there, a particularly bitter
debate in the universities and elsewhere about the appro-
priateness of this involvement.
IOThe works of Raymond Williams, George Lukacs and Lucien
Goldmann played a role in the development of this pos-
sibility, which was furt her formulated in the light of the
"rediscovery" of the works of Bakhtin/Volosinov, and of
uses of Coward and Ellis, Language and Materialism.
8 AN NE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
they defined their most traditional areas of
mqmry.
Though this separation of theory and method
typifies in OUf view an important issue in Aus-
tralian intellectual activity generally, and though
it can serve to locate and characterize one of the
interpretations of "semiotics in Australia," it is
only meaningful on the assumption of an implied
opposite. This opposite requires now to be made
explicit. A word that is frequently taken as a
quasi-synonym of "approach," is "perspective";
but it implies, rather, a way of looking at, or a
point of view from which to look at, a problem-
and thus, a way of defining an approach to it.
For instance:
... to und erstand language-change, one must study speech
as social action, and to understand the meanings of the
speech-forms that social actions employ, it is most useful to
utilize a semiotic perspective.
The gap between theory and method is closed
by the implicit claim that the interpretive
description of the selected empirical object can-
not be made until the process of theoretical
translation or reformulation of the problem
("understood as") has been effected. A stronger
form of this claim can be seen by juxtaposing
three comments, again from a single reply (the
first two from so me general remarks in the cov-
ering letter, the last from a course description):
In my own teaching I draw more on semiotic work concerned
with tex tu al production, discourse and questions of
narration . ...
I wouldn't call mys elf a semiotician-wouldn't know where
to locate the orthodoxy to be practised.
Since 1971, a new set offilm theory issues has been raised ....
Taken without the third comment, the first two
a
seem to match the bonne toutjaire use of semiot-
ics; but the second comment taken in conjunc-
tion with the third shows that this is not "applied
semiotics" in the sense in which we have met it
before, nor indeed can it be taken to be avoidance
of theory or theoretical agnosticism. The "per-
spective" has changed the object.
One of the rare avowed semioticians our ques-
tionnaire unearthed provides an interesting var-
iation of the patterns so far discussed:
I am interested in theories of semiotics and I am currently
engaged in research which is concerned with the develop-
ment of theory and empirical work.
Here, "theory" means the hypotheses of a behav-
ioral science, and "empirical work" has the func-
tion of testing these hypotheses-a different sort
of thing entirely from the opposition of "theory"
and "method" that characterizes the human sci-
ences. The interesting and, in the context we
have been describing, unusual thing about this
work is that although it "draws a great deal on
the 'spirit' of re cent semiotic enquiry," it takes
the theoretical categories of (for example) "sign"
and "symbol" as unproblematic, locating them
as it were between two practical activities:
[applying] behavioral science to symbol design. 11
Semiotics is employed as a bridge of a differ-
ent sort in another grouping of replies, which
suggest that there are gaps needing to be filled
in theories posited by other discoUfses as preex-
istent, or as still to be constituted: for example,
a "theory of ideology," a "materialist theory of
subjectivity." Studies in feminism, Marxism,
psychoanalysis, film and media l2 all converge on
this site, where some typical questions from
course outlines are:
... how literary production relates to ideology and the position
of the subject: the writer, the reader ....
The development of general theories of ideology ... in the
context of recent debates about the specific relationship between
film and ideology, many of these debates centering on the
construction of the viewing subject.
Once a general understanding of the basic dynamics of sign-
production is developed, the two major relationships thus to
be examined are the relations between language and politics on
the one hand, and language and subjectivity on the other
[emphasis added].
Here it is not a matter of locating the theoretical
categories of semiotics between practical activ-
ities; but of using semiotic theories as one method
of both posing and exploring the relations
IIOf course, our characterizations of any of the work dis-
cussed is based on the replies to our questionnaire; it should
not be taken as an account of the work itself, but merely
of the way the replies locate it with respect to other kinds
of semiotic or nonsemiotic research.
12The interest in film and media studies in Australia has
been stimulated by, among other things, the growth of the
Australian film industry in the past decade-and the cor-
responding expansion of training courses of one type or
another. Early comments on semiotics and film were made
by director Albie Thoms in the first issues of a local trade
newspaper, Filmnews.
 AUSTRALlA 9

between two terms which signify problems of The circulation of Language and Materialism:
entirely different epistemological orders ("ide- Developments in Semiology and the Theory 01 the Sub-
ology," "film," "language," "politics," "subjec- ject, by R. Coward and J. Ellis (London: RKP,
tivity"). Semiotic theory is thus considered to be 1977), raised semiotics 1'rom the lowly status of
either complete in itself, at least for practical footnote to full chapter position in the story of
purposes, as an already-constituted knowledge the production of a new object 01' knowledge-
("the basic dynamics of sign-production"); or to "the scientific knowledge of the subject." The
be, once again, a theoretical activity which may work of the British journal Screen has circulated
still be going on elsewhere, but which has already . not only among students of film and media the-
provided sufficient material for useful appropri- ory, but among groups interested for a variety
ation in the solving of problems not held to be of reasons in critiques of representation, in psy-
posed by "semiotics" itself For this reason, choanalysis, and in the philosophical work, men-
semiotic theory can provide a method for another tioned earlier, which draws out the implications
theory-and so "semiotics" is sometimes intro- 01' the programmatic texts of semiotic theory and
duced (as in the third course description quoted method.
above) as apreface to other work:
I don't teach any courses on Film Semiotics as such, though
the works of Christian Metz are standard texts. However in
No, I don't consider mys elf a semiotician, although I am
my own teaching I draw more on semiotic work concerned
interested in a theory of the subject, and the effects of sign-
with textual production, discourse and questions of
systems on subjects.
narration-Iess on semiotics specific to the cinema. Bcnven-
I'm by no means a semiotician, but I am interested in the iste, Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes and journals such as Semi-
effects of language on psychological development, particu- atexte, and Diacritics.
larly as it effects the psychological differences between the
sexes [emphasis addedJ. Semiotics thus per1'orms an enabling function
for a range of different activities; and in one
These two statements (taken from the same course outline (for a course which was literally
reply) show how much of the work assuming apreface to advanced work in mass communi-
that semiotics can become a possible methodo- cations), this is put forward as the raison d>itre of
logicallink defines itself in relation to specifically teaching it:
political questions (particularly those raised here
... The main aim of the course is thus to give students
by recent debates in feminism and Marxism)13 access to some of the contemporary work available in mass
rather than being concerned with a possible communications studies which uses approach es derived from
professional status to be accorded either to semiotics.
semiotics or to its practitioners. The emphasis will be on reading a limited number of texts
It is important to stress that the parameters which have influenced semiotic work in the past, so that at
of this kind of work in Australia have been set the end of the course people should have little difficulty in
reading more modern research in their own area.
as much by the circulation 01' a number of British
and American texts through the networks of
The theme of "aceess" and of "difficulty" needs
political movements as they have been by course
some comment here. Semiotics as apreface to
developments in university and college ins ti tu-
other (politieal) work is often situated as a prob-
tions. For example, J uliet Mitchell's Psychoanal-
lem of intelligibility: firstly as a difficult ("for-
ysis and Feminism (London: Allen Lane, 1974)
eign"?) discourse, whieh poses in itself the
functioned here to produce an interest in the
question of power in pedagogieal practice and
works 01' Levi-Strauss and Laean, and thus an
in group study ("making semioties intelligible");
interest in semiotics as a kind of explanatory
and secondly as a useful dis course which has in
footnote to their texts. For similar reasons, an
its turn the function of "making intelligible" the
early reading group in semiotics was set up by
psychoanalytic and philosophieal work which is
Sydney feminists working on Anthony Wilden's
held to be reformulating (in part through various
System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1972).
critiques of semiotics) the possibilities for politics.
13 A key text for the elaboration of this problematic-which
In the process, "semiotics" has oecasionally
differs widely from behavioral models of language acqui- been situated as the place where intelligibility
sition and of sex roles-is Coward and Ellis. itself (along with notions of coherence, system,
10 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
structure) is interrogated. Work of this kind-
making connections with the texts of such dis-
parate figures as Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze and
Luce Irigaray-elaborates a contestation of
"regimes of sense," and may desire to dissolve
such distinctions as theory and method in a gen-
eralized practice of writing. It is this move which
makes possible the juxtaposition noted earlier
between "semiotics" and "philosophies of non-
systematicity." In a similar context, the prob-
lems encountered during an English department
seminar on semiotics and literary theory were
discussed in these terms:
It's not a question offormulating a systematic plan to attack
the whole system ofliteracy. If we can make clear in writing
this our rejection of that "common language" and "common . semiotics explicitly as intervening in the writers'
sense," it is not to substitute a theory ofBabeiogue or babelies- own signifying practices:
lettres, but to tinker with and dislocate the joints, the artic-
ulations of any such systematizing. 14
Placed in the context of the replies to our ques-
tionnaire, the vast majority of which contained
so me form of explicit refusal of the "systematic,"
this statement could be read as part of a debate
in which all sides agreed that systematizing was
a foreign habit to be avoided. But this would be
to ignore the way in which this passage implies
that the practice of English studies and the tra-
ditional appeal to "common sense" rests, in fact,
on a "systematizing" which is simply
unacknowledged-and which needs to be dis-
located. 15 It is not that "semiotics" is considered
to be the name of this activity of dislocation; but
that the oppositional invocation of semiotics has
provided a place (in this case, a seminar) from
which such activities might be initiated.
Thus in some contexts and at certain times,
semiotics will be constructed as a contestation
of Marxism if Marxism is held to be a syste-
matizing discourse; and in others, it will be con-
structed as quite compatible with a Marxism to
which it supplies a liberalizing force:
My essential aim is to locate all media practices within a
Marxist framework ... employing semiotic tools ... to allow
muchfreer, less coherent methods to be legitimized and to allow
14Andrew Bouris et al., "Depositions," Random Issue, No. I
(1980), p. 9.
15Cf. Stephen Knight, "The Hidden Methodology of English
Studies."
students more opportunity to think about their own pro-
duction aims/assumptions [emphasis added].
Semiotics placed in this position becomes, of
course, a reversible sign. Once the terms of a
debate are set by an assumed inverse relation-
ship between "coherence" and "freedom," then
semiotics can equally weIl be defined as a sys-
tematizing discourse par excellence, and thus as a
dis course to be repudiated along with a repres-
sively coherent Marxism-or to be retained as
a preliminary study to be carried out in order to
be transcended (postsemiotics). Logically enough,
no one working exclusively in this direction
answered our questionnaire.
Finally, one grouping of replies located
... to raise questions associated with semiotic analysis, schizo-
culture, and their ramifications to art-making.
I like to listen closely to semiotics. It gives me good ideas.
Je suis moins interesse a trouver un modele qui me permette
de decrire de maniere intelligible ce que je fais, qu'a envis-
ager les consequences que ce savoir peut avoir sur mon faire.
The emphasis here is on "making" and
"doing," rather than on the description of what
is made or done; "semiotics" becomes a reftective
phase of the semiotic. Rather than being pas-
sively available for use in the ways previously
discussed, semiotics here is actively to be engaged
with: but once again, the three positions differ
in posing semiotics as, respectively, an activity,
a discourse, and a knowledge; and only the third
response allows the possibility that the subject
of semiotic making and the subject of semiotic
knowledge might-in some instances-coincide.
If it is true to say that the claim not to do
semiotics, which prevades the replies we received,
can be read as the claim to use semiotics in a
subordinate role, another claim not to do semiot-
ics must be read as counter to this discourse.
This is the claim made by the participants in the
"Forms of Communication" course at Griffith
University, and it deserves particular attention.
To frame the analysis of the "Forms" reply,
we must make a distinction between "method"
and "strategy" which has not been pertinent for
our other analyses. To say about one's method
that it is a strategy is (a) to locate it in the field
 AUSTRALlA
of political effectiveness, rather than in that of
academic disciplines, and (b) to declare one's
agnosticism with respect to its epistemological
status, or the truth of the theory which may be
claimed to subtend it. Thus
in Forms of Communication teaching and research areas,
semiotics is important since it provides means of making
certain theoretical and pedagogic moves.
The kind of activities characteristic of the course
are loosely describable as "reading" (i.e., cri-
tique, analysis, and the analysis of areas of prob-
lem) and "writing" (i.e., the making of counter-
texts, such as videotapes, to show, rather than
discuss discursively, the same sort of things).
These activities are thus in a meta-relation to
their objects, where "meta-" cannot carry the
connotation of "form a privileged position of
truth," for semiotics is "fair game" as itself an
object of analysis:
Forms of Communication is a two-year programme analys-
ing current theories and practices of representation, and
developing the consequences of this analysis for some con-
temporary forms of knowledge and training. This pro-
gramme does not primarily involve proposing a new and
different set of texts for reading; rather the mechanisms of
reading themselves, their ruIes, functions and conditions
become the primary objects of study.
It is clear just how crucial the concept of semiot-
ics is to the formulation of the projects of read-
ing, reading readings, and writing readings; and
it is equally clear that this sort of program takes
most seriously the advent of semiotics on the
scene of the "humanities" and the consequent
dis placement of its objects. But the reply we
received can be read in part as a response to our
insistence that we wished to include reference to
this work in our survey, for the reply is equally
emphatic that semiotics
does not provide the framework for the course and students
do not receive a formal training in it as a discipline.
The claim not to do semiotics rests therefore, in
this case, on the strategic supposition that
semiotics claims to be a formal model; from which
it would follow analytically that it would also
claim a privileged position of neutrality from
11
which to make its observations. 16 This brings us
back to the question of definition from which we
started, and to that of the taxonomy of the human
sciences discoverable from it. Semiotics as strat-
egy and as object disturbs this taxonomy
irretrievably-and at this point, the debate could
only be about which term subsurnes which term.
Up to this point we have located "semiotics
in Australia" principally in relation to other dis-
courses and disciplines. It remains for us to sketch
the status it enjoys in some sample institutions.
The Griffith program just outlined is one of the
few to have been built into the structure of a
school from its inception: it constitutes one of
the core courses in the main studies program l7
in the School of Humanities, and can be simply
contrasted with the status of the semiotics course
in the Department of General Philosophy at Syd-
ney U niversity described earlier, which is an
autonomous option in polemical relation with
other options in the same organization.
Another contrast can be drawn between the
institutions with which the writers of the present
article have been associated. In both, semiotics
has the status of being prerequisite to further
work, at least for so me students. In the French
Department at the University of Queensland, it
is prerequisite for the honors degree, and it is
available to students not embarking on an hon-
ors program as well as to students from outside
the French Department. There is also in that
department a first year option on narrative the-
ory, and further courses (required for the honors
degree) which use the prior training in semiotics
and discourse analysis to raise questions about
theories of literature and theories of knowing.
The New South Wales Institute of Technology
has a structure for the study of mass commu-
nications in which semiotics has been pre-
requisite for the completion of a mass
communications major. But the institute was the
object of a governmental enquiry during 1980,
the result of which-to be brief-has brought
under scrutiny a number of courses, including
16This point is hotly and unflaggingly debated within the
school, principally with colleagues who do claim the status
of neutral meta-Ianguage for linguistics and philosophy of
Ianguage.
17Semiotics is also referred to in the main study course on
"Society and the Media" at Griffith, but we received no
repIy from the group involved in this work.
12 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
semiotics, which were said to be unacceptably
"Marxist" in orientation. The irony of this impu-
tation is obvious, given the status of semiotics
elsewhere as anti-Marxist and as humanist. The
courses at the institute are being reformulated
to deemphasize the social dimension of co m-
munications in favor of the behavioral
("communication") .
The analysis we have given of semiotics in
Australia as not-professional-competence should
interpret without further reiteration here the
various places-from "opposition" to "govern-
ment"-that it can occupy in Australian
institutions.
Broadly speaking, our characterization of these
three loosely defined groups of work in "semiot-
ics in Australia" (semiotics for doing the same
thing better, semiotics for filling the gaps, and
semiotics for contesting regimes of sense) has
been based on an interpretation of the reception
of semiotics in this country, rather than its pro-
duction. This distinction is made abundantly
clear by two facts: (1) a number of people whom
we know to be actively engaged in this area of
work hesitated to answer the questionnaire, but
whispered furtively to us when pressed (mainly
during the "Foreign Bodies" conference) that yes,
they were saying that their work could be semiot-
ics, they supposed, but it was surely not of a
standard to be included in our article; and
(2) with very few exceptions the replies we did
receive omitted all details of publications in the
area. This is regrettable, because it must give
the impression that the work does not exist. But
rather than rectify the situation ourselves, we
prefer to interpret the modesty betrayed by these
absences as still declaring the foreignness of
semiotics, or its authoritative reality in an aca-
demic EIsewhere-despite the fact that semiotics
occurs as a normal part of a wide range of work
carried out by a growing number of people.
Rather than give the impression that only three
or four inhabitants of Australia have published
in semiotics, we have not included a list of pub-
lished papers or books. A good deal of work by
Australians appears, in fact, in overseas journals;
the list of Australian journals and occasional
publications that accept or seek work in semiot-
ics is to be found in Appendix B.
This chapter was completed in March 1981
and refers to work current at that time. With the
exception of Appendix D, we have declined to
update the information. Not only are there now
considerably more people involved in some way
in the field, with a concomitant increase in schol-
arly activity, but the place of "semiotics in Aus-
tralia" has changed considerably. There have
been some notable events in the form of confer-
ences, public controversies, and some shifting of
allegiances. These changes could not have been
represented by appending more lists; they would
have required the undertaking of an whole new
analysis.
APPENDIXA
Text of Questionnaire
Dear---,
We are participating in a project on semiotics in
various parts of the world. You will find copies of the
relevant letters attached. We are writing to you
(amongst others). to ask you far your help in assem-
bling as much precise information as to Australian
activity in semiotics as possible. We would also appre-
ciate any information about wark going on in Aus-
tralia in other arts and disciplines which draw on
semiotics at some point.
The following headings may be useful to you, but
please feel free to add others. Please also add to our
list of names (attached) any other people who may
be interested in responding to this request, or pass on
this letter to any interested person.
I. Do you consider yourself to be 'a semiotician'?
as using semiotics for other purposes otherwise
defined? Are you interested primarily in the the-
ory of semiotics? of what persuasion? in linguis-
tic semiotics, philosophical, ethological, other?
in semiotics as a method? or is your practice a
refusal of this distinction?
2. Do you give undergraduate or postgraduate
courses in semiotics? If so, would you send cop-
ies of your course descriptions (including the
status of the course in an institutional structure),
booklists, and a statement as to why you con-
sider the course to be 'in' (or 'on') semiotics.
3. Do you include reference to semiotics in a wider-
ranging course in another context? If so, would
you send copies of your course descriptions
(including the status of the course in an insti-
tutional structure), booklists, and/or a statement
as to why you find it useful to include it in your
course.
 AUSTRALlA 13
4. Have you supervised and/or written Masters' or Bob Hodge, School of Human Communication, Mur-
Ph.D. theses in semiotics? Please send abstracts. doch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
5. Please send precise references to any Australian 6155.
publications in, or relating to, semiotics which lan Hunter, School of Humanities, Griffith Univer-
you have been/are involved with (books, articles, sity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
Peter Jeffery, School of Human Communication,
or journals that accept or seek work in this field ).
If available, copies would be appreciated. Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
6. Are you, individually or with colleagues, cur- 6155.
rently engaged in a project that could be called *Gunther Kress, Hartley College of Advanced Edu-
semiotic? Please send details and working papers cation, Lorne Avenue, MagilI, S.A. 5072.
if available. *Sylvia Lawson, School of Humanities, Griffith Uni-
versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
*Gay MacAuley, Department of French Studies, Syd-
List ofNames ney University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006.
Included in this list are (a) the names of persons Marie McLean, French Department, Monash U ni-
versity, P.O. Box 92, Clayton, Vic. 3168.
who replied to the questionnaire, and (b) names of
Veejay Mishra, School of Human Communication,
other people mentioned in those replies. These latter
are marked. * The senders of the questionnaire also Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
received it, and replied to each other, so as to include 6155.
*Albert Moran, School of Humanities, Griffith U ni-
their own responses and course outlines in the analyses.
We wish to thank all those who replied, as weil as versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
Stephen Muecke, Hartley College of Advanced Edu-
those who helped us in other ways to gather our infor-
cation, Lorne Avenue, MagilI, S.A. 5072.
mation. We also wish to express our sincere regret at
*Anne Murch, French Department, Monash Univer-
the (unfortunately probable) omissions from this list.
sity, P.O. Box 92, Clayton, Vic. 3168.
Ivan Barko, Department of French Studies, Sydney *Dan O'Neill, English Department, University of
University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006. Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
*Anne Brown, School of Humanities, Griffith Uni- *Tom O'Regan, School of Humanities, Griffith Uni-
versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111. versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
Marion Campbell, School of Human Communica- Michael O'Toole, School of Human Communication,
tion, Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
W.A.6155. 6155.
*Mick Counihan, School of Humanities, Griffith Uni- Val Presley, School of Humanities, Griffith Univer-
versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111. sity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
Bob Elliott, Education Department, College of J.-M. Raynaud, Department of French, University of
Advanced Education, Messines Ridge, Mt. Gra- Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
vatt, Qld. 4122. Bruce Rigsby, Anthropology Department, University
*Dieter Freundlieb, School of Humanities, Griffith of Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
University, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111. Horst Ruthraf, School of Human Communication,
John Fraw, School of Human Communication, Mur- Murdoch University, P.O.Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
doch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A. 6155. 6155.
David George, School of Human Communication, *Margaret Sankey, Department of French Studies,
Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A. Sydney University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006.
6155. David Saunders, School of Humanities, Griffith Uni-
R. V. Graham, French Department, University of versity, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111.
Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067. *Bob Sherrington, Department of French Studies,
Bill Green, School of Human Communication, Mur- Sydney University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006.
doch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A. 6155. Gene Sherman, Department of French Studies, Syd-
*Catherine Greenfield, School of Humanities, Griffith ney University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006.
University, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 4111. Lyn Silverman, Sydney College of the Arts, P.O. Box
Liz Grass, Department of General Philosophy, Syd- 226, Glebe, N.S.W. 2037.
ney University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006. David Sless, Visual Arts Discipline, School of
M. A. K. Halliday, Linguistics Department, Sydney Humanities, The Flinders University of South Aus-
University, Sydney, N.S.W. 2006. tralia, Bedford Park, S.A. 5042.
U. G. E. Hammerström, Linguistics Department, Lesley Stern, School of Humanities, Media Studies,
Monash University, P.O. Box 92, Clayton, Vic. La Trobe University, Bundoora, Vic. 3083.
3168. Paul Thibault, School of Human Communication,
14 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
6155.
David Tripp, School of Human Communication,
Murdoch University, P.O. Box 14, Willetton, W.A.
6155.
*lrene Webley, Department of Government, Univer-
sity of Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
Anna C. Wierzbicka, Linguistics Department, Aus-
tralian National University, G.P.O. Box 4, Can-
berra, A.C.T. 260l.
lan Williams, Newcastle College of Advanced Edu-
cation, P.O. Box 84, Waratah, N.S.W. 2298.
*Sylvia Williams, French Department, University of
Queensland, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
Dugald Williamson, School of Humanities, Griffith
University, Kessels Road, Nathan, Qld. 411l.
John Young, Sydney College of the Arts, P.O. Box
226, Glebe, N.S.W. 2037.
APPENDIXB
Australian Journals and Occasional
Publications
This short list has been compiled on the basis of
information supplied to us by the respondents to our
questionnaire, and our own knowledge of available
material. Many of the journals have had only a small
circulation, and some may be no longer extant at the
time of publication. The names in brackets refer to
contributors to these publications. We have only been
able to list the names of those who replied to us-
there are surely many others.
Art and Text, Tasmanian School of Art, Tasmanian
College of Advanced Education, G.P.O. Box 1415P,
Hobart, Tas. 700l.
The Australian Journal of French Studies (lvan Barko,
Anne Freadman, Marie Maclean), Department of
French, Monash University, P.O. Box 92, Clayton,
Vic. 3168.
The AustralianJournal of Sereen Theory (lan Hunter, Les-
ley Stern, Tom O'Regan, Dugald Williamson),
School of Drama, University of N.S.W., P.O. Box
I, Kensington, N.S.W. 2033.
Brou-ha-ha (M. Morris, Lynn Silverman), Box A380,
South Sydney P.O., South Sydney, N.S.W. 2000.
Cog(n)ito, Journal of the University of N.S.W. Socratic
Society, University of N.S.W., P.O. Box I, Ken-
sington, N.S.W. 2033.
Design Methods and Theories (David Sless).
Heeate: A Women 's Interdisciplinary Journal (M. Morris),
P.O. Box 99, St. Lucia, Qld. 4067.
Information Design Journal (David Sless).
Performance Art and Semiotics, Ed. Paul McGillick, pub-
lished in conjunction with Act 2, Festival of Per-
formance Art, Canberra, 1980.
Proeeedings 01 AULLA (Australasian Universities Lan-
guages and Literature Association).
Proceedings 01 the Conferenee on Interpersonal and Mass Com-
munications, Clarendon Press, Sydney, 1977 (David
Siess) .
Proeeedings 01 Section 33 Communications, ANZAAS J ubi-
lee Congress, Adelaide 1980 (David Sless).
Random Issue, Box 380 Wentworth Building, 174 City
Road, Darlington, N.S.W. 2008.
Slug (Anti-Texts and Marginal Notes): generally on sale
at University of Sydney Union news agency, Uni-
versity of Sydney, N.S.W. 2006.
Southern Review (published from Adelaide ) accepts, and
indeed actively seeks, articles on or in semiotics.
Technical Papers, Centre for Applied Social and Survey
Research, Flinders University of South Australia
(David Sless).
Working Papers on Photography (David Sless), 20 Wel-
lington Street, Richmond, Vic., 312l.
Zerox, II Hugo Street, Chippendale, N.S.W. 2008.
Z/X, Sydney College ofthe Arts, P.O. Box 226, Glebe,
N.S.W. 2037.
APPENDIXC
Current Research Projects
(Abstracts have been included where available)
(i) Books
Colin Crisp, Manuscript in preparation on the evo-
lution of the cinematic codes of realism in the French
cinema of the 1930s.
Anne Freadman, The Muse and Her Sisters. A study of
fictions of the enonciation in texts by Louise Labe,
George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Monique Wit-
tig. (In preparation)
Anne Freadman and Meaghan Morris, Senders and
Receivers. Aseries of essays on modifications and
alternatives to models of communication. (In
preparation)
Sylvia Lawson, The Archibald Paradox. This is a study
of the Australian editor J ules Fran((ois Archibald
(1856-1919) and of his weekly newspaper the Bul-
letin for the years 1880-c.1902. Thejournal is exam-
ined as a single continuing text, with dominant
discourses on city and bush, race, nationality, gen-
der, and journalism itself. Archibald, traced both
from his reminiscent manuscripts and from within
the Bulletin, emerges as astrange case of self-
obliterating authorship. Through its approach, the
 AUSTRALlA
work contests the vers ions offered by Australian
literary scholarship. (Forthcoming, 1981)
Albert Moran, Television Drama Producers. A history of
Australian television, focusing on the specific his-
tory of drama series production. (In preparation)
Albert Moran, Australian Television Drama: Overview,
Checklist and Index. Australian Film Institute Pub-
lications/Currency Press, (1982).
Albert Moran, Bellamy: The Making 01 a Television Series.
By focusing on the production of a particular series,
the work attempts to explore some of the institu-
tional and organi.zational ramifications of working
in television in Australia. Australian Film Institute
publications/ Currency Press, (1981).
Jean-Michel Raynaud, Voltaire, soi-disant. Q. How can
a semiotician write a biography? A. (i) "bio": a
study of the discourses constructing "a life"; (ii)
"graphy": this, too, is a text - a semiotics of the
name Voltaire. (In preparation)
David Siess, In Search 01 Semiotics. (In preparation)
David Siess, Visual Communication and Leaming. Lon-
don: Croome Helm. (Forthcoming)
Lesley, Stern, Images rif Women in Australian Film. Aus-
tralian Film Institute Publications. (Forthcoming)
(ii) Ph.D. Theses (the address in parentheses is that
of the school to which the thesis will be submitted) .
Bob Elliott (Faculty of Education, U niversity of
Queensland ). "Becoming a T eacher. The Chan ging
Signs."
In this study the meanings of teaching con-
stituted by a group of students at Brisbane (Aus-
tralia) College of Advanced Education are inves-
tigated. The changes whiCh some aspects of these
meanings undergo for students moving from college
to school for the first teaching appointment are also
examined. A review of the characteristic literature
on becoming a teacher reveals that its power to
explain the difficulties experienced in such a move
is limited by the ways in which meanings of teach-
ing have been conceived and investigated. That
beginning teachers experience difficulties in the
transition to schools is weil known, but explanations
of such difficulties are inadequate. To develop these,
a theory of meaning is constructed which is based
on a "sign-interpretant" process. This theory, which
bridges an apparent gap in the existing literature,
draws on Peirce's definition of the sign. Within this
framework two aspects of meaning, indexical mean-
ing and iconic meaning, are formulated as analyt-
ical devices.
In Chapter 4 methodologies to explore these
aspects of meaning are developed. These are based
on an analysis of the relationships between signs
used to constitute the reality of teaching. Indexical
meanings are examined through a propositional
15
structural analysis of utterances of both student
teachers and teachers. Iconic meanings are studied
through an interactive systems technique.
Specifically, the study addresses four questions:
(I) What are the iconic meanings of teaching devel-
oped by student teachers and how are these related
to the contexts of preservice education? (2) What
are the indexical meanings of teaching developed
by student teachers? (3) What are the indexical
meanings of teaching developed by teachers?
(4) How can the process of becoming a teacher be
ascounted for in terms of changes in indexical
meanings?
Anne Freadman (Department of French, University
of Queensland). "Proposals for an Interpretation
of the Interpretant."
Meaghan Morris (School of Humanities, Griffith
University). "Travel Writing: the Representation
of Australian Spaces."
Stephen Muecke (Department of Anthropology, Uni-
versity of Western Australia). "Australian Abo-
riginal Narratives in English: A Study in Discourse
Analysis."
Aboriginal English is emerging as the major lan-
guage variety used by Aborigines in rural areas as
the numbers of speakers of Aboriginal languages,
pidgins, and creoles decline. In a situation of rap-
idly changing social and cultural environment, it is
the medium in which the Aborigines' adaptation to
these changes is expressed.
This thesis is a study of narrative told by elderly
Aboriginal men in the Kimberley region of Western
Australia who have been speaking Aboriginal Eng-
lish all their lives. Through constant retelling they
have developed a unique repertoire of stories. In
communities which are still largely illiterate, the
narrative in Aboriginal English has the important
function of maintaining the relevance of his tory and
tradition in the present-day context.
The analysis of the narratives is preceded by an
outline of the ethnographic background and a
description of the story-telling situation.
For the analysis of the overall structure of the
narratives, the framework developed by Tzvetan
Todorov in his study of The Decameron has been
adapted. Todorov's semiotic analysis is based on
the hypo thesis that individual stories in a culturally
coherent body of narratives are made up of ele-
ments (propositions), and sequences of elements,
of limited number and distribution. The product
of the analysis is thus a gramm ar of a specific set
of narratives. The analysis of the Kimberley nar-
ratives confirms Todorov's hypothesis; part of the
analysis of the narratives is accordingly formulated
in Todorovian propositional sequences. This
macrolevel analysis is integrated in the thesis with
a microlevel analysis offunctions. As the narratives
16 ANNE FREADMAN AND MEAGHAN MORRIS
unfold, it is possible to detect alternations among
a number of possible functions, such as the nar-
rative, repetitive and dramatic functions. These
functional shifts highlight the boundaries of broader
structural units in the narrative as well as making
it enjoyable to listen to.
The thesis represents an integrated approach to
the study of oral narrative literature. Ir is hoped
that such an approach can contribute to the under-
standing of the naturc and function of narrative in
contemporary Aboriginal life.
Gene Sherman (Department of French Studies, Uni-
versi ty of Sydney).
I have been working on a semiological analysis
of Andre Gide's work and the Old Testament
(i.e. individually and in relation to each other).
The way in wh ich the methodology was used
and applied is as follows: (l) I synthesized various
research procedures involving structural myth
analysis, concentrating on Levi-Strauss and the
British anthropologist Edmund Leach, but also
referring to mythologues such as Köngäs and Mar-
anda, Dundes, Butler, Waugh. I incorporated
into my argument and model information gleaned
from Todorov, Genette, Greimas, and Prince, and
made use of Russian Formalist school arguments.
(2) After analyzing a large sampie of Old Tes-
tament myths using ideas gathered in Step (I),
I formulated a model which was then tested
against myths and verified. (3) I analyzed a sam-
pie of Gide's writing and came up with a similar
model which was then applied specifically and
in detail to Les Faux-Monnayeurs and two short
Traites.
Dugald Williamson (School of Humanities, Griffith
University). "Problems of Representation in Cine-
Semiotics, Psychoanalysis and Theories of the
Subject."
Professor Halliday has provided the following infor-
mation about research projects in semiotics in prep-
aration in the Linguistics Department, Sydney
U niversity:
"Ph.D. thesis in preparation on 'Narrative Struc-
ture and Narrative Function in the English Novels
of Vladimir Nabokov.'" (The candidate has provid
ed a more detailed account but I would prefer not
to publicize it as it is still provisional..)
Another application received (not yet processed)
from candidate wishing todo Ph.D. thesis on appli-
cation of models of language to semiotic systems."
(iii) Master's Theses
Anne Brown (School of Humanities, Griffith Univer-
sity). "Exemplification as a Discursive Method."
R. V. Graham (French Department, University of
Queensland) . "Change of enonciation as the Matrix
of a Novel: Jacques le Fataliste. "
Catherine Greenfield (School of Humanities, Griffith
University). "Questions on Current Debates on the
Theory of the Subject."
Ian Hunter (School of Humanities, Griffith LJniver-
sity). "An Examination of Linguistic Formalisms
and their Critique."
Tom O'Regan (School of Humanities, Griffith Uni-
versity). "The Politics of Representation: Relations
of Discourse and Institution Es],?ecially in the Area
of Cinema in Australia."
Sylvia Williams (French Department, University of
Queensland). "Blanks, Silence, and the Subversive
Voice in some Texts of Marguerite DUIas."
APPENDIXD
Additional Infonnation as from
September 1982
(i) Reply from School of Communication, Mur-
doch University, W.A.
In the School of Human Communication two major
programs take semiotics to be a co re discipline. In
both Communication Studies and Comparative Lit-
erature the nature of the sign, the structure of sig-
nifying practices, and their relation to themes and
ideologies are central topics for discussion and analysis.
In Communication Studies the required courses are
Semiotics and Mass Communication and Society.
Students then select options under the headings:
Gommunication Anafysis: Semiotics, Principles of Lin-
guistic Analysis, Systemic-Functional Linguistics, Film
Theory, Semiotics of Art, Message Analysis.
Gommunication and Gontext: Language and Social
Structure, Children and the Media, Mass Commu-
nication and Society.
Gommunication Practice: Principles of Film. Principles
ofTV.
Directions in Semiotics: We emphasize the crucial role
general semiotic theory can play in cultural criti-
cism, thereby achieving a motivated integration of
such formerly disparate fields as literary studies,
art criticism, popular culture, film and media stud-
ies, mass communications, psychoanalysis, linguis-
tics and sociolinguistics-the study of ideological
forms and processes in a wide variety of contexts.
From the point of view of the development of the
discipline, we especially emphasize the necessity to
use linguistics as the best developed study of a major
code, as a core and resource for semiotic method.
 AUSTRALlA
The interplay between Halliday's concept of the
"social semiotic" and Bakhtin/ Voloshinov's theo-
ries of the dialogics of sign and context will be
crucial here.
Professor Michael O'Toole teaches: Semiotics, Semiot-
ics of Art, Systemic-Functional Linguistics, Lan-
guage and Social Structure, Structuralist Literary
Theory and Film, Theories of Literature and
Comm unication .-researches: N arra tive Theory,
Discourse Analysis, Methods of Semiotic Analysis,
Russian Structuralism and Semiotics.
Assoc. Professor Bob Hodge teaches: Semiotics, Mes-
sage Analysis, Language and Social Structurc, Tex-
tual Analysis, Children and TV.-researches:
Semiotics of Art and Architecture, Semiotics of Vis-
ual Media, Semiotics of Mass Media, General
Semiotic Theory, Socio-Semiotics.
Assoc. Professor Horst Ruthrof teaches: Literary The-
ory, Special Topics in the Novel and Short Story,
Theories of Literature and Communication.-
researches: Phenomenological Theory, Theories of
Meaning, Semiotics of Literary Narrative.
Dr. John Frow teaches: Semiotics, Theory of the N ovel,
Text Analysis, Structure, Thought and Reality.-
researches: Narrative Theory, Discourse Analysis,
Gender and Rcpresentation, Semiotics of Advertis-
ing, Semiotics of Law.
Mr. Paul Thibault teaches: Semiotics, Theory of the
Novel, Theories of Literature and Communica-
tion.-researches: Point of view in Narrative (Nabo-
kov), Frame Analysis, Systemic Linguistics.
Mr. Peter J effrey teaches: Film Theory, Principles or
Film, Principles of Television.-researches: Film
Theories and Practices, Film and Culture.
17
Dr. Veejay Mishra teaches: Literary Theory, Poetics
of Lyric Poetry, Theory of the Novel.-researches:
Indian Theories o[ Literature.
Ms. Marion Campbell teaches: Literary Theory, Women
and Literature.
Dr. David George teaches: Text, Play and Performance;
Drama, Ritual and Magie; Drama, East and West.-
researches: (Same fields.)
School of Education
Dr. David Tripp teaches: English and the Curriculum.
-researches: Semiotics of the Classroom, Children's
Perception of Television.
Mr. Bill Green teaches: English and the Curriculum.
-researches: Semiotics of the Classroom, Significa-
tion and Ideology.
(ii) Conferences
1. "Understanding Texts: Texts for What?" Con-
ference on Interpretation and Literary The-
ory, held under the auspices ofthe Humanities
Research Centre, Australian National Uni-
versity, May, 1982.
2. "Narratology." The first conference of the newly
formed Australian and South Pacific Associ-
ation for Comparative Literary Studies
(ASPACLS), held at Deakin University, Gee-
long, Victoria, August 1982.
Neither of these conferences was "on" semiotics,
but both included papers on issues raised by the
semiotics of texts and mobilized dcbates in wh ich
semiotics was a major protagonist.
 CHAPTER 2
Semiotics in Belgium
Richard Martin
I. Introduction
Semiology being a science which is still undergo-
ing rapid evolution, for some it is characterized
primarily by its object whereas for others it can
be defined in terms of its methodology. So far,
the uneven evolution of semiology has not
brought it to the point at which it could assurne
its basic, let alone its final, form. The number
of works which relate or could relate to this young
discipline is presently growing in almost geo-
metrical progression, thus testifying to a positive
albeit somewhat disquieting dynamism. It would
neither be feasible, therefore, nor even desirable
at this juncture, to discuss everything which has
been undertaken so far in Belgium and which is
either distantly or closely related to the science
of sign systems. In consequence, we shall delib-
erately limit ourselves simply to mentioning a
number of works or articles which make a con-
tribution to the semiotic project, rather than pre-
senting them in detail.
The translation of this chapter was prepared by Marguerite L.
Labolle.
'Andre Helbo, "Vers des etudes semiologiques: la situation
Richard Martin • Seminaire d'Esthetique, University of
Liege, Liege, Belgium 4000.
19
A. Criteria of Selection
• As a matter of principle, we have not taken
into consideration the works of authors whose
connection with semiology is superficial,
remote, or contrived, especially when they
themselves seem to be unaware of the exist-
ence of this science.
• Lack of knowledge, and simple prudence,
has dictated the omission of subjects with
which we are less weIl acquainted, such as
for example musical semiology, even though
some scholars have carried out thorough
research on these subjects.
• In our opinion, some quite re cent works
deserved particular attention because
(among other reasons) Andre Helbo, in his
1978 survey of Belgian semiotics, I could not
have been acquainted with or have reported
them.
• FinaIly, there are two endeavors especially
worthy of closer examination. The merit of
the first consists essentially in its historical
value, namely, the attempt of Eric Buyssens
en Belgique," in Le ckamp semiologique, ed. Andre Helbo. sero
Creusets (Brussels: Complexe, 1979), pp. 1~29.
20 RICHARD MARTIN
to lay the foundations of a semiology accord-
ing to the plan of Saussure. The merit of the
second endeavor lies in its profound and
wide-ranging influence on the revival of a
discipline which had practically disap-
peared by the beginning of the last century,
namely, rhetoric. I refer here to the activities
of the "Group J.l."
11. General Semiology and
Linguistic Semiology
Whatever one's view of the relation between
semiology and linguistics (from Saussure to
Barthes, Prieto, and Kristeva), it can be stated
that this relation-as invariably conceived both
by the semiologists themselves and by linguists-
turned-semiologists for the occasion-is theoret-
ically one of either inclusion or intersection, but
in practice one of mutual exclusion. The rela-
tively advanced age of structurallinguistics and
its extraordinary evolution on the one hand, and
the specificity of the problems and subject mat-
ter of semiology on the other, explain why a
his tory or comprehensive survey of the latter
branch of knowledge must unavoidably limit
itself to what applies to semiology, as opposed
to wh at strictly pertains to the field oflinguistics.
Now, the question whether the instruments
and concepts of the semiologist are borrowed to
a large extent from those of the linguist (or the
reverse) is another matter. This is a classic issue
and is also more interesting. Indeed this prob-
lem, probably more debated in Europe than in
America, is at the origin of the famous divide
between the semiology of communication and
the semiology of signification. I ts origins can be
traced to the circumstances which saw the birth
of semiology on each side of the Atlantic. Whereas
the founder of semiology in the United States
(Peirce) and his first great disciple (Morris) were
primarily interested in philosophical problems
and especially logic, F. de Saussure, the other
founder, and Eric Buyssens, the first. Eur?pe~n
semiologist, were first and foremost Imgmsts.
'Neither branch was aware of the other's existence for a long
time. Morris never mentioned Buyssens in the subsequent
reprinting of his works. Neither did Buyssens mention Peirce
or Morris in his first work in 1943, or in its reprinting in
1970.
Thus in 1943, when Eric Buyssens published
at Brussels his fundamental work Les Langages et
le discours, the subtitle read Essai de linguistique
Jonctionnelle dans le cadre de la semiologie (Study of
Functional Linguistics in the Framework of
Semiology), and the basic concept was that of
the act of communication: "the act by which an
individual knowing a perceptible fact which is
itself linked to a given state of consciousness,
i.e., an intention to collaborate, realizes this fact
in order that another individual may understand
the purpose of this behavior and reconstitute the
intention of the first individual in his own con-
sciousness.,,3 Only facts corresponding to this
definition of the act of communication are rel-
evant to semiological study. Now, the above-
mentioned definition emphasizes at least four
ideas, a few of which we shall discuss later. They
are, firstly, the idea of communication, those of
intention and intra-comprehension of aims and
means, and finally the idea of socialization
(socialite) .
The fundamental unit in semiology is not the
sign, as is the case in linguistics, but the seme,'
i.e., "any ideational process whose concrete real-
ization allows communication."4 Indeed, whereas
signs can always be combined amongst them-
selves to form an utterance, the seme can be
undecomposable and despite this fact constitute
an utterance on its own.
As far as the semiotic act is concerned, it is
"the concrete realization of aseme.,,5 Buyssens
insists a great deal on this distinction between
seme and semiotic act. As a matter of fact, it
appears to correspond to the distinction Peirce
had established between type and replica.
Whereas the semiotic act links two concrete fac-
tors, e.g., a perceptible fact and astate of con-
sciousness to which this fact refers, the seme is
an ideational act linking two abstractions, i.e.,
the form of the seme and its signification, which
in its turn consists in the association of a modality
(informing, questioning, enjoining or summon-
ing) with a substance (the object of the informa-
tion, question, injunction, or summons G).
3Eric Buyssens, Les Langages et le disco urs (Brussels: Office de
Publicite, 1943), p. 12.
4Ibid.
'Ibid.
(;But-as Prieto puts it in Etudes de linguislique el de semiologie
generales (Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1975), p. 126, note 144-
the object of the interpellation being on1y a piece of infor-
 BELGIUM
The sign, for its part, is the "indivisible ele-
ment .common to several semes with respect to
both form and signification."7 It is further spec-
ified, however, that the sign is the joining of a
form and of a value, rather than of a signification,
since the signification is an ideal state of con-
sciousness which is never referred to by an iso-
lated sign (consequently, the value of the sign
consists in a substance rather than in a modality).
The fact that it was the seme-a complex
unit-and not the sign that constituted the basic
unit is characteristic in its own way of the devel-
opment of sciences at that time, as described by
Bachelard (cf. Chapter 6, "L'epistemologie non
cartesienne," Le nouvel esprit scientijique, Paris,
P.U.F., 1978). Contrary to what Descartes
thought, it is not the simple idea which is clear
and distinct, but the complex idea. Therefore,
the sign is the unit that has to be constructed.
A semie will thus be a system of semes (and
no longer a system of signs) or, as it is ca lIed
today, after Hjelmslev, a semiotic.
On the basis of these definitions, Buyssens
drew up an inventory of semiotic acts which was
probably incomplete, since he laid primary
emphasis upon what he considered borderline
cases, e.g., art, in which the communicative
function is secondary (its fundamental function
being expressive), or the label "fragile" on a crate,
or the trademark for products. He also cites the
gesture of pointing a finger at something to spec-
ify a demonstrative, advertising by means of
images, the rules of etiquette, etc.
An interesting case in point is that of the sym-
bol. Buyssens examined four meanings of this
term:
• It may designate or represent an object, e.g.,
the crucifix, the scales of J ustice, or the rice-
grains of fertility;
• According to Cassirer, a symbol is any act
by means of which we aim to objectify our
thought (e.g., a word, a work of art, a myth);
• The act of the minister cutting the ribbon,
of the explorer raising a ftag, or of the cus-
tomer paying a downpayment is another form
of symbol;
mation, a question, or an injunction, challenging can con-
sequently be omitted from consideration as a "modality."
Btsides, Buyssens no longer mentions it in 1970.
7 E. Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours, p. 37.
21
• Finally, certain signs invented for the pur-
pose of communication are called "symbols"
(in mathematics, chemistry, etc.).
Since the symbolic acts belonging to the sec-
ond category do not result in "social collabora-
tion," and the acts of the third category "are
only used to prove by way 01 experiment" or to
emphasize the reality of what today would be
called (after Austin) illocutionary acts, Buyssens
concludes that "semiology is concerned with two
of these notions only. However a distinction must
be made between them. The symbols of scientific
formulae are elements invented for semic
requirements, whereas the crucifix has a value
independent of the semic act."s
Thus, there is nothing semic about the symbol
in the Saussurian sense, if it is envisaged sepa-
rately, i.e., outside the framework of a semic act
in which it could be used. In other words, the
crucifix used as an ornament has nothing in com-
mon with the crucifix used to signify one's faith.
The same applies to the rice used by the house-
wife in her kitchen, which is not the same rice
as that which is showered over the newlywed
couple.
The semic aspect of the symbol does not lie,
therefore, in the abstract relation established
between the cross and Christianity, that is to
say, between the symbolizing and the symbol-
ized, but in the existential relation linking the
cross to the body carrying it and to the intention
animating the body. Nevertheless, the nature of
this existential relation is not without impor-
tance: after marriage, the housewife using rice
in her kitchen may still meditate on fertility; rice
will still be a symbol but it will no Ion ger be a
seme since any idea of social collaboration is
excluded from the situation.
"It seems, therefore, that it is the use we make
of a symbol-in other words, its function-that
possibly confers on it a semic character."g Taken
separately, the symbol merely awakens in us an
association with something else, as do many other
objects.
Thus it is connotation, or at least certain phe-
nomena of connotation, that Buyssens elimi-
nates from the field of research on acts of
communication. At this level, however, one does
Blbid., p. 16.
9Ibid., p. 15.
22 RICHARD MARTIN

not very clearly see fundamental distinction which belongs to the Saussurian tradition); and
between the symbol of Saussure-Buyssens and (2) asystematic semies, in the opposite case.
the symbol of Peirce. The latter, too, evokes In La Communication et l'articulation linguistique
something else beside itself. While it is both arbi- (1970), Buyssens mentions articulated semies and
trary and unmotivated, whereas the former is unarticulated semies, but this was probably not a
arbitrary albeit motivated, the main point is that mere alternate definition. Although no mention
they are both arbitrary. A word written on a is made of it, the borderline between the two
sheet of paper which is framed and hung on the categories must have shifted. Indeed, he had been
wall as an ornament is communicating no mes- influenced by Andre Martinet's views on semies
sage whatsoever, nor is the decorative crucifix. and by his concept of double articulation. Con-
The word in this instance stands as an image of sequently, Buyssens was forced to realize that
itself. 10 Obviously, the same is also true of the by dassifying as systematic semies only those
label "fragile" for instance, which ceases to exert which can be decomposed into signs, he was
its semic function (normal) as soon as it is said obliged to dassify among the other semies those
to be a work of art. Once again, according to which could only be decomposed into figures (in
Buyssens, whatever distinguishes the Saussurian Prieto's sense), that is to say, those valid for the
symbol from the Peircian symbol (or Saussurian second articulation only. Now, it would be rash
sign) cannot lie in a motivated relation on the to define the numbering code of bus routes, for
one hand, and an unmotivated one on the other, instance, as "asystematic." Therefore, the dass
between the signifier and signified. Although the of articulated semies of 1970 groups all the mem-
difference is not relevant here, it becomes so bers belonging to the dass of semies of 1943, as
elsewhere when establishing the main categories well as apart of the members of the dass of
of semies. asystematic semies.
Nevertheless, Buyssens specifies that the "term Furthermore, the etiological viewpoint pre-
symbol refers to an object which, on account of sents a second dichotomy: (1) the intrinsic semies
some particular association, may be used in a are those where the link between form and sig-
semiotic act,,,ll whereas a little further on he nification is either causal or imitative, i.e., moti-
defines the label "fragile" as an "essentially semic vated but "independently of any intention to
element."12 Thus there would to a certain extent communicate," as Buyssens again specifies;13 and
be a kind of "organization-with-a-view-to" in the (2) the extrinsic semies are those where the link
seme, and in the symbol a kind of inherent tend- originates from the intention to communicate,
ency to serve the purpose of communication. which seems to imply, according to Buyssens,
However, this aspect is hardly brought to light precisely that the link is without motivation-
by Buyssens since the criterion of (real) intention an implication which we, for our part, find very
is alone vital in the selection of what is semic questionable.
and what is not. Naturally certain semies have a mixed char-
Besides this rather empirical inventory, one acter, he hastens to add.
can find in Buyssens' works a dassification of Finally, from the viewpoint of the relations
semies on the basis of several criteria, leading between semies, one can distinguish: (1) direct
to a simple and general typology. Not all these semies, which "directly link perceptible facts to
criteria are worth considering here. Weshall facts of consciousness";14 and (2) interchangeable
mention only three of the most important. semies, which "regularly substitute certain per-
First, from the stand point of economy, semies ceptible facts for other perceptible facts which
are divided into two big categories: (1) systematic are used as a form for another semie.,,15
semies, when the semes can be decomposed into It should be noted that in the latter case, where
signs (according to the definition given earlier, signifiers have as their signified either signifiers
of a direct semie or signifiers of an interchange-
able semie of inferior rank, this has obviously
IOSee in this respect the interesting remarks made by Prieto
in Etudes, p. 134 ff., about the advertising poster "Panzani"
and the analysis of it by Barthes. 13Ibid., p. 44.
11 E. Buyssens, Les Langages et Le discours, p. 15. 14Ibid., p. 49.
12Ibid., p. 27. 15Ibid.
 BELGIUM
nothing to do with the "metalanguage" defined
by Hjelmslev, since it is not the combination
expression + contents of the other seme which is
signified by the first seme. Furthermore, the
metalanguage of Hjelmslev is a triplane semiotic,
which cannot be the case with the interchange-
able semie, since there is isomorphism and con-
formity between both planes of the seme. This
in fact defines a monoplane semiotic, i.e., a system
of symbols, in the terminology of the Danish
master. Hjelmslev does not believe that systems
of this kind have to do with semiology.
If we now combine the three points of view
as defined above, we obtain an entity of 23 , that
is to say, eight large classes of semies, a few of
which will certainly remain empty.
In addition, the semies themse1ves can be
combined with each other to form what we shall
call, after Christian Metz,16 "langages" such as
publicity signs or road signs. Amongst these lan-
gages can be found on the one hand the stylistic
figure and on the other, utterances in which what
is said is less important than what is implied.
Functional linguistics cannot take these into
account, since they are made up of a properly
linguistic semie and of an intrinsic semie, i.e.,
the "implication" which has to do with "the psy-
chological viewpoint."17 Thus, a rather vague
association is set up between semiology and psy-
chology. Indeed, Saussure wanted to make
semiology a branch of general psychology, and
more specifically, of social psychology, but one
is not at all sure that examples such as the two
cited by Buyssens himself have actually gotten
us there. Doubtless we are situated at a level
more distinctly social where Buyssens later deals
with associations, suggested by words, which "are
common to individuals of the same social
group,,,18 and which are exploited by poets.
However, the rather impressionist vocabulary-
Buyssens mentions the "suggestive atmosphere
surrounding many words,,19-and the fact that
he should consider these phenomena of conno-
tation secondary, marginal, or even parasitic-
Buyssens uses the term "parasitic semie of
speech"ZO-(they are in any case independent
16Christian Metz, Langage et cinema (Paris: Larousse, 1971),
p. 5l.
l7E. Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours, p. 54.
18Ibid., p. 55.
19Ibid.
2°Ibid.
23
from phenomena of denotation) stillleave us far
from Hjelmslev's conception of languages of
connotation, as weIl as from Barthes's cherished
idea of the linguistics of connotation.
Two points of Buyssens's theory still remain
to be examined. They do not apply strictly to
semiology per se, since the first concerns the object
of linguistics and the second the relation of
thought to discourse; rather, they address the
philosophy of language, in the broad sense of
the word.
The important distinction Buyssens estab-
lishes on the semiological plane between the
semiotic act and the seme corresponds exactly
to that between speech (la parole) and dis course
(le discours) on the linguistic plane, the latter being
"the functional part of speech.,,21
According to Saussure, as is weIl known, there
exists an opposition between language on the one
hand, and speech on the other. Indeed, accord-
ing to the Genevan master speech covers two
distinct phenomena, as Buyssens reminds us:
"First the combinations thanks to which the
speaker makes use of the language code, and
secondly, the mechanism allowing him to exter-
iorize these combinations."22 Now, these two dis-
tinctions correspond respectively to dis course and
speech, in Buyssens's sense.
Language being a pure abstraction, a system
and certainly not an act of communication, and
speech, on the other hand, being a pure act,
neither of them is the object of linguistics. Only
discourse, which is both an act and an
abstraction-an abstraction implied by the func-
tional point of view-could play this part.
If Buyssens rejects "language" as the object
of linguistics, this is not only because this con-
cept of language is a pure abstraction, but also
because the level it represents is not discernible
in aB semies. Furthermore, the semiological
viewpoint should prevail over the linguistic one.
One may weIl ask, then: of what discipline is
langue the object? But one can equally inquire to
what extent, in Buyssens's viewpoint, langue has
an existence, since on page 31 of his book it is
considered only a system, and further on (p. 93)
it is no longer even a system: "this ideal system
is not itself a system."
2IIbid., p. 30.
"Saussure, Cours de linguistique genirale, p. 31, quoted by Buys-
sens, Les Langages et al discours, p. 3l.
24 RICHARD MARTIN
Table 1 Dimensions of Language According to Hjelmslev
and Buyssens
Hjelmslev SCHEMA
Buyssens (language)
IIThe sign "=" underlines correspondences.
"Parentheses point out concepts of less importance.
'Capital letters show important terms of the dichotomy. The opposition is situated either
(as in Hjelmslev's works) in the most abstract zone, or as (in Buyssens' works) in the most
concrete one.
Thus, it can be seen that if the concept of
discourse elaborated by Buyssens seems roughly
to correspond to that of usage in Hjelmslev's ter-
minology, it is chiefly to be opposed to speech (the
Hjelmslevian equivalent being also speech) and
not to language, i.e., to the schema which is the
second term of the basic opposition, according
to Hjelmslev. All this is expressed in Table l.
Finally, when examining the relations between
thought and discourse, Buyssens does not believe
that either one can be mistaken for the other,
since communication requires both a standard-
ization of thought, which proceeds from abstrac-
tion of the functional elements, and a modality.
Furthermore, considering that one and the same
thought can be communicated by me ans of var-
ious semies, there must exist a pure thought which
makes such a comparison possible.
This viewpoint raises many problems at the
outset. Any discourse one might hold on a thought
will have a modality. Now, if thought is itself a
kind of discourse without modality, the meta-
discourse proves to be at one and the same time
too homogeneous, and irreducibly heteroge-
neous, with its discourse-object, which it thus
tends either to assimilate completely or, on the
contrary, to reject.
Conversely, the argument used by Buyssens
regarding the comparison of semies presupposes
that in this respect the linguistic semie is on the
same level as the other semies. Now, Benveniste23
has drawn attention to some basic features of
human language-that it is the interpreter of all
semiotic systems-that it has a capacity for
semiotic modelling, and for being a double
signifier-which probably reduce the weight of
Buyssens's argument.
"Emile Benveniste, "Semiologie de la langue," in Problemes
de linguislique generale, 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp. 43-
66.
USAGE (speech)
DISCOURSE SPEECH'
Clearly, these considerations are closely linked
to the malaise described by Todorov 24 with regard
to the study of nonlinguistic meaning, wh ich can
only be grasped by the use of linguistic signifi-
cation; so that a shift of viewpoint eventually left
its mark on semiotic studies. This shift rendered
so me issues-or at least the way of putting
them-temporarily irrelevant: among them, such
issues as the relation between thought and
discourse.
The scope of this article does not permit a
more extensive examination of Buyssens's
semiology. Nonetheless, we would like to dweil
at greater length on the ramifications of this
undertaking, since it was the first step towards
a semiology of communication, as opposed to
the more daring approach later adopted by
Roland Barthes.
Buyssens's work was not successful, and
Mounin 25 has suggested several reasons for this:
the publishing firm, the place and time of pub-
lication, the extremely terse formulation of
sometimes bizarre statements, and the use of a
personal vocabulary which he willingly left dan-
gerous or awkward. Nevertheless, he has been
referred to by linguists and semiologists such as
Andre Martinet, J eanne Martinet, Georges
Mounin, and Luis J. Prieto. The last, in partic-
ular, dealt anew with Buyssens' notions of index,
signal and seme, in order to develop and improve
them with greater coherence.
To understand the particular evolution of
semiology on the European continent, one must
of course go back to Saussure. J.-M. Klinken-
berg pertinently reminds US 26 that Saussure's
240swa1d Ducrot et Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclope-
dique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 121.
25Georges Mounin, Inlroduction i1 la semiologie (Paris: Minuit,
1970), pp. 235-241.
2"Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, "Le linguistique et le semiolo-
gique," Le Franqais Modeme, 40, fase. 3 Oul)', 1972), p. 193.
 BELGIUM
views were clearly applied to systems of com-
munication based on signals, but also, hypo-
thetically, to aB facts of signification.
Enrico Carontini and Daniel Peraya tried to
show in Le Projet semiotique the ways in which
Saussure foreshadowed Barthes, and how he
paved the way for Buyssens and Prieto in par-
ticular. Whereas according to Peirce, the perfect
sign harmoniously balances the three characters
of its trichotomy-iconic, indexical, and
symbolic-in Saussure's view, it is arbitrariness
(which for many is characteristic, in Peirce's sys-
tem, of the symbol) which characterizes the ideal
sign. This arbitrariness will thus serve as a basis
for the hierarchic structure of sign systems.
Saussure's methodology was prompted by his
des ire to set the foundations of a science capable
of "studying language per se." It was for this
reason that he came to consider language as a
form rather than as a substance. This approach
"presupposes the phenomenon of signification
deprived of any natural motivation."27 Now if
semiology is the science of discourses, it must
"cope with the epistemological requirements
underpinning any scientific undertaking.,,28 The
authors further mention Kristeva, who sees in
the linguistic sign, arbitrary and severed from
the referent, the formal entity indispensable for
the scientific status of semiotics.
Thus "linguistics assumes, de facto and de JUTe,
the patronage of all future semiology." However,
Saussure's evolution towards phonocentrism (the
phonic substance being the substance par excel-
lence) and the metaphysics it brings in its wake
which sets the basis for the circuit of commu-
nication, introduce the risk "of reducing the
study of signification and meaning to the level
of the formal conditions necessary for their
appearance, whilst excluding the study of sig-
nification itself.,,29 The conception of the voice
as obliterating the signifier, and as being con-
sciousness itself (see Derrida, referred to by the
authors) results in a psychologism "inevitably
linked to the conceptual whole produced in the
problematic space of the sign,"30 i.e., to the con-
cept of communication. The latter implies, on
the one hand, objects (addresser and addressee)
27Enrico Carontini and Daniel Peraya, Le Pro)et semiotique. ser.
Encyclopedie U niversitaire (Paris: Delarge, 1975), p. 43.
'HIbid.
2'lIbid., p. 44.
lOIbid., p. 45.
25
which are already constituted and, on the other,
signified objects which are also constituted
beforehand. "If we ascribe apredominant posi-
tion to the communicative function of language
when examining facts of signification, we seri-
ously risk inhibiting the problematic of the sig-
nifying and/or linguistic production, i.e., the form
and the structure of the speaking subject and of
the communicated signification."31
The purely instrumental character of lan-
guage implicit in Saussure's Cours was made
evident by a rigorously phonological reading
which directed semiology towards a new object:
the communication circuit. It was on these foun-
dations that Buyssens and his successors estab-
lished the important distinction between signal
and index, only to reject the latter on the grounds
of its aBeged absence of intentionality and cod-
ification. According to Carontini and Peraya,
however, there is no evidence for this.
The issue raised by post-Saussurian semiolo-
gists consists in ascertaining whether the con-
cepts and methods of the semiology of
communication are applicable to facts of signi-
fication, since it is not evident that fashion, for
instance, is a phenomenon of communication to
the same extent as the highway code.
Semiologists of communication fear that
semiology might lose its relevance for the foBow-
ing three reasons:
I. An excessive extension of the object: When, in
1970, Buyssens again took up the problem of the
symbol, he stated, with reference to categories
he did not want to retain: "It is obvious that
these facts undergo interpretation; but one is
dealing here with indexes. Indeed, where is there
a fact that one does not interpret? ,,32
Other authors have made similar observa-
tions, the major argument being that to extend
the object of semiology to include the index inev-
itably entails taking into consideration aB facts
of perception. Obviously, one need not go to
such an extreme. Even if this were the case,
semiology would not for this reason have
encroached upon the field of other sciences. To
examine a fact from the angle of semiology does
not necessarily mean studying the fact in its
3lIbid.
"E. Buyssens, La Communication et l'articulation linguislique
(Brussels, Paris: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles et
Presses U niversitaires de France, 1970), p. 25.
26 RICHARD MARTIN
entirety. The study of a cloud or of clothes in
fashion from the semiological angle does not
deprive meteorology or sociology of their objects,
any more than phonology renders phonetics and
acoustics null and void.
2. A lack oj hold on the object: H, f~r instance,
one refers to Mounin,33 one realizes that the
index-which can be subject to interpretations
which vary according to the receivers-cannot
lend itself to the same strict examination as the
signal can. But this attitude testifies to a still
common confusion between the characteristics
of a science and those of its object. If scientific
research inevitably has to be rigorous and results
in the formulation of laws which are by definition
stable, this is no reason why the examined object
must itself be stable. Variability may be codified
and may reach thresholds which are ofthe great-
est interest for study.
3. The inadequacy oj methodological concepts to the
object: This point is obviously linked to the pre-
ceding, but it applies to another aspect of the
overall problem relevant to both of them. When
Priet034 tries to prove the usefulness of semiology
of communication, he has to emphasize the dou-
ble risk taken by a semiology of signification as
interpreted by Barthes: "Concepts which in fact
are only applicable to codes having a specificity
as well defined as languages risk being con-
sidered 'sufficiently general.' ,,35 On the other
hand, "communicative mechanisms which have
an analogue in significative systems risk being
ignored because they do not appear in
languages. ,,36
Indeed, these arguments have unquestionable
relevance when applied to a semiology of sig-
nification which asserts the primacy of linguis-
tics. But Prieto hirnself, who does not reject
semiology of signification, has views on the latter
different from Barthes's, and states that "lin-
guistics, semiology of communication, and
semiology of signification would constitute ...
three disciplines whose respective objects are, in
fact, interlocked. ,,37 Thus, semiology of signifi-
cation would provide the more general concepts
since its field of application is wider than that
33Mounin, p.14.
34prieto, pp. 125-14l.
35Ibid., p. 138.
36Ibid., p. 139.
37Ibid., p. 130.
of semiology of communication, whereas the
concepts of the latter would be general with
regard to those of linguistics only. Peirce and
Eco are fairly typical representatives of such a
general school of semiology.
The divide between the two schools of semiol-
ogy sterns perhaps from two confticting ways of
conceiving communication rather than from an
absolute and fundamental opposition between
signification and communication. 38 The first
approach is narrow, psychologizing, tied to the
notion of manifest intention and of unequivocal
evidence of intentions; the other interpretation
is broader and incorporates within its sphere the
notions of the unconscious, of signification, and
of production of meaning.
The restrictive definition, as stated above, is
in fact the one most stricdy related to linguistics,
since verbal language is usually considered the
means of communication par excellence. Paradox-
ically, it is Barthes' school of semiology, the one
least dependent on linguistics, that affirms the
dominance of linguistics over semiology.
The ascendency of the linguistic modelover
Barthes is in fact quite different from but no less
perceptible than its sway over the followers of
the "healthy semiology" (Mounin). The options
of the latter are inftuenced by the encroaching
denotations and/or connotations of linguistic
terms such as "sign," "arbitrary," "code," "sys-
tem," and so forth. Ever since Saussure, the lin-
guistic sign has been thought of as basically
arbitrary and linear. Even if linearity has been
a relatively insubstantial barrier (since maps,
plans, and diagrams are universally considered
to be semiotic objects), arbitrariness, on the other
hand, is loaded with connotations, since for many
it implies delimitation, construction, or con-
scious options-even lack of motivation. The idea
of code assimilated to that of system (by Buys-
sens and others) is no less innocent in this respect.
Vincent Descombes has clearly proved 39 that
semiology is based on the idea that verbal lan-
guage is comparable to a system of communi-
cation. From this point onwards, either the
semiologist must affirm that everything is struc-
turable and "reducible" to a system of signs
3BIn 1964 Barthes hirnself did not compare both notions as
clearly as Prieto was to do later.
39Vincent Descombes, Le Mime et l'autre. ser. Critique (Paris:
Minuit, 1979), p. 114.
 BELGIUM
analogous to the system which is the interpreter
of all systems (Benveniste)-in which case, the
borderline between the intentional and the non-
intentional, between the conscious and the
unconscious can no longer be an obstacle-or
else he must be content to recognize as a sign
system only that which resembles the most
important of these systems, the one which dis-
tinguishes man from animals and from every-
thing else, thus refusing semiotic status to
whatever cannot "easily" be perceived as a cod-
ified language. Seen from this angle, language
seems to constitute a threshold below which are
situated simpler codes, entirely constructed and
mastered by man; and above which are to be
found all kinds of phenomena the complex work-
ings of which cannot fully be grasped by con-
sciousness or will, and which are therefore not
languages. In Mounin's words, they are signi-
ficative but not signifying phenomena. On the
one hand, we have expressive manifestations
(such as art, for instance, whose expressions are
not governed by consciousness), and on the other,
indexes (which are not controlled by the will).
J.- M. Klinkenberg, in a paper at the congress
in Milan, 1974,40 attacked the defenders of too
strict a functional semiology which would aim
to exclude from its field of research non-human
facts as well as non-conscious and non-arbitrary
facts. Stating that the distinction established
between signal and index is not only methodo-
logical, but axiological, Klinkenberg examined
in two stages "the relevance of the act that sets
its foundation."41
1. The definition of signal proposed by Prieto
would be tautological, since it would amount to
stating that the signal is what is produced with
a view to be used as a signal. As for the criterion
of consciousness adopted by the functionalists,
it would be difficult to handle, since there is no
formal description at hand which would allow
one to establish the categories of objects it intends
to differentiate.
"Moreover, the concrete application of this
criterion rapidly leads to absurd consequences:
'°J.-M. Klinkenberg, "Communication et signification: l'unite
de la semiologie," in A Semiotic Landscape, Proceedings of the
First Congress of the International Associationfor Semiotic Studies,
Milan, June 1974 (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton,
1979), pp. 288-294.
11 Ibid., p. 289.
27
can it be said, in linguistics, that involuntary
lapsus linguae cannot be taken into account? One
would thus come to deny semiological status to
the theory of tropes according to the specific field
it is applied to, i.e., slang, poetry, advertising,
or puns.,,42
Anxio.us to avoid this kind ofreproachJacques
Pohl, in a general introductory work partly inftu-
enced by Buyssens's views,43 proposed shifting
the intentional criterion from the signal toward
the code: the dreamer who reveals a secret du ring
his sleep, the tortured person who finally gives
the wanted information to his torturer, are "com-
municating" not because they intended to but
because the instrument they are using, namely,
language, was intentionally conceived to fulfill
this function. 44
Klinkenberg suggests replacing the notion of
intentionality "by that of projection of the
receiver onto aseries of events,,,45 and even sug-
gests we consider that there is a "semiotic proc-
ess as soon as there is a transfer of information
leading to the modification of a state.,,46
2. Recalling the importance Prieto gives to
circumstances in defining the message to be
attributed to the signal emitted, Klinkenberg
points out that the formalizing Prieto indulges
in ceases arbitrarily when he finds hirnself on
the plane of these circumstances. Now, these
circumstances form a system which has its own
structure, and it is nothing but a "glossocentr-
ism,"47 or its residue, when starting from ele-
ments of the semantic field always to push toward
those of the noetic field, according no more than
a very secondary place, and in every instance
the chronologically last place, to the field of cir-
cumstances. Thus, "circumstances must be con-
sidered as facts operating on the same level as the
signal in defining a message. Furthermore, it
would not be necessary to make a distinction
between the verbal context (which would be part
of communication), and a nonverbal context
(which would not be part of it), since the latter
can always be verbalized. Consequently, a
42Ibid., p. 290.
43Jacques Pohl, Symboles et langages, vol. I. ser. Style et Lan-
gages (Brussels: Sodi, 1968).
44Ibid., pp. 144-145.
45Klinkenberg, "Communication et signification," p. 290.
46Ibid., p. 291.
47Ibid., p. 293.
28 RICHARD MARTIN
semiology of communication must take into
account facts relevant to a semiology of signifi-
cation (such as proxemics)."48
EIsewhere,19 Klinkenberg justifies Barthes's
revcrsal of thc Saussurian formula by consider-
ing the spectacular developments of linguistics
in the direction of transphraseastics, of rhetoric,
of poetics, and of other disciplines such as
an thropology.
Nevertheless, according to Klinkenberg,
semiology is threatened from two sides: on the
one hand by idealism, which results from the
rejection of a scientific approach to phenomena
such as poetic language,'iO and on the other by
positivism, under the banner of which the most
complex problems have suffercd at the hands of
an abusive reductionism.
"These two excesses ( ... ) evidence perhaps
two ways of conceiving the relation between lin-
guistics and semiology. Either the relation is nar-
row, and the results are certain, though meagrc,
or else one tcnds to stray from the models of
Saussurian linguistics, running the risk of attrib-
uting the metaphorical caution of our current
language to errors that are al ready half a century
old if not more.,,"l
As to the latter case, Klinkenberg is thinking
for example of Henri Meschonnic, whose ideas
are ultimately not very different from those of
Croce. As to the former, he mentions the "Lim-
ites de I'analyse linguistique en poetique" of
Ruwet.
It was Nicolas Ruwet who introduced J akob-
son and Chomsky in France. As a linguist, musi-
cologist and poetician, he applied with skill and
great care a method of analyzing classical poetry
which owes a great deal toJakobson and S. Levin.
Furthermore, he drew largely and profitablyon
transformationalism. Ruwet stressed that lin-
guistics could be used only as an auxiliary dis-
cipline in the analysis of poetry, since on the one
hand, what is relevant in a poem does not relate
exclusively to linguistics, but also pertains to wh at
he calls the "encyclopaedia";52 and on the other,
Wlbid.
I'lKlinkenberg, "Le Linguistique et le semiologique."
Klinken berg mentions this type of approach and the one
-,(1
adopted by Solomon Marcus in "Vers un modele theorique
du langage poetique," Degris, I Oanuary, 1973), pp. dl-
d12.
-,I Klinkenberg, "Le linguistique et le semiologique," p. 199.
"Ni colas Ruwet, "Synecdoques et metonymies," Poitique, 23
(197.1), p. 372.
even though linguistics provides valuable mate-
rial for poetics, the aesthetic relevance of this
material cannot be defined by the science of lin-
guistics itself. Therefore, it is merely descriptive-
at least in its structuralist version.
Nevertheless, it was a linguist, Jakobson, who
proposed one of the most interesting models of
poetic language. But Ruwer sees in Jakobson's
principle neither the necessary nor the sufficient
condition of the poetic function. Furthermore,
the transformational theory, which postulates the
existence of types of relations other than the
paradigmatic and syntagmatic, cannot be sat-
isfied with Jakobson's criterion. Finally, he fails
to specify how or how far thc recording of equiv-
alences which it implies is to be carried out, nor
does he state which equivalences are relevant.
Ruwet therefore proposes two approaches:
(I) The first is the one applied by J akobson and
Levi-Strauss in their analysis of "Les Chats." It
consists in systematically recording all equiva-
lences at each level. The inconvenience of this
method is that it makes no distinction between
the compulsory and the optional linguistic ele-
ments, so that the equivalences seem to be equiv-
alent in themselves, whereas they may have a
different status and a degree of power which
varies from one case to another. (2) "Another
approach would consist in choosing a given level,
in picking out the most obvious equivalenccs at
this level and in using them subsequently to
formulate hypotheses relating to other pos-
sible equivalences, but which are less explicit,
whether at the same level or at different levels. ,,5:l
Ruwet hirns elf applies this method in his own
analyses.
IH. Semiology and Pragmatics
When discussing the semiology of communi-
cation, we mean of course "communication" in
a narrower sense than that in which Jakobson
understands the term. For the author of Essais
de linguistique generale, communication occurs each
time there is an exchange of messages, and
furthermore in any form of exchange "where
messages play a relevant though subordinate
"N. Ruwet, Langage, musique,poesie (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 217.
 BELGIUM
part.""! Thus it can be said that "three sciences
belonging to a whole include one another and
represent three degrees of increasing generali-
zation: (I) the study of the communication of
verbal messages, i.e., linguistics, (2) the study of
the communication of any kind of messages, i.e.,
semiotics (including the communication of ver-
bal messages), (3) the study of communication,
or social and economic anthropology (including
the communication of messages). ,,""
Linguistics, therefore, does not study all forms
of communication; indeed it does not even study
the whole of communication in the field specially
reserved to it. Only the code, until recently, has
been the object of linguistic investigation. N ow
the code, as is weil known, represents but one
of the six factors in J akobson's schema of com-
munication. Nevertheless, other aspects of this
schema have recently attracted the attention of
certain linguists-not precisely as other factors,
since only the code and the message, taken sep-
arately, could survive as linguistic objects, but
rather as functions corresponding to some of the
six factors. The poetic function in particular has
received considerable attention.
I t should be noted however that if a factor is
an element of the schema, and if a function is a
relation between a message, or an aspect of this
message (i.e., an element), and one of the six
factors (i.e., another element), then linguistics,
among certain scholars, has gradually shifted
from a purely static object (the code) to a rela-
tively dynamic object (certain functions). If they
want the object to be still more dynamic, rela-
tions of three terms or more may be envisaged,
the study of which consequently directs research
towards a linguistics of enunciation such as
Saussure could never have conceived. Indeed,
only the code is potentially linguistic. The message
is linguistic in essence; it is also necessarily lin-
guistic in act. Similarly, the other four factors
can only be taken into account by linguistics
within the framework of the act of communi-
cation, even if the latter remains ideal or
theoretical.
If the origin of pragmatics owes more to the
United States than to Europe, this is doubtless
"Roman Jakobson, "Relations entre la seienee du langage
et les autres sciences/' in Essais de linguistique geniraLe, vol.
2. ser. Arguments (Paris: !'vlinuit, 1973), p. 37.
·"Ibid.
29
not really because American semiotics had a
philosophical origin and European semiotics a
linguistic one. I t is certainly rare for pragmatics
not to be directly associated with the philosophy
oflanguage and considered a branch orit, rather
than a branch of linguistics or even a linguistic
theory. What did playa primary role for Euro-
pean semiotics, however, was the fact that it owes
its origin to Saussure. Indeed, Saussure, in
establishing a distinction between language and
speech, and in rendering language the sole object
of linguistics, refused to take enunciation into
consideration, since in his view it was part of
speech. 56 American linguistics during the first
half of the 20th century was based on behaviorist
principles which in fact are akin to Saussure's
distrust regarding problems o[ meaning, and
which are even more radical. On the other hand,
behaviorism prevented American linguistics from
adopting the dichotomy (which for Saussure was
fundamental) between language and speech,
since speech is the sole element that can be
observed and that can constitute an object of
investigation.
Reference could be made here to the writings
of more than one Belgian scholar. Vve shall
restrict ourselves however to those of Herman
Parret, which offer the advantage of situating
their subject matter in relation to semiology.
A student of American semiotics as weil as
the philosophy of language on the one hand, and
a disciple of Saussure and his linguist and/or
semiologist successors on the other, Parret gives
a scientific, objective and anti-mentalist dimen-
sion to what were no more than vague and psy-
chologizing concepts and criteria in the hands
of semiologists such as Buyssens: first, intention
and the part it plays in communication, and sec-
ond, the recognition of this intention by inter-
locuters. In addition, the basis o[ these notions
is enlarged to allow cases to be taken into account
which had previously been rejected because they
were considered as having no relevance to lin-
guistics or semiology, but only to psychology.
We saw above the meaning and importancc
which the idea of dis course could have for Buys·
sens. We find this term again in pragmatics and
more particularly in the works o[ Parret, but it
'''Oswald Duerot, "De Saussure a la philosuphic du lan-
gage," in John R. Searle, Les Aetes de langage. ser. Savoir
(Paris: Hermann, 1972), pp. 7-34.
30 RICHARD MARTIN
no longer refers to the same concept. This time,
it is "language in communicative interaction.,,57
Similarly, one must not confuse communication as
mentioned by post-Saussurian semiologists with
communicability as interpreted by post-Peircian
pragmaticists. "Communication is a privileged
mode of being of internal relations of sociallife.
Communicability is a constituent characteristic
of discourse (of language in context). ,,58
The paradigm of communication according to
which language is nothing but a passive instru-
ment (see the notion of action in Karl Bühler)
constitutes the theoretical framework of semiol-
ogy (i.e., semiology of communication), whereas
the paradigm of communicability-which makes
of language a source or a place of action (see
the notion of act in Bühler)-constitutes the axi-
omatic basis of pragmatics. Nevertheless, it is
possible to envisage a semiological pragmatics,
that is to say, a pragmatics applied to non-
linguistic systems of communication, indeed of
signification. Parret himself does not exclude this,
and L. J. Cohen even considers this extension
essen ti al. 5g
The views expressed here as weil as those fol-
lowing should not lead us to believe that with
Parret the attempt is being made to elaborate a
linguistics of speech (parole), or of performance.
According to Parret, the term itself is paradox-
ical,60 since speech includes all that cannot be
the object of (linguistic) knowledge, and con-
sequently everything that can be selected and
studied linguistically belongs de facta to language
(langue). What Parret is proposing in the wake
of a philosopher like Austin or of a linguist like
Benveniste, but with his own personal and
enlarged approach, is a linguistics of enunciation.
Thus, Parret clearly departs here from Saus-
sure, whose meta-theory is in any case undefined
(indicidable) since language and the sign have an
ambiguous status within it. Indeed, language is
defined by Saussure as either a social act or a
"Herman Parret, "Pragmatique philosophique et episte-
mologie de la pragmatique: connaissance et contextualite,"
in Le Langage en contexte, ed. H. Parret (Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 1980), p. 52.
58Ibid., p. 59.
'>!'Leonard Jonathan Cohen, "Philosophy of Language and
Semiotics," in A Semiotic Landscape, eds. Seymour Chatman,
U mberto Eco,J ean-Marie Klinkenberg (The Hague, Paris,
New York: Mouton, 1979), pp. 19-28.
GOHerman Parfet, "Les Paral~gismes de l'enonciation," Revue
de l'Universiti de Bruxelles, 1-2 (1976), p. 100.
psychic act, and this in turn has furthered the
development of two structuralist axes. On the
one hand the substantialist or functional axis
with Jakobson, Martinet, Buyssens, Prieto, and
others, who consider the concepts of relevance
and economy to "presuppose an interactional
conception of language."61 On the other hand a
formalizing axis, with Hjelmslev, who considers
that language is pure form and "a privileged
medium (milieu) where the calculus unfolds in
full creativity"62 independent of any contextual
or phonetic constraint.
Parret adds: "Neither a Hjelmslevian gram-
mar ... nor a generative grammar will accept the
insertion of linguistics into an all-inclusive
semiotics, precisely because the formal perfec-
tion of language has no common measure with
that of semiotic systems the specificity of which
depends on their respective su bstances. ,,63
Indeed, Parret had shown previousll 4 that
Chomsky, in rejecting the idea that language is
the supreme means of communication, was led
equally to reject the idea of general semiotics,
since verballanguage is, according to Chomsky,
a unique phenomenon which literally bears no
comparison. However, despite the numerous
possible approximations between Hjelmslev and
Chomsky,65 the assimilation is perhaps rather
too drastic. Hjelmslev, who did not fail to rec-
ognize the interest of semiology, had to consider
that the so-called irreducibility of verbal lan-
guage to other semiotics was at least partially
due to differences of substances, which did not
interest him. In consequence, glossematics effec-
tively will not accept "the insertion of linguistics
into an all-inclusive semiotics" since it tends to
be itself a general semiology.
As for the sign, it is, according to Saussure,
"neither an expressive term nor a functional unit
but ... simultaneously the term of the system
and the functioning unit of language."66 Thus it
61Herman Parret, "Independance et interdependance de la
forme et de la fonction du langage," Revue Philosophique de
Louvain, 73 (1975), p. 64.
G2Ibid., p. 65.
63Ibid., p. 64-65.
64Ibid., p. 61.
6"See Jean-Pierre Corneille, "Un pn'curseur meconnu de
Noam Chomsky: Louis Hjelmslev," Marche romane (Liege),
22 (1972), pp. 39-54; and Jean-Pierre Corneille, La Lin-
guistique structurale. sero Langue et Langage (Paris: Larousse,
1976).
6GParret, "Independance et interdependance," p. 77.
 BELGIUM
has no proper place, and its double status allows
Saussure to place semiology under the depend-
ency of what he calls "social psychology."
Parret's interpretation of pragmatics can be
more easily situated in relation to "definable"
(decidable) metatheories. In "Connaissance et
contextualite," the first essay of the impressive
work Le Langage en contexte, published in collab-
oration with several other authors, Parret begins
by studying the theoretical status of pragmatics.
This status remains ambiguous in the three-
dimensional semiotics of Morris as weil as in
Carnap's attempt to reconstruct a logico-
syntacticallanguage, since pragmatics is at one
and the same time conceived by these authors
as a mere component compared with semantics
and syntax, which are irreducible to it ("mini-
malist" conception), and as an integrating basis
of linguistic theory ("maximalist" conception).
Although Carnap and especially Morris tend
toward the maximalist conception-the tripar-
tition no longer being presented as objective, but
as only epistemologically and heuristically
motivated-Peirce alone offers a conception of
pragmatics as a unified semiotics. This unifica-
tion, due entirely to the pragmatist origin of Peir-
ci an semiotics, has three causes: (I) The
interpretant, conceived as "a particular habit to
action,,,67 is "the context which makes the dynamic
of the semiotic process possible";68 (2) the lin-
guistic sign, as a symbol, "has no pure semantic
content, since the interpretant is not a
designator,,69 in the sense understood by Morris.
Moreover, when defined by abduction, the order
of the signs is no longer syntactic either, accord-
ing to Morris; (3) the thirdness-which is the cat-
egory of the linguistic sign, introduces
conventionality into the semiotic process und er
the form of habits (the interpretants) which put
the generality of the conventional in correlation
with the action of the intentional. 70
67Parret, "Connaissance et contextualite," p. 20.
6'Ibid.
69Ibid., p. 20-21.
7DOf course, the tendency towards unification can be found
almost everywhere today. In Leo Apostel, another impor-
tant Belgian pragmaticist, unification is, one might say, of
a circular and hierarchical type, since syntax and seman-
ties, according to hirn, presuppose pragmatics-which in
its turn presupposes a general theory of action, or
praxeology-whereas the former must refer to syntactic
and semantic data which have to be established.
31
Dealing with the logical syntax of the Chom-
skian type and with the immanent and denota-
tional forms of semantics such as those of Husserl
which derive from mentalist metatheories-or at
least, can derive from them, since this is not the
case with Carnap, for instance-Parret adopts
the view of a transcendental anti-mentalism of
the Kantian type, such as that found in Peirce's
works, where semiosis is conceived as phenom-
enality, and where the significative community
(and not the objective unity of representations
in the Ego as in Kant) constitutes the transcen-
dental principle of consistency.
The pragmatist, therefore, does not consider
the mind as an internal psychic universe "but
as a mode 01 behavior by which individuals interact
with each other and with the world ,,71 and it is
with the Wittgensteinian paradigm of commun-
icability, marked by its metatheory of the social
fact, and not with the Chomskian paradigm of
expressivity, marked by its metatheory of the
psychic fact, that the pragmaticist identifies
hirnself.
As for intentionality, which proves necessary in
the reconstruction of pragmatic competence,
Parret wonders how it can be defined so as to
transform it into an anti-mentalist transcenden-
tal concept.
The theory of transcendentals of dis course can
be summed up in three propositions:
I. The first states that "only intentionality in
its actional aspect"72 applies to pragmatics.
According to a primary reduction, intention is
thus reduced to intentional action by inscribing
it in dis course in the form of marks. And Parret,
like the analytical philosophers, believes that
every discursive manifestation has an actional
character, i.e., intentional. This concept avoids
mentalism, insofar as intentionality is only deduced
from the extern al marks of action in discourse.
2. The second proposal states that only the
sub-dass of modal acts (actes-types), out of the all-
indusive dass of discursive actions, is of in te rest
for pragmatics. According to second reduction,
the intentional action becomes intentional act by
its being dassified, on the basis of the identity
of the marks. Here again, the concept of dis-
cursive intentionality es capes the accusation of
mentalism. Inasmuch as they are universals of
71 Parret, "Connaissance et Contextualite," p. 29.
"Ibid., p. 33.
32 RICHARD MARTIN
discourse, modal acts ensure the transcenden-
tality of pragmatics.
3. Finally, "the intentionality of modal acts is
invested in discursive fragments in the form of
s]stematic empirical efficts." 7:l
Parret's viewpoint is essentially linguistic.
Therefore, the objective of pragmatics consists
far hirn in identifying modal acts according
to theoretical strategies which establish types
of regulari ties, and m classifying them
sys tema tically.
In the second part of his essay, Parret presen ts
a descriptive topograph] of the field of pragmatics,
built intuitivelyon the metatheory of the com-
municability of language and according to the
methodology of functional gramm ar.
The axiomatics proposed by Parret contains
four axioms:
Axiom 1: "The speaking subject, by means of
his discourse, cannot not communicate. 71
Axiom 2: "Any communication presents two
aspects, content and relation, in such a way that
the latter includes the former."7' With this, prag-
matics becomes the integrating basis of semiotics.
Axiom 3: "Every communication implies reci-
procity, which is symmetrical or complementary
(the absence of reciprocity represents only a spe-
cial case of complementary reciprocity)."76 By
adding to symmetrical reciprocity (which applies
to all cases of assumed cooperation) a comple-
mentary reciprocity (which applies to all cases
where the absence of reciprocity must be rec-
ognized), pragmatics as so conceived provides
answers to aseries of cases arbitrarily rejected,
or at least regarded as hard to handle by
Buyssens.
Axiom 4: "Every communication actualizes the
virtual system of significations, and simultane-
ously brings to realization the dependence of this
system vis-a-vis the conditions of communica-
bility."n Discourse therefare accomplishes a
double operation, both actualizing and transform-
ing a virtual content.
There follows next a s]stematic topograph] estab-
lished deductively on the basis of the central
notions of junction and context (that is to say, the
presupposed context, reconstructed by a referential
73Ibid.
"Ibid., p. 55.
"Ibid., p. 66.
7('Ibid., p. 67.
nlbid., p. 68.
grammar, and the action context reconstructed by
an action grammar.).
In the third and last part, devoted to the epis-
temology of pragmatics, Parret proposes a typol-
ogy of what he calls pragmatic strategies, strategy
being defined as "an interiorized and valorized reg-
ularity generating the discursive fragment on the
basis of the context oj enunciation." 7B
IV. Semiology and Semantics
Le Discours antrfrieur by Daniel Laroche, which
bears the subtitle "Propositions pour une seman-
tique du texte litteraire," represents an attempt
to sum up the problem of signification. 79 The
viewpoint he adopts is equally novel though quite
different from Parret's since it belongs to the
school of thought associated with Kristeva and
Derrida.
The author starts by examining various
semantic theories, both ne.w and old (Saussure,
Hjelmslev, Sapir, Bloomfield, Martinet, Chom-
sky, Greimas), which all ascribe a non-linguistic
nature to signification, leaving to other disci-
plines the problem of defining it. Structuralism,
although a way of thought based on "differ-
ence," begins by excluding meaning "per se" from
its field. Difference thus remains clearly subor-
dinate to identity. Following the same line of
thought as Derrida, Laroche searches far the ori-
gin of meaning (in his terms the "noogenetic
process") in a linguistics of speech. For, besides
the lexical system of the signifier which belongs
to the plane of materiality, there exists a dis-
cursive system which presides over the organi-
zation of wards into discourse, and both these
systems (units and configurations ) participate in
the production of meaning.
For Laroche, "difference" is no longer a phil-
osophical category, at a necessarily high level of
abstraction, but a notion linked to the subjective
space (and therefore definable on the psycho-
logical plane as an "engram," a modification of
the nervous system that underlies the fixing of
a memary-trace). Thus, the noogenesis can be
envisaged only in the field of the subject and his
78Ibid., p. 153.
7"Daniel Laroche, Le Discours antirieur. Propositions pour une
simantique du texte littiraire (Louvain: unpub1ished doclora1
thesis, 1978).
 BELGIUM 33

his tory. The acquisition of the details of a semi- of actualized, material, tangible signifiers (and
otic system always proceeds according to a proc- not ideas), we are dealing actually with a proc-
ess of "individuating difference." The acquisition ess. It is a process that presents a legendum (mate-
of a concept, for example, is the crystallization rial signifiers which only potentially carry a
of the combinatorial capacities of a signifier, a meaning) and a lectum (the signified version of
crystallization which belongs to the plane of the the legendum as it has been elaborated by the
imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) and which reader), with the help of a set of means which
produces a new mental effect: the signified. 80 constitute the lectural system (linguistic compe-
It is obvious, therefore, that no semiotic sys- tence + cultural data + intersubjective idio-
tem is possible without the prior existence of a syncrasy). The lectural sys tem delimi ts the space
discursive organisation. Further, paradigmatics, of intelligibility within which the lectum will nec-
as an independent system, has only a secondary essarily have to be fitted (conventions, etc.). This
existence, at one remove from the syntagmatic lectum is a diseourse, amental utterance considered
plane. by the reader to provide hirn with the knowledge
The semes (in Greimas's sense) far from being of the legendum. It is therefore a process of enun-
minimal units, are themselves nothing other than ciation (thesis of reading-writing). Conse-
signifieds, defining themselves therefore not by quently, nothing could appear in the leetum that
their nature, but by their function as analyzers would not belong in the first place to the lectural
in the framework of a given analytical operation system, although the latter is retroactively mod-
which is different every time. ified according to the readings.
Thus, meaning is always the result of agglom- From here onwards, the stage is set for pro-
erations of parts of previous discourses with a posing a methodology of literary reading. Bas-
more or less pronounced stereotypy (the intel- ically, the ideological knowledge of the lectural
ligibility of an utterance being proportional to system has to be transformed into accurate
its stereotypy). Here the author is exploiting and knowledge. Laroche treats this subject in the third
generalizing the notion of intertextuality. Sig- and last part of his thesis.
nification does not belong to the component in
itself, but is linked to its presence in the dis-
course, i.e., to its enunciation. Literary texts by V. The Fields
their very existence give proof that language is
endowed with a "power" other than that of com-
A. Semiology of Literature
munication. The objective of literary language The question of literature has already arisen
is to break the yoke of the communicative prac- in connection with the work of Laroche. We do
tice in order to give free play to its own inno- not have sufficient space he re to present the
vating potentialities. Only the text which takes interesting and even important works of Belgian
chances with the real expresses the reality of scholars on narrative Uacques Dubois, Victor
language. This kind of literary text reveals the Marie Renier, and Andre Helbo) or on poetry
"unheard of," the unimaginable, of a culture. (Francis Edeline, J.-M. Klinkenberg, and Nico-
One recognizes here the theses of Kristeva and las Ruwet, of whom we have already spoken).
of autotelism. Consequently, we shall restrict ourselves to two
The question remains, in wh at does the sub- works which, despite fundamental differences,
jective dimension of intellection consist? Gen- have in common the fact that they deal with both
erally, the "reception" of the message is narrative and poetry, and that their approach is
considered to be a relatively passive apprehen- broadly or essentially founded on rhetorical
sion. However, since a discourse is made up solely research. Furthermore, both devote as much
attention to the plane of the signified as to that
Hl'One can detect here a somewhat "Cartesian" interpretation of the signifier. In Structure du diseours de la poesie
of the sign (or of what has been substituted for it). The et du deit, Maurice-J ean Lefebve supports the
signifier is mainly conceived as belonging to the material thesis according to which the fascination char-
order, whereas the signified belongs entirely to the mental. acteristic of literary language is of the same
Thus the mi nd/matter duality is still apparent. So much
so--and this is a heavy restriction-that the "ghost" in this
nature as the fascination exerted by certain nat-
case really has no right to find itself in the "machine" at ural images, "those where nature seems 'to im ag-
all. ine herself (reality here slides towards the
34 RICHARD MARTIN
imaginary), or else those where, on the contrary,
it is the mental image which seems to acquire a
certain consistency and which gives the impres-
sion of being on the verge of 'materializing' .,,81
Thus, by making of the literary object a spe-
cial blend of reality (to be situated on the plane
of the signifier) and unreality (on the plane of the
signified), Lefebve launches his demonstration
with a comparison between everyday discourse and
literary discourse. Whereas the former is "inter-
ested" (utilitarian), adequate, and transparent,
the latter is gratuitous, inadequate (in that it
reveals both its tendency and its inability to meet
the ideal of the "original language" in Plato's
Cratylus), and opaque (since it aims at "main-
taining the presence of the signifier and of trans-
forming any signified in to a new signifier"). 82
This being the case, the literary dis course
operates according to a tri pIe, diaiectically artic-
ulated schema:
I. Centripetal movement: InitiaIly, the literary
work is in astate of withdrawal (corresponding
to the weIl known thesis of autotelism). This is
what Lefebve calls materialization (of language at
all levels: the signifier is perceived as such and
the signified becomes signifier). Because it is sev-
ered from the practical referent, the literary dis-
course asserts itself as afigure, since it becomes
an object of language which designates itself in
its own materiality. Phenomena of materializa-
tion are handled by rhetoric, which aims at con-
stituting a taxonomic model of the figures of
discourse (the last chapter of the work is devoted
to a study of the figures of diegesis in narrative).
Any dis course presenting itself as discourse is
literary. In other words, "literarity is primarily
a matter of intention."S3 Now, if literary inten-
tionality directs the literary work towards its
materialization and thus appears under the traits
of reflexive connotation, it has another side which
is inseparable from the first.
2. Centrifugal movement: It is this that allows
language, freed from all utilitarian function, to
open out to the external world in order to ques-
tion its metaphysico-aesthetical reality. Whereas
practical reality gives the answer to "What for?"
and scientific reality gives the answer to "How?"
metaphysico-aesthetical reality in fact represents
BIMaurice-J ean Lefebve, Structure du discours de la poesie et du
dei!. ser. Langages (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1971), p. 1l.
"'Ibid., p. 28.
HlIbid., p. 34.
the fundamental question of the "Why?" of the
"being-there" (l'etre-la) of things. From this
viewpoint, "the question both produces and
defines Reality. Reality consists in the ques-
tion.,,84 To attempt to answer this question would
immediately abolish this Reality. Thus, sum-
moned by a discourse without an object, marked
therefore by a void but fascinating as an image,
this kind of Reality "becomes present" (se pri-
sentifie). This "becoming present" (prisentification)
is due to the connotative power of the literary work
of which the literary intentionality takes account.
It tends to make of the referent a special, fas-
cinating signified, endowed with both absence
and heightened presence. There are however
three types ofreferents: R I is the utilitarian refer-
ent of everyday discourse. R 2 designates the
"reactivation of our experience of the object"S5
in poetic discourse, but also in narrative, where
R 3 , i.e., the diegesis, constitutes a second signifier
beyond the narration, and "actualizes R 2 den-
otatively or connotatively in the phenomenon of
'becoming present' as an image."S6
3. Return to the centripetal movement: The "becom-
ing present" (the impression of being in the pres-
ence of a certain reality), which is a consequence
of the vagueness of connotations responding to
the "call for meaning and presence,,,87 looks for
its support and its body in the very structures
of the signifier. ,,88 This is what Lefebve calls
embodiment.
However, this tendency towards embodiment
is only allowed to begin, and even then takes on
no more than a semblance of materialization, in
imitation, whose procedures (part of the figures )
constitute the literary object in "the image of its
meaning. ,,89 It is precisely this gap, "the very
inadequacy of language, which enables it to sug-
gest to us the adequate language."gO
Over the last fifteen years, rhetoric, which had
almost vanished from the scene during the 19th
century, found new inspiration within the frame-
work of structuralism. Group fL Oacques Dubois,
Francis Edeline, Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Phi-
lippe Minguet, Fran<;ois Pire, and Hadelin Tri-
non) largely contributed to this important revival
S4Ibid., p. 89.
85Ibid., p. 111.
86Ibid., p. 113.
B7Ibid., p. 36.
8BIbid., p. 30-31.
89Ibid., p. 54.
90Ibid., p. 55.
 BELGIUM
by publishing a pioneering book in 1970 entitled
Rhitorique generale. gl
Even though, as Genette has noted,92 the cur-
rent rhetoric, induding the rhetoric of Group J.1,
is particularly "limited" in scope compared with
that of antiquity, since it breathes new life into
elocutio alone,93 the authors nevertheless have
three reasons for believing that their project opens
the way to a generalization of rhetoric: (1) figures
are reduced to a few simple and fundamental
operations; (2) rhetoric evolves beyond the
semiological stage (sign) towards the semantic
stage (utterance), according to Benveniste's dis-
tinction; (3) the field of application is now
extended to other semiotics beyond that of artic-
ulated language.
At the most general level the figure appears,
no less openly than in,the writings of Jean Cohen,
as a deviation with regard to a norm which is
defined in terms of degree zero. However, since
degree zero very often represents an ideal,94 the
authors see it as a purely operational concept.
The notion of deviation and all it implies, par-
ticularly on the ideological plane, could not fail
to give rise to objections. This is why Group J.1
subsequently reviewed their concepts and defined
them more accurately. The figure was now
regarded as a place of tension, interaction, and
interpenetration between a perceived degree and
one or more conceived degree(s), with no hier-
archy whatsoever among these degrees, as is the
case in the dassical and logicist conception of
"tenor" and "vehide," according to the inter-
pretation of many Anglo-Saxon writers and of
Chai"m Perelman. The authors therefore adopted
a viewpoint very similar to that held by Pius
Servien and Solomon Marcus, in whose view
poetic language and scientific language would
constitute theoretic models obeying opposite
tendencies. 95
91Groupe ..... , Rhilorique generale. ser. Langue et Langage (Paris:
Larousse, 1970).
92Gerard Genette, "La rhetorique restreinte," Communications,
16 (1970), pp. 158-171.
93Nevertheless, this is not the case for another Belgian group
of neo-rhetoricians whose main exponent is Chai"m PereI-
man. His interest focuses on the whole problem of argu-
mentation in discourse, as opposed to the problem of
demonstration.
94 Although it might be calculated very precisely on certain
planes and even numbered. The normal redundancy rate
of a text is estimated at 55%, for instance.
95See Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, "Vers un modele theorique
du langage poetique," Degres, I (1973), pp. dl-dI2.
35
The typology of metabole proposed by Group
J.1 is worked out on the basis of two differen-
tiating criteria:
1. The level of linguistic articulation at which
the rhetorical operation takes place allows four
large dass es of figures to be distinguished: the
metaplasms, which alter the morphological aspect
of the code; the metataxes, which alter its syn-
tactical aspect; the metasememes, which alter its
semantic aspect; and the metalogisms, which mod-
ify the relation between utterances and the
referent. 96
2. The type of operation performed on each
of these different aspects introduces aseries of
distinctions within each large dass: the substantial
operations are suppression (partial or complete),
addition (simple or repetitive), and suppression-
addition (partial, complete, or negative). The rela-
tional operations, on the other hand, consist in
permutation of any kind, or in inversion. These
operations imply a decomposition of units at each
level into integrated units of a lower level. Thus,
as far as the metasememes (roughly correspond-
ing to the old tropes) are concerned, they imply
a decomposition into semes, as in Greimas.
Finally, metaplasms presuppose a decomposi-
tion of the phonemes into phemes.
There is no doubt that the most significant
aspect of this whole dassification is the impor-
tance given to the three best-known metase-
memes, namely metaphor, metonymy, and
synecdoche. Traditional rhetoric has usually
considered synecdoche as a particular species of
metonymy which it distinguished in turn from
metaphor. The rhetoric of Jakobson turned this
distinction into a radical and fundamental
opposition.
Group J.1 have different views on this point.
But it is necessary first to note their distinction
between two types of semantic decomposition:
1. If we take a tree for instance, we can con-
sider it as a whole made up of branches and
leaves and roots and a trunk, etc. In this case, we
have made a decomposition according to the material
mode, or mode 11, because the coordinated parts
are related to each other according to a logical
product 11 (co~unction: and).
2. This tree can equally be considered as a
dass containing the sub-dass es of poplars and
9GThis classification was al ready present, though to a lesser
degree, in Tzvetan Todorov, Litterature el signification. ser.
Langue et Langage (Paris: Larousse, 1967).
36 RICHARD MARTIN
oaks and birches, etc. However, one single tree,
from this point of view, can only be a poplar or
an oak or a birch, etc. The decomposition in this
case has been based on the conceptual mode, or mode
I, because the parts are related to each other
according to a logical sum I (conjunction: or).
Therefore, depending on the mode adopted or
imposed for the decomposition of a unit, and
depending on the direction in which the hier-
archy is followed (from the included to the inclu-
der or vice-versa), one can distinguish four types
of synecdoches: the Sg I or conceptual gener-
alizing synecdoche, the Sg II or material gen-
eralizing synecdoche (rare), the Sp II or material
particularizing synecdoche, and finally the Sp I
or conceptual particularizing synecdoche (rarely
"feIt") .
A synecdoche is invariably the resuIt of a sim-
ple operation of addition or suppression,
depending on the circumstances. It is a complex
operation of suppression-addition which is at the
basis of metaphor, as weIl as of metonymy. In
the first case the figure is made up of a double
synecdoche which is generalizing and then par-
ticularizing, of mode I, or else, particularizing
and then generalizing, of mode II. In the second
case the trope is based on a double synecdoche
which is generalizing and then particularizing,
of mode II, or else particularizing and then gen-
eralizing, of mode I.
If the general matrix established by Group f-L
throws light on the mechanism of figures, it
nevertheless does not get as far as answering the
question of the effect of meaning which these
figures produce. In abrief chapter, the authors
deal with the problem of ethos (or effect of mean-
ing) but they mainly refer to a further investi-
gation in which context-an essential issue in
this case--is to be extensively taken into account.
It is in the second chapter of the book, Rhetoric
rif Poetry, that the question of ethos is addressed.
More precisely, the triadic pattern's analysis
represents a contribution to the study of the ethos
of poetic language.
Finally, in the last chapter the group sketches
an initial generalization, by extending rhetorical
analysis to the field of intersubjective relations
in communication ("figures des interlo'cuteurs")
and to the field of narrative in literature, films,
and painting ("figures de la narration") .
The ideas put forward in the Rhitorique generale
could not fail to provoke criticisms. We shall deal
with only two, which the members of Group f-L
answered in a fairly long article entitled "Miroirs
rhetoriques" (1977).
In La Metaphore vive,97 Paul Ricoeur showed
among other things how the whole of French
rhetoric, and in particular that of Group f-L was
founded on a semantics of the word, that is to
say, on a purely semiotic theory in which the
sole unit is the sign. This phenomenon is quite
understandable from a historical point of view.
It draws on the impressive teachings of Saus-
surian linguistics, which make a clear distinction
between language and speech and which place the
latter outside the field of linguistics. Now, the
unit in language is the sign and the unit in speech,
in discourse, is the sentence.
Thus, the tropological theory, and more par-
ticularly the theory of the metaphor, will be a
theory of substitution, that is to say, priority is
given to the system, or to the paradigm.
Conversely, Anglo-Saxon rhetoric, which has
its roots in propositional logic-a fact which
explains a great deal-is based on sentence
semantics, and therefore on a genuine semantics,
which sets the foundation of (its) tropological
theory. The primacy of the syntagm and of the
predicative character of tropes such as the met-
aphor thus gives rise to a theory of interaction or
tension.
In actual fact both points ofview may coexist,
as Pire has noted. 98 Interest may center on the
structure of the metaphor and/or on its truth
value. They even coexist in the Rhitorique generale,
since it is in the horizontal dimension of the
predicative component that the deviation is per-
ceived, i.e., between a "mark" and a "basis,"
whereas the internal structure of the metabole
emerges in the vertical dimension of the figural
component. Furthermore, Ricoeur's interpreta-
tion of these problems is biased due to his exclu-
sive interest in the metaphor alone.
Ruwet99 , for his part, criticizes the taxonomy
of Group f-L for its not having been integrated
into a predictive theory, for having gone beyond
its object (in that it describes non-rhetorical phe-
nomena), and for being too powerful (since it
foresees nonexistent rhetorical phenomena).
Ruwet advocates a theory of tropes based on a
97Paul Ricoeur, La Metaphore vive. ser. L'Ordre Philosophique
(Paris: Seuil, 1975).
98Fran<;ois Pire, "Rhetoric and Rhetorics," Philosoph) and
Rhetoric, 13, No. 3 (Summer, 1980), pp. 147-159.
99Nicolas Ruwet, "Synecdoques et metonymies," Poitique, 23
(1975), pp. 371-388.
 BELGIUM 37
theory of interpretation of utterances in general, neglected from the stand point of the effect pro-
which would consist of five components: "(I) a duced, or of the psychological mechanisms of
semantic theory of the interpretation of sen- emission or reception. Proof of this is the fre-
tences itself, including (a) a system of semantic quent confusion between the two figures. How-
representation of lexical items and (b) a system ever, once again at the level of generating
of semantic rules building up the interpretation mechanisms, the distinction is clearcut. Either
of sentences from semantic representations of its the relation from the whole to one of its parts
lexical components, and of the syntactic struc- (or inversely) is direct, i.e., it does not presup-
ture of these sentences; (2) a theory of reference; pose the existence of a third term which would
(3) a theory of speech acts; (4) a theory of the explain its mechanisms, or the relation from one
effects of context, discourse, and situation; (5) an element to another external to it ("contiguous")
encyclopaedia covering the knowledge of the can only be explained by the insertion of a third
world and the beliefs of speakers." \00 term which in its turn articulates the relation
Only the first component would have been into two movements.
handled by the Rhitorique generale, in which sev- In practice one might hesitate to consider
eral of these phenomena would have been merged smoke a synecdoche of the boat rather than a
und er the one category of seme. metonymy, since according to a still unpublished
Another important point concerns the choice analysis by Group /-l itself, the perception of
of the synecdoche as the fundamental trope. On empirical wholes depends on general knowledge,
the one hand, few of the synecdoches would be which in turn varies according to individuals.
genuine figures. On the other, the real figural Nevertheless, there will be no hesitation what-
synecdoches would be very similar to metony- soever concerning the fact that the relation of
mies, and this would undermine Group /-l's the- smoke to the whole "boat-plus-smoke"-however
ory about metasememes and would support arbitrary and precarious it might be-will always
Jakobson's viewpoint. be synecdochic, whereas the relation of smoke
If the synecdoche does not exist, it cannot be to the whole or "boat-minus-smoke" element will
used as a basis for metaphor and metonymy. always be metonymic. Furthermore, neither the
Conversely, if it does exist, it is no longer impor- metonymy nor the metaphor will ever be
tant whether the majority of examples of so- explained or even perceived in its mechanism
called synecdoches are not synecdoches, provid- until the relation between a perceived degree and
ing the (double) mechanism at work in the met- a conceived degree or degrees is motivated by a
aphor and the metonymy should itself be common element, i.e., one or several included
synecdochic. Since the examples analyzed by seme(s) in the case of metaphor, or an including
Ruwet are excluded from the class of synec- configuration in the case of metonymy.
doches only on the basis of the analysis of certain According to Ruwet, analysis by double synec-
contexts in which the utterances appear, there doche would not be relevant, since anything may
is at this level no need to be concerned about be part of anything, and consequently anything
such exclusion for complementary synecdoches may potentially be the metonymy of anything
which constitute metaphors or metonymies, since else. For instance, in the utterance "Hitler
at this level of description, according to purely invaded Poland in September 1939," "Poland"
operational criteria, the synecdoches in question could be a metonymy of "USSR" since both
have no context-at least not in the sense Ruwet countries belong to the whole: "Eastern bloc."
understands it. Of course, the metaphor or meto- . The objection is only valid if it aims to prove
ny my generated by pairs of synecdoches have a that Group /-l's theory is not predictive, i.e., that
context that makes them perceptible as such. it does not foresee all cases of acceptable meto-
However, the analysis of the mechanisms places nymies and those alone. The neo-rhetoricians'
us at a lower, one might say, infracontextual theory provides in fact the necessary and suffi-
level. cient conditions for obtaining any kind of meto-
The concrete difference between metonymy nymy, but it does not provide the necessary
and synecdoche is much harder to establish. conditions for obtaining an acceptable and per-
Obviously the difference is often negligible or tinent metonymy.
In other words, the Rhitorique generale provides
1()IIIbid., p. 372. only a descriptive theory, which in any case is
38
fundamental in structural research. On the other
hand it does not give an. explanatory theory as
required by Chomsky's generativism of which
Ruwet is a follower. It was not Group .... 's inten-
tion to situate their preliminary research at such
a high level. On the contrary, they contemplated
dealing subsequently with more sensitive prob-
lems of an explicative nature, as we shall see a
little further on.
Even if Ruwet declares the analysis by double
synecdoche irrelevant, under the pretext that it
would in theory open the way to a wild "meton-
ymism," clearly the whole theory cannot be
rejected as Ruwet would seem to suggest. On
the contrary, an attempt should be made to enrich
it, and this would not necessarily consist in rev-
erting to ad-hoc hypotheses, but rather in deepen-
ing the quest and reaching further, more exacting
stages of theorization.
Where lack of relevance does seem to und er-
mine the typology established by Group .... is at
the level of basic operations. No advantage can
be drawn from a generalized description of rhe-
torical mechanisms in terms of additions and
suppressions. Indeed, many other phenomena
besides figures can probably be dealt with in the
same manner. In several instances the distinc-
tion between types of operations proves com-
pletely arbitrary. For example, when it is stated
in the Rhitorique generale that the cinematographic
closeup is a figure by suppression, one might find
this puzzling and consider that it could just as
weIl be seen as an addition, depending on the
point of view. Since at the cinema the size of the
image and of the screen seldom change, one might
also argue, from another point of view, that the
closeup results from a suppression-addition.
Nevertheless it would be less arguable to con-
sider it as a particularizing synecdoche, although
it can be and is analyzed as suppression. How-
ever when the figure cannot be named (since
rhetoric has not foreseen everything), recourse
to the typology of operations proves to be incon-
sistent, because the characterizations then
become in many cases non-falsifiable, and anal-
ysis draws no benefit from such a procedure. 101
If Ruwet regards the table worked out by
Group .... as too powerful and therefore rather
IOIIf psychoanalysis, as Popper believes, cannot reach the in accordance with any procedure.,,103
status of a science, this is because (many 01) its theoretical
propositions are not falsifiable-but the relative therapeutic
value of the applications of psychoanalysis justify its exist-
ence in a certain way.
RICHARD MARTIN
cumbersome, this is probably because it foresees
all possible figur es in all possible worlds and not
only in the real world, that is, (to, be strictly
accurate), in our present Western world. On the
other hand, if it might seem awkward that only
one out of the four types of synecdoches can
effectively be met with or felt as a figure, it seems
that this disequilibrium is compensated for at
the more abstract level of figural mechanisms,
since none of the four types can be dispensed
with in constituting metaphors and metonymies.
However, empty squares, "overftowing"
squares, and disequilibria should be fully
explained; and perhaps this would lead to a com-
pIe te transformation of the table. Notwithstand-
ing,- the table has at the very least a heuristic
value which cannot be neglected.
In 1977, with Rhitorique de la POeSie,102 Gr6up
.... (reduced to four members-]. Dubois,
F. Edeline,].-M. Klinkenberg, and P. Minguet)
established a program at once more limited and
more ambitious. At variance with ]akobson,
whose poetic function, and the underlying prin-
ciple of its definition, does not allow one to dis-
cem the poetic phenomenon in the strictest sense,
the authors endeavored to focus on poetry alone
as a literary genre in order to isolate its char-
acteristic features. Group .... believed that this
could not be achieved by means of a single cri-
terion, still less by a linguistic one.
This work represents an improvement on the
Rhitorique generale. It consists of two parts, the
second containing exhaustive analyses of poetic
texts of varied origins. While the first essay
examined stylistic devices as isolated elements,
the Rhitorique de la poesie considers them within
their context, shifting from the level of utterance
to that of the text. Norm is thus defined in terms
of isotopy, a concept that was borrowed from
Greimas and extended to the field of the signifier,
as in the work of Rastier. The former concept
of deviation is then viewed as a break in the
isotopy, or as an allotopy. When certain criteria
are met, allotopies may produce a polyisotopy
which is a necessary condition for the poeticity
of the text. Consequently, rhetorical units are
defined as "connecting sets of variable extent
that may be read on the basisof more than one
isotopy at a time inside a single utterance and
102Groupe IJ., Rhitorique de La poesie (Brussels: Complexe, 1977).
103Ibid., pp. 56-57.
 BELGIUM
Thus, the tabular reading, which is the result of
both a linear reading-which in turn follows
its own rules in poetry (see Chapter 5 in
particular )-and of a rereading made necessary
by the various allotopies, records and puts at
play the highest possible number of rhetorical
units. 104 These units may either be given, and are
thus rhetorical units performing a role as con-
nectors between the different isotopies, or they
may be projected through a process of retrospec-
tive correction, or according to pre-textual factors.
Polyisotopy by itself cannot define the poetic
object. It must be supplemented with the triadic
model which accounts for the more general but
constant form of content in poetry, at least in
Western poetry. Poetry seems to display and to
oppose two fundamental semantic categories
sharing the total field of concepts. These are the
category of Anthropos (everything relating to the
human as subject) and thecategory of Cosmos
(everything in existence besides the human). The
resulting effect is one of totality, microcosm, and
closure.
Nevertheless, this antagonism undergoes a
process of reduction which in turn creates a sense
of well-being-contrary to what happens in the
tragedy where the opposition persists. Thus, it
is the category of Logos ("all manifestations of
the communicational function, which include
mythic beings, literary characters, works of art,
etc."I05) which performs a mediation. It can occur
explicitly or implicitly even in the case where
mediation is actually rejected, as in some poetic
trends which date as far back as Mallarme, or
in poetry based on word games (emphasizing
the signifier) in contrast to poetry based on the
metaphor (which underscores the signified).
By comparing Ungaretti's laconic verse "M'il-
lumino d'immenso" with the equally laconic for-
mula "I like Ike" analyzed by Jakobson, the
authors reach the conclusion that only the first
is apoern. The gap between the two elements
which are rhetorically linked (mediation) is much
wider in this instancethan in the second. This
conception of poetry cannot fail to bring to mind
the views held by the Surrealists themselves and
confirms furthermore one of Group f.L's basic
viewpoints, namely that rhetoricity and literarity
are intimately linked.
1'''Graupe .... , "Rhetorique poetique: Le jeu des figures dans
un poeme de Paul Eluard," The Romanic Review, 58, fase.
2 (1972), pp. 125-151.
""Graupe .... , Rhitorique de la poesie, p. 85.
39
Poetry is also characterized by the specific use
it makes of the temporal properties of discourse.
Thus, linear time becomes cyclic time due to the
numerous processes of feedback and feed-forward.
Although the issue of ethos was examined more
in depth than it had ever been in the Rhitorique
generale, Group f.L nevertheless had to recognize
the limited scope of their research and admit
that the undoubtedly more laborious question of
the value of texts did not fall within the compe-
tence of rhetoric or poetics (despite several sug-
gestions supporting this idea as mentioned above,
namely that increased rhetoricity should in prin-
ciple correspond to increased value).
Moreover, acting on repeated criticism, the
authors put not only the object of their study to
the test of a lucid ideological scrutiny but also
their approach and the instruments they had
chosen to use.
The Rhitorique de la poesie seems to display all
the characteristics of a poetic. The title of the
work is in fact too modest, since rhetoric is,
according to the authors themselves, a necessary
but by no means adequate condition for poet-
icity. Admittedly, the more rhetorical a text is,
the more poetic it is likely to be. On the other
hand the prudence, even scepticism shown by
this group concerning the possibility of appre-
hending the specificity of poetry leads one to
consider their work another particular rhetoric
situated half way between a true general rhetoric
and a true poetic. In this case they would be
closer to Jakobson than they appeared at first
sight.
B. Semiology of Imagery
Research undertaken by Philippe Dubois (a
recent member of Group f.L) could serve to bridge
the gap between the two fields, since it aims at
establishing a rhetoric of the signifier viewed,
among other things, in its materiality.
In a third, still uncompleted section which was
prompted by P. Minguet's preliminary studies,106
106Philippe Minguet, "Metaphore et metonymie dans les lan-
gages non linguistiques," in Le Langage, Actes du XlIIe
Congres des Societes de Philosophie de langue fran<;aise,
Geneve 1966 (Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1966), pp. 261-
264; "Metaphores de la peinture et peinture de la meta-
phore," Journal of the Faculty 01 Letters, The Uniuersity 01
Tokyo: Aesthetics, 3 (1978), pp. 71-82. "L'isotopie de
I'image," in A Semiotic Landscape (The Hague: 1979),
pp. 791-794.
40 RICHARD MARTIN
Group JA, is currently undertaking research in
the field of the rhetoric of imagery as suggested
by a comparison between the "reading" of a
painting and the tabular reading of a poem. 107
However, differences between the verbal and the
iconic are visible at the very start, e.g., in the
case of the metaphor. 108
The authors establish a first distinction in vis-
ual messages between iconie signs on the one hand
and plastie signs on the other. The latter are set
in a system which is deprived of any preesta-
blished code and in which rhetoric therefore plays
a special part. Indeed, the deviation occurs from
a loeal degree zero which is solely provided by the
isotopy of the "utterance."
Even though the plastic signifier has a matter
and a substance, nevertheless it has no real form
since the substance in this case is a eontinuum.
We will therefore speak in terms of gradation. The
norm being defined as a combination of iso-
materiality and allogradation, three types of
deviation can be considered to pertain to the field
of rhetoric at the plastic level.
At the level of the plastic signified, the rhe-
torical deviations must be evaluated in relation
to certain norms underlying the systems of chro-
matism and spatiality.
At the iconic level, which is generally better
known since it is the field of the analogical, rhet-
oric must be defined in terms of polyisotopy,
which is obtained by the re evaluation of different
kinds of allotopies, or through the projection of
a new isotopy (a pre-textual one, for instance).
One unquestionable advantage of the plastic
vs. iconic antinomy is to provide an adequate
semiotic and rhetorical analysis of abstract
painting.
The semiotics of photography as undertaken
by Rene Lindekens seems more sophisticated but
perhaps also more arduous. In contrast to Buys-
sens, for example, Lindekens holds that "a priori,
semiotics precludes any intention of communi-
cation."IO'l Moreover, contrary to the taxono-
mists, he supports the axiomatic viewpoint, which
calls for an explicit theory of the sign. Basing
II17Philippe Minguet, "Metaphores de la peinture," p. 793.
IIJ8Groupe /J-, "La chafetiere est sur la table. Elements pour
une rhetorique iconique," Communicalion el Langages, 29
(1976), pp. 36-49.
""'Rene Lindekens, "Semiotique de la photographie," in A
Semiotic Landscape (1979), p. 139.
hirnself on Hjelmslevian and Greimasian theo-
ries, Lindekens' intent is to emphasize the sub-
stance of the photographic expression in order
to disclose a pure iconic code llO that impresses
itself unconsciously upon our perception and
determines the specific cutting-up of the world.
Thus, Lindekens is opposed to Barthes on the
one hand, who considers photography a "mes-
sage without a code," and to Metz on the other,
who believes that the cutting up of the world in
photography is derived from the code of lan-
guage. Many concrete experiences with "naive
readers" seem to confirm the existence of dis-
tinctive ieonie fiatures as constituents of ieonic mor-
phemes, i.e., minimal significant units which at a
later stage are set up in supermorphemes at the time
verbalization occurs. This leads to an ieonie mean-
ing distinct from the identiJjing signification. The
latter acts at the analogicallevel and is ruled by
the linguistic and anthropological codes. Quite
frequently, this meaning is not consciously per-
ceived by the reader, who confuses it with sig-
nifieation, but it is still fully present as the result
of a process of iconization, i.e., a codifiable
transformation of the visible world.
To this preverballanguage there corresponds
a parole (in the Saussurian sense) which actual-
izes it and in which personal and social idiolects
may be distinguished. Thus, Lindekens does not
believe that the language of imagery is universal.
Besides a rhetoric of analogical information-
or a rhetoric of the continuous-in which Barthes
includes all the rhetorical aspects of photo-
graphic imagery, that is to say the figures that
modify the visible reality as well as those that
do not, Lindekens examines the existence of a
rhetoric of iconic meaning-or a rhetoric of the
discontinuous-which actually accounts for the
second type of figure set out by Barthes.
This kind of semiology poses a classic prob-
lem, namely the recourse to verbal language as
a metalanguage. Inevitably, the use of verbal
language to describe what is pre-verbal or can-
not be verbalized prevents Lindekens from
reaching definite conclusions.
Research on television and cinema is undoubt-
edly less homogeneous, and less extensive. Never-
theless, some researchers deserve mention, such
as Hadelin Trinon-a co-author of Rhitorique
'11J"Iconic" in this case rather refers to what Group /J- calls
"plastic. "
 BELGIUM
ginirale-and Adolphe Nysenholc, whose book
L'Age d'or du comique (based largely on a psy-
choanalytic approach) appears as a "Semiology
ofCharlie Chaplin." Lindekens andJean-Marie
Peeters should also be mentioned in connection
with this field.
C. Other Fields
Semiology of drama has been the object of
several articles by Edmond Radar, of an essay
by Raymond Ravar and Paul Anrieu, and of
some essays by Andre Helbo. Like Metz, Andre
Helbo devotes special attention to the embroil-
ment of codes which is characteristic of the dra-
matic phenomenon and especially to the multiple
and complex relations between the digital and
the analogical. He tries to isolate the various
semiologicallevels and to establish the necessary
distinctions between, e.g., the dramatic and the
theatrical or between the various manifestations
of semiosis, using for this purpose the typology
of signs established by Sebeok, after Peirce. Helbo
eventually appeals to interdisciplinarity (proxem-
ics, kinesics, etc.) in order to "escape from the
tyranny of linguistic modeling.,,111
The semiology of advertising is sporadically
represented by Joseph Bya, France Govaerts, and
Rene Lindekens.
With regard to semiology in the field of the
press, Pascale Delfosse's essay Riformisme et presse
ouuriere deserves mention, because it provides a
study of the socio-political his tory of Belgium
based on a semiotic analysis of ideologies which
is closely linked to a historical analysis of the
marxist type. In order to "define the character-
istic aspects of the development of a social
grouping, " 1 12 namely, the evolution of the social
reformist ideology at the turning point of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the author
examines the leading articles in the major Bel-
gi an socialist daily papers of that period. Her
approach is not thematic, as is usually done, but
semiotic, and the tools of her analysis are pro-
vided by Greimas's work. Thus, she succeeds in
isolating at three distinct levels-the rhetorical
IIIAndre Relbo el aL., SemioLogie de La reprisenlalion. ser. Creu-
sets (Brussels: Complexe, 1975). p. 72.
ll'Pascale Delfosse, Riformisme el preISe Duvriere. Hisloire el semio-
lique. ser. Dossiers Media (Brussels: Labor et Nathan, 1979),
p.37.
41
(discursive), the actantial, and the taxonomic-
a common three-term structure of the
conjunctive-disjunctive type in which only the
contents vary from one level to another: "oppo-
sitions (disjunctions) between values, social
classes, various groups, etc. are established and
then 'retrieved' by conjunctive links with unify-
ing terms that both include and reject the former
oppositions and reveal the real content of a refor-
mist action." 113 This approach brings to light the
"trade-unionism," "legalism, " and "paternal-
ism" that characterize the political trends of that
period.
In the field of music, Celestin Deliege has based
his research on Saussurian linguistics in order
to establish a musical semantic by considering
the score exclusively. This approach can be
opposed to that of Henri Pousseur, who is less
infiuenced by linguistics than by sociology and
musicology and who emphasizes problems of
interpretation in particular. Conversely, Ruwet
applies to music the same method he used in
poetics, which is based on J akobson's principle
of equivalence, Levin's theory on couplings, and
the contribution of the generativists.
Edmond Radar has been partly infiuenced by
Jakobson's theories in his works on urbanism,
fashion, education, etc. His research, which at
tim es is not very thorough, seeks to find the ele-
ments corresponding to the six functions of
communication.
The essays of Luc De Heusch in the field of
anthropology define his approach in relation to
that of Levi-Strauss and also attempt to make a
distinction between languages (langues) and lan-
guage (langage) while criticizing the extension of
linguistic methodological concepts to the study
of mythology conceived as a language.
Finally, in a really pan-semiotic vision of cul-
ture, Henri Van Lier, in his recent work L 'Animal
signi, tries to "demonstrate that the originality
of man derives from the sign and the various
ways it functions." 1 14 Thus, he means to situate
the sign, according to its two general forms-
irnage and symbol-in the history of the uni-
verse, i.e., at the moment of man's first appear-
ance in the world and after the prevailing
infiuence of the signal and the stimulus-signal.
ll3Ibid., p. 157.
ll4Remi Van Lier, L'AnimaL signi (Rhode-St.-Gencse: De
Visscher, 1980).
42 RICHARD MARTIN
However, the his tory of mankind has been
marked by certain decisive periods. Some of these
have been due to the sign, the status of which
is changing. Van Lier maintains that there has
been an evolution from a "sign-making" ancestor
(the semiotic animal) to a "sign theorizing" con-
temporary (the semiological man). It is not possible
here to summarize Van Lier's views in their
entirety. The encyclopedic complexity of his
ideas, which show a strong tendency toward bi-
narism (probably inspired by Jakobson), lead
the author to reject the index from Peirce's triad,
since he regards it as an effect of which a cause
can be inferred.
VI. Semiotic Activities
Semiotic activities in Belgium, though varied,
are not centralized and, therefore, have not been
the object of any institutionalization on anational
scale. Although there is as yet no Belgian Society
for Semiotics, some universities offer courses in
semiotics (Brussels: A. Helbo and A. Nysenholc;
Louvain-la-Neuve: M. Otten; Liege:J.-M. Klin-
kenberg and Ph. Minguet; et al.).
Also, the U niversity of Louvain, in 1980, ins ti-
tuted various series, certain publications of which
are specifically addressed to semiotic issues.
Notably, three works, ll5 which parallel the work
of Gerard Deledallein France, have contributed
to diffusing the Peircean theory of sign, which
has, in recent years, inspired researchers more
and more. Thus, for example, Philippe Dubois,
in a remarkable work on the pragmatics of pho-
tography,1\6 pi aces the diverse attempts at a
theorization of the pragmatics of photography
in diachronic relation with the well known tri-
chotomies of the sign: in effect, photography has
been successively conceived as icon, as symbol
and as index.
In addition, groups or individuals are con-
ducting research everywhere in the country:
115Theresa Calvet de Magalhaes, Signe ou Symbole. sero Tra-
vaux de Semantique et Hermeneutique. (Louvain-la-Neuve
and Madrid: Cabay, 1981); Un, deux, trois catigoriesjimda-
mentales. ser. Questions de Communication. (Louvain-1a-
N euve and Madrid: Cabay, 1981); Enrico Carontini, L 'Ac-
tion du signe. (2 vo1s.) sero Questions de Communication.
(Louvain-Ia-Nel!ve: Cabay, 1982/1983).
116Philippe Dubois, L 'Acte photographique. sero Dossiers Media.
(Paris/Brussels: Nathan et Labor, 1983).
• In Mons, articles on semiology are fre-
quently published in a journal entitled:
Cahiers Intemationaux de Symbolisme.
• Degris, a journal with a markedly semio-
logical orientation, has been published in
Brussels since 1973 under the supervision of
Helbo, who is also the editor of the "Creusets"
series for the publishing house Complexe.
• The "Communication and Cognition" group
at the U niversity of Ghent (Gand) also pub-
lishes its own journal.
• In Antwerp, Herman Parret and Jef Ver-
schueren head a group with definitely more
pragmaticist tendencies which publishes
short studies in aseries entitled "Pragmatics
and Beyond."
• Finally, there is Group fJ. in Liege, whose
activities we have already mentioned.
VII. Bibliography
The works examined or slmply mentioned in
this chapter and which are listed here were writ-
ten by Belgian scholars only (including scholars
of Belgian origin, or foreign scholars living in
Belgium). Other important works or articles
which for various reasons were omitted from the
text are also included.
Apostel, Leo. "Towards the Formal Study of Models in the
Non-formal Sciences." Synthese, 12 (1960), 125-161.
- - - . "Syntaxe, semantique et pragmatique."· In Logique
et connaissance scientifique. Ed. Jean Piaget. sero La Pleiade.
Paris: Gallimard, 1967, pp. 289-311.
- - - . "Symbole et Parole." Cahiers Intemationaux de Sym-
bolisme, 22-23 (1973), 5-23.
Bard6n, Sa1vador Garcia. Semantique du texte. ser. Travaux
de Semantique et Hermeneutique. Louvain-Ia-Neuve:
Cabay, 1981.
Buyssens, Eric. Les langages et le discours. Brussels: Office de
Publicite, 1943. J
- - - . "Le langage par gestes chez les moines." Revue de
l'Institut de Sociologie. Brussels, 1956.
- - - . La Communication et I'articulation linguistique. Brussels
and Paris: Presses U niversitaires de Bruxelles et Presses
Universitaires de France, 1970.
Bya,Joseph. "La Publicite ou le disours detourne de la mar-
chandise." Litterature, 12 (1973), 36-49.
- - - . La Transaction et les formes dans la rhetorique
publicitaire." Degres, 5 (1974), d1-dI5.
Calvet de Magalhaes, Theresa. Un, deux, trois, catigories fln-
damentales. ser. Questions de Communication, 3. Louvain-
la-Neuve: Cabay, 1981.
- - - . Signe ou symbole. sero Travaux de Semantique et Her-
meneutique. Louvain-Ia-Neuve: Cabay, 1981.
Carontini, Enrico. L'Action du signe. 2 vols. sero Questions de
Communication, 7. Louvain-Ia-Neuve: Cabay, 1982/1983.
 BELGIUM
Carontini, Enrico and Daniel Peraya. Le Projet semiotique. ser.
Encyclopedie Universitaire. Paris: Delarge, 1975.
De Heuseh, Luc. "Anthropologie structurale et symbol-
isme." Cahiers Intemationaux de Symbolisme, 2 (1963),51--66.
- - - . Pourquoi l'epouser et autres essais. Paris: Gallimard,
197!.
- - - . Le Roi ivre ou l'origine de l'etat. Paris: Gallimard, 1972.
Delfosse, Pascale. Rfformisme et presse ouvnere. Histoire et semio-
tique. ser. Dossiers Media. Paris, Brussels: Nathan-Labor,
1979.
Deliege, Celestin. "La Musicologie devant le structural-
isme." L'Arc, 26 (1965),48-55.
- - - . "Approche d'une semantique de la musique." Revue
Beige de Musicologie, 20, No. 164 (1966), 21-42.
- - - . "Theorie et pratique de I'analyse musicale." Bel-
grade: Recueil des rapports du premier Congres de Semiol-
ogie musicale, 1973.
- - - . Pierre Boulez, par volonte ef par hasard. Paris: Seuil,
1975.
- - - . "Theories recentes de la tonalite." Degres, 18 (1979),
dl-d26.
Dubois, Jacques. "Une ecriture a saturation." Etudes Litter-
aires, 3 (Quebec: 1971),297-310.
- - - . L'Assommoir de Zola. Societe, discours, ideologie. ser.
Themes et Textes. Paris: Larousse, 1973.
"Code, texte, metatexte." Litterature, 12 (1973), 3-
I!.
"Surcodage et protocole de lecture dans le roman
naturaliste." Poetique, 16 (1973), 491-498.
Dubois, Philippe. "La metaphore filee et le fonctionnement
du texte." Le Fran(ais Modeme, 43, No. 3 (1975),202-213.
- - - . "Esthetique du collage: un dispositif de ruse." Annales
d'Esthftique (Athens), 15-16 (1976-1977), 74-100.
- - - . "L'Italique et la ruse de I'oblique. Le tour et le
detour." In L'Espace et la lettre. Ecritures, typographies. Ed.
Anne-Marie Christin. ser. 10/18 Paris: U.G.E., Cahiers
Jussieu, Nov. 1977, pp. 243-256.
- - - . "L'Enonciation narrative du recit surrealiste: I'i-
dentite de l'objet et du sujet couplee a la conquete du nom.
Vers une circularite de la narration." Litterature, 25 (1977),
I 9-4 !.
- - - . "Anamorphöses: dispositifs rhetoriques et effets de
sens." 34/44: Cahiers de Recherches en Sciences des Textes et
Documents, 2 (1977), 117-126.
- - - . "La Metaphore filee: machinerie rhetorique et
machination narrative." In Strategies discursives. Ed. Alain
Berrendonner. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1978,
pp. 267-280.
- - - . Fragments d'une rhftonque du signifiant. Diss. Liege 198!.
- - - . L'Acte photographique. ser "Dossiers Media." Paris,
Bruxelles: Nathan-Labor, 1983.
Dubois, Philippe and Yves Winkin, eds. Langage et ex-
communication, pragmatique et discours sociaux. sero Questions
de communication, 5. Louvain-Ia-Neuve: Cabay, 1982.
Edeline, Francis "Le symbole et l'image selon la theorie des
codes." Cahiers Intemationaux de Symbolisme, 2 (1963), 19-
33.
- - - . "Aspects logiques dujeu de mots poetique." Dialec-
tica, 66/67 (1964),297-306.
- - - . "La poesie et les elements." Cahiers Intemationaux de
Symbolisme, 8 (1965), 75-93.
- - - . "Contribution de la rhetorique a la semantique gen-
erale." Versus,3 (1972),69-78.
43
- - - . "Sy~taxe et poesie concrete." Courrier du Centre Inter-
national d'Etudes Poftiques, 89 (1972), 3-19.
- - - . "Mediation rhetorique et formation du symbole."
Cahiers Intemationaux de Symbolisme, 26 (1974), 27-38.
Everaert-Desmedt, Nicole. Sfmiotique du recit. sero Questions
de Communication, 2. Louvain-Ia-Neuve: Cabay, 198!.
Geerts, Walter. "La lecture comme performance-
psycholinguistique et communication litteraire." In A
Semiotic Landscape. Ed. Seymour Chatman, Umberto Eco,
andJean-Marie Klinkenberg. The Hague, Paris, New York:
Mouton, 1979, pp. 644--647.
Govaerts, France. "Rüles et discours publicitaire. Une ana-
lyse sociosemiologique." Colloque, Universite de Liege,
1975.
- - - . "Le discours publicitaire, un modele ideologique."
Degres, 10 (1975-1976), dl-d12.
Groupe de Syntheses de Louvain. La Signification du corps. Ed.
L. Morren. sero Linguistique, Epistemologie et Semio-
tique. Louvain-Ia-Neuve: Cabay, 1981.
Groupe JI., "Rhetorique generalisee." Cahiers Intemationaux de
Symbolisme, 15-16 (1968), 103_115.
- - - . Rhftonque generale. ser. Langue et Langage. Paris:
Larousse, 1970.
- - - . "Rhetoriques particulieres." Communications, 16
(1970), 70-124.
- - - . "Rhetorique poetique: Le jeu des figures dans un
poeme de Paul Eluard." The Romanic Review, 58, No. 2
(1972), 125-151.
- - - . "Lecture du poeme et isotopies multiples." Le Fran-
(ais Moderne, 42, No. 3 (1974), 217-236.
- - - . "La chafetiere est sur la table. Elements pour une
rhetorique iconique." Communication et Langages, 29 (1976),
36-49.
- - - . "Isotopie et allotopie: le fonctionnement rhetorique
du texte." Versus, 14 (1976), 41--65.
- - - . "Miroirs rhetoriques." Poetique, 29 (1977), 1-19.
- - - . Rhftonque de la poesie. Brussels: Complexe, 1977.
- - - . "Ironique et iconique." Poetique, 36 (1978), 427-442.
- - - . "Douze bribes pour decoller en 40.000 signes." In
Collages. Ed. Groupe JI. (special numbers of the Revue
d'Esthftique, 3-4 [1978]), 11-41.
- - - . "Trois fragments d'une rhetorique de I'image." Doc-
uments de Travail (Urbino), 82--83 (1979).
- - - . "Iconique et plastique, sur un fondement de la rhe-
torique visaelle." In Rhftoriques, semiotiques. Ed. Groupe JI.
(special numbers of the Revue d'Esthftique, 1-2 [1979]),
173-192.
- - - . "Plan d'une rhetorique de l'image." Kodikas/Code,
2, No. 3 (1980), 249-268.
- - - . Rhftonque generale. rev. ed. sero Points. Paris: Seuil;
English translation, A General Rhetoric. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University, 1982.
- - - . "Avant-gardes et rhetoriques." In Les Avanf-gardes
litteraires au XXe siede, Vol. 2. Ed.J. Weisgerber. Budapest:
Akademiai Kiado, 1984, pp. 881-940.
Helbo, Andre. "Etudes semiotiques en Belgique." Versus,8-
9 (1974), 9-17.
- - - . "Prolegomenes a la semiologie du theatre: une lec-
ture de Port-Royal." Semiotica, 11, No. 4 (1974), 359-374.
- - - . Michel Butor, vers une litterature du signe. ser. Creusets.
Brussels: Complexe, 1975.
- - - . L 'Enjeu du discours, lecture de Sartre. ser. Creusets. Brus-
sels: Complexe, 1975.
44 RICHARD MARTIN
"Reflexions sur la semiologie du theitre." In A Semiotic
Landscape. Eds. S. Chatman, U. Eco, and J.-M. Klinken-
berg. The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton, 1979, pp. 873-
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Helbo, Andre, et al. Semiologie de la representation. ser. Creusets.
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Klinkenberg, J ean-Marie. "Elements d'une rhetorique
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 CHAPTER 3
Semiotics in Brazil
Monica P. Rector
I. Historical Development
Before exploring the specific subject of this chap-
ter, I would like to briefty survey the cultural
background, not only of Brazil but of Latin
America in general, in which the study of semiot-
ics has emerged. Portuguese and Spanish colo-
nization, imposed upon an indigenous population
and then mixed with African Negro blood, gave
rise to a Latin American civilization still known
throughout the worId as underdeveloped and
belonging economically to the Third W orId.
Although Brazil has problems quite different from
its Spanish American neighbors, the basic socio-
cultural aspects have been the same, varying only
according to the political moment. Over the cen-
turies cultural models from Europe were also
imposed upon Latin America, often via the col-
onizing power which had interpreted the models
according to its own needs. Thus there emerged
the attitude that only what was imported was of
a.ny value, and that anything imported was supe-
nor to what was produced at horne. This attitude
extended from the material level to the intellec-
tual, encompassing ideas and thoughts.
Monica P. Rector • Department of Social Communi-
cation, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil.
47
Although Brazil (and the rest of Latin Amer-
ican) had achieved political independence ear-
li er in the nineteenth century, Portugal was
considered a model until the beginning of the
twentieth century. Because the university is a
fairIy re cent phenomenon in Brazil (the first one
was the University of Sao Paulo established in
1934), upper dass families perpetuated this tra-
dition by sending their children to study either
in Lisbon or Coimbra, and these, in turn, con-
tinued to import European customs and trends
into Brazil. The twentieth century has witnessed
changes in this trend; Brazilians still consider
European c~lture an intellectually up-to-date one,
but t~e Umted States now, for the most part,
occuples the place that Europe on ce did in the
Brazilian mentality. However, the diplomatie
language remains French, and French has been
and still is the model adopted in theories of lan-
guage and literature. Most of the research work
in these areas is original in its practices, but there
exists a general timidity on the part of most
Brazilian scholars to elaborate their own theo-
ries, so the theoretical framework continues to
be based on foreign sourees.
In the field of semiotics in general there have
emerged several tendencies. These may be sim-
plified and grouped around the theoretical and
methodological tendencies to which they adhere:
48 MONICA P. RECTOR
(1) semiotics which is linguistic in origin, stem-
ming from Ferdinand de Saussure; (2) semiotic
research based on Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud, developed by psychoanalysts following
the theories of J acq ues Lacan; (3) semiotic
research in discoursc analysis, according to A. J.
Greimas's orientations; (4) semiotic investiga-
tions of verbal language, especially that of lit-
erature and mass communications, influenced
by Charles Sanders Peirce; (5) semiotic inves-
tigations of literature, essentially following the
Paris-based group of writers that ineludes Tzve-
tan Todorov, Claude Bremond, Roland Barthes
and J ulia Kristeva; (6) semiotic research by
pragmaticists working on the analysis of lan-
guage, according to John Searle's and John C.
Austin's philosophy of language.
In Brazil there are several orientations which
can basically be reduced to four which parallel
and combine the abovementioned trends: the
influence of Peirce on literary studies and studies
in communications; the influence of Lacan on
psychoanalysis (particularly in Rio and Sao
Paulo, and also in Caracas, Venezuela); the
influence of Bernard Pottier and Greimas on
studies in linguistics; the influence of the Paris
group on literature.
We cannot pretend here to make a complete
description or elassification of the Brazilian bib-
liography on semiotics, although it is not exten-
sive. Bibliographic references giving a more
thorough picture of the extent of interest in
semiotics in Brazil may be found in the following
key works:
Barros, Diana L. Pessoa deo "Bibliographie semiotique"
(Atlas). Actes Semiotiques, 7 (1984), pp. 93-96.
Campos, Haroldo deo "Prolegomenos a la actividad estruc-
turalista en Brasil: contexto de una especificidad (EI estruc- of native cultural forms, the order imposed by
turalismo y la semiologia en America Latina, II)." Lenguajes,
3 (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision, 1976).
Carvalho, Julio. "Semiologia no Brasil." Revista de Cultura
Va<:es, 8, No. 68 (Petropolis: Vozes, 1974). , activity. The resistance to the critical and trans-
Pignatari, Decio and Lucrecia d'Alessio Ferrara. "Etudes de
semiotique au Bresil." Versus, 8/9 (Milano: Bompiani, 1974),
pp. 22-31.
Rector, Monica. "Semiotik in Lateinamerika. " Zeitschriftfir
Semiotik 2. (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft.
Athenaion. 1980).
Rector, Monica and Eduardo Neiva, Jr. "Estudo dos signos
no Brasil." Revista de Cultura Vo<:es, 9, No. 72 (Petropolis:
Vozes, 1978).
Semiological studies and investigations in writings were published in Portuguese. Two years
Brazil were, at the beginning, linked to the work later the Associa<;ao Brasileira de Semi6tica was
of a particular group of writers and critics advo-
cating structuralism. France was the principal
center from which structuralism was imported
into Brazil, so authors and works ci ted among
the Brazilian group tended to be the same and
the references cited can be reduced to a basic
lisL The "first semiology" of the sixties which
was brought to Brazil was heavily influenced by
the thought of the structural anthropologist Levi-
Strauss and by such authors as Barthes and
Greimas. The common denominator of the work
of these scholars is the structural linguistics
inspired by Saussure.
Also of importance to the beginnings of
semiotics in Brazil was the literary movement
known as concretismo. This literary manifestation
of the 50s with concretist poetry as its basis
brought together poets and critics who pro mo ted
a dialogue to renew the theory and practice of
textual studies, breaking radically with tradi-
tional approaches to literature, and creating
enthusiasm as weil as resistance.
These two aspects-structuralism and concre-
tismo---are important in explaining the begin-
nings of semiotics in Brazil. I t is important,
however, to specify the difficulties encountered
by semioticians during this initial phase in Bra-
zil. Obstaeles to the incipient discipline took the
form of an absence of theoretical texts in the
Portuguese language and the hostility of many
established critics and writers toward any cre-
ative or innovative research that did not fall
within the academic cultural tradition. The first
obstaele was more easily overcome than the sec-
ond. It is impossible to understand any cultural
manifestation in Brazil without taking into
account the kind of domination created by ethnic
and logocentric knowledge. After the destruction
the colonizers was maintained by use of rhetoric
and oratory, instead of a critical and reflexive
verbal activity o[ semiotic studies was to be
expected in the type of atmosphere that has per-
sisted throughout Brazilian intellectual history.
The semiotic consciousness, however, brought a
cultural revision, and slowly these many obsta-
eies were overcome.
The year 1972 is an important date in the
evolution of semiotic investigation in Brazil. In
that year the first selections of Charles S. Peirce's
 BRAZIL
founded and began organizing activities such as
symposia and meetings. The Associat;:ao has its
headquarters in Sao Paulo, but since 1974 a
number of regional branches have been es tab-
lished, making semiotics a more real aspect of
Brazilian intellectual life: Sao Paulo, Rio, Cur-
itiba (Parana) , Joao Pessoa (Paraiba), Natal (Rio
Grande do Norte). The great geographical dis-
tances within Brazil that historically have exer-
cised a negative influence on intellectual exchange
create physical and intellectual isolation, forcing
scholars to work on their own. Exchange of ideas
and research in semiotics is limited to periodic
meetings and publication of articles and theses.
Contacts, however, are maintained with neigh-
boring countries, particularly Argentina. Both
Brazil and Argentina publish material by anel
about research in semiotics in each other's coun-
try. An example is the publication of texts of
Argentinian semioticians in the journal Gamum,
in which Eduardo NeivaJr. ' studies, from a Bra-
zilian point of view, the activities in the field of
semiotics in that country.
In its bcginnings in Brazil, scmiotics was used
principally to qualify nondiscursive litcrary
processes. The concrete poets, who first pub-
lished their work in the "Suplemento Dominical"
(Sunday Supplement) of the newspaper Jamal
do Brasil, besides creating poetry, justified this
ncw form of expression through a theoretical
activity based on semiotics. Decio Pignatari and
the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos
were the founders and have been the moving
force behind this process. One of the main points
of concretismo focused on the necessity of rethink-
ing the traditional manifestos of poetry and for-
mulating new ones capable of explaining
innovative poctry of the twentieth century. This
is elaborated in Decio Pignatari's book, Infir-
mar;ao, linguagem, communicar;iio (Sao Paulo: Edi-
tora Perspectiva, 1968), now in its tenth Brazilian
and second Spanish-language edition. In the
chapter "Semi6tica ou a teoria dos signos," the
author discusses the problem of the sign, sum-
marizes the principal theories, and leads the
reader to examine the sign process in mass com-
munication, in thc series Thrones of the poems of
Ezra Pound, in lVlarcel Proust, anel in nonverbal
concrete poems.
'Eduardo NeivaJr., "Um l\10mento na Semi6tica Argentina,
Apresentando Oscar Steimberg e Oscar Traversa," Cornurn
" (1979).
49
The contributions of the literary movement
made an impact in Brazilian universities, par-
ticularly in literature departments-the Facul-
dade de Letras which had been created in 1962,
by resolution no. 19 of the Federal Council of
Education of the Ministry of Education and Cul-
ture. Thc study of signs was introduced into the
curriculum in two disciplines: linguistics and the
theory of literature. However, departments of
literaturc tended to take a logocentric approach
to the study of signs. The model used was from
Saus sure, and this was mostly due to the pub-
lication of the Gours de linguistique generale in Por-
tuguese in 1970 (interestingly enough this was
two years after the publication of Peirce's writ-
ings in Brazil). From Saussure came the basic
principle that linguistics is part of a more general
science and that the laws discovered by semiol-
ogy will be applied to linguistics. This premise
is inverted with the publication in 1972 of Roland
Barthes's Elements de semiologie in Portuguese.
Barthes maintains that linguistics in not a less
privileged part of the theory of signs, but that
semiology is apart of linguistics, "to be precise,
it is that part covering the great signiJjing unities
of dis course. " After 1973, the groups working
under Greimas's orientation in Sao Paulo state
that semiotics is a larger science and linguistics
is one of its branches. The academic tradition
used both premises in studying signs; the lin-
guistic model was placed in opposition to the
iconic predominance in the semiotics of concrete
poetry.
Goncretismo was followed by another move-
ment-the avant-garde group that propounded
the theories of the poema-processo (poem-process)
in 1956. The proponents of the group proposed
a three-part theoretical project: to situate the
marxist space in semiology, to estabIish the
semiological space of semiology, and to establish
the semiotic space of "avant-garde." The poets,
following Saussure, tried to capture the sign
process in its social course, and thus focused
their attention on the political phenomenon of
mass culturc. Once more, there were repercus-
sions in Brazilian universities. The result was
Resolution No. 12, 1969, of the Federal Council
of Education, which states:
The activities of written journalism, radio, television and
cinerna, of public relations, publicity and propaganda, are
to be taught in the undergraduate courses of Social Com-
munication; the students will receivc a bachelor's degree in
these subjccts.
50 MONICA P. RECTOR
The professional institutionalization of the study
of communications in the Brazilian university
system was reflected in the creation of the dis-
cipline "scientific principles of communication."
The study of signs became an integral aspect of
the curriculum of the discipline "theory of
communication. "
We may conclude then that the introduction
of semiotics into Brazil has two directions: the
nonacademic one, through concrete poetry, and
the academic one, through the departments of
literature and communications. The two masters
were first Saussure and then Peirce. The biblio-
graphical field improved vastly with the trans-
lations into Portuguese of more and more
established texts of semiotic studies by such
authors as Eco, Saussure, Barthes, Buyssens,
Peirce, Kristeva, Bense, and Greimas. Particu-
larly active in the divulgation of these authors
has been the Editora Perspectiva and Cultrix of
Sao Paulo. Teachers began to have more readily
available materials in Portuguese for themselves
and theirstudents in their research and appli-
cation of semiotics.
11. Semiotic Fields and
Practices
Semiotic fron tiers are movable and move in
different directions. On the one hand, Thomas A.
Sebeok reveals the field of animal communica-
tion (zoosemiotics), on the other, Erving Goff-
man and Gregory Bateson elaborate aseries of
conversational rules that clarify the social con-
ditions of the practical use of signs. Semiotics
explores the nature of signs, studies one code in
relation to another and the product of this rela-
tionship. Although having ideas in common,
semiotics (Peircean) and semiology (Saussurian)
follow different paths. Both designations have
been used in Brazil, and there is hot one tend-
ency but several. The terms, however, become
confused; both have as their cultural object the
relation between codes, a relation that is the gen-
erator of interpretants.
In Peirce's work we perceive the diversity of
objects to which he dedicated his semiotic stud-
ies, but his lack of systematization sometimes
produces a sense of ambiguity of readings. Saus-
sure has the advantage that he integrated his
principles into a system. It was, however, only
after his ideas were rediscovered and rewritten
by Gödel that his system was made coherent.
Recent investigations redefine semiotics accord-
ing to its object. There are two directions:
(1) Semiotics of communication, which studies
signs, linguistic or not, as a system, leading to
one possible meaning. The communicative func-
tion, which is already implicit in Saussure, is
stressed; and (2) semiotics of signification, which
reveals underlying codes beyond linearity of the
discourse or signifier. This is the real pI ace for
the literary text.
What is the place of semiotics today m schol-
arly research and inquiry? This remains the
question not only in Brazil but in the world in
general as revealed at the two Congresses of the
International Association of Semiotic Studies
(lASS), 1974 and 1979. We might say that
semiotics is an autonomous scientific discipline,
or denying this statement, simply say that it is
a methodological development out of linguistics,
according to some authors, or out of philosophy,
according to others, and that it has now become
an interdisciplinary field related to several human
sciences. In reality, science and philosophy are
two processes of knowledge, and they are com-
plementary. The development of one has an
important influence on the progress of the other.
In general, science is a process of searching for
the truth anti of constructing knowledge, even
if its final purpose is the object of endless argu-
ments. So, the usefulness and social interest of
science cannot be demonstrated scientifically. As
a process, science has the character of adynamie
knowledge. In this sense, it is opposite, in its
everchanging ways, to erudition. As it is a search
for truth, the several scientific truths are always
provisional. On the other hand, science is con-
fused with scientific discourse, which, in its turn,
can be subdivided into discovery discourse (dis-
curso da descoberta), the cognitive adventure of a
subject searching for an object of value-
knowledge--and investigative discourse (discurso
da pesquisa), the narrative of "search" and its
results. The conflict between believing and
knowing is permanent. It is not the world, but
a knowledge about the individual that is pro-
jected upon the world. As metalanguage, the
proposal is to construct a second "vision of the
world," starting from a "built world" in a col-
loquial language.
 BRAZIL
Semiotic studies have displayed from the
beginning an interdisciplinary vocation. Propo-
sitions made by sociology, anthropology, eth-
nology, psychology, his tory, theory of
communication, and theory of information are
present in semiotic investigations. And semiotics
is a science in process of construction, one that
uses methods from linguistics, as weIl as several
other models. The tendency towards interdisci-
plinarianism has increased lately with the inclu-
sion of the so-caIled social (i.e., not literary)
discourses within semiotics: sociosemiotics. Psy-
choanalysis has also been used by semioticians
to explain codes that are conscious, while search-
ing for their meaning in the unconscious. This
is psychosemiotics.
The relations between signification and infor-
mation leads us to aseries of other considera-
tions. The cultural profiles produced by different
semiotic systems in the same sociolinguistic-
cultural community are coherent. The signifi-
cation is produced accordihg to the structures
of each system, but together they produce "visions
of the world" that in turn produce and reflect
the same ideology, that of the culture to which
it belongs. 2 In this sense, aIl paths lead us to a
"semiotic of culture."
With these considerations let us now return
to the two movements that influenced semiotics
in Brazil: structuralism and concrete poetry.
Structuralism became "fashionable" thanks to
the prestige of French culture, a traditional point
of reference for several Brazilian inteIlectual
movements. However, the structuralist orienta-
tion has a background that predates the decade
of the 60s. This background may be simplified
and outlined as folIows: (I) The pioneering
activities of the linguist Joaquim Mattoso
Camara, Jr., a disciple of Sapir, Bloomfield and
Jakobson; (2) the divulgation of the Anglo-North
American new criticism, mainly through the
efforts of Afranio Coutinho; (3) the elaboration
of a sociological-structural approach to literature
presented in the work of Antonio Candido; (4) the
knowledge of Russian formalism transmitted
through the translations of Boris Schnaiderman;
(5) concrete poetry in the early 50s. 3
'Cidmar Teodoro Pais, "Semi6tica, uma Ciencia em Con-
struC;äo," in Anais do /I ColOquio de Semiotica (Rio deJaneiro:
Säo Paulo, PUC/RJ - Loyola, 1983).
3Haroldo de Campos, "EI Estructuralismo y la Semiologia
en America Latina (II)," Lenguajes 3 (1976), 117-118.
51
There are various reasons why structuralism
was surpassed (or surpassed itself). The science
that was its model-linguistics-changed from
structural to transformational and generative,
leading to a substitution of the spatial notion of
structure to the temporal notions of competence
and performance. The phase of description and
definition was foIlowed by an evaluative and crit-
ical phase that was overtaken somehow by lit-
erary structuralism. The arbitrary use of a
method transformed structuralism into a simple
repertoire of pseudoscientific words in some cases.
The analysis of literarycontent was surpassed
by analysis of literary process. A great many of
the books and articles published can be con-
sidered as "semiotic processes." Under this label
we include as literary practices texts on concrete
poetry and poem-process, and semiotic analysis
of literary texts. As to communications, the
semiotic texts are applied to gestures, comic
strips, telenovela, photography, architecture, city
planning, folklore, advertising and musical
language.
In addition to books, there are several articles
in specialized and general publications. The aca-
dernic impulse also gave birth to aseries of theses,
most of which are unpublished but which show
an interest and a continuous struggle for the rec-
ognition of the validity of a semiotic approach
to different disciplines.
The word semiotics, however, still creates a sense
of discomfort in Brazil, and there persists the
erroneous notion that semiology or semiotics is
merely an improved dimension of literary struc-
turalism. This is due to the fact that semiotic
studies have sometimes been read and applied
incorrecdy. The study and application of Peirce's
work provides a good example. His work was
discovered and absorbed only in parts. His co m-
pie te work, the Collected Papers, are to be found
in only two or three libraries in Brazil. A thor-
ough study of his work reveals that his ideas are
constructed carefuIly step by step. Philosophy
for hirn has three divisions: phenomenology, nor-
mative science and metaphysics. Phenomenol-
ogy is the foundation of the other sciences. The
normative sciences on the other hand also have
three divisions: aesthetics, ethics, and logic. The
normative sciences arise from phenomenology;
ethics and logic are based on aesthetics. Ethics
is the basis for logic. Logic is for Peirce, in its
general sense, another name for semiotics. We
52 MONICA P. RECTOR
do not intend to develop Peirce's theory with
these brief statements; we simply outline them
here to point out that to understand hirn, it is
necessary not only to follow his ideoscopy, but
also to have a general culture. And many Bra-
zilian scholars who tried to apply Peirce's con-
cepts either did not have access to his Collected
Papers or were ignorant of this general culture.
Thus his work was read incompletely and often
incorrectly, and the results of some Peircean pro-
ponents in Brazil have led other scholars to mis-
trust semiotics in general.
Peirce's ideas have been introduced into Brazil
mostly through the works of other authors.
Jakobson focuses Peirce's sign classification (icon,
index, symbol) on verbal language. This leads
one to believe, if one bases his opinion on Jakob-
son, that semiotics is more useful to linguistics
than to other fields. Max Bense, on the other
hand, combines in his theories of aesthetics Peir-
cean concepts with concepts of information the-
ory. Peirce's theory is not a recipe which, if
followed correctly, will produce an excellent final
product. According to Peirce, metaphysics is
the science of reality, and reality is sign. Every-
thing that an individual learns consciously is
learned as sign and what we continue calling
nature is a sign for uso In this semiosis, we find
reality.
Eliseo Veron, whose work has had an impact
on Brazilian scholars, attempts to systematize
this "reality" in a field of sign-systems or lan-
guage, which he calls a "field of ideological man-
ifestation." This field embraces linguistic (verbal)
and nonlinguistic (nonverbal) messages of social
communication; that is (1) texts (verbal-auditory,
verbal-visual, verbo-voco-visual, visual, audi-
tory and audio-visual codifications); (2) the
organization of social space (architecture, city
and urban planning); (3) the actions of the col-
lective agents and their rules (usage, habits, sys-
tems of institutional, technical, and professional
behavior, systems of organized political action,
rituals, etc.).4 This gives the possibility of clas-
sifying the semiotic process in a more reasonable
and systematic form.
Another phenomenon that tends to occur when
4Eliseo Ver6n, "Condicionesde Producci6n, Modelos Gener-
ativos y Manifestaci6n IdeoI6gica," EI proceso ideol6gico (Bue-
nos Aires: Ed. Tempo Contemporaneo, 1971), p. 269.
literary productions are judged is that any book
containing a social theme on poverty and oppres-
sion will be welcomed by the critic, while on the
contrary any work on the level of the signifier
will be considered unworthy of attention. Even
the word avant-garde is considered dangerous. In
the seventies the avant-garde was accused of
provoking the decay of Brazilian literature and
even of the Portuguese language.
It is necessary to consider, however, that
working with the signifier is the only way of
creating a literary work. The signifier does not
transmit a previous signification; it creates the
meaning in a complex and ambiguous relation
with reality, because at the same time as it affirms
this signification with words, it destroys it. Con-
crete poetry has this effect. Historically, concrete
poetry was born at the same time in Brazil and
in Europe (Bern/Ulm). Both groups had in mind
the evolution offorms and both came to the same
conclusions. Decio Pignatari and the brothers
Haroldo and Augusto de Campos organized, in
1952, the group "Noigandres," which began
publishing concrete poetry in 1956. Thus 1952
and 1956 are fundamental dates for concrete
poetry and thus for semiotics in Brazil. The word
noigandres comes (through Ezra Pound) from the
minstrel of Provence, Arnaut Daniel. First, it
was considered a synonym for poetry in progress,
slogan for experimentation in poetic forms and
research in poetics in general. As Max Bense
says, "concrete art can be understood as a mate-
rial art.,,5
The concrete poets found their inspiration in
Mallarme (Un Coup de des, 1897), in Apolinaire
( Collegrammes, 1918), in J ames J oyce (Ulysses,
1914-21 and Finnegan's Wake, 1922-39), as weIl
as in the works of Ezra Pound and E. E. Cum-
mings. Concrete poetry also brings to mi nd cer-
tain forms of dadaism, futurism, and surrealism.
The starting point, however, is Mallarme, who
demands a functional printing in order to reflect
the "ups and downs" of thought. Devices used
to reflect this include (a) the use of different types;
(b) the positioning of typographical lines from
top to bottom of the page to indicate rising and
falling intonation; (c) the graphic field giving
emphasis to the "white" space on the page;
'Max Bense, Pequena Estitica (Sao Paulo: Perspectiva-USP,
1971).
 BRAZIL
(d) the special use of the page, such as the use
of two unfolded pages where the words form a
whole and at the same time separate themselves
into two groups, to the right and to the left of
the central fold.
The concrete poem is based on economy of
expression. Two or three words procreate, com-
municate their own structure, which is a content
structure. Therefore, to know how to see and
hear structures is the key to understanding a
concrete poem, or let us say, to hearing a poem.
This is an innovative proposal on the part of the
concrete poet; it is one that demands the reader's
participation in processes that traditional poetry
ignored. The verbal, vocal, and visual materi-
ality of the word and of the language is empha-
sized. These elements allow the information to
reach the receiver in a three-dimensional form,
from the material point of view. The word, not
the sentence, is the raw material for the elabo-
ration of the text. The sentence, a conventional
informative characteristic of dassical poetry, is
replaced by a nonlineal distribution of elements.
The goal is not chain texts, but surface texts.
The vocabulary employed in a concrete poem
is relatively small; one word is often repeated or
modified, preserving the main nudeus which is
proposed and interposed, by means of the divi-
sion of words into phonemes and syllabies. The
text becomes aseries of articulated elements.
The positional value of the words on the surface
of the text forms a set of elements in which the
signifier is the signified. Thereforc, each element
is a sign and the text is a set of signs, forming
a structure that communicates and informs at
the same time. This reveals that to make a con-
crete poem does not me an to let intuition or
subjectivity act; it is a constant and methodic
excrcise with a scientific, mathematical basis.
Without using the word semiotics, the verbal-
visual code, the signifier and signified as
employed in concrete poetry, initiated a process
that was later used in several forms of mass com-
munication. However, in order to introduce not
only the name semiotics, but also the entire
movement, symposia and meetings have been
organized in various pI aces in Brazil, but espe-
ically in Rio and Säo Paulo. These two cities are
the principal centers of academic studies and
publishing. (Rio, the former capital and cultural
center of the country has gradually lost its
53
posltIon to Säo Paulo, an industrialized mega-
lopolis.) In most publications resulting from the
symposia, social concerns are present, mainly in
the studies of production of meaning, as well as
in the ideological discourse. This is a conse-
qucnce of the tense political situation that cre-
ated a lack of communication and information
exchange from 1964 until1980. From 1972 until
1984, the Sociedade Brasileira de Professores de
Linguistica (SBPL) has held eighteen meetings
at universities and especially participated in the
annual meetings of the Sociedade Brasileira para
o Progresso da Ciencia (SBPC), during which
symposia, round-tables and communications
have been presented on semiotic studies and
researchers.
In 1978, the Pontificia U niversidade Cat61ica
of Rio de Janeiro held the I Co16quio de Semi-
6tica. 6 This was a joint venture of the Brazilian
and Argentinian semiotic associations, with the
participation of internationally distinguished
specialists: Thomas A. Sebeok (United States),
Eliseo Ver6n, Alain Fourcade, and Claire
d'Hennezel (France). General themes demon-
strated the spectrum of tendencies: semiotics and
soeiety, politics of language, verbal and nonver-
bal processes in the semiotics of culture. The
colloquium showed that semiotics is understood
as the theory of sign systems and the study of
the production of meaning, and that semioti-
cians are in general attempting to find a place
for semiotics in the institutional system.
Also in 1978, the Semiotic Association of Säo
Paulo promoted aseries of activities. These con-
sisted of a round table on semiotics, individual
conferences held by Ued Maluf, Robert Srour,
Emir Rodriguez Monegal, and David Jackson,
and a eyde of debates on the following topics:
how is semiotics to be confronted; semiotics and
scientific discourse; semiotics and political dis-
course; semiotics and its applications. This pro-
motion was one more step to introduce semiotics
and to trans mit to an edectic public the possi-
bilities of this science or method.
Is Semioties a seienee or a methorP. This was the
first question of the II Co16quio de Semi6tica
that took place in August 1980 at the Pontificia
U niversidade Cat61ica do Rio de J aneiro.
6 Anais do Primeiro Colaquio de Semiatica (Säo Paulo: Loyola,
Rio deJaneiro: PUC, 1980).
54 MONICA P. RECTOR
(Another conference, I Co16quio Luso-Brasileiro
de Semi6tica was held in Niter6i, Rio deJaneiro,
in 1984.) To develop this theme Marcio Tavares
d'Amaral discussed the subject of "Philosophy,
Science, Language, Reality: Semiotics' Identity
Problem."
The following is a resume of his paper, which
is considered an important contribution because
it inftuenced other scholars, synthesized a num-
ber of ideas that had been topics of concern
among Brazilian semioticians, and suggested
future lines of investigation.
The author took an historical approach, going from the eight-
eenth century to the twentieth. Metaphysics, according to
him, is made of logos (logic) and physis (physics), of reason
(individual) and nature (surroundings), which is the object
of reason. Philosophy occupies a high er level than science,
and in science, exact science predominates over experimental
science (of nature). In the eighteenth century there is an
apparent equilibrium. Reason and sensibility are equivalent,
they are part of the same system. This means that there is
such an advance of the natural sciences over philosophy that
Engels specifies that philosophy will survive only as a method.
The discourse of nature defeats the discourse of logic. The
twentieth century has a technical relation to the nineteenth.
The problem that arises is that language cannot only be
thought of as a reflexive form. Language has to give an
account of objectivity, of scientific advances, and at the same
time of historicity (Saussure).
Semiology is born from the fact that linguistics has a limit
of language realization. Semiology would be the science of
language. Saussure's contradiction is that he puts together,
at the same time, nominalism and realism into structural
linguistics. The signifier is in the order of language, but one
cannot leave thought aside (acoustic image). On the other
hand, the acoustic image is not the mental image. This con-
tradiction expresses the crisis: system (logic) versus sign
(appeal to nature). The Saussurian revolution consists in the
introduction of the concept of system. The idea of system
is nominalist. But the doctrine of system opposes itself to
the doctrine of sign. The system is a historical, diachronic
reading. This is an "opening" created by Saussure and "lost"
in the confrontation between philosophy and science.
Semiology is therefore a science that comes to guarantee
certain presuppositions because it intends to be the discourse
about language. The social relationship of one man with
another goes beyond a simple description of language. It is
relevant to know that language is at the same time historical
and natural, objective and reflexive, science and method.
When we say science, we are working with one exclusion,
that of philosophical thought. Science is a way of knowledge
al ready established historically; a method will always be a
scientific method; it is the path between object and subject.
So science is knowledge, and method its direction, and between
both is the nature of the object: the contact with the object
and how we can speak about it-theory of the object and
the object being the subject of theory.
From theory, the colloquium passed to prac-
tice with the theme "Semiotics of Culture-
Mass Communication." Affonso Romano de
Sant' Anna tried to explain the actual Brazilian
situation in his lecture "Redefining the Political-
Cultural Space." Once again, because of the
importance the lecture had for the meeting, I
will summarize the main points here.
In the decade of the seventies, according to the author, there
was a predominance of writing, a tendency to formalize, that
came from the former dictatorship in the country which had
created the habit of self-contro!. The decade of the eighties,
however, brought a transformation through a relative polit-
ical "opening up." There was a tendency not to formalize
knowledge as much as before. People were awakening to
daily life, which demanded aredefinition of the Brazilian
political-cultural space. Space now meant time. Brazil lost
the race for gold and the industrial race. I t has passed from
barbarianism to decadence, with no apparent apogee.
Here semiotics finds its place. It studies language, as a
socialization of knowledge, through displacement, which in
other words means a possibility ofbeing historica!. The space
opened in the sixties by the exile of the scientists was occu-
pied by composers of popular music. Were they prepared to
assume this pi ace? They were the only actors available. It
was not the music that was outstanding, but rather the his-
torical moment that gave them a place, the pi ace at that time.
It was for them easier to obtain aspace during dictatorship
than during democracy. The democracy itself is a question
of terri tory.
This is how Sant' Anna essentially redefines the
Brazilian space: from physical-bodily to socio-
cultural. This demands a modification of lan-
guage. The choice was interdisciplinarianism, at
least within the academic framework. But the
final question posed was: Does knowledge reside
inside the universities? These and other subjects
of the symposium are published in the Anais do
II Col6quio de Semi6tica (Säo Paulo: Loyola, 1983).
Semiotics in Brazil nowadays asks more ques-
tions than it answers. The place for semiotics is
in the universities; in humanities, letters, com-
munications, anthropology, philosophy of lan-
guage. These disciplines need and demand
semiotics. Will this last long? The space is free,
but it may be taken away. The whole discussion,
in June 1982, is an educational problem: the
closing of departments of communications, their
fusion with departments of letters. Would this
mean a step backward for semiotics? Or would
it perhaps be a new order in which language and
literature might be put together under one huge
umbrella called semiotics, which would include
verbal and nonverbal communication?
 BRAZIL
IH. The Institutional
Framework
Servi~tic~ er:te~ed .Brazilian universities as an
academlc dlsclphne In 1972. At that time it was
taught as an elective during one semester. In
1977, however, it became obligatory in several
curricula. The f{)llowing is a listing of the various
universities in which semiotics is now taught on
a regular basis:
State of Säo Paulo: PUC (Pontificia Univer-
sidade Cat6Iica): two semesters for undergrad-
uate and threc for graduate students; FAU
(Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo): since
1976 the course "Semiotics of the Urban Envi-
ronment" has been offered; UNESP (Universi-
dade Estadual "J ulio Mesquita Filho"): this is
the third university of size and importance in
the state of Säo Paulo; it is a conglomeration of
sixteen campuses spread over the state. Semiot-
ics is taught in the cities of Araraquara (since
March 1981), in Assis at the Institute of Letters
in Marllia in the Department of Philosophy, i~
Santo Andre at the Institute of Arts of the "Plan-
alto"; USP (Universidade de Säo Paulo): There
are courses taught at the ECA (Escola de
Comunica<,;äo e Artes) for undergraduates and
graduates; in the Department of Linguistics of
the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and Human
Sciences as an elective discipline after 1973; in
courses of letters and as an obligatory discipline
after 1975 in the undergraduate courses of Lin-
guistics; and in graduate, doctoral and post-
doctoral courses of linguistics. In these courses
of linguistics, investigations are being done in
sociosemiotics and psychosemiotics.
In Rio de Janeiro there are several courses in
semiotics in various departments of letters, and
a total of twelve such courses in departments of
communications. At the Federal University the
Department ofCommunications offers "Systems
of Signification" for graduate students; this area
is subdivided into several different disciplines.
At the Conjunto Universitario Candido Mendes
a center for the study of semiotics is being
developed.
In the departments of communications, the
main bachelor's degree is in journalism. At the
moment, however, there is a discussion centered
on the need for theoretical and/or professional
background in the preparation of future jour-
55
nalists. Some of this discussion has been pro-
voked by the criticism of newspaper editors
regarding the poor quality of journalism edu-
cation. These criticisms fall into three main cat-
egories: (1) Litde relations hip between the output
of the schools and the job market; (2) students'
lack of practical experience; (3) "theoretical
nature" of most of the instruction. Theory is
c?nsidered here as the opposite of practical expe-
nence. On the other hand, the interest in semiot-
ics can be seen in the large number of master's
theses.
Mention should also be made here of the Cen-
tro de Estudos Semi6ticos A. J. Greimas
(CESAJG) which was established in 1967 by
Edward Lopes and Eduardo Peiiuela Caiiizal.
With Alceu Dias Lima, Ignacio Assis Silva and
Tieko Yamaguchi, the group published the Jour-
nal Bacab-Estudos Semiol6gicos. In 1973, sponsored
by the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Let-
ters Barao de Maua, the Bacab group organized
a course on semiotics of narrative and invited
A. J. Greimas to present it. The success of the
course was so great that the CESAJG was
founded and Significagiio, Revista Brasileira de Semi-
otica was published as the official journal of the
center. Later on, the center also started Proposta,
a bulletin which contains working papers.
Today the headquarters of the center are in
Araraquara, but it has working groups in Säo
Paulo, Säo Jose do Rio Preto, Ribeiräo Preto,
Franca, Batatais, and Matao, all cities in the
State of Säo Paulo. The center maintains an
exchange program with the Groupe de
RechercJ:es Semio-linguistiques of thc Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. The center
has about 80 publications, concentrated on the
foll~w~ng research topics: semiolinguistics,
semlOtIcs of literary discourse, of cinema, of
painting, of gestures, of space, of political dis-
course, of manipulation, and of theater. These
publications can be subdivided into the following
ltems: master's theses, doctoral dissertations
boo~s, and essays as weU as translations (A. i
Grelmas and J. Courtes. Dicionario de Semi6tica.
Trans. A. D. Lima, D. L. Pessoa de Barros
E. Peiiuela Caiiizal, E. Lopes, I. Assis da Silva:
M. J. Castagnetti Sembra, T. Yamaguchi Miya-
zaki. Säo Paulo: Cultrix, 1979). Since December
1981, the members of CESAJG have been divided
into. groups, ~a~h one dealing with a specific
proJect: semlOtlcs groups on manipulation,
56 MONICA P. RECTOR
spatiality, political discourse, theatrical repre-
sentation, and intersemiotic relations.
IV. Publications
As to publications, journals dealing exclu-
sively with semiotics are appearing in several
countries of South America. There are publi-
cations that appear regularly and others that
appear for only a few issues and then disappear.
In Argentina, there is Lenguajes (Buenos Aires,
Nueva Vision, four numbers published). In Bra-
zil, there is BACAB-Estudos semiol6gicos, pub-
lished by the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and
Letters of Sao Jose do Rio Preto (Sao Paulo);
Significar/io, published by the A. J. Greimas Cen-
ter of Semiotic Studies of Ribeirao Preto (Sao
Paulo); Semi6tica, published by the Group of
Language Studies of Bahia, and Acta Semiotica et
Linguistica, an international journal published by
the Sociedade Brasileira de Professores de Lin-
guistica and Hucitec (1977-78) and Editora
Global (from 1979 onwards); De Signos published
by the Department of Arts (PUC, Sao Paulo);
Ars Semiotica (Center for Linguistics, Sao Paulo).
None of these specialized publications has had
more than six issues. Some journals not spe-
cializing in semiotics per se do publish articles
dealing with the discipline. These include LiUera
(1971-76), Revista Brasileira de Lingülstica (since
1974), Revista Tempo Brasileiro, Letras de Hoje,
Atraves, Revista de Cultura Vozes, Comum, Comuni-
car;iio e Sociedade and Comunicar;5es e Artes. In Ven-
ezuela, there is Video-Forum (Academia Nacional
de Ciencias y Artes dei Cine y de la Television,
Caracas) specializing in the semiotics of film and
television. It has not yet been possible for the
Associa<:;ao Brasileira de Semiotica to have its
own publication, which would be a kind of con-
verging nucleus of thoughts and development of
Brazilian semiotics. Historically, once more we
are handicapped by a yearly inflation rate of over
200%, which permits survival but prevents pub-
lishing houses from systematically renewing
subscriptions, which would pi ace their publi-
cations in peril. The cost of the next issue is
always a question mark. Therefore, it is easier
to publish books. The results of Colloquium I
are in the Anais do Primeiro Col6quio de Semi6tica,
and, of Colloquium II in the Anais do II Col6quio
de Semiotica.
v. Final remarks
Semiotics in Brazil has been a process of indi-
vidual efforts and autodidacticism. The two great
influences are the French school, stemming from
Saussure's linguistic orientation, and the North
American semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
The two places where semiotics is most devel-
oped are Sao Paulo, working among other sub-
jects with literary semiotics, and Rio de J aneiro,
with mass communication. The initial historical
development is nonacademic. Today, individual
efforts are made with the support of universities,
in either the departments of letters or of com-
munications. The future of semiotics in Brazil
depends on the semiotic field and practices cho-
sen from the realms of various disciplines.
VI. Bibliography
A. Books and Articles
As to recent bibliography, the last article pub-
lished about semiotics in Brazil contains publi-
cations up to 1978. Publications since 1978
constitute the following bibliography.
Barbosa, Maria Aparecida. "Processos Intrassemi6ticos e
Realimenta<;äo Intersemi6tica da Dinamica Lexica." Acta
Semiotica et Linguistica, 4 (1980), 43-55.
Braga, Maria Lucia Santaella. "0 Problema da Reda<;äo
Diante da Transforma<;äo da Linguagem Escrita." Revista
da PUCSP, 49 (1979).
- - - . Produfiio de Linguagem e Ideologia. Säo Paulo: Cortez,
1980.
- - - . "Entre-ver a Literatura Inter-1endo um Poema."
Revis De Signos. Säo Pau1o: Cortez, 1981.
- - . 0 que i semi6tica. Säo Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983.
Campos, Haroldo deo Ideograma, Anagrama, Diagrama. Säo
Paulo: Cultrix - EDUSP, 1977.
Carontini, E. and Peraya, D. 0 Projeto Semi6tico: Elementos de
Semi6tica Ceral. Trans. Alceu Dias Lima. Säo Paulo: Cultrix
- EDUSP, 1979.
Cirne, Moacy. "Da Vanguarda Produtiva a Semiologia
Materialista." Revista de Cultura Vo.:es,9 (Petr6polis: Vozes,
1979).
- - . Uma Introdufiio Po/{tica aos Quadrinhos. Rio deJaneiro:
Achiame/Angra, 1982.
Coelho, Netto and J. Teixeira. Semi6tica, Informa,iio, Comun-
icafiio. Säo Paulo: Perspectiva, 1980.
Dascal, Marcelo, ed. Pragmritica: Problemas, Crfticas, Perspectiua
da Lingüistica, Bibliografia. Campinas: Unicampo, 1982.
 BRAZIL
Ferrara, Lucrecia D'Alessio. "Poluic;ao Visual e Leitura do
Ambiente Urbano." Atravis, I (1977), pp. 63-79.
- - - . "Linguagem: Noticia/Informac;ao," Atravis, 3 (1979),
35-40.
- - - . A Estratigia dos Signos: Linguagem, Espa(o, Ambiente
Urbano. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva. Colec;ao Estudos, 1981.
Fiorin, Jose Luiz. "0 Discurso de Antonio Conselheiro."
Religiäo e Sociedade, 5 (1980).
Katz, Chaim Samuel, et al. Dicionario Critico de Comunica(äo.
Rio deJaneiro: Paz e Terra, 1971.
Lima, Luiz Costa, introd., comments, selections. Theodor
Adorno et al., Teoria da Cultura de Massa. 2nd ed. Rio de
Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978.
Lopes, Edward. Discurso, Texto e Significa(äo: Uma Teoria do
Interpretante. Sao Paulo: Cultrix - Secretaria de Cultura,
Ciencia e Tecnologia do Estado de Sao Paulo, 1978.
- - - . "Hacia una Definici6n dei Concepto de Funci6n en
el Relato." Acta Semiotica et Linguistica, I, No. 2 (1978),
257-269.
Neiva, Eduardo, Jr. "Informac;ao e Communicac;ao." In:
Manual de Linguistica. Eds. M. Rector and C. T. Pais.
Petr6polis: Vozes, 1979.
Ortiz, Anna Maria Balogh, "Reftexöes sobre Tradu.,ao Inter-
semi6tica." Significa(äo. Revista Brasileira de Semiotica, 3 (1981).
Pais, Cidmar Teodoro. "Structuration du signifie: de I'ana-
Iyse conceptuelle a la lexemisation." Acta Semiotica et Lin-
guistica,2 (1978), 327-337.
- - - . "Semiose, Informac;ao e Transcodificac;ao. "Lingua
e Literatura, 8 (1979).
- - - . "Les Tensions et les parcours de production du
processus semiotique." Acta Semiotica et Linguistica, 3 (1979),
103-123.
- - - . "Systemes de signes et systemes de signification au-
dela du structuralisme." Acta Semiotica et Linguistica, 4 (1980),
69-80.
- - - . "Semi6tica, uma Ciencia em Construc;ao." In Anais
do IIo Co16quio Brasileiro de Semiotica. Rio deJaneiro, PUC
- Loyola, (1983),43-60.
- - - . "Elementos para uma Tipologia dos Sistemas Semi-
6ticos." Revista Brasileira de Lingüistica, 6, No. I (1982),45-
60.
Peiiuela Caiiizal, Eduardo. Duas Leituras Semioticas: Graciliano
Ramos e Miguel Angel Asturias. Sao Paulo: Perspectiva -
Secretaria de Cultura, Ciencia e Tecnologia do Estado de
Sao Paulo, 1978.
- - - . "A Perspectiva Semi6tica no Ensino de Comuni-
ca<;ao," Comunica(öes e Artes, 8 (1979).
- - - . "Le Processus d'iconicite dans le texte artistique."
In Proceedings rif the 2nd Congress rif the International Association
flr Semiotic Studies. Vienna, 1979.
Pignatari, Decio, Informa(äo, Linguagem, Comunica(äo. Sao Paulo:
Cultrix, 1968. (10th ed., 1981).
- - - . "A Ilusao da Contigüidade," Atravis, I, (1977), 30-
38.
- - - . IrifOrmacion, Lenguaje, Comunicacion. Barcelona: Gus-
tavo Gili, 1978. (2nd ed., 1980).
- - - . Contracomunica(äo. Sao Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1971.
(3rd ed., 1981).
- - - . Semiotica e Literatura. Sao Paulo: Moraes, 1974. (3rd
ed., 1981).
- - - . Coml!lnica(äo poitica. Sao Paulo: Moraes, 1977. (3rd
ed., 1981).
57
- - - . "Um Neolitico de Consumo." InRioDico. Eds. Luci-
ano Figueiredo and Oscar Ramos. Rio de Janeiro, Joao
Fortes Engenharia, 1980.
- - - . Semiotica da Arte e da Arquitetura. Sao Paulo: Cultrix,
1981.
Rector, Monica. "The Language of the Telenovela and Its
Inftuence on Brazilian Society." In A Semiotic Landscape,
Eds. Seymour Chatman et al. New York: Mouton, 1979.
- - - . "Requiem para Roland Barthes," [Rio deJaneiro]
Jornal do Brasil, (special issue, Apr. 6, 1980).
- - - . "EI Lenguaje de la Telenovela." Video-Forum, 6
(Caracas: Fundaci6n Academia Nacional de Ciencias y
Artes del Cine y la Televisi6n, 1980),35-43.
- - - . "Semiotik in Lateinamerika. " Zeitschrift fir Semiotik
2 (Berlin: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1980).
- - - , and Yunes, Eliana. Manual de Semlintica. Rio de
Janeiro: Livro Tecnico, 1980.
Ricci, Vera Lucia Zapolla. Afon(äo simbolica: lingua e ideologia.
Aravaquara: ILCSE-UNESP, 1982.
Silva, Ignacio Assis. "Une Lecture de Velasquez." In Actes
simiotiques: Documents du Groupe de Recherches Sbnio-linguistiques,
11, No. 19. (Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, CNRS, 1980).
- - - . 0 projeto greimasiano de semiotica narrativa. Araraquara:
ILCSE, 1981.
Yunes, Eliana. "A Linguagem dos Sinos." Revista de Cultura
Vozes, 9 (Petr6polis: Vozes, 1978).
- - - . "Filosofia da Linguagem e Semi6tica do Poder." In
Anais do Primeiro Co16quio Brasileiro de Semiotica. Sao Paulo:
Loyola; Rio deJaneiro, PUC, 1980.
- - - . "A Verdade e 0 Discurso Politico." Comum, 8 (Rio
de Janeiro, FACHA, 1981) 5-12.
- - - . "Semi6tica da Repressao: 0 Poder da Fala em '0
Sargento Getulio'." Linguagens, 2 (Rio de Janeiro: PUC,
1981).
B. Theses
The most interesting research in semiotics has
been done by students in the form of theses to
obtain either their master's or their Ph.D. degree.
Most of these theses remain unpublished. The
following bibliography lists them according to
the university and department in which they were
written.
1. School of Communication of the
Federal University of Rio de )aneiro
Jorge Helio Santos, "0 Dever Textual."
Anamaria K6vacs, "Coluna Social: Linguagem e Montagem."
Mario Galvao Queir6s Filho, "A Significac;ao da Traduc;ao."
Mario Cezar de Miranda Fortes, "0 Significado do Outro."
Zulene Reis, "0 Discurso Mitico/ Poetico na Musica Pop-
ular Brasileira."
Joao Luiz Vieira, "Foto de Cena e Chanchada: a Eficacia
do "Star System" no Brasil."
Alberto Oliva, "Estados de Coisas e Silencio."
58 MONICA P. RECTOR
Maria Bernardina de Oliveira Silva, "A Noticia na Pe na do
Cronista."
Isis Lourdes Figueira Costa, "Mito e Cultura, Dois Sistemas
de Significa<;äo da Mulher."
Tania Maria Olivier Chulam, "Escritos Sobre os Escritos
de Lacan."
Everardo Pereira Guimaräes Rocha, "0 Oficio de Encantar:
Uma Analise da Representa<;äo do Fazer do Publicitario."
Newton Ferreira Lima, "A Interdependencia da Linguagem."
Almo Saturnino Vieira Magalhäes, "Linguagem e Estados
Esü~ticos. "
2. Department of Letters of the
"Pontificia Universidade Cat6lica" of
Säo Paulo
Maria Rosa D. Oliveira, "A Escritura Semi6tica de Memorias
Postumas de Bras Cubas."
Fernando Segolin, "Personagens e Anti-personagem: Da A<;äo-
funcäo ao Texto."
SamiraJorge Roas, "Tra<;os de Modernidade em Pedro Kil-
kerry ou de um Modo de Perceber 0 Texto Kilkerriano."
Maria Prazeres Mendes Clini, "0 Interprocessar Barroco/
Publicidade. "
Maria Ines dos San tos Duarte, "0 'Nouveau Roman' corno
Metalinguagem da Narrativa."
Maria Helena Marcondes Machado, "Problemas de Tra-
du<;äo Poetica e sua Pratica em Textos de Baudelaire. "
Maria Jose Pereira Gondo Palo, "0 Texto no Espa<;o do
Problema Didatico-Literario. "
Luis Antonio de Figueiredo, "Poesia Concreta: Sob 0 Signo
da Sintaxe Radical."
Carlos Gardin, "Rarefa<;äo do Enredo na Narrativa Teatral."
Jose Joäo Cury, "A Quantifica<;äo e Analise dos Dadas na
Narrativa Teatral."
Olga Sa, "A Escritura de Clarice Lispector."
Tarcisio Justino Loro, "Cartaz de Cinema: Corno e Escol-
hido e Decodificado pelo Adolescente."
Ana Maria B. Ribeiro, "0 Movimento Corno Processo Semi-
6tico: Oswald de Andrade."
Clara Maria Silveira Machado, "0 Fantastico em Cortazar:
Um Joga Estranho."
Ana Maria Soares de Salles, "Saude Publica em Cartaz-
Possibilidade de Decodifica<;äo."
Luiz Tyller Pirola, "As Interven<;öes da Autor ao Nivel de
F ala das Personagens ."
Anne Shirley Araujo, "Mensagern Urbana e Participa<;äo".
Nivia Assump<;äo, "0 Parnasianismo corno Fenömeno da
Cultura Brasileira em Conflito entre Kitsch e Vanguarda."
Julian Francis Nazgrio, "Tristarn Shandy", 0 Munda as
Avessas de Laurence Sterne."
Zula Garcia Giglio, "Literatura para Adolescentes."
Francisco Ivan Silva, "Par uma Sociologia dos Sistemas
Semi6ticos. "
Maria Lucia Fabrini de Almeida, "Uma Leitura de 'Otre-
dad' nos Ensaios de Octavio Paz."
Marilena Esberard de Lauro Montanari, "0 Poema Canto,
Gerado na DiaJetica: Musica Popular X Texto Literario."
Samir Curi Meserani, "A Reda<;äo (Repla<;äo) Escolar."
Elizabeth de Aquino Cunha, "A Literatura Para Crian<;as."
3. Department of Letters of the
"Pontificia Universidade Cat6lica" of
Rio de ]aneiro
Sergio Waldeck de Carvalho, "Considera<;öesSobre a Prag-
matica: Marcas de Enuncia<;äo."
Eudenise de Albuquerque Limeira, "A Comunica<;äo Ges-
tu al de Dan<;as Folcl6ricas Nordestinas." Published aso A
Comunica(iio Gestual (Rio de J aneiro: Editora Rio, 1977).
Maria Helena Lopes de Oliveira, "A Linguagem da Barroco
Mineiro: Analise da Escultura da Aleijadinho."
Julio Cesar da Silva, "0 Canto de Monteiro Lobato: Analise
Semiol6gica. "
4. Department of Letters of the
Federal University of Rio de ]aneiro
Carolina Maia Gouvea, "A Linguagem Gestual em Grande
Sertiio: Veredas."
Aglaeda Fac6 Ventura, "Para uma Possivel Estilistica
Semi6tica. "
5. Department of Linguistics of the
Faculty of Philosophy, Letters, and
Human Sciences of the University of
Säo Paulo
Milton Jose de Almeida, "Notas a uma analise semäntica
de discurso em enunciados de politica internacional."
- - - . "A Codifica<;äo Semäntica da Discurso Lingüistico:
Aspectos Basicos e Analise Sememica. "
Jose Luiz Daniel, "Semi6tica narrativa: Um Estudo das
Estruturas Narrativas."
Lia Pereira Jardim, "Texto e pre-texto: 0 Agenciamento
Discursivo da Significa<;äo no Pro ces so Metalingüistico da
Leitura."
Jose Luiz Fiorin, "A Ilusäo da Liberdade Discursiva."
Maria Aparecida Barbosa, "Para um Modela Te6rico da
Combinat6ria Semiotaxica."
lone Maria Ghislene Bentz, "A Ilusäo do Referencial."
Jose Jorge Peralta, "Estruturas Lingüisticas e Analise da
Texto Literario."
Hercilia Tavares de Miranda Teiles Pereira, "0 Teatro
Infantil de Maria Clara Machado: Estruturas Narrativas
e Discursivas, Produ<;äo e Sustenta<;äo de Ideologia."
Nina Rosa da Penha Louren<;o, "A Constru<;äo da Signifi-
ca<;äo nos Cantos de Rubem Fonseca."
Elisabeth Brait Rodrigues de Oliveira, "Questöes de Ordern,
Questöes de Desordern, um Lance de Dadas que Jamais
Abolira 0 Acaso."
Maria Aparecida Barbosa, "Para um Modela Te6rico de
Sistema Semi6tico-Lingüistico: Dinämica das Estruturas
Lexicas."
 CllAPTER4
Semiotics in Canada
Paul Bouissac
I prefer to be frankly subjective, and warn you beforehand
that my account will be fragmentary, and to a great extent
reminiscent of those aspects which have come under my own
personal view. (Schuster, 1911)
It is generally acknowledged among today's
semioticians that Canada has become over the
last decade one of the main centers of semiotic
research in the world. The existence of adefinite
interest in the study of signs in several Canadian
universities was officially recognized in the early
seventies: In 1969, when the International Asso-
ciation for Semiotic Studies was created in Paris,
only seventeen countries were represented on its
executive committee; two years later, Canada
was added to the list at the same time as Israel,
Japan and the Netherlands, where in the mean-
time active centers of semiotic research had
emerged. However, this relatively early inter-
national recognition preceded by several years
the admission of a specifically semiotic group to
the learned societies of Canada. It is interesting
to compare the situation that prevailed in the
early seventies, at a time when the ftedgling
Canadian Association far Semiotic Research was
struggling for recognition on the national aca-
demic scene, with the situation in the early
eighties when, in spite of drastic budgetary
Paul Bouissac • Department of French, Victoria Col-
lege, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada M5S lK7.
59
cutback, semiotics is enjoying a growing popu-
larity among scholars and graduate students and
shows definite signs of progress in terms of both
research achievement and institutional integra-
tion. Naturally, this pattern of evolution is not
peculiar to Canada, but reftects a worldwide
movement which undoubtedly announces the
emergence of the new paradigm that was out-
lined by Saussure and adumbrated by Peirce
about a century ago.
This global assessment is relatively easy to
make in view of the increasing number of public
events and scientific publications that are grad-
ually giving semiotics a greater visibility. How-
ever, the task becomes far more complicated when
one tries to give a detailed account of the ongoing
research and academic enttenchment of semiot-
ics in a given country, especially when this coun-
try is, like Canada, spread across a whole
continent. The problem does not exclusively stern
from geographical circumstances, however; there
are also conditions intrinsic to the semiotic
movement that make it difficult to grasp all
aspects from a single point of view, however well
informed. The disciplinary and subdisciplinary
compartmentalizations which characterize con-
temporary knowledge tend to give only partial
visibility to current research. In theory the cen-
tralization of federal funding agencies should
provide accurate information that would palliate
this obvious difficulty; but as long as there is no
60 PAUL BOUISSAC
slot or box labeled "semiotics" on the various
application forms printed by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada or
on those of the Canadian Federation for the
Humanities, it will be impossible to gather from
their published statistics and reports exhaustive
information regarding the number and type of
semiotic projects proposed, funded, and com-
pleted. However, let us record as a sign of prog-
ress the following excerpt from the 1980-81
Annual Report of the Canadian Federation for
the Humanities, which is entering the fifth dec-
ade of support of scholarly publications:
A nnmber of manuscripts submitted to the Programme were
within the still em erging discipline of semiotics. In view of
the number received and the likelihood of its increase, it was
decided to attach to the Aid to Publications Committee, on
an informal basis, representatives of this discipline, to act
as resource persons for members of the existing committee.
When the number of manuscripts in Semiotics reaches the
criticallevel, the discipline will be formally incorporated into
the Committee. (p. 41)
The social organization of knowledge, which is
largely a bureaucratic phenomenon, always lags
behind the actual process of the coming of age
of a discipline. Moreover, the fact that semiotics
is still mostly in the pre-paradigmatic stage adds
to the difficulty.l Soundings in various disci-
plines indicate that "objective" references such
as the membership of the Canadian Semiotic
Association or the publications by Canadian
scholars in Semiotica, for instance, are only the
tip of the iceberg. Indeed, it is frequently the
case that an individual's connection with semiot-
ics comes through an informal association with
those of similar interest in another country, or
through a subspecialization within the discipline
with which this individual is affiliated. This phe-
nomenon is quite common in philosophy,
anthropology, psychology, and linguistics, for
example, and can be easily accounted for by the
fact that the founders and first members of the
IThe terms "pre-paradigmatic" and "paradigm" are used
throughout this chapter in the sense first developed by T. S.
Kuhn in The Slructure 01 Scienlific Revolutions (1962), and dis-
cussed and refined in subsequent publications such as the
second edition of the same book (1970), Lakatos and Mus-
grave (1970), and Suppe (1977). Application of this concept
to an assessment of the development of semiotics can be
found in Bouissac's review articles of A. Rey's Thiories du
signe el du sens (1976) and T. A. Sebeok's Contributions to the
Doctrine 01 Signs (1979).
Canadian Semiotic Association were almost
exclusively associated with language and liter-
ature departments, with which philosophers,
psychologists, and anthropologists usually have
little contact and would sometimes even be
reluctant to acknowledge any form of intellectual
affinity. For many, semiotics (or semiology) 2 still
remains a name of dubious academic respecta-
bility that they associate with the hermetic and
often irresponsible writings of some French lit-
erary critics who, obsessed with novelty, had
rediscovered Saussure, Hjelmslev, and the Rus-
sian formalists in the late fifties and early sixties.
This general attitude is understandable but must
not obfuscate the fact that this aggressive and
sometimes arrogant stream of thought does not
have the monopoly on the research concerning
communication and signification processes, and
that other fruitful reflections and research in this
domain have been taking place for some time in
epistemological settings-such as Peircean phi-
losophy, American pragmatism, the cognitive
sciences, developmental psychology, or infor-
mation theory-which owe nothing to French
structuralism.
I t can now be confidently asserted that semiot-
ics in Canada, as a collective phenomenon, has
largely overcome the stigma of its origin and has
succeeded in establishing itself on a multidisci-
plinary basis, as the varied membership of the
Toronto Semiotic Circle or the composition of
the editorial board of the official publication of
the Canadian Semiotic Association amply
demonstrate.
In order to describe and assess semiotics in
Canada, two aspects will be successively exam-
ined: first, the scope and variety of semiotic
research as indicated by publications and doc-
urnen ted works in progress; second, the insti-
tutionalization of semiotics in the form of
associations, journals, and academic programs.
2There is not yet a conSensus regarding the use in English
of "semiotic," "semiotics," "semiology" and of "semio-
tique" and "semiologie" in French. The nature of this ter-
minological issue is both historical and ideological. A
thorough investigation of all existing definitions and uses
remains to be done. I twill suffice to note here that Quebec
semioticians tend to prefer "semiologie," except those who
belong to Greimas's school and use "semiotique"; English-
speaking semioticians overwhelmingly prefer "semiotics" to
refer to the general science of signs or to applications ora
semiotic methodology to the analysis of a domain of inquiry
such as "the semiotics of cinema."
 CANADA
I. Semiotic Research in
Canada
Two reports have already been published con-
cerning the state of semiotic research in Canada,
the first in 1974 in a special issue of Versus (Bouis-
sac, 1974), the second five years later in a book
edited by A. Helbo, Le Champsemiologique (1979).
The former, entitled "Semiotics in Canada: A
Selective Bibliography," lists about one hundred
publications, most oi" them articles; this bibli-
ography is accompanied by abrief outline oi" the
general situation of semiotic research as it
appeared to the author in the early seventies; the
latter, entitled "Les Discours semiotiques au Canada"
(Semiotic Discourse in Canada) is a thirty-page
essay, lcss restrictive than its predecessor in its
definition of semiotics because it includes a long
seetion on McLuhan's theories (actually about
a sixth of the total number of pagcs) as weIl as
a full subsection on Northrop Frye's contribu-
tions to literary criticism; the bibliography, which
also lists about one hundred Canadian publi-
cations in addition to general reference books,
only partially overlaps with the one published
in Versus. In spite of important difi"erences in the
perception of the semiotic movement due to the
authors' personal circumstances, both articles
emphasize the particular situation that charac-
terizes Canada, namely the existence of a double
semiotic infl uence-the American and the
French. This is obviously an oversimplification
inasmuch as it tends to overlook the complex
network of communication that irrigates the
Canadian academic fjeld. Nevertheless this fac-
tor has to be taken into consideration, mainly
because it is not only a matter of influence
through books and articles, but also a sociolog-
ical phenomenon-inasmuch as both the United
States of America and the French-speaking
European countries provided Canadian univers-
ities, mainly in the sixties, with a large number
of academics in the humanities and social sci-
ences who brought with them their own intel-
lectual traditions and biases. This general
situation was reinforced by the fact that a large
number of their Canadian colleagues had done
their graduate work either in the United States
or in France and had been exposed in their form-
ative years to some aspects of one of these streams
of thought.
On the one hand the American source com-
61
prises the semiotic theories of C. S. Peirce and
Charles Morris, the logic tradition, the applied
semiotics inspired by Bloomfield's structurallin-
guistics, and later some extrapolation from
Chomsky's theories, as weIl as information and
communication theories and the development of
nonverbal communication research. Charles
Morris, Gregory Bateson, and T. A. Sebeok,
among others, have had a significant personal
influence and are often mentioned and quoted
in Canadian publications. On the other hand,
the European sources include the various cur-
rents which merged in French structuralism:
Saussure's semiologie, the Prague and Copen-
hagen schools, and the Russian formalists. The
theoretical impact of the French linguists Gus-
tave Guillaurne and Lucien Tesniere should also
be cited here, although they are rarely acknowl-
edged. The restrictive approach to semiotics
found in the polemical works of Georges Mounin,
a faithful exponent of Andre Martinet's linguis-
tics, or of Luis Prieto, who belongs to the same
stream, has had only sporadic influence in Can-
ada. The most important fountainheads oi" the
French source undoubtedly were Claude Levi-
Strauss, Roland Barthes, and A. J. Greimas, who
in the sixties and seventies directly initiated many
young Canadian scholars into semiotics. Natu-
rally special mention of Roman J akobson's cru-
cial influence should be made here. His
ubiquitous presence, both in Europe and North
America, was a determining factor in bridging
the gap between the European and American
sources of semiotics, and many modern semi-
oticians are indebted to hirn for having discov-
ered new dimensions in their field of inquiry.
It is clear, from this brief outline of the various
influences which inspired Canadian scholars, that
semiotic research in Canada is arecent phenom-
enon. Indeed, none of the major international
semiotic colloquia of the sixties included con-
tributions from established Canadian scholars
(Bloomington, 1962; Warsaw, 1965 and 1968;
Urbino, 1968-1969). However, the la te sixties
and early seventies witnessed a rather sudden
and multifaceted interest in semiotics with a sub-
sequent explosion of publications that has since
not diminished. The proceedings of the first con-
gress of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies (Chatman, Eco, and Klinkenberg, 1979),
which took place in Milan inJune 1974, includes
fifteen papers by Canadian scholars, but at the
62 PAUL BOUISSAC
second congress in Vienna, in 1979, Canadians
gave more than twice that many. At this point
Canada's role in semiotic research was publicly
recognized, and the general assembly voted in
favor of Montn~al as the location of the next
international congress, which was due to take
place in 1984. The proposal had been put forth
by the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, which
had just then inaugurated its doctoral program
in semiologie. However, the project had to be can-
celed in 1982 when, due to the drastic cutbacks
made by the Quebec government, the Universite
du Quebec's high er administration refused to
grant the funds necessary for implementation of
the project.
Semiotic research in Canada has been partic-
ularly important and innovative during the last
fifteen or so years. But before attempting to
review in detail the most significant achieve-
ments, it is important to emphasize that the task
of listing all the publications and works in prog-
ress relevant to semiotics is difficult, and perhaps
impossible. There is no certainty that the letter
of inquiry I circulated among the directors of
the relevant departments reached all the col-
leagues it may have concerned-and I apologize
to them if their work has been overlooked in this
report-nor is it likely that all those who have
been informed of this report have found the time
to provide me with adequate information-and
I apologize to the reader for these unavoidable
but nonetheless regrettable lacunae. But this is
not all. The issue of what does count as semiotic
research remains a difficult one. As a rule it has
seemed appropriate to take into account works
by individuals who identify their ultimate goals
at least with some part of the general scientific
project that the word "semiotics" denotes, even
though they may feel ill at ease with some of the
speculations that have branched out from this
general program. I have done my best not to
drag anybody into this chapter against his or her
explicit will. However, there are many cases of
scholars or scientists whose research and
achievements are so crucial for the construction
of a general science of the systems of signs that
an excess of discretion regarding their works
would ammint to a willful perpetuation of error
and ignorance. Indeed, if any advances in this
domain are to be accomplished before the end
of the century, semioticians have to come to grips
with the fact that many aspects of the kind of
knowledge they want to acquire are being dealt
with in other fields of specialization under other
labels by people who do not see themselves as
semioticians but as zoologists, psychologists,
computer scientists, mathematicians or neurol-
ogists, to name only a few. Moreover, projects
such as this chapter must be assigned at the
outset some kind of arbitrary limits if they are to
be at all manageable. For instance, the present
investigation was restricted to the human sphere,
in spite of the great relevance for semiotics of
animal communication research. After all, one
of the first public symposia of the Toronto
Semiotic Circle, in' 1975, was on this topic with
the participation of Anton Bubenik (Ontario
Ministry ofNatural Resources), Frances Burton
(University ofToronto) and T. A. Sebeok as key
speakers, and many no ted zoologists, such as
Bruce Falls (University ofToronto), who studies
bird song, or Mireille Mathieu (Universite de
Montreal), who appropriately investigates her
four chimpanzees' species-specific "language"
rather than trying to force upon them a human
system of communication, keep enriching by their
research one of the most fascinating facets of
semiotics. 3 But confining oneself to the human
sphere raises enough questions ofits own: should
research projects be listed according to their geo-
graphical and institutionallocation? or the par-
ticular subset of cultural domains to which they
apply? or the theory or methodology to which
they relate? or the discipline from which they
originate? There are so many equally valid and
unsatisfactory principles of classification that one
simply has to look for a lesser evil. The solution
adopted, a listing according to major disciplines
in the humanities and social sciences, seems to
present two advantages: first, it makes reason-
ably sure that the coverage is as complete as
possible; second, it underlines the fact that
semiotic research is firmly entrenched in many
"official" disciplines and provides one of the best,
if not the only ground for interdisciplinary com-
munication and transdisciplinary endeavors. If
semiotics ever becomes a scientific paradigm, it
will be because a consensus will have emerged
from within several established disciplines
'Other names which should be mentioned here are David
Dunharn (University of Toronto) for his study of commu-
nication patterns in hermit crabs, and Ann Zeller (Univer-
sity of Waterloo) for her investigations into facial
communication in the Barbary ape (macaca sylvanus).
 CANADA
regarding a common set of epistemological prob-
lems expressed in a common idiom, and because
a sufficiently large number of qualified individ-
uals will have found joining forces and resources
to be in the best interest of their ultimate research
goals.
I should like to conclude this introduction by
expressing my thanks to the friends and col-
leagues who have provided me with helpful rel-
evant information, more particularly Kevin
Dunbar, John McCleIland, Paul Perron, John
O'Neill, David Savan, and E. A.Walker.
A. Semiotics and Philosophy
In their 1979 report, Brodeur and Pavel
pointed out that in English-speaking Canada the
concept of semiotic research must encompass the
work of phi10sophers as weIl as 1inguists who, in
the wake of Chomsky's theories and the ensuing
controversies on the issue of semanties, turned
to logicians such as Carnap, Montague, and
Kripke in order to achieve a more satisfactory
description of natural 1anguage (Helbo, 1979,
El-32). Following Weinreich (1963) and
McCawley (1969), so me Canadian philosophers
and linguists have made important contributions
to this domain of inquiry. Brodeur and Pavel
mention, for instance, Nei1 Wilson (MeMaster
University), whose earlier book on The Concept
01 Language (1959) represents this approach. Wil-
son redefined semiotics as comprising two parts:
pure semiotics and descriptive semiotics.
Pure semiotics includes on the one hand pure syntax, in
which notions such as "calculus" and "Iogically true" are
defined and in which names and variables refer to some
expressions of an object-Ianguage, and, on the other hand,
a pure semantics whose aim is to define the objects desig-
nated by the descriptive signs included in this part of pure
semiotics. Semiotics also comprises a pure pragmatics which
applies the above notions of logical truth and reference to
particular languages as used by people ... descriptive
semiotics is thus considered as an empirical discipline bring-
ing together an (empirical) syntactical component and an
(empirical) semantic component. (Brodeur and Pavel, 1979:
E7-my translation.)
From this point of view semiotics is defined as
a theory of valid inferences or as formal seman-
ties, or even sometimes as formal pragmatics.
Other representative publications to be listed here
include Mari() Bunge (1974), Bas van Fraasen
63
(1971),Jonathan Bennett (1973, then at the Uni-
versity of British Columbia) and John Woods
(1974, University of Lethbridge).
In the 1970s, the most active centers in this
domain were in the universities of A1berta, Brit-
ish Co1umbia, and Ontario. Brodeur and Pavel
focus their report more particularly on three phi-
losophers: Bas van Fraasen, Jonathan Bennett,
andJohn Woods, whose contributions they ana-
1y:./ie in some detail. They also mention as rele-
van.t to this line of research works by John King-
Farlow (1972,1973), F.J. Pelletier (1974) (both
from the University of Alberta), and
H. Herzberger (1965, 1973, U niversity of
Toronto), whose re cent publications on seman-
tics are of the utmost importance (1980; 1981;
1982a, b).
In French-speaking Canada, this sort of
research appears to be less developed. Never-
theless there exists an important focus of research
at the Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres by
C1aude Savary, Claude Panaccio, Normand
Lacharite and Daniel Vandervecken. Thomas
Pavel (Universite du Quebec a Montrea1) has
undertaken since the middle seventies to apply
modal logic to the analysis of fiction (1976b,
1978). Special mention must be made, in the
context of philosophy and logic, of Irena Bellert
(McGill University), who has brought to Can-
ada from her native Poland a rich and sophis-
ticated tradition of logical semiotics. In addition
to being the author of several important articles
(e.g., 1970, 1971) often quoted in the semiotic
literature of the seventies, she edited, in collab-
oration with Peter Ohlin (1978), an interesting
collection of definitional articles on some major
concepts in semiotics and aesthetics, most of them
by Po1ish scholars, which cover a vast field some-
what cursorily in two hundred typed pages (the
book was on1y semiformally pub1ished by the
Graduate Programme in Communication of
McGill University), including linguistics from
Saussure to Chomsky (pp. 1-74), logical semiot-
ics (pp. 76-126) and aesthetics (pp. 127-175).
The bibliography comprises 280 entries with a
majority of Polish, Czech, and German authors.
Among the distinguished Quebec philoso-
phers whose writings are pertinent to semiotics
in the broad sense are Jean-Paul Brodeur and
Yvon Gauthier (Universite de Montrea1). Guy
Bouchard (Lavai), through his invo1vement in
the editing of the officia1 pub1ication of the
64 PAUL BOUISSAC
Canadian Semiotic Association as well as through
numerous books and articles, is playing a crucial
role in the mapping and monitoring of the var-
ious semiotic theories and is putting forth a lucid
assessment of the movement as a whole (1978,
I 980a-e, 1981).
Another important part of the semiotically
oriented research in philosophy is the study of
C. S. Peirce's work. There exists in Canada a
modest but steady tradition of Peirce studies and
the Charles S. Peirce Society has always counted
several Canadians among its members. Although
not all the aspects of this interest might be found
equally relevant to semiotics, it could neverthe-
less be claimed that any research on Peirce's
thought is likely to have a bearing upon semiotics
in the broad sense which is currently accepted.
At the University of Toronto, Thomas A. Goudge
and David Savan, both now retired, are noted
specialists in this field and have influenced many
students and colleagues. Among the most rele-
vant contributions by Goudge is his monograph
on Peirce's Index (1965). David Savan's publica-
tions are principally concerned with epistemo-
logical questions and with Spinoza's philosophy
of language, but he published, early in his career,
an essay on Peirce's theory of categories (1952)
and since the middle seventies, through his
involvement with the Toronto Semiotic Circle,
of which he was one of the first presidents, his
research is almost exclusively focused on Peirce's
semiotics and other relevant topics (1976; 1977;
1980a, b; 1981 a, b). His Introduction to Peirce's
Semiotics (1976), and the most recent Studies in
Peirce 's Semiotics (1982) which he edited, have
played a crucial role in rectifying many false
conceptions, based on partial or even second-
hand knowledge of the original texts among
semioticians. This function has also been carried
on through teaching on this topic at the first two
semiotic institutes in 1980 and 1981. In spite of
being officially retired, Savan is very active on
the semiotic scene and his most recent publi-
cations are eminently relevant to the develop-
ment of the semiotic paradigm (1981, 1982,
1983). Among those who have done noteworthy
graduate work in this field at the University of
Toronto, J am es Maroosis and J acqueline Brun-
ning are to be mentioned.
The University of Waterloo Department of
Philosophy includes a prominent Peirce special-
ist in the person of Donald C. Roberts, whose
book on Peirce's graphs (1973) was published
in the "Approach es to Semiotics" series. His cur-
rent research deals with a computerized treat-
ment of Peirce's logic. Other centers of Peircean
interest are located at the U niversity of Western
Ontario (Maryann Ayim and P. J. O'Leary), at
the University of Ottawa (Fran<;ois Duches-
neau), and at the University of Lethbridge
(Michael Kubara). Maryann Ayim, a me mb er
of several semiotic associations, has made exten-
sive use of Peirce's system in her publications
(e.g., 1974, 1979, 1980).
In French-speaking universities adefinite
interest in Peirce is currently developing, notably
since the publication of a translation into French
by Gerard Deledalle, of aselection of canonic
texts. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Universite de Mon-
treal) (1979) makes use of some Peircean notions
in the framework of musical semiotics, as do
Louis and Marie Francoeur (Universite Laval)
in the analysis of literary texts (1981) and J ean
Fisette (Universite du Quebec a Montreal) in a
fascinating semiotic reassessment of aphasia
(1982). An interesting example of this new phe-
nomenon is the publication in 1980 of an issue
of Langages, entitled Au dela de la semiolinguis-
tique:La semiotique de C. S. Peirce, edited by Fran-
<;ois Peraldi (1980) (U niversite de Montreal)
with, among the contributors, David Savan
(1980a) and Timothy Reiss (1980) (U niversite
de Montreal), the latter's contribution being an
expanded version in French of an important arti-
cle on Peirce and Frege published earlier in the
Canadian Journal 01 Research in Semiotics (1977).
The use of Peirce's concepts made by Jurgen
Pesot (Universite du Quebec a Rimouski) in his
stimulating introduction to semiotics-Silence, on
parZe (1979)-should also be noted. Finally, it
should be pointed out that Guy Bouchard,
already mentioned, has on several occasions
written very competently about Peirce, notably
in his insightful "L'A, B, C, de la semiologie"
(1980e), a review article on Pesot's book, and in
his comprehensive review of existing semiotic
theories, "Seulement les signes, mais tous les
signes" (1981).
Philosophical inquiries more often than not
touch upon semiotic issues and make interesting
contributions to a better understanding of lan-
guage, communication, thought, and other key
concepts. For instance, Patricia Smith Church-
land (University of Manitoba) has published
 CANADA 65
several seminal papers on information-processing is being made to reduce the gap between spec-
models in relation to basic intellectual functions,ulative semiotics and empirical psychology.
more specifically nonsentential cognition (1978, Interdisciplinary colloquia such as the on es
1980). As a philosopher who has studied neu- sponsored by the Toronto Semiotic Circle in 1980
rophysiology, Churchland should also be listed ("The Neurological Basis of Signs in Commu-
in the next as weIl as the last section of this nication Processes") and 1982 ("The Biological
chapter. This disciplinary polyvalence is a recur- Foundations of Gesture: Motor and Semiotic
ring phenomenon among semioticians. The same Aspects") or the frequent meetings of the "Jour-
thing is also true of most philosophers interested nal Club" (which will be discussed later), orga-
in language, such asJohn Heintz (University of nized in Montreal by Andre Roch Lecours and
Calgary), whose first research in semantics, pub- J ean-Luc N espoulous (U niversite de Montreal),
lished in a book on Subjects and Predicables (1969),
create the necessary conditions for the circula-
was continued by work in the area of meaning tion of ideas and the communication of pertinent
in the arts (e.g., 1979) or Leonard Angel's (Uni- information across a disciplinary boundary all
too often characterized by misinterpretations and
versity of Victoria) The Silence oi the Mystic (1983),
in which the author investigates silence as a mode prejudices. 4 The role of Marcel Kinsbourne
of communication. Francis Sparshott (U niver- (U niversity of Toronto and Eunice Shriver
sity of Toronto) should also be mentioned in this Research Center) in this discussion is notewor-
section for his works in aesthetics (e.g., 1982). thy (e.g., 1978, 1981).
An exhaustive review of semiotically relevant
research in psychology and neuropsychology is
B. Semiotics and Psychology naturally out of the question within the limits
of this chapter. However it is possible to point
Besides so me references to Charles Morris, out some recent research which contributes to a
notably in the works of the late D. E. Berlyne better understanding of so me typical semiotic
(University of Toronto), whose research on the problems.
psychology of aesthetics was related to semiotics Developmental psychology should obviously
(in particular 1971, Chapter 6), and who dealt be mentioned first if only because it is almost
in his Structure and Direction in Thinking (1965) synonymous with developmental semiotics.
"with symbolic processes from a point of view Although Piaget's school is a universe of its own,
that owes a great deal to Morris' treatment of it is generally acknowledged that the issues it
semiotics with special reference to thinking" addresses are crucial to the semiotic project.
(personal communication, 1974), Canadian psy- Among the Canadian psychologists involved in
chologists do not usually show an interest in this type of research are Bruce Bain, (U niversity
semiotics inasmuch as they relate the word either
to untestable philosophical speculations or to the
4Jean-Luc Nespoulous, formerly from the Department of
esoteric jargon of literary criticism. However, Linguistics of the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail in France,
some have responded positively during the last was appointed in 1980 to the Department of Linguistics of
few years to the approaches made to them by the University of Montreal where he had held several vis-
semioticians who perceive in their research many iting professorships in the past. These visits were related to
various projects in neurolinguistics in cooperation with Andre
aspects that are eminently relevant to the project Roch Lecours from the Department of Psychology (neu-
of a general science of sign systems, communi- ropsychology) in the same university. As it will be pointed
cation, and signification. Thanks to the efforts out in the second part of this paper, the team they lead and
of people like Gilles Therien (U niversite du Que- inspire at the newly founded Laboraloire Thiophile Alajouanine,
bec a Montreal), who invited semioticians to take in Montreal, is the focus of intense interdisciplinary inter-
action, and the conceptual framework within which they
seriously the words of Saussure when he claimed work is explicitly semiotic. It should also be noted that both
that semiologie must be seen as apart of general Nespoulous and Lecours are regular participants in inter-
psychology (1981, 1982), and Paul Bouissac disciplinary colloquia such as the ones taking place in the
(University of Toronto), who has since the late setting of semiotic institutes (e.g., Urbino, Toronto). Their
participation in semiotic conferences and publications plays
seventies repeatedly emphasized the importance an important part in the dissemination of neuropsychol-
for semiotics of the current development of the ogical knowledge among semioticians (e.g., Lecours, 1982;
brain sciences (1976b, 1980, 1982a), an attempt Lecours and N espoulous, 1981; N espoulous, 1981).
66 PAUL BOUISSAC
of Alberta) (e.g., 1974, 1976); David Olson
(University of Toronto, Ontario Institute for
Studies in Education-O.I.S.E.), whose current
research deals with the relations hip between cog-
nition and literacy in young children (1977, 1980)
and who has edited two books in this domain,
Media and Symbols (1974) and Social Foundations rif
Language and Thought (1980); a third book edited
in collaboration with Nancy Torrance and Angela
Hildyard (University of Toronto, O.I.S.E.) on
Literacy, Language and Leaming (1985); J erry Anglin
(University of Waterloo), the author of an
important book on meaning, reference, and the
development of the semiotic function (1977); John
MacNamara (McGill University), who has also
published numerous articles on meaning, refer-
ence and conceptual development, in particular
an article entitled "From Sign to Language"
which appeared in a book he edited on Language,
Leaming and Thought (1977), and whose latest
publication, Namesfor Things (1982), is particu-
larly relevant in this context.
Another sector of psychological research which
be ars upon the basic concerns of semiotics is the
study of cognitive and symbolic processes, for
instance, the books co-edited by Paul Kolers
(University of Toronto) regarding the reading
process (1979, 1980) or Ko1ers's attempt at tran-
scending the opposition between the "pictorial-
ists" and the "propositionalists" by developing
the notion that cognitive processes can be und er-
stood in terms of skills in the manipulation of
symbols and in the relating of symbols to the
semantic domains they map. An article such as
his "Images, Symbols, and Skills," in collabo-
ration with William Smythe (1979) offers a great
deal, in spite of some terminological discrep-
ancies,5 to those semioticians interested in mak-
ing the concept of sign operational as does Ko1ers
or Roediger (1984). Zenon Pylyshyn (U niversity
of Western Ontario) has also published exten-
sively in the domain of perception and cognition
(e.g., 1973, 1978, 1979). His articles, for instance
"The Ro1e of Competence Theories in Cognitive
5Terminological discrepancies are the plague of semiotics.
This is a characteristic feature of the pre-paradigmatic stage
in the development of a discipline. "Symbol" far instance
is used with very different meaning not only in various
disciplines such as literary theory, philosophy, and psy-
chology, but also within semiotics itself. It is hoped that
the forthcoming Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics will at least
provide a guide to these various uses.
Psycho10gy" (1973a, b), usually address questions
which are familiar to semioticians. His ongoing
debate with Allan Paivio (U niversity of Western
Ontario) (e.g. Paivio, 1971, Paivio & Begg, 1981)
concerning the issue of the form of internal rep-
resentations in view of the opposite thesis of S. M.
Kosslyn and Pomerantz (1977) is particularly
interesting and stimulates an intense reflection
on the general phenomenon of the encoding of
cognition. Alinda Friedman's (University of
Alberta) research also bears upon the mann er
in which knowledge is represented and how con-
ceptual structures influence perception, mem-
ory, and understanding. Interesting results are
reported in her paper on "Framing Pictures: The
Ro1e of Knowledge in Automatized Encoding
and Memory" (1979).6
Research concerning the various systems that
have been developed to overcome communica-
tion impairments, such as finger spelling, Amer-
ican sign language, or Bliss symbolics,
undoubtedly belong in the semiotic sphere. The
efforts made by Peter Reich (U niversity of
Toronto) to cast an analysis of these systems in
linguistic terms and to study how these substi-
tutive codes take up the basic functions of lin-
guistic communication are an important
contribution to the understanding of sign sys-
tems from the point of view of stratificational
linguistics (1973, 1975, 1976); let us note in par-
ticular his recent works (in collaboration) on the
Bliss system (e.g., Giddings, 1979). Schools of
human communication disoiders foster a great
deal of relevant research in applied semiotics,
such as the thesis defended at McGill University
in 1979 by Rachel Mayberry on Facial Expression
and Redundancy in American Sign Language. Some
relevant material can also be found in thejournal
of the Association of Canadian Educators of the
6In general, the self-definitions publicized by cognitive-sci-
ence groups exhibit striking resemblances with the stated
aims and purposes of semiotic groups. Both are explicitly
interdisciplinary and involve the same disciplines. The sep-
arate identity that cognitive scientists try to establish seems
to be rooted in the same institutional situation as semioti-
cians experience. Two such groups currently are very active:
the Cognitive Sciences Group of McGill University which
organizes regular colloquia (Myrna Gopnik, director), and
the Centre for Cognitive Science at the U niversity of West-
ern Ontario, which offers a graduate studies program
involving the departments of anthropology, physiology, psy-
chology, neurology, computer science, library and infor-
mation science, and philosophy (Zenon Pylyshyn, director).
 CANADA
Hearing-Impaired (AC.E.H.I.) published by the
University of Alberta. Research on communi-
cation processes in the blind has also yielded a
great deal of theoretical interest concerning the
tactile channel. The foremost specialist is John
Kennedy (University of Toronto) who has
extensively published in this domain (e.g., 1974;
1982a,b; 1983a,b); the research by Suzan Led-
erman (Queen's University), who, incidentaIly,
has been participating in the Toronto Semiotic
Circle, should also be mentioned here (1982).
The rich field formed by the study of Cana-
dian bilingualism, with its systematic investi-
gation of the cognitive, social, linguistic, and
semantic aspects of the problem, could almost
entirely be seen as a subdomain of semiotics.
Actually semiotics appears to be the only epis-
temological framework capable of integrating the
various approaches that have been developed
over the years in departments of psychology,
linguistics, and sociology. This topic could form
a long chapter of its own, but we would be seri-
ously remiss here if at least the monumental
work of Wallace Lambert (McGiIl University)
were not mentioned (e.g., 1972).
Obviously, so many aspects of research in psy-
chology touch upon the core issues of current
semiotic speculations that it is almost impossible
to cover this vast field adequately. However, two
more lines of particularly relevant research
should be added to this brief review. The first
one deals with the analysis of excitement in lit-
erature and is the result of the collaboration
between Clifford W. Anderson (psychology) and
George McMaster (mathematics and computer
science), both from Brandon University. Their
articles on the structure of excitement and the
measurement of tension, novelty, and surpris-
ingness in literature and other texts form an
important contribution to the semiotics of lit-
erature as weIl as empirical aesthetics (1978,
1979, 1980). Their references interestingly include
not only D. E. Berlyne, as could be expected,
but also C. E. Osgood and V. Propp.
The second line of investigation consists of
psychological research into the various systems
of traffic signs and, more generally, "symbolic
public information signs," by Robert Dewar
(University of Calgary) who has published
numerous papers on this topic (e.g., 1977), some
in collaboration with Janice Mackett-Stout
(University of Calgary), J. G. Ellis and others.
67
Studies such as "Evaluating Pictographs Using
Semantic Differential and Classification Tech-
niques" (1980) are brilliant examples of applied
semiotics.
FinaIly, it is a pleasure to report as an encour-
aging conclusion to this section that the content
of the Presidential Address delivered at the 42nd
annual meeting of the Canadian Psychological
Association (Toronto, June 3,1981) was an out-
ward invitation to psychologists to turn toward
the study of language, poetics, and literature.
Vaira Vikis-Freibergs (Universite de Montreal)
did not hesitate to introduce Saussure's insights
to her audience of hard-nosed psychologists as
having achieved more for the understanding of
language than the countless-and often
mindless-psychological experiments in this
domain. She pointed out how regretful it was
that the immense field of the language arts had
hardly aroused her coIleagues' interest, and
invited them to reflect upon the results of mul-
tidisciplinary research that are reported in jour-
nals such as Discourse Processes, Poetics, and
Semiotica. What she enthusiastically referred to
as "the new interdisciplinarity" was unmistak-
enly semiotics (1982).
C. Semiotics and Linguistics
As the expansion and diversification of Cana-
dian universities and the creation of most
departments of linguistics coincided in the six-
ties with the rise to prominence of Chomskyan
theoretical linguistics, these departments are
usuaIly domina ted by transformation al-
generativists for whom the semiotic movement
is of little significance. The claim that the only
legitimate object of linguistic inquiry is "the sys-
tem of universal structural characteristics shared
by aH known languages but not imposed on men's
speech by their physiological heritage, and not
predictable on the basis of any considerations
extern al to Man" (Sampson, 1980), is indeed
incompatible with the view, generally accepted
in semiotics, that natural languages are but a
kind of semiotic system and that they can be
fuHy understood only in a comprehensive frame-
work including social and sociobiological as weIl
as historical and evolutionary dimensions. This
does not mean, of course, that all Chomskyans
are absolutely closed minds with whom dialogue
68 PAUL BOUISSAC
is impossible, nor that it is impossible to extrap-
olate some aspects of the theory toward a ten-
tative semiotic analysis of some other domains
of human culture. However it is symptomatic
that none of the efforts made in this direction
has been pursued beyond the exploratory stage.
Since the condescending dismissal by Chomsky
of Levi-Strauss's use of linguistic models in cul-
tural anthropology (1968, p. 66), semioticians,
for example, Greimas (Parret, 1974, p. 66) and
others have usually been met with a contemp-
tuous silence when they tried to establish some
links between Chomsky's views and their own.
The claim, confidently made in a special issue
of Sociologie ef Sociitis (U niversite deMontreal)
on "Semiologie et ideologie" (Veron, 1973:47),
that generativism was "the second foundation"
of semiotics, appears ten years later both as a
naive misunderstanding and an error of judg-
ment. The various attempts made in Canada to
acclimatize Chomskyan concepts to extralin-
guistic domains have been short-lived, for
instance in the semiotics of the visual arts, archi-
tecture and body movement (Gopnik and Gop-
nik 1971a, b, c; Boudon 1973a, b; Bouissac, 1973).
Brodeur and Pavel, in their report mentioned
above (Helbo, 1979, El-32), consider that the
criticisms of Chomsky's theory as developed by
a team oflinguists at the University of Alberta
Q. M. Stuart, G. Prideaux, B. Derwing) were
important and exemplary for semiotics, inas-
much as semiotics is rooted in 1inguistic theory
and is in search of a firm theoretical föundation.
The reliance of protosemiotic research on lin-
guistic models is indeed a historically crucial
phase in the emergence of the semiotic para-
digm, and no semiotician can remain indifferent
to the evolution of what is still, although to a
lesser extent, a pilot discipline with which
semiotic research entertains a close relationship.
However the restrictive conception of linguistic
theory and the dogmatic attitude which often
prevail in the Chomskyan mainstream and its
offshoots seem to have discouraged further
attempts at extrapolation and genera1ization, and
the bulk of current semiotic research can be
ascribed to the Saussurian legacy through the
direct influence of Jakobson, Martinet, or Grei-
mas. A systematic mapping of the linguistic
trends in Canada would indeed reveal a few iso-
lated strongholds of functionalism, or at least
some foci of interest which are not necessarily
connected with linguistic departments as such.
They usually combine harmoniously with the
various brands of American sociolinguistics and
show some affinities with semiotics in both its
European and American varieties. Concerns for
the problems of context, extralinguistic co m-
munication, paralinguistic factors, social dimen-
sions of 1anguage, semantics, pragmatics, and so
on, establish points of contact with other disci-
plines and create a favorable climate for semiotic
research. Let us mention, for instance, Mar-
guerite Fauquenoy (Sirnon Fraser University)
(1972) and Bernard St-Jacques (University of
British Columbia), who study the sociolinguistic
aspect of Canadian bilingua1ism and who have
co-edited a book on this topic (1979); Konrad
Koerner's work on Saussure at the University
of Ottawa (1973, 1978a, b); the research on the
role of context and situation by ClaudeGermain,
who teaches in education at the U niversity of
Montreal (1981); and the interesting case of the
Department of Linguistics at Universite Laval,
with, on the one hand, Roch Valin's team,
devoted to the works of Gustave Guillaurne
(whose "psychologism," considered unpalatable
by both Chomskyans and functionalists, is
attractive to some semioticians); and, on the
other, the representatives of the Aix school, whose
research on objective stylistics can be viewed as
relevant to literary semiotics (e.g., Conrad Bureau
1976). It should be noted that often linguists
trained in the European tradition are members
of language rather than linguistics departments,
with which they are only marginally connected
as cross-appointed or adjunct faculty. 1t seems
that this academic segment provides, mainly in
English-speaking Canada, a fairly large number
of scholars defining themselves as within the
semiotic sphere, and ii is symptomatic that most
of those who gave the initial impulse toward the
formation of a semiotic organization in Canada
belong to this category. This search for an ins ti-
tutional identity is not the least fascinating aspect
of semiotics and should be of interest to the soci-
ologists of sciences.
Let us now turn to some individuals who, as
philologists or linguists, have made significant
contributions to semiotic research during the last
two decades. The most eminent is undoubtedly
Leo Zawadowski (Lakehead University). His
numerous publications in linguistic theory (e.g.,
1964), semantics (e.g., 1967, 1975) and general
 CANADA
semiotics (1977) aim at establishing semiotics on
a firm rational basis. His aggressive questioning
of contemporary semantic theories is in many
respects sound and refreshing in a context in
which too many unverifiable assumptions are
taken for granted. Since his retirement in 1980,
Zawadowski has been pursuing this critical
enterprise, which can be viewed as a comple-
ment to his constructive publications of the six-
ties and seventies.
Myrna Gopnik (McGill University) is known
for her linguistic analysis of scientific texts (1972)
and for her semiotic approach to theories (1976,
1977). Her interest in linguistic theory has led
her to consider the nature of other systems of
signs and to investigate the differences between
theories in the natural sciences and theories in
the behavioral sciences. Her latest research bears
upon the biological, perceptual, and cognitive
constraints that determine in part most semiotic
systems, thus questioning the concept of arbi-
trariness usually considered to be central to many
semiotic approaches (1981). In a similar vein,
Richard Kimpel (University of Western Ontario)
investigates phonetic symbolism through the
study of expressive languages, taboos and
euphemism, particularly in German (1981).
Richard Jeanes (University of Toronto) has
developed, over the last decade, a noteworthy
theory of linguistic communication based on the
concept of interest which allows hirn to account
for some anomalous or puzzling aspects of French
grammatical rules and usages. His general
approach draws on the works of Pottier (1974)
and Halliday (1977) and belongs to the class of
semantically based grammars, but gives "inter-
est" a more central role in determining form
(1981, 1983). The semiotically oriented linguists
at the University of Toronto also include Henri
Schogt, whose research deals with semantics
(1976) and translation theory (1971); Barron
Brainerd, a mathematician and a linguist
involved in information theory, mathematical
linguistics, poetics, and stylistics who is a former
president of the Toronto Semiotic Circle and one
of the founders of the Journal 01 Empirical Aesthetics
(1983-); and finally Philippe Martin whose orig-
inal and innovative treatment of intonative struc-
tures, within the epistemological framework of
Hjelmslevian linguistics and dependency gram-
mars commands international attention (1977,
1981, 1982). Carl Urion (University of Alberta)
69
should also be mentioned along this line for his
remarkable work on intonation and melody in
the perspective of the ethnography of speaking
and face-to-face interaction (1978, 1979).
Last but not least, Jean Claude Choul (Uni-
versity of Regina) is currently developing an
innovative approach to semantic problems within
a semiotic framework. His many articles are con-
cerned with the theoretical issues involved in
translation and with areevaluation of classical
notions such as synonymy or paraphrase as weil
as the elaboration of new operation al concepts
such as hypersemy and interdefinition (e.g., 1980;
1982a, b).
U nfortunately it is probable that this cursory
list is incomplete and that there exist a few other
distinguished scholars, from the Chomskyan
mainstream or from other trends, whose research
should have been recorded in the context of this
section. However the criterion for inclusion that
decisively seems to qualify those named above
is their membership in semiotic organizations
and their explicit reference to semiotic concepts
in their writings. Moreover, in response to the
letter that was circulated in order to gather infor-
mation for this chapter, several colleagues sent
their bibliography accompanied by a statement
explaining why they felt their research might be
found relevant to semiotics. For instance,
Michael C. McIntyre (University ofWinnipeg),
and assistant dean in the Faculty of Medicine
(psychiatry), is doing research in "language
development, pathology, and the development
of verbally media ted processes." He studies more
specifically "the development of categorical per-
ception in normal, ESL, and speech-delayed
children" and the "perceptual/motor aspects of
language delay as weil as broader neuropsy-
chological concerns of the children with cogni-
tive and/or linguistic problems"; in philosophy,
H. A. Nielsen (University of Windsor) has
developed criticisms of certain assumptions made
by Chomsky and other linguists concerning the
mode of existence of linguistic signs (1982).
Thomas Patton (University of British Colum-
bia) deals in some of his many papers with
semantic issues from a logical point ofview (e.g.,
1968, 1973, 1976).
Naturally, as in other countries, stmiotically
relevant research appears at the intersections of
several disciplines. In the case of linguistics, sec-
tors such as neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics,
70 PAUL BOUISSAC
and sociolinguistics may appear to be quasi-
autonomous, in part because they have been
somewhat rejected from the mainstream, in part
because they undertook to stand against the
others in sheer competition for students and
research funds. Semiotics might provide some
day the institutional and epistemological frame-
work that is needed in order to coordinate the
ongoing research and to rationalize the academic
puzzle that often results from this state of affairs.
This is an important issue in times of budgetary
constraints, because many original researchers,
in Canada and elsewhere, run the risk of finding
themselves squeezed or asphyxiated in this inter-
disciplinary space if departments set their prior-
ities in a conservative way, that is, in favor of
what appears to be the mainstream to a majority
of their members.
D. Semiotics and Literary Studies
From rhetoric to the analysis of ideologies,
textual semiotics covers a wide array of research
activities which have been by far the most pro-
ductive if not the most interesting. Paul Zumthor
occupies a special position in this domain both
as one of the early founders of the semiotic move-
ment in Canada and as a prolific and provocative
writer whose numerous publications have
reflected the various methodological approaches
that characterized the French literary semiotics
of the sixties and seventies. His field of appli-
cation has usually been medieval poetry and
poetics, but his acute intellectual curiosity has
occasionally led hirn beyond the boundaries of
his specialty, for example his recent excursion
into the realm of African ethnology in connection
with an investigation of the role of the human
voice in various cultures. His authoritative Essai
de poitique midiivale (1972) and Le Masque et la
lumiere (1978) are major contributions to the con-
temporary renaissance of rhetoric which can be
considered a side effect of the more general inter-
est in forms fostered by modern semiotics. Pr ac-
tically all Zumthor's publications since 1970
should be quoted in this context (e.g., 1975). Let
us note also that he is responsible for having
introduced semiotics, for the first time, as a for-
mal partöf a graduate curriculum when he
became the first director of the Comparative Lit-
erature program at the Universite de Montreal
in 1970. One of his collaborators was Eugene
Vance, the author of alandmark analysis, Read-
ing the Song 01 Roland (1970), who has since pub-
lished a great deal in the field of the history of
semiotics (e.g., 1974, 1978, 1979) and who, inci-
dentally, was in charge of a seminar on "Rhe-
torique et semiologie" in the pioneering program
mentioned above. He is also the editor with Lucie
Brin d' Amour of Archiologie du signe (Brin d' A-
mour, 1983).
Descriptive and theoretical rhetoric,
approached from the point of view of semiotics,
is the focus of much interest both in French-
speaking and English-speaking universities.
Linda Hutcheon (McMaster University) has, for
instance, closely monitored the works of the Bel-
gi an Group J.t since the publication of their first
book in 1970, and is the author of a critical
presentation of their main propositions (1981).
Her current research deals with parody (1981),
and she has been an occasional participant in a
research group (GROUPAR) concerned with this
topic based at Queen's University which includes
Max Vernet (1983), Pierre Gobin (1980),jean-
jacques Hamm (1983), and Clive Thomson
(1982, 1983), who is also the editor of the pro-
ceedings of a colloquium on parody held in 1981
(1983) .
The leading role of Canadian scholars in the
semiotic study of rhetoric was recently con-
firmed when Bernard Dupriez (U niversite de
Montreal) and lohn McClelland (University of
Toronto) were each invited to write an article
on rhetoric for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiot-
ics. The former is the author of severa1 important
contributions in the field of stylistics (1971, 1980);
the latter, a specialist in Renaissance poetics, has
published numerous articles dealing with the
general issue of diachronie semiotics not only
with respect to literary forms (1973, 1977) but
also in music (1980,1981), and sport (1983); his
recent "Rhetoric: The State of the Art" (1985)
is a definitive account of the neorhetoric that
came of age during the last decade. Peter Nes-
selroth's (University of Toronto) innovative
inquiry into the psychoanalytical dimension of
classical tropes should also be mentioned here
(1977) as well as his precise and meticulous anal-
yses of the rhetorical structure of modern poetic
works (e.g., 1975, 1980, 1983), following the
methodology developed in Michael Riffaterre's
 CANADA
Semiotics 01Poetry (1978), notwithstanding his dis-
creet questioning of some of the assumptions
embodied in Riffaterre's version of the theory of
1iterariness and intertextua1ity (1981). He is also
the editor of the proceedings of a symposium on
The Interpretation of Rhetoric (forthcoming).
In a different vein, Guy Lafleche (Universite
de Montrea1) deve10ped in his doctora1 thesis,
Mal/arme: Grammaire generative des contes indiens,
pub1ished in 1975, an interesting methodo10gy
based upon the model of transformational-
generative grammar, through which he
attempted, with the help notab1y of statistica1
1inguistics, an exhaustive analysis of the text
including its 1exicon, .syntax, rhetoric, and the-
matic as well as narrative structure. One of his
students, Yves La1iberte, defended a thesis in
1980 dea1ing with the semiotics of poetry, enti-
tled Les lies de la nuit d'Alain Grandbois: Essai de
semiotique poetique. Also belonging to the semiotic
reflection on poetics isJacques Michon's (Univ-
ersite de Sherbrooke) Mal/arme et les mots anglais
(1978), an important essay on poetic 1anguage
whose pretext is a scho1arly study of Mallarme's
pedagogica1 and philologica1 book but which is
written from the perspective of the text poetics
of the French school in the early seventies. Der-
rida, Genette, Jakobson, Kristeva, and Todorov
are the authors most often quoted by Michon.
Another interesting contribution to the
semiotics of poetry is Semiotique de la poesie que-
bicoise (1981) by Helene Dame et Robert Giroux,
which contains several textual analyses. Finally,
Jean Fisette (Universite du Quebec a Montrea1)
has published an exemplary semiotic study of
automatist poetry in which he makes a convinc-
ing use of Greimas's approach to poetic texts
while raising the more general issue of the rela-
tionship between textua1 theory and practice
(1977). The book was perceptive1y reviewed by
MichQn (1978) and Imbert (1981).
This brief overview of some of the pub1ica-
tions pertaining to poetics and rhetoric from a
semiotic point of view is undoubtedly incom-
plete, but it is hoped that it will convey to the
reader an accurate impression of the variety and
richness of the research in this domain.
However, the main bulk of semiotic research
in literary studies concerns the novel and the
short story, whose fictitious and narrative nature
is the object of much specu1ation and theorizing.
71
This is also the domain of Canadian research in
which the influence of Greimas's semiotic theory
is the most felt, either in straightforward appli-
cations of the methodology or in reactions against
the formalism of this approach, the alternative
being to seek inspiration from other French struc-
turalistes such as C1aude Bremond, Roland
Barthes and Gerard Genette, or from 1ess abstract
American models such as those of William Labov,
Alan Dundes, or H. A. G1eason Jr. (who, inci-
dentally, taught at the University of Toronto
unti1 1982). As Greimas started his semiotic
teaching at l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
in the sixties and soon attracted some Canadian
students who often did their doctora1 research
und er his direction before returning to their
homeland to take up academic positions, there
now exist at least two generations of 1iterary
scholars who relate more or less closely to this
branch of the French school, recently self-sty1ed
"1'Ecole de Paris." Greimas's influence has been
regularly reinforced by severa1 visits to Canada,
for instance a summer course he gave in the
Department of French at the University of
Toronto in 1965; he also participated in confer-
ences such as the important interdisciplinary col-
10quium on "Vraisemb1able et fiction" organized
at the Universite de Montreal in 1974.
Clement Legare (Universite du Quebec a
Trois-Rivieres) is one of the main exponents of
this approach. He is the author of severa1 exem-
p1ary pub1ications (e.g., 1976) among which the
most re cent have consisted in editing selected
Quebec folkloric tales followed by a semiotic
analysis of the text (1980, 1982). One of the best
systematic uses of Greimas's models is found in
Pau1 Perron's articles on Quebec literature (1978,
1979) and on Balzac's novels (1980), sometimes
in collaboration with Roland Le Huenen (1980a,
b); both teach in the Department of French at
the University of Toronto. Perron is also the
author of the main article on narrato10gy to
appear in the Encyclopedic Dictionary 01 Semiotics
(Sebeok, forthcoming). Hans-George Ruprecht
(Carleton University), an active member of the
Paris Groupe de recherches simio-linguistiques directed
by Greimas, is one of the authors of a program-
matic document on 1iterary theory (1978) and a
contributor of tlle group's monograph series
(1981a). His recent publications de~ls mosdy with
Hispanic literatures from the point of view of
72 PAUL BOUISSAC
intertextuality and manipulative strategies (1977,
1980, 1981b). Patrick Imbert (University of
Ottawa) also relies occasionally on Greimasian
methodology in his research on the nineteenth-
century French as well as contemporary Quebec
fiction (e.g., 1980b). His book on the semiotics
of description in Balzac's novels (1978a) is a
revised version of his doctoral dissertation on
"Semiotique de la description du mobilier dans
la Comidie Humaine de Balzac" (1974); another
book, on the Quebecois novels since 1950 (1983),
draws in part on the same methodo10gica1
sources, but his other pub1ications demonstrate
a greater range of theoretical inspiration (e.g.,
1978b, 1979, 1980a). An interesting application
of Greimas's semiotics of narratives is found in
a study of Hamilton and Beckford by C1aude
Filteau (U niversite de Sherbrooke) (1981), con-
structively reviewed by Walter Moser (Univer-
si te de Montrea1) (1981). Frank Collins
(University ofToronto) has pub1ished some per-
ceptive essays applying semiotic concepts to both
medieval and contemporary texts (1979, 1981).
Two members of the Universite du Quebec,
C.E.U.O.Q./Hull, Serge Theriault and Rene
Juery, have recently published a double-headed
book on the structural approach to text analysis
(1980), which in spite of so me eclecticism can
be considered a successful effort to bring to the
universities' classrooms the basics of Greimas's
methodology. Theriault's essay is entitled "Ele-
ments de narratologie : Exercises pratiques"; the
author's interest in narrato10gy as well as pedag-
ogy is also demonstrated in his other publica-
tions (e.g., 1980a, b, c). Juery's contribution is
a detai1ed semiotic analysis of a short story by
Anne Hebert, and is part of a more ambitious
collective project bearing upon a formalistic
approach to Quebec literary discourse. These
two essays have been discussed by Perron (1981)
in a review article which also examines Ther-
iault's book on Anne Hebert (1980) as well as
the proceedings of a conference held at the U ni-
versity of Guelph in 1978 (Erickson, 1980). qther
relevant publications in this domain are by Alex-
andre Amprimoz (University of Manitoba) in
Prisence Francophone and the Revue de l'Universiti
de Moncton (1979a, b; 1980; 1981; 1982). It is
interesting to note that J ean Louis Major (U ni-
versity of Ottawa), the well-known author of
numerous remarkab1e books and articles on var-
ious French writers and literary problems, is cur-
rently completing an essay on the semiotic
method of textual analysis.
Some of the most productive and innovative
scho1ars in the field of the theory of narrative
have drawn their first inspiration from Greimas's
work even if a combination of intellectual evo-
lution and epistemological opportunism led them
later on to exp10re new philosophica1 paths.Jean
Fisette, mentioned above, has developed a con-
structive critical point of view (1981) and has
lately ventured into Peirce's philosophy under
the guidance of Charles Deledalle (1982).
Thomas Pavel (Universite du Quebec a Mon-
treal), a linguist by training and a philosopher
by inclination (1972a), who wrote his doctoral
dissertation in 1971 on "Les Variations isoto-
piques" under Greimas, and whose first semiotic
publications were focused on the Greimasian
conception of narrative structures (1973a, b),
soon evolved toward a Chomskyan point of view
before discovering the greener pastures of Anglo-
Saxon philosophy and logic (1976b, 1978, 1979,
1980). Wladimir Krysinski (Universite de Mon-
treal) belongs to the same semiotic generation;
a prolific writer, well served by a wide erudition,
Krysinski attempts to transcend the narrow
domain of folktales and short stories which has
been the field of predilection of Greimas and his
immediate disciples, by boldly confronting the
theory of narrative structures with the rich and
polymorphous realm of nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century fiction (1975, 1980, 1981). His
promising current investigation of wh at he
calls, after Jolles, "complex forms" should lead
hirn to a powerful semiotic theory of narratives,
rooted, so to speak, in the real world of fiction
(1983).
The theory of narrativity is the horizon in
direction of which a growing number of Cana-
dian scholars seem to be working, some with
reference to Greimas and Genette, such as, in
addition to those mentioned above, J acques
Michon (1981) and Jean-Marcel Uard (1981),
who have jointly edited a special issue of Etudes
Littiraires on textual semiotics and literary his-
tory of Quebec (Leard, 1981), others in a some-
what different perspective, such as Pierre Hebert
(University of Toronto), whose doctoral disser-
tation on "Figures, temporalite et forme du dis-
cours narratif" (Laval, 1977) draws its
methodological inspiration from Jean Rousset,
Gerard Genette and Claude Bremond and whose
 CANADA
numerous artides provide a valuable contribu-
tion to this global project which integrates co m-
muni ca ti on theory within its methodology (1981,
1983). Narrativity is also the central topic of
Agnes Whitfield's research (Queen's University)
with a thesis on the Quebec novel in the first
person (Laval, 1981) and severa1 artides bearing
upon narration and confession, the "enoncia-
tion" process, andmore generally discourse
analysis (e.g., 1979). Some recent special issues
of scholarly journals and collections sh6u1d be
added to this list; for instance, the second issue
of The Journal rif Practical Structuralism (1980), an
ephemer a1 pub1ication of the Royal Military
College of Canada edited by Stephen Bonny-
castle and Armine Kotin, which is devoted to a
discussion in depth of Gerard Genette's Narrative
Discourse and Seymour Chatman's Story and Dis-
course; or the outstanding volume on Interpretation
rif Narrative (1978) edited by Mario Valdes and
Owen Miller (both from the University of
Toronto) with contributions by both semioti-
cians and hermeneutes. Valdes's latest book on
the topic of literary criticism (1982) indudes
many critica1 discussions of the formalist treat-
ment of narratives and adumbrates his long-term
project of an exhaustive his tory of form changes
that should indeed be particularly relevant to
the neglected domain of diachronic semiotics.
But the most impressive and possibly the most
consistent contribution to the theory of poetics
and fiction is found in Lubomir Doldel's (Uni-
versity of Toronto) work, which now spans almost
thirty years of publications. A prominent mem-
ber of the Prague school postwar generation,
Doldel first did his research in quantitative lin-
guistics, dealing mostly with stylistics and poet-
ics. For instance he coedited in 1966 and 1967
a two-volume book entitled Prague Studies in
Mathematical Linguistics in which one of his own
contributions was "The Prague Schoo1 and the
Statistical Theory of Poetic Language" (1967);
in the same year, he published a long artide on
"The Typology of the Narrator: Point of View
in Fiction" (1967). Since the early seventies his
research has mainly dealt with the theory of nar-
ratives, and shows a progressively greater reli-
ance on concepts borrowed from the logic of
action, logical semantics, and the philosophy of
language; among the thirty or so books and arti-
des he published in this domain let us note 1973,
1976, 1979, 1980.
73
The vast field of literary semiotics indudes
also the study of particular sociocultural codes
as they are reftected and used, or transformed,
in literary texts. James Brown (Dalhousie Uni-
versity) has studied the semiotic functions of
meals, alimentary systems and gastro-culinary
imagery in the French novel in several artides
(e.g., 1978) and in a book on the articulation of
the alimentary code in the nineteenth-century
French novel between 1789 and 1840 (1983).
Nicole Treves-Go1d (Dalhousie University), a
scholar noted for her publications in sixteenth-
century French literature (e.g., 1977) as weIl as
in film analysis (1974), is currently working on
the semiotics of space in twentieth-century fiction.
An impressive stream of research in the domain
of literary sociosemiotics is Stephane Sarkany's
(Carleton University) numerous books and arti-
des, notably 1974a, b; 1975; 1976; 1977a, b;
1980a, b. One of the founding .members of the
Canadian Semiotic Association, Sarkany con-
siders that semiotics can achieve its ultimate goal
of integrating all the "sciences de l'homme"
(humanities and social sciences) only in the
framework of an adequate theory of culture. In
his forthcoming book on Forme, socialiti et processus
d'information, he locates the textual signifying
process at the co re of the cultura1 information
process, thus framing all production of meaning
in the socio-cultural system. His general concern
is dearly epistemological and beyond his interest
in wh at is usually called la socio-critique Sarkany
sees semiotics as the progressive integration of
communication and information theories, prag-
matics, sociology, and cultura1 theory. This point
of view is shared by a group of Canadian scho1-
ars whose strength can be assessed through at
least two collective publications: the proceedings
of a colloquium on the socio-critique of the novel,
edited by Graham Falconer (University of
Toronto) and Henri Mitterand (Paris) (1975),
and a collection oI some of the papers read at a
colloquium on "Ecriture, lecture et 1e lecteur"
at Carleton University in 1976, later published
under Sarkany's editors hip as a publication of
the series, "Travaux du groupe de recherche
international" (1980). This latter publication has
been perceptively reviewed by Dominique Lafon
(University of Ottawa) (1980). It seems appro-
priate to mention in this context the in te rest in
Bakhtin's thought that has recently developed
in Canada under the efficient leadership of Clive
74 PAUL BOUISSAC

Thomson (Queen's University). The success of belong to the domain of literary texts. This
Ann Shukman's seminar on "Bakhtin and His includes for example religious texts, essentially
Circle" given in 1982 as part of the International from the J udeo-Christian tradition, approached
Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural from the point of view, derived from Greimas,
Studies (U niversity of Toronto) is certainly that has been developed by the Entrevernes
indicative of areaction against the formalist and group, Jean Calloud in France, and Daniel Patte
idealist conception of semiotics. A Bakhtin News- in the United States. Olivette Genest's (Univ-
letter is now published at Queen's U niversity ersite de Montreal) Perspective semiotique sur le reeit
under the international editorship of Don Bialos- de la Passion (1978), Robert Polzin's (Carleton
tosky, Michael Holquist, Ann Shukman and Clive University) Biblieal Structuralism (1977) and Moses
Thomson, and several colloquia are being and the Deuteronomist (1980), Robert Culley's
planned in the wake of the one which took place (McGill University) "Action Sequences in Gen-
in 1982 in Toronto. esis 2-3" (1980), or "Themes and Variations in
The semiotic investigation of dramatic texts Three Groups of 01d Testament Narratives"
and performances is another modest but active (1980), DavidJobling's (U niversity of Saskatch-
focus of Canadian research. Following the early ewan) works on biblical texts are good examp1es
publications of Patrice Pavis (1976), then at the of such treatments.
Royal Military College (and now at Paris 111), Another field of dis course analysis is the study
Louis Francoeur (U niversite Laval) and Wla- of scientific and scho1arly texts. Myrna Gopnik
dimir Krysinski (1979), then at the U niversity (McGill University) has been mentioned in the
of Ottawa (and now at the Universite de Mon- previous section for her book on syntactic struc-
treal), colloq uia and special issues of scholarly tures in scientific texts (1972). This is a domain
journals on this topic are pr(~liferating as we enter in which socio1ogica1, 1inguistic, and philosoph-
the eighties. For instance Etudes Litteraires pub- ical concerns and methodologies interfere with
lished a set of essays on the semiotics of theater each other and often meet on the common ground
under the editorship of Jeannette Laillou-Savona of semiotics. In recent years Ken Morrison and
(University ofToronto) (1980) and Modem Drama John O'Neill (York University) have been work-
devoted a complete issue to theory of drama and ing on the analysis of the written organization
performance she edited in collaboration with of science articles. In Written Inquiry: Studies in
Josette Feral and E. A. Walker (University of the Organization of the Inquiring Seienees (forthcom-
Toronto) (1982). The importance of the Cana- ing), Morrison analyzes the traditions of inquiry
dian participation in the special issue of Poeties in five academic disciplines (philosophy, history,
Today on "Drama, Theatre, Performances, a biology, physics, social science). He attempts
Semiotic Perspective" (1981) is to be noted, as (1981) to bring together various thematic ele-
well as some of the contributions to be found in ments of academic discourse by viewing their
Sarkany (1980b) mentioned earlier. This field is history as involving wholly textual arts. Each of
characterized by a certain methodological eclec- the disciplines studied is found to textualize its
ticism involving a superficial use of Peirce's and tradition of logic, fact, evidence, and argument
Jakobson'sconceph (Pav~, 1973, 1976, 1979)or according to its discipline-specific pedagogic
drawing on Austin's and Searle's speech acts aims. O'Neill (1981) is concerned with the
theory (Laillou-Savona, 1980, 1982); others are empirical description of the disciplinary prac-
characterized by their reliance on certain ana- tices whereby knowledge is competently dis-
lytical categories of Gallic or Slavic structural- played as cogent argument, evidence, refutation,
ism (e.g., Melanc,;on, 1982), More consistent and the like. This work is part of a larger col-
approach es are found in Lise Gauvin (Universite lection, Seienee Texts: Studies in the Literary Anafysis
de Montreal; 1979), Francoeur (1975, 1976, of Natural and Social Scienee (forthcoming) in which
1980), Issacharoff (1980, 1981), and Krysinski a paradigm of approaches to the literary analysis
(1980b, 1981 b, 1982) who te nd to base their of scientific dis course is presented.
analyses of plays or thidtraliti on a single theo- The semiotics of ideology has also attracted
. retical frame of reference. a great deal of interest. The publication, in
The last section of this overview will deal with 1973, of a special issue of Soeiologie et Societes on
the semiotic analysis of discourses which do not this topic under the editorship of Christianne
 CANADA
Tremblay Querido (Universite de Montreal) can
be considered as the inaugural document of a
continuous stream of research bearing upon the
very conditions that determine in depth the
semantic effect and social efficacy of discourse.
This leads toward the exploration of the political
and sociocultural unconscious of the society in
which a given discourse circulates. Naturally,
the semiotic discourse itself is not immune to
this sort of analysis. Pierre Boudon (1973a), J ean-
Jacques Nattiez (1973b) and Franc;:ois Peraldi
(l973), all from the Universite de Montreal, have
taken advantage of this special issue to reftect
upon their own semiotic practice. Since then,
others have engaged in more systematic research
in this domain. Annette Paquot andJacques Zyl-
berberg (Universite Laval), the former from the
Department of Linguistics, the latter from the
Department of Political Science, undertook in
1980 an ambitious project on the semiotics of
nationalist discourse consisting in an analysis of
a corpus formed by the editorials and readers'
letters published in the French Quebec press at
the time of the postreferendum constitutional
debate. Their previous work (Paquot, 1980;
Paquot and Zylberberg, 1980; Zylberberg, 1978,
1980) dealt with this type of analysis. In a dif-
ferent vein, Joseph Melanc;:on (Universite Laval)
is conducting research on the ideological struc-
tures that are articulated in a corpus of academic
essays written by Quebec students in the late
nineteenth century. Other relevant publications
of his to be noted also deal with discourse anal-
ysis (1981, 1982). Michel van Schendel (Univ-
ersite du Quebec a Montreal) is the author of
several articles on the ideological content of
pedagogical texts (l965, 1976a), and Denis
Bachand (University of Ottawa) has published
several seminal studies on the dis course of adver-
tising (1977, 1978) and the dis course of power
(l979) as weIl as Jean Charles Chebat (1973,
1974b). Alain Goldschläger's (University of
Western Ontario) interest in this domain should
be mentioned he re (1975, 1980) with'his current
analysis of the political dis course in France dur-
ing World War H. Finally, Marc Angenot's
(McGill University) impressive scholarly pub-
lications since 1970 which include, as of 1981,
no less than 127 titles, are for the most part
eminently relevant to this field of inquiry (e.g.,
1975; 1977a, b; 1978; 1981), in particular his
most recent contribution, a long and important
75
work on La Parole pamphletaire (1982). This has
also been a constant interest of Jean-Paul Bro-
deur (Universite de Montreal) whose memora-
ble article analyzing a text by Julia Kristeva
outlined in the early seventies a brilliant critique
of contemporary culture through an examina-
tion of its language (1973).
As seems obvious from the above account, the
research on the semiotics of ideology is mostly
located in French-speaking Canada. This
research is weIl served by the numerous schol-
arly journals which welcome such studies and
publish special issues on this topic, for instance
"Semiotique du discours" in Etudes Litteraires
(1977) or "Didactique et litterature" in the same
(1981). In the previous decade, Strategie regularly
published articles on this topic. Let us also note
the existence of a Cercle quebecois d'etude des for-
mations discursives which coordinates the research
and organizes colloquia such as the recent
"Interdiscursivity and Social Discourse" at
McGill U niversity in the fall of 1982. U nd er the
leadership of Angenot, the contributors included
Darko Suvin (McGill University), Walter Moser
(Universite de Montreal), Stephane Sarkany
(Carleton U niversity), Denis Saint-J acques
(U niversite Laval), Marie-Christine Leps
(McGill University), Pierre Laurette (Carleton
University), Eva Kushner (McGill University),
Marike Finlay-Pelinky (McGill University), and
Francesco Loriggio (Carleton University). There
is little doubt that in the years to come this direc-
tion of semiotic research, which includes a crit-
ical examination of its own discourse, will
considerably expand and play an important role
in shaping the semiotic scene in Canada.
E. Semiotics and Cultural
Anthropology
The move from adescription of research on
texts, discourses, and ideology to research in cul-
tural anthropology should make it clear that
semiotic research tends to blur the institutional
distinctions established during the twentieth
century between the humanities and the social
sciences as weIl as the compartimentalization or
"departmentalization" within each one of these
two branches. Principally, at a time when many
ethnologists apply their investigative methods to
their own society, there is in fact no real epis-
temological gap between most of the items listed
76 PAULBOUISSAC
in the previous seetion and those that will be
recorded here. Differences are often only super-
ficiai, for instance in such things as technical
terms, references, intertextual allusions. But the
economy of symbolic forms, the construing of
sociocultural phenomena as communication
processes, the search for recurring patterns or
underlying systems of structures, are common
to both textual semiotics and cultural anthro-
pology. This is also true of a large segment of
the research in sociology.
The most original reflection on the overlap
between these domains is undoubtedly by Fer-
nando Poyatos (University of New Brunswick),
whose re cent seminal article on "Literary
Anthropology: A New Interdisciplinary Per-
spective of Man Through his Narrative Litera-
ture" (1981) may very weil appear in the future
as a decisive step toward a reassessment of dis-
ciplinary boundaries. In this dense essay, Poy-
atos points to the fact that "the unquestionable
yet unjustifiable gulf between the theory and
practice of literature and the various areas sub-
sumed und er anthropology is becoming more and
more conspicuous" (1981, p. 3).7 It should also
be underlined that his background and previous
research, which will be detailed in the next sec-
tion, explicitly pertain to semiotics. Brenda Beck
(University of British Columbia) a well-known
specialist of South Indian narratives (e.g., 1982a)
and the author of important articles on meta-
phors (1978, 1982b), also relies on semiotic
methodology in her ongoing research on the use
of imagery by Canadian bank managers and on
the symbolic content of newspaper advertise-
ments in North America. But the clearest case
of disciplinary multivalence certainly is Pierre
Maranda (Universite Lavai), whose abundant
and important work can be seen as a paradig-
matic example of productive semiotic research.
7The recently developed reluctance of David Turner (Uni-
versity of Toronto) to be considered a semiotician prevents
me from including him in this section. However, it should
be mentioned, for the sake of history, that he participated
in the seventies in the Toronto Semiotic Circle's activities,
prepublished a monograph in the circle's publication series,
and gave a course in collaboration with William McKellin
(University of Toronto) as apart of the program of the
Third International Summer Institute for Semiotic and
Structural Studies (1982). Interestingly, this course was
entitled "Text and Context: The Connection between Myth,
Literature and History" and dealt with work by the Cana-
dian novelist, Hugh MacLennan.
As an early structuralist of the Levi-Straussian
brand, he contributed to the study of myth and
oral tradition (e.g., 1972, 1974b). In collabora-
tion with Elli Köngäs-Maranda, he notably
devised a productive theory of textual models in
relation to folktales. Structural Models in Folklore
remains a canonical book in the field (Maranda
and Köngäs-Maranda, 1971). His direct knowl-
edge of Russian semiotics (l974a) combined with
the various branches of the French and Amer-
ican schools, provided hirn with a privileged
epistemological point of view from which he
developed a methodological approach whose
results appear in his numerous publications (e.g.,
1977b, c; 1978b; 1982) as well as in the research
projects he has coordinated over the last decade.
Special mention should be made of his semio-
graphie method through which some form of
measurement can be introduced in the study of
"la vie des signes au sein de la vie sociale" (Saus-
sure: the life of signs in the midst of sociallife)
(1981) .
Erik Schwimmer, another Laval anthropolo-
gist, is also playing a leading role on the Cana-
dian semiotic scene. His early contributions to
semiotic events, such as the first meetings of the
International Association in Milan in 1974 (1979)
and the Tampa colloquium of 1974, during which
the Semiotic Society of America was founded
(1977), raise the issue of the relations hip between
semiotics and anthropology. Since then he has
published many articles which not only make
use of various semiotic models but also contrib-
ute a provocative reflection on the semiotic par-
adigm itself (e.g., 1976, 1981).
Some sociologists have found it useful to apply
certain aspects of Levi-Strauss's theory of mythic
thought to an analysis of popular culture; for
instance, Thelma McCormack (Y ork U niver-
sity) uses such a type of structural analysis in
her research on images of women in the mass
media; Michael Carroll (University of Western
Ontario) is the author of several provocative
articles (e.g., 1980), mostly dealing with popular
culture, in which he challenges some of Levi-
Strauss's, Leach's, and Douglas's famous "illus-
trations" in the name of their own principles,
and attempts to demonstrate that these princi-
pies are right in spite of the flaws of the appli-
cations (e.g., 1977; 1978a, b; 1979). Carole Farber
(University ofWestern Ontario) has been study-
ing for some time public events such as local
 CANADA
parades, carnivals, and festivals in a manner akin
to semiotic analysis; Jim Freedman (University
of Western Ontario) has dealt with professional
wrestling in a similar way; Frank Manning (U ni-
versity ofWestern Ontario) (1978, 1981) recently
edited a fascinating collection of articles (forth-
coming) on the signification of celebrations in
complex society in which his own contribution
and those of Farber, Freedman and others are
particularly relevant to the semiotics-of-culture
approach, inasmuch as they are not purely
descriptive but interpretive in terms of the cul-
tural system within which they are observed.
The abundance of research of this type makes
such abrief account necessarily incomplete and
only indicative of the rieh contribution of Cana-
dian anthropologists to semiotic research. How-
ever, this overview would be seriously lacking if
the following works were not reported here: first,
Tom McFeat's (University ofToronto) study of
small-group cultures (1974), and, more gen-
erally, of cultural transmission, a concern which
has din-:cted most of his teaching and research
since his initial fieldwork with the Zuiii Pueblo
Indians in the early fifties. A keen observer of
various semiotic proeesses in social interactions,
McFeat has recently brought together a wealth
of observations in an exquisite monograph enti-
tled The Communication 01 Culture: Models 01 Learn-
ingfor Troops and Children (1979). The second set
of publications that must be mentioned here is
by Peter Stephenson (University of Victoria) and
deals with the evolution of communieation sys-
tems (calls, gestures, language, writing and
mathematics) (1979a, b; 1980). Stephenson's
research also includes a sensitive investigation
of Hutterite symbolism in its pragmatic, struc-
tural and mystical context (1978).
Let us now turn to the sociologists' contri-
bution, limiting ourselves to representative cases.
Jean Charles Chebat (Universite du Quebec a
Montreal), an early contributor, in collaboration
with Georges Henault (University of Ottawa),
to the Canadian Journal of Research in Semiotics
(1974), defines his own research as sociosemiotic
and relies on communication and information
theory concepts as well as linguistic models in
his investigations of advertising and social inter-
action, for instance in the decision-making proc-
ess (1977, 1978) or in family life (1980). Andre
Stein (University of Toronto) also uses a semiotic
framework to discuss, for instance, political pos-
77
ters (1979), aspects of the literature related to
the holocaust (1981) and the process of social
identification (1979). His close links with the
ethnomethodological school is consistent with his
semiotic interest, as there are epistemological
affinities between the two approaches. The same
is true of Peter Eglin (Wilfred Laurier U niver-
sity) in his book and articles on Talk and Taxonomy
(1980a), "Culture as Method: Loeation as an
Interactional Device" (1980b), and "Inequality
in Service Eneounters: Professional Power vs
Interaetional Organization in Calls to the Police"
(forthcoming); Eglin gave an interesting paper
on the pragmatics of truth-claims in ordinary
language at the Second Congress of the Inter-
national Association for Semiotic Studies in
Vienna (1979). He has recently completed re-
search on complaints and the structure of soeial
action (forthcoming). Roy Turner's (University
of British Columbia) contributions in this domain
are of utmosr importance and he definitely plays
a leading role in Canadian ethnomethodological
research (e.g., 1969, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1976).
The study by Michael Overington (Saint Mary's
University) of the rhetoric of the construction
of social scientific knowledge and the "drama-
tistic logic of inquiry" is also to be noted. In a
number of fascinating papers (1977a, b, c; 1979a,
b; 1981a, b), he has advanced the point of view
that what is taken for knowledge in the social
sciences is an achievement of an artful rhetoric
which is authorized by the community within
which that dis course is situated. Two papers
(1979a, b) have advanced the general position
with an effort to cast the social sciences, in par-
ticular sociology, as communitarian knowledge
practices. Others, such as "The Scientific Com-
munity as Audience: Toward a Rhetorical Anal-
ysis of Science" (1977d), have focused on rhetoric
as the form of argumentation when it is addressed
to an audience licensed to evaluate the merit of
the discourse. Still others (1981 a, b) are efforts
to speak about the problems created for socio-
logical dis course under such a rhetorical for-
mulation; one treats the matter of how one might
claim to be speaking responsibly in the absence
of apodictic standards (such as those allegedly
provided in a positivist mode); the other looks
at Emile Durkheim's Suicide as a rhetorical
achievement. This fascinating work obviously
shows some commonality of concern with Mor-
rison's and O'Neill's endeavors listed at the end
78 PAUL BOUISSAC
of the previous section, in which they appear to
fit-as they themselves agree-quite weH,
another sign of the upsetting quality of semiotics
with respect to today's disciplinary boundaries.
Finally, the research by Alan Blum and Peter
McHugh (York University) should also be men-
tioned in this report, pafticularly their joindy
authored volume On the Beginning 01 Social Inquiry
(1974) in which they study the function of lan-
guage formulations of everyday life, science, and
art.
F. Semiotics and Communication
Studies
The tide chosen for this final section will
undoubtedly seem too general or inappropriate.
It is not meant to cover the sort of research
usually fostered by communication programs or
departments on the his tory of the technology of
the mass media. The Canadian tradition in this
domain is oriented toward the pragmatics of
communication, advertising, and journalism, and
occasionally toward a sociology of "communi-
cation" as a modern institution. Marshall
McLuhan's speculations often serve as an uncrit-
ical philosophical background for such studies.
However, communication as a sociobiological
process stands at the heart of most semiotic the-
ories and the basic concepts of the cybernetic
and information theories of post-World War II
have played a determining role in the emergence
of semiotics as a discipline-to-be. Theoretical
thinking regarding communication is definitely
a vital part of the semiotic project. In this respect,
Tony Wilden (Simon Fraser University) has
produced over the last two decades a critical and
forceful reflection on the fundamental issues at
stake in the various contemporary doctrines of
meaning, communication, system and sign. His
System and Structure (1972a, 1980) is alandmark
in this field, and each of his many articles is an
important step toward the general theory of
communication that is still lacking in spite of
the proliferation of publications in this domain
since the fifties. Wilden's contributions to the
Einaudi encyclopedia, for instance, are con-
sidered to be definitive essays on the notions they
examine, such as communication (1978) and
information (1979). His treatment of commu-
nication processes within the framework of a the-
ory of ecosystems and ideology (1973) casts a
new light on many current concepts in semiotics
(1981), as do his forthcoming essays on iconicity
and on the ecology of communication.
Let us turn now to a set of studies belonging
to the category which is commonly referred to
as "semiotics of .... " It seems appropriate to
review this aspect of semiotics under the heading
of "communication" primarily in that the var-
ious "objects" of inquiry it comprises have first
been construed as instances of communication
or as "languages" before being analyzed in terms
of sign systems, signifying processes, code, dis-
course, syntax, and so on. Even though, over the
years, the crudeness of this initial epistemolog-
ical step has been qualified by the claim that
such an approach was purely heuristic, there was
nevertheless a stage in which most semioticians
believed that all sign systems were necessarily
endowed with more or less the same structure
as naturallanguages, and that the main problem
was to discover the functionallevels correspond-
ing to the phonemes, morphemes, and syntactic
units of naturallanguages. In the early years of
structuralism and semiotics this was a sort of
credo, which can now be questioned (notably in
view of so me advances in the brain sciences),
but it had the invaluable merit of opening new
fields of inquiry in the social sciences and of
providing the investigation of the human sphere
with novel conceptual tools and new frames of
reference. The least that can be said is that the
application of linguistic models to various cul-
tural domains has revealed some essential aspects
that had not been perceived before; and this is
a common feature of scientific progress.
Nonverbal communication occupies arealm
of its own in North American research. It covers
a great variety of conceptions, goals, and meth-
ods. The semiotics of body movement, of ges-
tures, of patterned behaviors are labels diversely
used to define this sort of research which has
mushroomed with extraordinary intensity in the
seventies. Martha Davis's annotated bibliog-
raphy on Body Movement and Nonverbal Communi-
cation (1982) for the period 1971-80 includes no
less than 1411 items. At least three Canadians
are listed among them. Paul Bouissac (Univer-
sity of Toronto) attempted in the la te sixties a
radical application of the functionalist linguistic
model to the entire sphere of all possible body
movements and introduced a project of mathe-
matization of this object of inquiry (1973). This
 CANADA
enterprise included a critical examination of
Birdwhistell's kinesics (1972). In the early sev-
enties, E. H. Baxter (University of Manitoba)
comp1eted an interesting study in comparative
kinesics; his report dealt with nonverbal com-
munication among Innuit and Indians in North-
ern Canada (1974). Howard Smith (Queen's
University) has been mostly concerned with
nonverbal communication in teaching, its cul-
tural imp1ications and its relation to students'
achievement (1979a). He published in the Review
qf Educational Research a comprehensive discus-
sion of the impressive research accomplished in
this field (1979b). In a different veinJoan Kahn's
(McGill University) research on medica1 semiot-
ics deserves special mention here; her insightfu1
papers are contributing significantly to the
renewal of this age-old problem from which, as
many contend, semiotics itself was born (e.g.,
1980). Let us also take notice ofCarole Marks's
(Toronto) writings on human sexuality, which
include some interesting accounts of "coital
kinesics" (1980); she considers a culture's coital
patterns as a reftection and symbol of nonsexual
elements: economic, political, and social rela-
tionship between the sexes, as weH as broader
factors such as mythical thought and world views
must be taken into consideration. The most
inclusive and consistent research in the domain
of nonverbal communication has been done by
Fernando Poyatos (University of New Bruns-
wiek), whose seminal monograph on Man Beyond
Words (1976a) was preceded by several papers
and articles (e.g., 1975) and has since been fol-
lowed by aseries of complementary publications
aiming at the foundation of an integrative theory
of nonverbal systems (1976b, c, d, 1977a, b, 1980,
1981). The topic of gesture has also inspired
so me specialists of literature; for instance
Angenot, who studied the gestural code used by
the Catholic preachers of the neoclassical period
in France (1973), and Gobin, who analyzed the
role of gestures in Mirbeau's novels (in Falconer
and Mitterand, 1975). See also Paul BIeton,
(Montreal) for a study of etiquette (1980).
It seems that Poyatos, who has also written
on the reftection of kinesic systems in literary
texts (1977b), is the only Canadian scholar who
so far has made any significant contribution to
the semiotics of theatrical performances (1982).
Circus performances have been extensively stud-
ied by Bouissac since the late sixties. In Circus
79
and Culture (1976a) he applied eclecticaHy several
kinds of linguistic and communication models
to the analysis of individual circus acts. He has
published since then a number of articles dealing
with various aspects of circus performances (e.g.,
1977a; 1978; 1979b; 1981; 1982c, d) as weH as
on methodological issues (e.g., 1977b, 1982a).
The semiotics of the opera has recently been the
object of a book by Jean-Jacques Nattiez (Univ-
ersite de Montreal). This study of Wagner's
Tetralogy at the 1976-1980 Bayreuth Festivals
breaks new ground in the study of theatrical and
musical performance (1983).
But naturaHy Nattiez's name is above all
linked to the creation in 1974 of the Groupe de
recherche en semiologie musicale at the Faculty of
Music (Universite de Montreal). This center has
been continuously active since then and has done
a great deal of research which has com-
manded international attention. In 1975, a team
comprising Eve Benoit, Marcelle Guertin and
Gilles Naud was involved in combinatory anal-
ysis of the style of Debussy's Preludes. Another
team, with Nicole Beaudry, Claude Charron, and
Denise Harvey, was busy recording Innuit
(Eskimo) songs in northeastern Canada in order
to undertake a semiotic study of the material
collected. With the years, more researchers
became involved and the epistemological posi-
tions of the group evolved toward a more com-
prehensive point of view, in that it became
concerned not only with the immanent struc-
tures of the throat songs, but also with ethnol-
ogical investigations. For details regarding the
group's composition and evolution, see Nattiez
(1978b). All these projects have now been com-
pleted (Pelinski, 1981) or are ne ar completion,
and have regularly yielded in the meantime a
great number of publications (e.g., Desroche,
1982, Guertin, 1979, 1982; Hirbour-Paquette,
1979; Naud, 1975, 1979). Areport on the
Debussy research was presented at a special ses-
sion of the American Musicological Society in
1980, at Denver. Nattiez hirns elf, a prolific, inno-
vative, and aggressive thinker, has produced over
a hund red publications. One of the few partic-
ipants in the first International Congress of
Semiotics of Music which was held in October
1973 at Belgrade, he has convincingly and dem-
onstratively developed over the last decade an
original semiotic theory of music, which has pro-
gressively emancipated itself from the constraints
80 PAUL BOUISSAC
of the initiallinguistic model (e.g., 1975b, 1976,
1978a, b, 1982). N attiez has also written the arti-
des on "Armonia," "Melodia," "Rythmo-
Metrica," and "Scala" for the Enciclopedia Einaudi,
and he is the editor of aseries published by Les
Presses de l'U niversite de Montreal: "Semiologie
et analyse musicales." However, Nattiez is a
semiotician whose field of application is music,
rather than a musicologist who would use
semiotic methodology in order to solve some tra-
ditional problems; this is why his own contri-
butions to theoretical semiotics are to be taken
into consideration in assessing the current evo-
lution of the semiotic paradigm (e.g., 1973a, b,
1975a, 1978a).
Nor is the Universite de Montreal research
group the only focus in Canada where a semiotic
theory of music is taking shape. David Lidov
(Y ork U niversity) has developed both precise
analyses and theoretical perspectives (e.g., 1978;
1980a, b; 1981), this time from within the mus-
ical and musicological traditions, but in elose
contact with the semiotic movement. Lidov is
author of the artiele on the semiotics of music
for the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics. Like those
of Nattiez, Lidov's contributions are eminently
pertinent to the semiotic theory itself as shown
in his paper on "A Doctrine of Autonomy in
Signs", read at the 1982 annual conference of
the Semiotic Society of America.
The semiotics of cinema is a strong and rich
subdomain of semiotic research with its inter-
national specialists like Stephen Heath, Chris-
tian Metz, or Seymour Chatman, and its multiple
connections with the much larger community of
film study and cinema history specialists. It is
often difficult, in this particular case, to decide
what is relevant to semiotics among the numer-
ous books, artieles, and journals published in
this field. A good, example of this situation is the
special issue of Etudes Littiraires on " Cinema et
recit" (1980). However, let us mention two spe-
cialists whose research seems to be unambigu-
ously of a semiotic nature: Cameron Tolton
(University of Toronto), who offers a graduate
course on the semiotics of cinema in the Depart-
ment of French and has published some semiotic
analyses of films (1979, 1983, forthcoming), and
Bill Nichols, director of the Department of Film
Studies at Queen's University, where the research
done in this area ineludes "the semiotics of the
image, the place of the spectator, principles of
discourse and enunClatlOn in narrative exposi-
tions as these areas pertain to the cinema."
Nichols is the author of a number of artieles and
of two books relevant to semiotics (1976, 1981).
The notion of visual semiotics bears upon the
domain usually restricted to static objects which
convey information through the optic channel.
Naturally, this is one of the many ad hoc defi-
nitions in extension that still map semiotic
research. I t ineludes for instance the visual arts,
design, advertising, architecture and so on. It is
used here only as an inventory convenience.
Visual semiotics was excellently represented
in Canada by Rene Lindekens (U niversite de
Montreal) from the middle seventies until his
untimely death in 1980. His main publications
dealt with the semiotics of photographs (1971,
1976), painting (e.g., 1977, 1978, 1979), and
advertising (1975), as well as with issues in gen-
eral semiotics in the numerous artieles he wrote
for the Canadian Journal oJ Research in Semiotics
between 1974 and 1980. Payant (Universite de
Montreal), formerly a elose collaborator of Lin-
dekens, has developed his own approach to the
analysis of painting, in conjunction with the
eelectic trend represented in France by scholars
like Louis Marin or Hubert Damish. He is a
collaborator of the journal Art Press International.
His publications inelude artieles or, photographs
(1979) and on painting (e.g., 1978). Other note-
worthy contributions to visual semiotics are by
Jean-Franc,;ois Lhöte (Universite de Montreal)
regarding metaphor in painting (1973), Irwin
and Myrna Gopnik (McGill University) con-
cerning conceptual art (1971, a, b, c), Paul Heyer
(Sirnon Fraser University) who has been active
for ten years in this area, and makes use in his
analyses of Levi-Strauss's structuralism (1973,
1974, 1978), and Pierre Savignac (1977). The
University of Quebec in Montreal sponsors a
research group whose aim it is to further the
semiotics of visual arts. One of its recent meet-
ings was devoted to "the grammar of images"
(May 1982); the participants ineluded, beside
Payant, Jean Guy Meunier, Fernande Saint-
Martin, the author of a noted book on pictural
space (1968), and Pierre Boudon. This is arecent
addition to Boudon's (Universite de Montreal)
research interests. His name is indeed associated
with one of the most interesting sets of publi-
cations on the semiotics of space, urban settle-
ments, and architecture (e.g., 1969, 1973c, 1977),
 CANADA
although he has also dealt with writing systems
and design (1973). Note in particular his latest
book (1981a) and his review article on works by
Preziosi, Krampen, Bordreuil, and Ostrowetsky,
in which he brilliantly assessed the state of the
art (1981 b). Other semiotic treatments of archi-
tecture are found in Shelagh Lindsey, University
of British Columbia (1982), George Baird, Uni-
versity of Toronto Oencks and Baird 1969), and
Manar Hammad, Universite de Montreal, who
belongs to L'Ecole de Paris and has applied
Greimas's theory to the analysis of urban space,
indoor topological structures, and architecture
(1976, 1977, 1978, 1979). Hammad is in partic-
ular the editor of several reports of a Paris
research group in architecture (Groupe 107) (e.g.,
1976). In the area of design, Hanno Ehses (Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design) is pursuing a
serious and promising line of inquiry. His pub-
lications have dealt so far with the semiotic foun-
dation of typography (1976), a semiotic approach
to communication design (1977), and the semiot-
ics of the design process (1978). Ehses, who
teaches a course on "Semiotics: Theory and
Practice," undertook in 1980 a large-scale
research project on a semiotic theory of design.
Finally it should be mentioned that the most
important collective endeavour in this domain
is being carried out by the "Ecoie des arts visuels"
at Laval University, which has sponsored, since
1972, a research team whose interest concerns
functional static images (Groupe de recherche sur
l'image fonctionnelle statique, GRIFFON). Under
the leaders hip of Claude Cossette, who, inci-
dentally, edited a book on mass communication
(1975) in which his own contribution is entitled
"Semiologie de l'image fonctionnelle," the group
has published a complete bibliography on this
topic (Bachand and Cossette, 1977) and a spe-
cial issue of 1conicum devoted to the proceedings
of a symposium on iconicity which took place at
Laval (1980). The Canadian participants
included, besides Cossette, Denis Bachand (Uni-
versity of Ottawa), Maurice Fleury (Lavai),
Maurice Macot (Universite du Quebec a Mon-
treal) and Philippe Morton (Laval) . All the
papers are noteworthy contributions to the
semiotics of design and iconicity.
In conclusion to this section, several remarks
can be made. First, a common pattern of evo-
lution is noticeable in most of the semiotic
research undertaken in the sixties and continued
81
over the past two decades: a growing questioning
of the linguistic models and a quest for a better
theoretical basis: second, a marked interest in
the cognitive dimension of semiotics and the psy-
chological basis of the semiotic process; and third,
a tremendous increase in the density of the com-
munication network which enables researchers
from a greater number of disciplines to try and
discuss their ideas and share their discoveries
with colleagues at a relatively fast rate. This last
phenomenon obviously points to the institu-
tional emergence of this epistemological move-
ment, which will be the subject matter of the
next section.
11. The Institutionalization of
Semiotics in Canada
The social process through which ideas, the-
ories, and methodologies become academic dis-
ciplines is slow but forceful. It is sustained by a
growing network of personal connections and
local interest groups that eventually reach the
threshold beyond which the credibility and vis-
ibility of the movement provide its participants
with a viable social and academic definition or
identity. In this section I will attempt to outline
the progressive institutionalization of semiotics
in Canada by reviewing the organizations, pub-
lications, and teaching activities that have
emerged during the seventies, and whose
momentum is confirmed by the evolution of the
movement in the eighties.
A. National Association
The creation of a Canadian Semiotic Asso-
ciation, variously referred to in its earlier years
as The Canadian Association of Research in
Semiotics and the Canadian Semiotic Research
Association, was due to the initiative and efforts
of Pierre and Madeleine Monod (University of
Alberta). During the academic year 1971-72,
Pierre Monod circulated among Canadian uni-
versities a letter in which he gave a sketchy def-
inition of semiotics or semiologie with reference
to Saussure, and then noted that although
semiotic research was still at an early stage of
its development, quite a few Canadian scholars
were al ready actively involved in this field. The
letter continued:
82 PAUL BOUISSAC
I would like to ask all interested to form an association so
that we can work along the lines evoked by Roland Barthes
when he says in his EUments de semiologie: "Semiotics, which
surely will undergo transformations in the future, must first
define itself and explore its possibilities and impossibilities."
The association would enable us to develop this new science
through the publication of research material, meetings, and
exchanges with similar associations on the international level.
The general response to this invitation was
encouraging, and the first group of Canadian
semioticians convened at the subsequent meet-
ing of the Canadian Learned Societies at McGill
University in May 1972 and held a constitutive
assembly. In 1973 a provisional constitution was
presented and adopted. Since then the associa-
tion has organized annual meetings and has been
recognized as a full-fledged member of the
Learned Societies. It was officially represented
by a five-member delegation at the University
of South Florida (Tampa) when, in July 1975,
on the occasion of the North American Semiotic
Colloquium, the Semiotic Society of America was
created.
Under the efficient leadership of Pierre Monod,
who remained president of the fledgling asso-
ciation for the first seven years, the Association
successfully overcame the difficulties that new
ventures of this sort usually encounter: scepti-
cism, administrative resistance at all levels,
financial fragility, and such. In 1979, the time
had come to endow the association with a defin-
itive constitution similar to other scholarly soci-
eties, and, since then, the membership has elected
its executive officers at regular yearly meetings.
The Association was incorporated in 1982. Its
official purpose is to organize annual confer-
ences, sponsor local semiotic circles and other
relevant groups and events, and publish a jour-
nal. Since 1979 the successive presidents have
been Louis Francoeur (Universite Lavai), Alain
Goldschläger (U niversi ty of Western Ontario),
and Gilles Therien (Universite du Quebec a
Montreal).
B. Local Associations
In addition to this national association, there
exist in Canada several semiotic circles whose
function is to provide a local setting for the
exchange of ideas and the coordination of
research. Having been created independently
of each other, their structure and composition
depend on local circumstances, but they all seem
to be markedly interdisciplinary and their usual
openness with respect to theoretical commit-
ments nicely reflects the intellectual tolerance of
Canadian semioticians in spite of the prepara-
digmatic status of present semiotics and the usual
tensions between competing trends that this stage
entails.
The first semiotic circle to appear seems to
have been Le Cercle de semiologie de Montrial, cre-
ated in 1973 by Paul Zumthor, who was then
director of the Department of Comparative Lit-
erature at the University of Montreal. The other
people involved in this initiative were J ean-Fran-
<;:ois Lhöte, chairman of the Department of Fine
Arts History of the same University, the late
Rene Lindekens (psychology), Jean-Jacques
Nattiez (music), Rene Payant (fine arts history),
and Andre Vidricaire (philosophy). Over the last
ten years this circle has followed an erratic course,
with dormant phases succeeded by short-lived
revivals; in 1980, the circle was meeting at an
irregular pace in private hornes and the individ-
uals involved were mainly members of the
Department of Communication of the U niver-
sity of Montreal, notably the coordinators Pierre
Boudon, Annie Meat, and Manar Hammad.
There is only scant information on its proceed-
ings and it seems at the time of this publication
that Le Cercle de semiologie de Montrial is und ergo-
ing another eclipse.
In spite of the fact that Montreal has undoubt-
edly been for the past ten years the most active
center of semiotic research in Canada, the local
semioticians seem to have had some difficulty in
overcoming the various tensions existing within
this particularly resourceful academic commu-
nity, notably an early rivalry between the well-
established U niversite de Montreal and the
younger and more aggressive Universite du Que-
bec a Montreal (UQAM), a situation still fur-
ther complicated by the presence of the
prestigious English-speaking McGill University.
Naturally this does not mean that there were no
contacts across institutions and that no semiotic
dialogue was taking place, but it seems, at least
from the point of view of an outsider, that the
several groups involved in some branch of semi-
otics or whose research was relevant to semiotics,
did ~ot consider regular interactions to be a
priori ty. The Groupe de recherche en semiotique
(GRESEM), founded in 1974, later became the
 CANADA
"seminaire intersemiotique" of the Department
of Literary Studies at UQAM. The activities of
the Departments of Communication at McGill
and at the University of Montreal, the team
formed by Irena Bellert and Peter Ohlin (McGill)
for their project of abilingual dictionary of
semiotics and aesthetics in the middle seventies,
and, undoubtedly, a few other foci of semiotic
activities such as the Groupe de recherche en semiol-
ogie des arts visuels (GRESAV), seem to have had
so far only episodic contacts and mostly run par-
allellives. This general situation explains in part
the unfortunate cancellation, mentioned earlier,
of the meeting of the International Association
for Semiotic Studies that was slated to take place
at UQAM in 1984.
However, at the time this report was written
a very promising initiative of Andre Roch Lecours
(neuropsychology) and Jean Luc Nespoulous
(linguistics), both from the University of Mon-
treal, offers a great potential for the future of
semiotic research and seems to have succeeded
in overcoming the relative isolationism of Mon-
treal's many semiotic families. The strangely
named Journal club de neurolinguistique et de neuro-
psychologie meets twice a month at the
LaboratoireTheophile Alajouanine at the Centre
Hospitalier Cöte-des-Neiges. The his tory of this
circle and the prominent place it has recently
taken are symptomatic of the semiotic move-
ment's evolution. This "club" was created in 1970
by Andre Roch Lecours and his collaborators at
the Centre du langage de l'Hotel Dieu de Montreal,
one of the city's main hospitals. Its initial pur-
pose was to collectively review the neurological
and neuropsychological literature by asking its
members to present reports on journals, hence
the name ''journal club." But it progressively
evolved into a discussion group in which regular
participants and occasional visitors read papers
on their own research. Over the last few years
a notable evolution has taken place and semiot-
ics, or more precisely neurosemiotics, has become
one of the topics most often discussed. The orga-
nizers recently reported that the club's meetings
now attract many local linguists and semioti-
cians from all Montreal's universities and that
thanks to the club's bilingual policy the exchanges
are extremely fruitful. The explicitly semiotic
orientation of its founders, as weIl as their per-
sonal profiles, make it indeed an ideal forum for
the communication and discussion at a high level
83
of research and ideas among local and visiting
semioticians, linguists, and psychologists. The
club's success has already had as a result the
revival of an interest in a more inclusive Cercle
semiologique de Montreal in which all local uni-
versities are becoming involved. The initiators
of this latest development on Montreal's semiotic
scene are Gilles Therien and Thomas Pavel
(UQAM), Wladimir Krysinski and Eugene
Vance (Universite de Montreal) and Marc
Angenot (McGill). The explicit model for this
new organization is the Toronto Semiotic Circle.
The Toronto Semiotic Circle occupies a prom-
inent place in the North American semiotic land-
scape because its publishing and teaching
activities have given it an international dimen-
sion. Its original profile, characterized by a well-
balanced association of various disciplines and
schools of thought, can be explained by the per-
sonalities of its founders, the nature of its con-
stitution, and its location in the midst of a major
university in an important and attractive urban
setting. The Circle started in 1973 when three
members of the University of Toronto,
P. Bouissac (French), B. Brainerd (mathematics
and linguistics) and L. Dolezel (Slavic languages
and literatures) circulated a brief letter among
fifty or so of their colleagues, whom they had
identified as potentially interested in participat-
ing in informal monthly meetings during which
ongoing research relevant to semiotics could be
discussed. The response was encouraging, and
two senior members of two other departments,
Tom McFeat (anthropology) and David Savan
(philosophy) soon joined them and became
actively involved in the project. Thus, from the
outset, the Circle was not a divisive organization
but a congenial group whose founding members
were mature scholars. Their philosophical con-
victions were somewhat tempered by a small dose
of scepticism and their genuine interest was the
interdisciplinary circulation of ideas rather than
the promotion of a particular doctrine. Abrief
look at some aspects of their intellectual origins
will shed some light on the circle's epistemolog-
ical variety and will undoubtedly account for the
multidirectionality of its subsequent develop-
ments. David Savan, a former president of the
Peirce Society, was known for his writing and
teaching on Peirce's semiotics; Tom McFeat, an
anthropologist who had been influenced by Gre-
gory Bateson, had then just completed his
84 PAUL BOUISSAC
research on small group cultures and had devised
several curricula on communication and culture;
Lubomir Doldel, belonging to the second gen-
eration of the Prague School, had recently emi-
grated from Czechoslovakia, bringing to Toronto
a rich tradition of semiotic research; Barron
Brainerd, a mathematician cross-appointed in
the Department of Linguistics, had a strong
interest in communication and information the-
ories and was known for his application of math-
ema tical methods to linguis tic and li terary
research; Paul Bouissac had done his early study
of the circus und er the guidance of Claude Levi-
Strauss and A. J. Greimas and was then involved
in several projects in connection with the
Research Center for Semiotic Studies established
by T. A. Sebeok at Indiana University.
The primary purpose of the Circle was the
discussion of ongoing research relevant to
semiotics. Members of various departments of
the University of Toronto and of other Ontario
universities, as well as occasional visitors, were
invited to give informal papers. As Victoria
University-a subsystem of the University of
Toronto--had lent its support to this endeavor
from the beginning, meetings took place there
in a comfortable seminar room whose setting was
particularly conducive to free discussion. The
minimal coordination required was ensured by
Paul Bouissac during the first two years. It soon
became evident that the continuing success of
the meetings could provide the grounds for a
more formal organization and, in 1976, a con-
stitution was drawn up in order to provide a
minimal administrative structure. At the same
time it was decided, with the support of Victoria
University, to publish some monographs by
members of the Circle. The group's self-definition
was worked out as a general statement that read
as follows:
The Toronto Semiotic Circle is an interdisciplinary associ-
ation whose object is the discussion, communication, and
promotion of research in semiotics. The Circle takes the field
of semiotics in the broadest sense, to include the theoretical
and empirical study of signs, sign systems, and processes,
signalling and communicative behavior, and their biological
and social foundations.
In 1979, the Toronto Semiotic Circle was incor-
porated as a nonprofit association in the Prov-
ince of Ontario. Since its inception in 1973, it
has organized eight to ten meetings during each
academic year, published thirty monographs,
created in 1980 the yearly International Summer
Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies,
sponsored many colloquia, and developed reg-
ular links with other semiotic groups and asso-
ciations. It counts now several hundred members
who pay a token fee, thus feeding a small budget
sufficient to meet basic administrative expenses.
The mono graph series, first edited by Paul
Bouissac (1976-79), then by Paul Perron (1979-
1984), has gained wide recognition and makes
it possible to rapidly circulate among members
of the Circle working papers, original mono-
graphs, and prepublications, as well as the pro-
ceedings of the colloquia organized by the circle.
Other Canadian academic communities are
fostering similar interest groups that are explic-
itly or at least potentially of a semiotic nature.
It is extremely difficult however to keep track of
their evolution, let alone to be aware of their
existence as long as they do not reach beyond
the limits of their own campus. Two of these
groups have recently emerged and should be
mentioned here as potentially importantfoci of
semiotic research in the years ahead. The first
one is the "Cercle semiotique de l'Outaouais,"
created in 1978 by Pa trick Imbert (U niversity
of Ottawa), Rans-George Ruprecht (Carleton
University), Rene Juery, and Serge Theriault
(Universite du Quebec a Rull). The Circle meets
monthly at one of the universities involved.
Members usually present research reports.
Occasional visiting scholars also read papers or
participate in the discussions. The lack of formal
structure is conducive to intellectual spontaneity
and ideological freedom but makes unavoid-
able that, at times, the Circle undergoes periods
of latency.
The second group is the Semiotic Circle of the
University ofWestern Ontario, which was orga-
nized in the late seventies by Alan Goldschläger
and followed more or less the same pattern as
the others, with monthly meetings fostering
interdisciplinary discussions, and periods of
latency due to various circumstances such as the
temporary absence from the university of key
participants.
The latest interdisciplinary group to have
formed is the Vancouver Semiotic Circle. The
variety and size of the academic population made
up by the three main local institutions, the U ni-
versity of British Columbia (U.B.C.), Simon
 CANADA
Fraser University (S.F.U.), and the University
of Victoria, provide a favorable context for schol-
arly meetings of this sort. The Circle was created
in 1979 and officially started in 1980 with monthly
meetings during the academic year. I ts founders,
all from the University of British Columbia, are
Carlo Chiarenza (Hispanic and Italian Studies),
Andrew Busza and Graham Good (English), and
Shelagh Lindsey (School of Architccture). In the
latter's words: "The motivation [or the Circle
was to give those with a scholarly interest in
semiotics the opportunity to exchange ideas in
a context conducive to serious discussions with
a minimum of formal organization." The moti-
vation and organizational talents of this group
obviously make up for the absence of formal
structure, since it offered during the first years
of its existence a very attractive pro gram of dis-
cussions covering a wide array of interests and
drawing from both local faculty and visitors. The
Spring 1980 program included a discussion on
"Semiotic Theories," and papers on "Theology
and Semiotics: The Theory of Signs in the Mid-
die Ages" Oohn Freccero, Stanford University);
"Is Deconstructionism an Ideology?" (Terry
Eagleton, Oxford); and "Barthes' Rhetoric of
the Image" (Bridget Elliott, fine arts, U.B.C.)
in the following academic year all speakers were
from U.B.C.; the program included a discussion
of Eco's theory and papers on "Left and Right:
A Topography of Political Perception" O. A.
Laponce, political science); "Commodity Fetish-
ism and Communication Systems" (F. E. Stock-
holder, English); "Barthes" (Anne Scott, French);
and "The Semiotics o[ the Theatre" (Valerie
Raoul, French). In 1981-82, Simon Fraser Uni-
versity provided several speakers, and some
meetings were scheduled on its campus; the pro-
gram included "The Writing of the Female Body"
(Kaja Silverman), "Ambiguity in Liberations"
(Hilary Clarke), and a paper by Tony Wilden
and other members o[ S.F.U. were announced.
From the latest report, those attending meetings
are from the departments of anthropology and
sociology, architecture, classics, comparative lit-
erature, English, fine arts, French, Hispanic and
Italian Studies, linguistics, Slavonics, theater, and
visual arts. It should be added that although
semiotics is included in the courses of several
departments, a major or minor in the subject is
not yet possible at the U niversity of British
Columbia.
85
In view of this interesting mushrooming of
circles, some remarks can be made regarding the
general pattern they exhibit and the various spans
oflife they enjoy. Indeed, the circles documented
to date seem to have followed-quite
independently-similar courses, but their even-
tual success seems to depend on factors that it·
may be useful to point out. A few individuals
belonging to different departments decide to give
so me semiformal status to their common interest
in semiotics and organize meetings in which
ongoing research is discussed. The meetings are
selectively publicized among the faculty at large,
more specifically in the humanities and social
sciences. Occasionally prominent colleagues from
other universities who happen to visit may be
invited to give a talk on their own research, and
by accepting the offer they lend credibility and
visibility to the group. It seems significant that
such groups crystallize best in interdisciplinary
space. Intradepartmental initiatives are usually
short-lived because internal politics tend to
interfere with the smooth functioning o[ such
groups and the leader( s) can easily be suspected
of having ulterior motives. Circles can indeed
prosper only in a sufficiently relaxed atmosphere
among individuals that are more intellectually
than politically motivated. The psychological and
scholarly profile of those who actively partici-
pate in the circles is noteworthy. They tend to
be active scholars but somewhat marginal in their
own departments either because their topics of
research are unusual or because their intellectual
origins differ from the epistemological approach
that prevails in their department. A case in point
would be a specialist of C. S. Peirce in a phi-
losophy department domina ted by analytical
philosophy, or a musicologist interested in com-
munication theory and conversant in linguistics
finding hirns elf or herself among colleagues with
strictly historical concerns. These two individ-
uals will find sooner or later that they can indeed
efficiently communicate within a semiotic frame-
work, and that this sort of interaction is mutually
beneficial. But there is still another condition for
the viability of a circle beyond its first years of
existence, and this is a purtly quantitative one:
it has to be located at a pi ace where several
universities are within easy rcach of each other.
Only a large concentration of scholars can reg-
ularly provide a sufficient attendance to the
meetings as well as an optimal variety that
86 PAUL BOUISSAC
ensures a constantly renewed ftow of information
without which small groups decline and even-
tually collapse. Naturally a dogmatic leaders hip
that would filter the available information would
have the same result whatever the milieu's infor-
mation potential may be. It is likely that over
the next ten years semiotic circles will keep mul-
tiplying in Canada until official graduate pro-
grams and departments take over the channelling
of information and reduce the need for parallel
quasi institutions by granting semiotics full aca-
demic status. But for the time being these circles
fulfill an important function in laying the grounds
for the restructuring of programs and curricula
that will not fail to take place before the end of
the millennium. They also provide those who
are involved in their scholarly activities with a
great deal of intellectual stimulation and a deep
sense of being at the outpost of a new episte-
mological frontier.
c. Publications
One of the main purposes of scholarly asso-
ciations and circles is the sharing of information
and the dissemination of ideas by way of more
or less formal publications. The Canadian Semi-
otic Association, und er the editorship of Pierre
Monod, started in the winter of 1973 the pub-
lication of The Canadian Journal of Research in
Semiotics/ Le Journal Canadien de Recherche Semio-
tique. The first issue was a me re thirty-page
roneographed brochure with a presentation by
Paul Zumthor followed by twoarticles. The sec-
ond issue (Spring 1974) was twice as long. Start-
ing with Volume 2, the publication evolved
toward a more professional appearance, and
adopted, with Volume 3, the format and design
a la Vasarely through which it became better
known and which it kept until 1980 (Volume 8)
when the Association decided to modify and
expand the editorial structure of its official pub-
lication, and to entrust to Paul Bouissac the task
of editing a new journal, Recherches Semiotiques/
Semiotic Inquiry (RS/SI). It was indeed gene rally
felt at this point that the evolution and expansion
of semiotic interests in Canada could be better
served by a broader interdisciplinary basis and
a more ambitious editorial policy. A measure-
ment of the progress made by semiotics in Cana-
dian universities and governmental as well as
private funding agencies is indicated by the list
of sponsors published in each issue of the new
journal. But this is not all; whereas the profile
of the successive editorial boards of the first jour-
nal reftected the fact that in the early seventies
semiotic research was principally fostered by
language and literature departments, a glance
at the new editorial board clearly shows the pen-
etration of semiotic concerns into many other
disciplines, as it includes anthropologists, psy-
chologists, linguists, communication specialists,
philosophers, mathematicians, and zoologists.
The same is true of the international advisory
board. The journal's aim is not only to serve
Canadian scholarship, but also to become an
international forum for innovative views that
contribute to the emergence of the new semiotic
paradigm. By publishing in each issue detailed
abstracts in German, Italian and Spanish, in
addition to the two nationallanguages, English
and French, the journal extends its antennae, so
to speak, in the direction of other important loci
of semiotic research in the world.
Research groups and circles have also engaged
in publishing activities during the last decade.
It is truly impossible to keep an accurate account
of all the semiformal, short-lived, or irregular
publications that keep irrigating the semiotic
field, nor is it feasible to list all the regular jour-
nals and reviews which at one point or another
have published special issues or individual arti-
cles that are emin,ently relevant to semiotics. On
the French side, Etudes Littiraires (Presses de l'U-
niversite Lavai), Voix et Images (Presses de l'U-
niversite du Quebec), Strategie, Etudes Franr;aises,
and Sociologie et Societes (Presses de l'Universite
de Montreal) should definitely be mentioned.
On the English side, a modest journal called
Signum was launched in 1974 by Patrice Pavis at
the Royal Military College of Canada at Kings-
ton, where he was then teaching. The same insti-
tution started publishing in the early eighties The
Journal rif Literary Theory under the editors hip of
Stephen Bonnycastle. Another publishing activ-
ity that is presently taking place, also at Kings-
ton but this time at Queen's University, is the
Bakhtin Newsletter, a document eminently rele-
vant to semiotic research, edited by Clive Thom-
son and a team of international scholars.
Turning now to book publications, it should
be pointed out that no Canadian publisher has
yet launched a semiotic collection, as Mouton,
De Gruyter, Indiana University Press, Gunther
 CANADA 87
Narr, or Klincksieck for instance have done in their courses in criticism or methodology. A rep-
other countries. The only monograph series that resentative case is the following report from Fer-
appeared in the 70s were semiformal publica- nand Dorais (Laurentian University, Sudbury):
tions sponsored by academic institutions such as "Since 1976-77, students enrolled in French may,
the publications of the Groupe de recherches en and in so me cases must take three half courses
semiologie musicale (Faculty of Music, U niversity in critical methods devoted to structural and
of Montreal) under the general editorship of Jean semiotic analysis of literary texts.,,8
Jacques Nattiez, or the prepublication, mono- However, the only institution that offers to
graph, and working paper series published by date a full-ftedged graduate curriculum in
the Toronto Semiotic Circle since 1976 with the semiotics is the French-speaking Universite du
support of Victoria University. At a rate of four Quebec a Montreal. The project of a doctoral
publications a year, the circle has now over thirtyprogram in semiologie was initiated in 1977 by the
titles comprising collections of articles in pre- Department of Literary Studies. It had devel-
publications, proceedings of symposia and orig- oped from a research group in semiotics (Groupe
inal monographs that their authors have de recherche en semiotique, GRESEM), which was
sometimes chosen to call working papers. About one of the local circles which mushroomed in
two-thirds of these publications are by Canadian Montreal during the seventies. This group had
scholars, members of the Circle. been active since 1974 and was concerned not
only with fundamental research, but was also
interested in applying semiotic methodologies to
D. Teaching the study of Quebec's culture and society. A
Since the late sixties, most universities have formal document was first circulated among
tended to include some form of semiotic teaching French-speaking semioticians and was endorsed
in their undergraduate and graduate programs. by supportive letters from Mare Angenot, Paul
Courses in semiotic theories and methodologies Bouissac, J acques Derrida, J acques Dubois,
are offered in departments and centers in the Claude Duchet, Raymonde Genette, Andre
humanities and social sciences, or at least Helbo, Christian Metz, Luis Prieto, Jean Sta-
semiotics is apart of more inclusive courses. It robinski, Tzvetan Todorov, as well as by the
can be assumed that at the time of publication directors of the UQAM departments of biology,
of this volume only a few Canadian universities communication, linguistics, and sociology. The
will not have in their academic calendar some other departments to be involved in the imple-
formal mention of semiotics. At the U niversity mentation of the project were philosophy, art
of Toronto, for instance, both the Department history, music, theater, design, communication,
of Linguistics and the Department of French his tory, and law. The pro gram was inaugurated
have been offering a graduate course in semiotics in 1979 and has ever since enjoyed a continuous
since the early seventies, and the Centre for success. The 1980-81 brochure listed poetics,
Comparative Literature, which was first created linguistics, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociol-
under the auspices of hermeneutics, formally ogy, philosophy, and biology among the disci-
introduced semiotics into its program in 1980 by plines potentially involved in the program's
coopting as adjunct faculty individuals involved specializations. In 1981-82 it had eighty-nine
in semiotic research and by adding explicitly M.A. students and eighteen Ph.D. students, and
semiotic courses to its curriculum. At the und er- the first doctorate, a semiotic approach to mem-
graduate level, semiotics has usually been taught ory, was granted that year. It should be noted
for some years in the framework and as apart that at the undergraduate level students can
of Communications Studies, but-sign of the major in semiotics. The core semiotics courses
times-a three-year course sequence that had for the doctorate included in 1982-83 a course
been offered at Victoria College (University of on general semiotics Oean Fisette), a course on
Toronto) for over ten years under the heading
of "Communication" was restructured and 8There exists in Canada a developing concern for the peda-
gogical relevance of semiotics both in the sense of "How to
renamed "Semiotics" in 1982. Many language teach semiotics" and "How can semiotics contribute to more
and literature departments have also included efficient teaching?"; see for instance Imbert (1980a) and
some aspect of semiotics, notably as apart of Brown (1980).
88 PAUL BOUISSAC

Charles Morris (GilIes Therien), and the semi- In addition to these advanced semInars, each
naire intersemiotique, a collective seminar whose Institute provides a pedagogical course designed
topic was "Parody and Mimicry." to introduce secondary school and community
In response to an inquiry regarding the eco- college teachers to semiotics as a potentially use-
nomic prospects and professional outlets for the ful methodology in their treatment of various
program's students, the Chairman for Graduate topics in the elassroom. Leaders in this field such
Studies, Andre Belleau, no ted in 1981 that it is as Donald Thomas, Gilles Therien, and Robert
difficult to speak precisely about "outlets," not Carey have so far been involved in this aspect
because they are absent, but because of the ori- of the institute.
gin and situation of the students who, for the This month-long regular event, which pro-
most part, already hold a position in architec- vides a dense program of lectures, seminars, and
ture, urbanism, museology, communication, colloquia, has been hailed as a unique focus of
media, education, and so on. Therefore the Ph.D. intensive semiotic reflection and communication
in semiotics may lead to a teaching or research and is considered by many of the participants
position but in most cases is used as a means to as a historical landmark in the emergence of the
improve one's competence and efficiency and to semiotic paradigm. It has played an important
expand one's intellectual grasp of several dis- part in the high profile that Canada has acquired
ciplinary fields. It could also be added that, in the semiotic sphere.
should the institutionalization of semiotics keep
its current pace, specialists will certainly be in
demand in the 90s. IH. References
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 CHAPTER5
Semiotics in Chile
Andres Gallardo and Jorge Sanchez
I. Introduction
A. Definition and Scope
The first obstacle that arises when one attempts
to present an overview of the development of
semiotics anywhere has to do with the definition
of the field. As a matter of fact, just about any
research in social science can be considered
semi~tic or having a direct bearing on people's
creatlOn and use of signs. This being so, and
because this is not a theoretical paper but an
informative one, we made an arbitrary decision
and adopted the following criterion: An intellec-
tual work or enterprise is semiotit when it
approach es sign systems as such, that is to say,
when. there is an explicit awareness of having to
do wlth systems of signification and an overt
willingness to account for them in a systematic
way. Along these lines, we have excluded those
works that have a narrow professional relevance
~ven if t~ey deal with a semiotic system. A typ~
lcal case lS that of linguistic research: even though
language is the semiotic system par excellence, a
Andres Gallardo and Jorge Sanchez • Department of
Spanish, University of Concepci6n, Concepci6n, Chile. The
research that allowed us to prepare this report on Semiotics
in Chile was done under the auspices of the Vice-rectoria
de Investigaci6n, University of Concepci6n, through project
No. 20.85.01.
99
description of a language or apart thereof is
considered semiotic only if it overtly ties itself
to a semiotic theory or if it relates the description
to a general theory of signs (for instance, by
contrasting a linguistic structure with some other
semiotic system).
B. Sources of Chilean Semiotics
The bulk of semiotic activity in Chile can be
neatly traced to the tradition started by Saus-
sure's Cours de linguistique generale (Spanish trans-
lation: Curso de lingü{stica general, 1945, and many
subsequent editions). Typically, the authors
present themselves as structuralists and incor-
porate a methodology and terminology taken
from linguistics, much like their European coun-
terparts. Many of them, perhaps most, do not
relate to linguistics directly, but rather through
semioticians and literary or "culture" critics, such
as Barthes, whose links with linguistics in turn
are at best superficial. Among those p~st-Saus~
sure authors whose inftuence has been more
noticeable in Chile (they constantly occur as ref-
erences ) are Eric Buyssens (especially Les Lan-
gages et le discours, 1943, perhaps the first serious
project of a true semiology); Emile Benveniste
(especially Problemas de lingü{stica general, Mexico,
1971), extremely inftuential among literary semi-
oticians with his works on speech acts; Roland
100 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SANCHEZ
Barthes (Ensayos criticos and EI grado cera de la
escritu ra , 1967, and especially Elementos de semiol-
ogfa, 1970), whose inftuence can be observed even
in the style and basic attitudes of Chilean semi-
oticians; Claude Levi-Strauss (especially Antro-
pologfa estructural, and his analyses of myth); and
U mberto Eco (especially La estructura ausente,
1972). The works of J acques Derrida, A. J. Grei-
mas, andJulia Kristeva are also frequently men-
tioned as theoretical foundations of literary
semiotics. Another type of inftuential European
work linked to structuralism is that related to
Marxism and psychoanalysis (for instance,
J. Lacan and L. Althusser). Related to these areas
there has been a rather enthusiastic line of
semiotic research oriented towards a criticism of
society and its myths, attitudes, and institutions.
Although not always organized and many times
explicitly antiacademic, this semiotics of social
life has proved consistent and rich, in spite of
the many changes in the political life of the
country.
In general, those authors who work within this
European frame of reference refer to their dis-
cipline as "semiology" rather than "semiotics."
The semiotics of American origin, namely, that
semiotics that stems from Peirce's and Morris'
works, has been less inftuential in Chile. It can
be found especially among linguists interested in
language teaching problems and eventually
among social science oriented researchers. One
author whose work has had more inftuence seems
to be Marshall McLuhan. Many of his books
have been reviewed and commented on (Rurley,
1968; Valdes, 1971; Valenzuela, 1973; Otano,
1975).
Those authors who adhere to the "American
semiotics" tradition consistently use the terms
semiotics and avoid semiology, which, it seems,
appears unscientific to them.
Another tradition of semiotic research present
in Chile is one linked to philosophy, which has
inftuenced especially the work of art critics and
theoreticians.
Coseriu (1968), analyzing the development of
linguistics in Latin America, observes among lin-
guists an attitude characterized by a bit too
excessive receptivity to foreign inftuence and a
tendency to apply theories and methods devel-
oped elsewhere rather than trying to develop new
approaches. Coseriu's observation also holds true
for semiotic research. To most semioticians, for-
eign works appear scientifically sound, and
therefore good, just because of their origin. This
has generated a lack of continuity and a sort of
insecurity in semiotic research. Our report will
have to expose this, but we will try to concentrate
on those areas where semiotic activity has pro-
duced more original and solid advances.
We have organized our presentation as folIows:
I. Research areas: language (writing in-
cluded), literature, mass communications,
artistic expression, design, urbanism, and
architecture, folklore, psychosocial behav-
ior, philosophy.
2. Description of particular semiotic systems
(gestures, food, traffic signs, human types).
3. Institutional framework (especially jour-
nals and universi ties) .
4. Semiotic practice (creation of sign sys-
tem, explorations in communication
possibilities) .
C. Several Accounts of Semiotics
In spite of the fact that Chilean intellectuals
are traditionally inclined to review their own dis-
ciplines, we have found no more than three or
four works that present semiotics as a general
field of inquiry, and not a single review of semiotic
research or theory in Chile. This is obviously
due to the newness of the field.
Rios (1973) is perhaps the most encompassing
presentation of the field according to its most
characteristic European trends, and a program
of what semiotic research could be in Chile. Rios
offers a good, brief review of the Saussurean
origins of semiology, an appraisal of the inftu-
ence of linguistics, and the classic distinction
between semiology of communication and
semiology of signification. In his view, the area
where research appears more promising is the
development of mass communication media. For
him semiology, in spite of its linguistic meth-
odological debt, is reaching a wider scope,
becoming a sort of general statement about
human communication:
En su conjunto, la semiologia inaugura la epoca en que el
ho mb re interroga sus propios signos de manera sistematica
y generalizada en la busqueda de su sentido mas radical.
(p.490)
Wagner (1978) also offers a view of post-
Saussurean European semiology. As a structural
 CHILE
linguist, he is more concerned with the descrip-
tion of the types of basic units involved and the
types of systems-codes-they form. Neither Rios
nor Wagner discuss the issue of a specific research
strategy for semiotics.
A completely different approach is found in
Astaburuaga (1978), who presents a view of the
development of physiognomy, defined as
e! estudio de aquellos signos corporales permanentes que
indican condiciones permanentes de! alma, corno tarn bien
el estudio de los signos transitorios de! cuerpo que indican
condiciones transitorias de! alma. (p. 9)
Physiognomy, as understood by Astaburuaga,
should not be confused with symptomatology,
the science of disease symptoms. It is rather the
philosophical study of man's expressive capac-
ity. Accordingly, Astaburuaga reviews dozens of
philosophers from Aristotle to Ortega y Gasset
trying to find cues about the intrinsic content of
the terms sign.
In Vaisman (1974) there is a general pres-
entation of Saussurian semiology, but
approached as it relates to a semiotics of archi-
tecture. Quite useful is a unique glossary of
semiotic terms (compiled with Gemina Ahu-
mada) that complements the book, which will
be reviewed in the following section of this
paper. (Hozven, 1979a, also contains a semiotic
glossary, but restricted to literary semiotics.)
11. Research Areas
A. Language and Related Systems
Wehave mentioned the influence of Saussur-
ian notions in the development of semiotics in
Chile. In line with this fact, Chilean linguists
have frequently approached language from a
semiotic perspective. Saez-Godoy (1974-78) and
Rabanales (1973, and especially 1978) offer reli-
able overviews of the development of linguistics
in Chile, which include information about
semiotics-oriented linguistic research. G6mez
Macker (1976) analyzes Saussure's principles and
influence. Several works aim at presenting a gen-
eral view of language as a semiotic system or as
an aspect of human communication as a whole:
Araya (1963, 1964), G6mez Macker (1967, 1977-
78), Schulte-Herbrüggen (1968). H. Contreras
(1965) is interesting in that he departs from the
Saussurian tradition and raises new issues, such
101
as the relation oflanguage to information theory.
Other authors touch on more specific aspects of
the semiotics of language, such as the special
nature of the linguistic sign in relation to other
signs (Schulte-Herbrüggen 1966, Carrillo, 1968),
the nature of linguistic images (Rodriguez, 1979),
or aspects of semantics (Wigdorsky, 1977, which
includes the notion of communicative compe-
tence). Some linguists (notably Rabanales, 1953)
have carried the semiotic approach into dialec-
tology, expanding the notion of "Chilenism" to
mean not only a particular linguistic expression
originated in Chile, but graphic and body signs
(see below "somatolalia") as weil. Along these
lines, Rabanales has also studied the pathology
of communication and not only of language
(1977) and has made a programmatic presen-
tation of the different disciplines that relate lan-
guage to other semiotic institutions (1979).
Writing is a linguistic subsystem that has
deserved quite detailed attention in a semiotic
perspective. A recurrent issue is that of the rela-
tionship between writing and language and the
identity of the former, the nature of its basic
units and the rules that govern them. General
works are those of Ferreccio (1965), Zamudio
(1966), and especiaily L. Contreras (1976), who
pos es the problem of the independence of gra-
phemics as a semiotic discipline. L. Contreras
(1979) offers a detailed description of the Spanish
graphemic system. Henry (1977 and 1979) has
described aspects of Spanish (especiaily Chilean
script) graphemes from the standpoint of their
relevant features, and within the framework of
post-Saussurian structuralism.
B. Literary Semiotics
Literature is by far the principal cultural area
in which semiotics has served as a constant the-
oretical guideline among Chilean researchers, at
least at the lev,el of attitudes. Their semiotic
approach has been overwhelmingly marked by
the so-called French structuralism. Even the
Prague tradition (including J akobson's great
influence) has been introduced through the works
of Barthes, Benveniste, Greimas, Todorov, Bre-
mond, and the like. A first presentation of this
framework is that of Jara and Moreno (1972).
Although restricted to the problem of the novel,
this book presents basic notions, such as the con-
ception of the novel (and the literary text) as a
sign, and the foundations of structural analysis.
102 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SANCHEZ
More significant (and much more ambitious) is
Hozven (1979a), which presents itself as an
exhaustive treatment of the theoretical founda-
tions of literary structuralism in a clearly semiotic
direction, and a presentation of its most con-
spicuous practitioners. The subject of literary
studies-the literary text-is characterized in
terms of a network of sign relationships whose
defining feature is that of "literariness"; this lit-
erariness is, in the final analysis, the subject mat-
ter of literary serniotics. Hozven's book ends with
a glossary of literary-semiotics terms. Within this
same tendency, namely literary semiotics influ-
enced by French structuralism, so me works that
dwell on specific topics deserve mention: Muiioz
(1976) has attempted a formal description of
drama and has presented a model for the semiotic
description of the essay as a particular type of
discourse (1978-79). Oelker introduces the stra~
turn model applied to lyric poetry (1977) and to
narrative (1978). Hozven (1978) and Foerster,
Gonzalez and Gunderman (1978-79) and Foers-
ter, Gonzalez, Gunderman and Valenzuela
(1978) applied the model to folktales with Chi-
lean examples, whereas Soto (1980) discusses the
model itself, presenting a view of the relations hip
between Saussure's ideas and Propp's approach
to the morphology of folktales. (A different the-
oretical view of folktales, perhaps less semiotics-
oriented, is found in Maya 1978). Hozven him-
self (1979b and 1979c) has introduced further
refinements into this line of research by dis-
cussing U~vi-Strauss's ideas and presenting the
so-called homologic model and its power to
account for the structure of some literary texts.
Also within this frame, Sanchez and Soto (1980)
present and apply Bremond's notion of fictional
"actions."
Closely related to this line of inquiry is the
one worked out by A. Valdes and C. Foxley,
namely, the theoretical model of J. Cohen cou-
pled with a Saussurian semiology ala Prieto (the
Argentinia,n author of Messages et signaux, 1964).
Valdes (1974-1975) studies the process of coor-
dination in Vicente Huidobro's Poemas articos.
Specifically, she is interested in Huidobro's mode
of structuring poetic language, from which she
derives a view of the specificity of literature as
a semiotic system.
La literatura bus ca una ordenaci6n que rompa con la lineal-
idad que supone la sintaxis, y obtenga una simultaneidad
capaz de crear un espacio no lineaL (p, 50)
Foxley (1974-1975) analyzes "predicative
impertinence" in Neruda's Residencia en la tierra
as a building strategy, a deviation from standard
norms' which nonetheless characterizes poetic
language as an autonomous object. Poetic lan-
guage is thus conceived of as a structured object,
subject to laws whose adequate description makes
it possible to reduce the "classificatory abun-
dance" of rhetoric. In arecent book (Foxley,
1980), she has presented a historical overview
of the development of literary theory which con-
tains frequent references to the influence of
semiotics on literary studies.
Along the lines of a somewhat different frame
of reference, but still referring to the semiotic
description and interpretation of literary genres,
we should mention the following works: on
drama, Vaisman (1978), Villegas (1971), and
Kupareo (1966); on fiction, Villegas (1978),
which analyzes the narrative hero's mythical
structure; and on poetry, Kupareo (1965; see
also Section 2.D below).
Some works analyze the relations hip between
literature and other semiotic systems: Gast6n
(1971) discusses the sociology of literary con-
sumption; Valdes and Rodrfguez (1971) inquire
into the nature of myth as a social force in Roa
Bastos' novel Hijo de hombre; Gerias (1968) relates
novel and the fine arts. In Cesped (1972) there
is an interesting mapping of film-structure
notions into fiction. The works of M. Ostria rep-
resent, in our view, the most serious attempt at
integrating linguistic and literary analyses in a
semiotic direction. See especially Ostria (1970),
on the structural function of "fragments" in fic-
tion, and 1980b, on structural dualism and text
unicity. In 1976, and again in 1980a, Ostria
theorizes about literature's autonomy, present-
ing a model-largely based on Coseriu's ideas-
for understanding the literary text against the
background of its social setting.
C. Semiotics of Mass Media and
Communication
Mass communication and mass media have
been approached predominantly from sociolog-
ical standpoints and in an application-oriented
perspective. All the same, some of these
approaches are indeed of interest for the semi-
otician. Colle (1978) provides both an overview
of current communication models and a general
statement on human communication based upon
 CHILE 103
systems-analysis theory. He conceives of com- World, hence their distorted nature and their
munication as a process of contents exchange danger. Gaston (1971) has a similar ideologica1
that takes place within a system where compo- approach, but he is more theoretical and more
nents and their relations constitute a coherent sociological, and therefore 1ess relevant for
totality the meaning of which cannot be grasped semiotics.
by mere consideration of its parts. In Colle (1982) The structure of comic strips has also been
he applies his model to the analysis of advertis- dealt with by Cecereu (1982), in a McLuhan-
ing, which is considered "noise", that is, inter- inf1uenced approach, as a "sistema de pr'!ftrencias
ference. Other general works on the research of orientado hacia la imagen visual" (p. 68). Ivelic (1982)
communication structure and communication offers a less interesting view of TV children's
systems are those of Pacheco (1965) and Vilches cartoons.
(1965). They are addressed to a less specialized Always within the framework of the critique
audience and are therefore quite elementary in of socia1 messages, Wittig (1972) offers a semiotic
nature. More interesting is Contardo (1974), who analysis of a popular singer and the social mean-
discusses the importance of mass-communication ing of one of his movies.
systems for social development. The abovemen- A10ng somewhat different 1ines, other works
tioned paper by Rabanales (1977) shou1d be ana1yze the general impact and significance of
mentioned again here, because it is the only one the media. Miranda (1978) discusses the impact
that contains general information on the pathol- of the media on lower-dass cultural patterns;
ogy of communication. Roa (1981 b) does the same, but at a more gen-
A more consistent line of research (presently eral level. Other authors discuss specific media
almost discontinued) was concerned with a cri- types and the nature of their messages. Echev-
tique of mass-communication systems and their errfa (1963) analyzes journalism as mass com-
social impact. A. Mattelart, M. Mattelart, and munication and Henry (1964) approaches the
M. Piccini (1970) offer an exhaustive analysis of same subject from the stand point of style. Henry
mass media through an analysis of the so-called ( 1965) discusses the rela tionshi p between jour-
liberal press. Even though they are more inter- nalism and literature, and the style of journal-
ested in the sociological aspects of the subject istic messages (1966-67). Moya (1966-67)
(with a dear neo-Marxist orientation), their addresses the issue of publicity communication.
methodo1ogy owes a lot to semiotics (in a post- Roa (1981 c) studies the relationship between
Saussurian-especially Barthian-structuralist television and culture, and the structure of tele-
direction). A. Mattelart (1970) insists on these vision messages has been discussed by Aicardi
views, this time trying to dismantle the myths (1963), Morel (1972), and Gines (1976). Otano
of mass-media messages, and M. Matte1art (1972) offers an interesting view of soap operas.
(1971) discusses the notion of "modernity" with Radio messages have been analyzed as media by
regard to women's magazines. Modernity is seen Alcalay (1972).
as a bourgeois myth, and it is discovered and Huneeus (1981) represents a most ambitious
exposed through the analysis of journalistic com- analysis of the impact of TV in Chile's cultural
mercia1 messages. Dorfman and Mattelart (1971) dynamics. Huneeus daims that TV has intro-
present a critique of Walt Disney's children's duced a huachaca type of culture, that is to say,
magazines, especially Donald Duck, which are seen a bastard culture characterized by its triviality,
as a systematic negation of the real world because which finds its place between Western ration-
of their consistent distortion of or lack of atten- ality and popular tradition.
tion to culture and his tory and because of the
lack of social antagonisms in the world.
D. Semiotics of the Fine Arts
Disney approvecha dcl "fondo natural" del niiio solo aquellos There are two general theoretical approaches
elementos que le sirven para inocentar el mundo de los adul- to artistic phenomena that are of relevance to
tos y mitificar el mundo de la niiiez. (p. 29) semiotics: Kupareo's and Schwartzmann's.
R. Kupareo developed a system of esthetics
Disney's messages are seen as embodiments of that conceives of art in terms of man's symbolic
the "American dream," but trans plan ted into capacity. According to this, the basic component
the wrong environment, namely, the Third of art is the symbol, defined as a double-faced
104 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SANCHEZ

entity where a concrete element, called sign, is Schwartzmann (1967) is presented as a com-
in a relations hip of suggested identity with an prehensive statement on the nature of expres-
abstract human idea (or feeling). The symbol is sivity. The approach is closer to philosophical
thus differentiated from the symptom ("an anthropology than to any current line of semiotic
uncertain sign of something tangible") and from research. Schwartzmann's point of departure is
the enigma (whose contents are not comprehen- his interest in all those phenomena that establish
sible), because in these cases there is a neat dis- links between man and hirnself, others, nature,
tinction, that is, not a suggestion of identity, and culture, such as language, art, religion, the
between the sign and the mental element. Along human figure (face, sight, masking,
these lines, different types of symbols will dif- dissimulation)-in sum, symbolic phenomena.
ferentiate classes of arts. This taxonomy based The semiotic interest of Schwartzmann's work
upon modes of expression and not upon contents lies in the fact that he establishes that man's
(or artists' intuitions ) distinguishes nine types of very existence reveals itself as expressivity, inso-
symbols and therefore nine types of arts (see far as it is not the mediation of perceptible signs
Table 1). which characterizes expression, but rather
Kupareo .began the elaboration of a general expression as actualization of existential reality
treatise on aesthetics, but only published the which gives sense to signs.
introductory volume (1964), and the volumes of There are so me works on specific types of arts
poetry (1965) and drama (1966), and aseries of which, because of their perspectives or meth-
papers on particular arts and aesthetic problems. odology, are of interest for semiotics. Let us start
I velic (1978) offers a reasonable disciple's account with music and the performing arts. Pardo (1960)
of Kupareo's aesthetic ideas and production. To studies the problem of communication in mod-
be sure, R. Kupareo is more a philosopher of art ern music (basically, the relationship composer-
than a semiotician, but this symbol-centered interpreter-public), whereas Santa Cruz
approach to the aesthetic phenomenon is a true approaches the problem of masses and musical
semiotic construction which aptly accounts for life (1946) and tries to determine Chile's position
the unicity of art: man's capacity to make objects within music's contemporary world (1959). Advis
meaningful. (1960) discusses the use of logical symbols in
music, and Solari (1958) discusses the problem
Table 1 of ballet notation.
The area of architecture, urbanism, and design
has been more fortunate in the sense that here
Type of semiotic approaches have been both more con-
Mode of expression symbol Type of art sistent and richer. (For a detailed source of infor-
I. The word as metaphor poetry
mation see M. I velic et al. 1969.) Michelis (1969)
monologue and M. I velic (1969) inquire into the specificity
2. The word as character drama
of architecturallanguage. In 1966 the Revista de
dialogue Planificaci6n devoted an issue to the problem of
3. The word as event novel
urban design. In Martinez (1966) there is a
narration (fiction)
review of contemporary approaches to the dis-
4. Movement as melody mUS1C
cipline, and in Martinez and deI Fierro (1966)
sound there is an attempt (following the principles of
5. Movement as "molpe" ballet
K. Linch) at defining the visual elements that
"step" characterize downtown Santiago as an urban
6. Movement as shot film
structure. Both papers have in common the con-
photographs ception of the city as a vast and complex sign
7. Line as spatial "order" archi tecture
that incorporates the inhabitant-setting rela-
form (style)
tionship. Trebbi (1966) is a historical discussion
8. Line as volume figure sculpture
of the contrast open city/city-state as main var-
9. Line as color "atmosphere" painting
iables of urban design.
There are two major works that have a special
relevance, for they are true semiotic accounts of
 CHILE
architecture: E. Meissner's Hacia una interpreta-
cion semiotica de la arquitectura (undated ms.) and
L. V aisman' s Semiologia arquitectonica (1974).
These works are, each in its own way, self-
contained, exhaustive efforts to account for
architecture as a semiotic phenomenon.
Meissner's study, as yet unpub1ished and
unfinished (there is a second part in prepara-
tion), was designed as a textbook for students of
an architecture and design workshop. Its main
purpose is to determine the 1anguage proper to
architecture as a semiotic system. The necessity
of doing so springs from the consideration of
architecture in a double dimension, namely, as
a constructive activity that satisfies concrete
needs, and as a system susceptible of semantic
interpretation, that is to say, as a system that
organizes itself in a meaning-oriented way along
the lines of a conscious handling of its means of
expression. The theoretical foundations of Meis-
sner's approach stern from linguistics, but the
semiotician's basic effort is geared towards the
definition of the identity of architectural lan-
guage, which is discovered in the interaction of
an abstract configuration structure and a struc-
tured space. That is why geometry alone does
not account for architectural identity; the sem an-
tic component is an integral part of it.
Vaisman's study has a double interest for us:
on the one hand it discusses the origins and
foundations of semiology and analyzes the con-
stituents of communication, and on the other
hand it poses the possibility of studying archi-
tectural experience as a communicative experi-
ence from a semantic stand point. The specificity
of architectural communication is approached
by contrasting it with linguistic communication
along the lines of Saussurean structuralism. As
a cultural object, architecture develops from
practical needs (basically protection) but also
from the need to make the social setting me an-
ingful in its spatial dimension. As po in ted out
before, Vaisman's work is complemented by a
useful glossary, to which ajudicious selection of
texts is added ("Symbolization," by Norbert-
Schultz, "Architecture and Semiology," by
H. van Lier, "On the Meaning of Architecture,"
by M. L. Scalvini, "A Prevision on Architectural
Semiotics," by R. de Fusco, and "An Analysis
of Sign Components," by U. Eco). Vaisman's
book is undoubtedly the single most important
work on semiotics written in Chile. Its value go es
105
far beyond the area of architecture and is rele-
vant for anyone interested in semiotics.
A quite special paper deserves mention here:
Fidel Sepulveda's "Materiales para una estetica
del entorno" (Sepulveda, 1982), where semiotics
is coupled with aesthetics and ecology to account
for contemporary culture in a rather gloomy way.
It is claimed that man's cultural and natural
scenery has reached a high degree of semiotic
degradation due to a steady loss of meaning.
(Our cities, our land mean nothing to us!) For-
tunately, a way out from this decadence is seen
precisely in a semiotic-oriented recovery of man's
capacity to collaborate with his surroundings and
make them "talk" again to uso
E. Semiotics of Folklore
Chilean folklore research has been either his-
toricalor confined to a nonsystematic or trivial
description of folk events. (For general infor-
mation see Pereira, 1952; Carvalho-Neto, 1969;
and especially Dannemann, 1979).
Some authors, though, have tried to und er-
stand the nature of folklore within a theoretica1
frame of reference. An early attempt is that of
Cortazar (1949), but it is M. Dannemann who
has consistently worked on a theoretica1 frame-
work to account for folk phenomena as such. In
Barros and Dannemann (1964) the subject is
viewed from a methodologica1 standpoint, but
later on he developed a clearly semiotic approach.
Folk events are conceived ofnotjust as "things"
(morphological description), nor just as social
functions, but as cultural objects or events hav-
ing a particular meaning and integrated into the
totality of culture; in sum, they are signs, and a
community recognizes and expresses itself in its
folklore and through its folk objects:
Unhecho culturalllega a convertirse en folklorico solo cuando
para deterrninados grupos funciona corno bien cornun, pro-
pio, aglutinante y representativo. (Dannernann, 1976; see
also Dannernann, 1977.)
There are some studies of specific folk ins ti-
tutions that are of interest in a semiotic per-
spective. Music and dance folklore have been
described by Pereira (1945) and especially by
Dannemann (1972, 1975), who has tried to
determine their pI ace within the whole of folk
culture. The structure and cultural significance
106 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SANCHEZ

of the cueca, the alleged Chilean national dance, only psychiatry as such (for instance, Roa, 1971a,
has been studied, among others, by Vega (1947) 1974b, 1981a), but also the problem of psychia-
and Pino (1951). In section 2.B .we have men- try as a semiotic system and its relationship with
tioned the special case of folktales. Related to other disciplines such as psychology (1955), soci-
this area of folk culture is the study of riddles ology (1960), his tory (1976), and such; the study
(Boggs, 1950). Special mention should be made of mass media (see section 2.C); reßections of
of the study of myths, which seems to be an li terary crea tion (1947, 1980a); the an thropol-
unavoidable topic of those who have been in ogical analysis of adolescence (of great semiotic
contact with the culture of Chiloe: see Molina relevance: 1971b, 1972-73, 1974a, 1980b, 1980c);
(1950) and especially C. Contreras (1966) and the assessment of Latin-American identity (1945,
Wagner (1966), who incorporates a methodol- 1951); religion (1967c, 1970a); and sex (1967b,
ogy of philological and linguistic orientation and 1970b). Works of specific interest for semiotics
und erstand the function of myth as a meaning- are those of 1956 and 1966 on the problem of
ful, that is, semiotic element. meaning and on the nature of symbolic refer-
A paper by C. Gonzalez (1975-76) deserves ence, respectively. His book on marijuana
special attention. He discusses the semiotic nature (1971 b) is more enterprising and a definitely
of American Indian craftmanship, especially semiotic approach to the problem. Marijuana is
pottery. He tri es to demonstrate that p.rl.ntings conceived of as a true sign that acts in a social
on pots and other objects are not merely orna- context in relation to a specific group, namely,
mental but true signs that represent those forces addicted teenagers. Why do teenagers smoke?
which shape man's destiny: heaven, earth, water, Adolescence is basically astate of mind: the
fire, that is to say, the basic cycles of life. Gon- youngster tries to find his proper place in life,
zalez builds a complex and comprehensive but and to do so he has to reach a comprehension
highly structured serniotic interpretation of cross- of it and conquer the ability to manipulate
cultural pre-Hispanic pottery, which allows hirn semiotic codes without which it is not possible
to tie it to some hitherto ill-explained elements to decipher the world in which he lives. But mod-
of the culture and to account for them in an ern society, dissociated at all levels, provokes in
integrated fashion. Such is the case with the cul- youngsters a sort of "perceptual deprivation": it
trung, the traditional Mapuche ritual drum (see is here that marijuana, as a means of reestab-
also Grebe, 1973): the common functional factor lishing a connection among things, acts as a sym-
is a religious meaning manifested in drawings bolic substitute to make up for the lack of clear
that are morphologically different but identical and workable systems to find the "intimate being"
at the symbolic level. Gonzalez' re cent work has of life.
continued this li ne of inquiry. In a quite inter- Other authors have developed different lines
esting "diaporama" consisting of an integrated of inquiry, such as semiotic aspects of therapy
presentation of text and pictures, he approaches (for instance, through the arts: Gayan, 1958),
different sampies of Amerindian objects in terms communication networks among the insane
of their semiotic function, and again concludes (Munizaga, 1966-67}, cultural myths such as
that "las figuras no son simples ornamentos, son machismo (Sissi, 1972), and the social implication
signos que confieren a los objetos un caracter of nicknames and the semantics and taxonomy
diferente" (1982, p. 10). This fact gives Amer- of them (G6mez-Macker, 1977). Ribeiro's (1972)
indian culture unity and a sense of continuity: paper on the "semantization of sexuality" is an
"Hay un innegable sentido simb61ico que liga avowedly semiotic treatment of the subject. The
las obras actuales con el arte del pasado prehis- analysis of the behavior of the sexes in modern
pani co (pp. 10-11). capitalistic society has as its ideological point of
departure the so-called French neo-Marxism of
the sixties. The technical apparatus is provided
F. Psychosocial Approaches to
by Greimas's semantic categories. Along these
Semiotic Behavior lines, the male-female relations hip is seen as an
This section is basically devoted to aspects of exchange of rule-governed social messages. To
the work of Armando Roa, a psychiatrist with interpret these messages is to account for the
a wide sphere of interests. His works include not group's behavior.
 CHILE
G. Philosophical Approaches to
Semiotics
Apart from some works on the philosophy of
art (Kupareo, 1964; Schwartzmann, 1967) and
the philosophy of language (G. Araya, 1963;
Gomez Macker, 1967), philosophical inquiry has
not shown a special interest in semiotics (see, for
instance, the review by Escobar, 1976, especially
Chapter 2). Herrera (1965) is a rather crude
attempt at linking the emergence of a new con-
ception of man with that of communication, and
Peronard (1976) discusses some principles of
Skinner's behaviorism which are of some rele-
vance for semiotics (even though this line has
not been of importance in Chile). Those who
have explicitly touched on semiotics from a phil-
osophical stand point do so in connection with
the notion of structuralism and the development
of structural linguistics. Such is the case with
Nuiiez (1976), for whom the interest in language
is central to contemporary thought and from
which any interest in other sign systems flows.
Something similar happens with Marchant (1970,
1971), for whom the notion of system developed
by post-Saussurian linguists and expanded to
semiology is the richest aspect of contemporary
philosophical research, especially with regard to
a general theory of signs.
111. The Description of
Particular Sign Systems
Many of the works reviewed in the preceding
section describe particular semiotic systems or
areas in a systematic way and usually within an
explicit frame of reference. The papers we
describe in this section are basically isolated
efforts at describing sign systems or semiotic
objects that do not make explicit their semiotic
approach or their frame of reference. Neverthe-
less, they do describe meaning-bearing entities
and therefore should not be ignored.
Perhaps the most conspicuous of these areas
is that of body signs, which has been approached
in a linguistically oriented direction. Rabanales
(1954-55) represents a first-and as yet the
only-systematic and exhaustive treatment of
the subject. He coined the technicism somatolalia
(Greek soma 'body' and lalio 'to speak' ) to define
107
"any systematically arranged set of body signs
of linguistic value, that is, the somatic language,
with its two Saussurean components of langue
and parole (p. 355). To Rabanales "linguistic"
means "semantic." His description proceeds fol-
lowing Saussure's basic contrasts, to which he
adds Karl Bühler's notion oflanguage functions,
and thus he distinguishes three types of body
signs: expressive, communicative, and active
gestures. A perhaps excessive insistence upon
taxonomic exhaustiveness and a burdensome
terminology have somehow obscured the neat-
ness of the description and its relevance for a
general theory of signs. Rabanales's line was
continued by Meo Zilio, who discussed the prob-
lem of the relative autonomy of body signs in
relation to language, as weIl as that of their uni-
versality (Meo Zilio, 1960). In another paper,
he applied the theoretical principles to a descrip-
tion of body signs in U ruguay (Meo Zilio, 1961).
Plath (1957) is a less interestingjournalistic arti-
cle on the subject, but reveals that there exists
a popular interest in this aspect of communi-
cation. This same author (who is above all a fine
folklore researcher) has written a paper of some
interest for food-folklore semiotics (Plath, 1966).
Within this area, Hozven (1970) offers an
avowedly Barthian analysis of the mariscal, a tra-
ditional seafood dish.
The legal system has also been described in
ways that are of interest for semiotics. Manson
(1972) discusses the semantics of normative sys-
tems, whereas Burotto (1971) tries to account
for legal thought as a sign system. Both authors
identify European structuralism with semiotics
(strictly speaking, with semiology), and take their
basic notions and methods from structural lin-
guistics in a rather crude way. To be sure, they
are aware that they are pioneers in this work
(Burotto caIls it presemiologic), and unfortu-
nately they have had no followers.
Another field of inquiry which sporadically
produces works of semiotic relevance is the anal-
ysis and description of human types character-
istic of Chilean society. Apart from novelists and
historians, there are books such as those by Ruiz
Aldea (1947), Lago (1953), and Leon (1955),
which in a sometimes folksy way describe types
such as the huaso as symbols of the country's
identity. At times, there is a humoristic and crit-
ical approach to these types and habits, as in the
case of Lefebvre (1971) and Huneeus (1980),
108 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SA.NCHEZ
who try to understand meaningful but less noticed
aspects of our culture. A very special case is that
of Lukas, a political- and social-humor cartoon-
ist, author of a nicely illustrated book on "beasts"
from the "Kingdom of Chile," actually a pene-
trating interpretation ofhuman characters based
on people's traditional habit of giving other peo-
pIe animal names. Each one of Lukas's drawings
is a vivid symbol with a multiplicity of meanings
and connotations.
IV. Institutional Framework
Semiotics is yet to find a solid international
organization in Chile. It can hardly be said that
there is any stable semiotic-oriented body at the
university level. Linguistics and literature stu-
dents receive some information on the subject
along with their specific courses, but always inci-
dentally. For example, in aseries of dass notes
for linguistics students published at the U niv-
ersidad Austral (Valdivia), there is a short review
of the field of semiotics (mainly the Saussurean
tradition) by C. Wagner (1978). A bit more sys-
tematic seems to be the information given to the
students of architecture, design, and fine arts, if
one considers the abovementioned works by
Vaisman (1974) and Meissner (undated), but a
sad proof of the fragile nature of this activity is
the fact that if the professor leaves (or is fired) ,
the subject is simply discontinued.
J ournalism and education students have
courses in communication and mass media, but
usually media-manipulation-oriented rather than
theory-oriented. (Cr. some of the theses at the
University of Concepci6n: Barrera et al., 1979,
Aguilera et al., 1979, A. Araya, 1979.)
At the School of Architecture and Design,
Universidad Cat6lica, there exists a Centro de
Documentaci6n Fisiogn6mica (see Astaburuaga,
1978). Within the Institute of Aesthetics of the
same university there is a permanent activity
oriented toward the research of art and the rela-
tionship among different artistic expressions
which many times yields results of semiotic rel-
evance. Along similar lines, some researchers at
the Center for Humanistic Studies (Universidad
de Chile) give an explicit scmiotic dimension to
their activities (see below, Section V).
In 1975, a group ofspecialists in different dis-
ciplines (linguistics, literary theory, architec-
ture, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, the fine
arts) organized a pro gram of semiotic research
and conversations. For reasons unknown to us,
the program was discontinued.
In so me academic journals we do find inter-
esting semiotic material.
Among those journals devoted to the arts, Ais-
thesis (since 1966) is perhaps the most interesting
one. In general, each issue is devoted to a par-
ticular problem: No. 1, theater; No. 2, the cri-
tique of art; No. 3, the novel; No. 5, poetry; No. 8,
music; No. 9, painting; Nos. 10 and 11, theory
of art. Each issue includes theoretical views and
analyses of Chile-centered problems. A most rel-
evant feature of this journal is the importance
accorded to the specific expressive means of each
type of art (see the analysis above of Kupareo's
system of aesthetics).
The Revista Musical Chilena (since 1945) deals
mostly with issues of professional interest to
musicians, but eventually incorporates papers of
wide semiotic interest which touch on music as
a communicative system or as a sign system.
Something similar happens with the Archivos del
Folklore Chileno (since 1950), even though it has
to be said that this is a less systematic and con-
sistent publication.
Some literature journals (especially the ones
of recent creation) have a line of publications
which in many cases is explicitly semiotic. Such
is the case with Acta Literaria, published at the
U niversidad de Concepci6n. In general, the
authors account for the structure and function
of texts conceived of as manifestations of a
semiotic system, a langue in the Saussurean sense.
Acta Literaria is dearly inftuenced by so-called
French structuralism (see Hozven, 1979). We
also find attempts at building a literary semiotics
in Taller de Letras (U niversidad Cat6lica), and to
a lesser extent in Revista Chilena de Literatura
(U niversidad de Chile).
Most of the papers published in linguistic
journals are primarily of a narrow professional
interest and therefore do not fall within the scope
of the present review. Nevertheless, they do pub-
lish semiotic artides, which in some cases raise
relevant theoretical issues. Such is the case with
Rabanales's work on sign language and Con-
treras's and Henry's papers on graphemics (in
Boeltfn de Filologfa, Universidad de Chile, and
Estudios Filol6gicos, U niversidad Austral). Estu-
 CHILE
dios Filo16gicos often publishes papers of semiotic
interest on literary topics (such as those by Ostria
and Hozven). Revista de lingüistica teoricay aplicada
(RLA) (Universidad de Concepci6n) is more lin-
guistically oriented in a narrow sense. Never-
theless, given the linguistics-dependent origins
of semiotics (or rather semiology), some papers
published here are relevant for semiotics, either
because they discuss the development of basic
notions (Coseriu, 1970), or present a methodo-
logically significant analysis of semantic cate-
gories (Valdivieso, 1975), or deal with systematic
semantic behaviors linked to aspects of culture
(Bocaz, 1972).
Some journals devoted to social and political
issues continually publish papers that discuss
and analyze communication systems and mass
media problems. Pensamiento y Accion seems to
favor works on the impact of mass media on the
cultural patterns of Latin America's working
classes (Contardo, 1974; Miranda, 1978; Gines
1976). In Mensaje (a Catholic journal), we find
papers on mass media, community policies, the
semiotic needs of some groups (especially Ocha-
gavia, 1968), and lucid analyses ofthe country's
present-day social and cultural life, such as the
one by A. Valdes (1979), who discusses the writ-
ers' self-censorship through a semiotic analysis
of texts where "clues of the writer's own silence"
can be found. It is in Mensaje that the only formal
presentation of semiotics (semiology) as an
autonomous discipline addressed to a general
audience is found: "La semiologia, sistema de
senas" by Patricio Rios (1973, see Section I
above). Another social-reality oriented journal
where important semiotic papers were published
was the Cuademos de la realidad nacional (U niver-
sidaad Cat6lica), today discontinued. Two other
short-lived journals were to a great extent
semiotic journals: EAC (Escuela de Artes de la
Communicaci6n, Universidad Cat6lica), and
Estudios de Periodismo, later Estudios de Comunicacion
Masiva (Universidad de Concepci6n).
We conclude this section on the institutional
framework of semiotics in Chile by reporting
that in the spring semester of 1981 the senior
author of this paper gave a graduate course of
introduction to semiotics to a group of literature
students at the Universidad de Concepci6n. The
results, if one is to judge by the students' enthu-
siasm and the originality of their term papers,
were rather auspicious.
109
v. Semiotic Practice
We would like to conclude this report with
some information on semiotic practice, that is to
say, that type of activity which has as its explicit
aim the creation or manipulation of semiotic sys-
tems. This is arecent and as yet ill-defined devel-
opment and it represents a new awareness of the
possibilities of semiotics as a theoretical disci-
pline full of suggestions for concrete work. It has
been the area of art where these experiences have
been developed in a rich way. Among the groups
representative of this line are CAL (Coordina-
dora artistica latinoamericana), CEDLA (Cen-
tro de estudios de la arquitectura), and VISUAL,
integrated by a variety of plastic-arts and lit-
erature practitioners who have in common a the-
ory- and creation-oriented attitude. The
characteristic products of this activity is a type
of "semiotic object," that is, semiotic entities
that result from the interaction of already estab-
lished systems (literature, photography, engrav-
ing). It is the variety of expressive means which
bestows semantic independence on these enti-
ties. An excellent example of these semiotic
objects is Manuscritos, ajournal that incorporates
·literature (text), photography (image), and
graphics (text-image), all related in the com-
position and diagramming process integrating a
meaning-rich unitary structure, different from
each of the particular systems that enter in to
its formation. Another journal of this type is La
separata, where literature and art criticism are
integrated with creation proper and even with a
meaningful diagramming. In short, La separata
presents itself as a concrete semiotic instance of
the immediacy of Chilean creative activity.
Very similar in spirit is a less systematic type
of expression that is becoming increasingly fre-
quent, namely, the composition of creative cat-
alogs that present and describe artistic
expositions, such as those by Eugenio Dittborn,
Carlos Leppe, Catalina Parra, and Nelly Rich-
ard. Among the more theoretical texts in this
area des erve mention those by Dittborn (1979),
on the strategy and perspectives of the plastic
arts in Chile, and Kay (1980), on Latin Amer-
ican geographic space as an art-and therefore
semiotic-object. A most promising semiotic
approach to this type of art criticism is that of
Adriana Valdes, who has been able to integrate
the more sophisticated conceptual framework of
110 ANDRES GALLARDO AND JORGE SANCHEZ
literary semiotics with an unusual capacity to
discover the significance of cultural arts. A
good example of this is her lucid analysis of
A. Jaar's pictures and videos as an open act
(Valdes, 1981).
Richard (1981) presents itself as an overview
of Chilean artistic activity between 1977 and
1981, from an overtly semiotic standpoint. Rich-
ard's notes do not intend to "homogenize" his-
tory, but just to offer insights into the semiotic
work of the Chilean avant-garde, which is seen
as an "escena de transformacion de las mecan-
icas de produccion y subversion de los codigos
de comunicacion cultural" (p.3). Perhaps the
person who best synthesizes this semiotic
approach with the whole of culture is the poet
Enrique Lihn. As a professor, writer, lecturer,
and art critic, he integrates the notion that cul-
tural events are but signs ingrained in a meaning-
centered environment.
A very different line of semiotic practice is
one that sterns from the activity of graphie de-
signers interested in the theory (and practice) of
visual communication, such as Miranda and van
den Bosch (1979), and the practical apportations
of what could be called semiotic planning, such
as a work by Carcamo (1978), who approaches
the problem of forest-fire prevention as a
communication challenge that has a semiotic
solution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many persons helped us in the process of pre-
paring this chapter by giving bibliographie guid-
ance, by sharing their experience with us, and
by offering theoretical background. Among them,
we would like to mention the following: Manuel
Dannemann, Albino Echeverria, Carmen Fox-
ley, Victor Gubbins, Enrique Lihn, Eduardo
Meissner, Luis Munoz, Eduardo Nunez, Dieter
Oelker, Mauricio Ostria, Ambrosio Rabanales,
Patricio Rios, Armando Roa, Maria Isabel Smith,
Fidel Sepulveda, Gilberto Trivinos, Luis Vais-
man, and Adriana Valdes. Our colleagues Ana
Maria Pandolfi and Roman Soto read the man-
uscript and made valuable suggestions. We
remain indebted to all of them. All omissions
and inadequacies that the re port might contain
are solely our responsibility.
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 CHAPTER6
Semiotics in Denmark
J0rgen Dines Johansen
I. Origins of Danish Semiotics
It is always difficult to date the beginning of a
new point of view, a new theory and method,
within a given research area, but although Den-
mark has had a great philological and linguistic
tradition (in the nineteenth century, for example,
Rask, Madvig, Verner, Thomsen, in the twen-
tieth century Pedersen, Jespersen, and so on),
semiotics is associated with a turning point in
Danish linguistics in the 1930s marked by the
formation of the Linguistic Circle of Copen-
hagen (Le Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague) and
the publication of the linguistic journal Acta Lin-
guistica Hafoiensia (1[a].1939- ). The editors of
the journal were the Romance philologist and
linguist Viggo Bmndal and the comparative
philologist and linguist Louis Hjelmslev.
Although the work of Bnmdal did not have the
same impact on the development of linguistics
and semiotics as that of Hjelmslev, it should be
mentioned because of its wide scope (medieval
The bibliography at the end of this chapter consists of four
different sections; therefore, all in-text references to year of
publication are preceded by a boldface numeral indicating
the section in which that reference is to be found.
Jorgen Dines Johansen • Department of Literature,
Odense University, Odense M, Denmark 5230.
115
linguistics, logic, and phenomenology), its pen-
etrating analysis, and its aiming at a theory of
universal structures in language. Among his
works, Essais de linguistique ginirale (2.1943) and
Les Parties du disco urs (2.1948) are of special
interest.
With regard to semiotics, however, the impor-
tance of the work of Hjelmslev is outstanding.
Hjelmslev studied comparative philology with
Holger Pedersen and in 1937 sucteeded hirn as
Professor of Comparative Philology at Copen-
hagen University, but as early as 1931 he and
other young Danish linguists founded the Lin-
guistic Circle of Copenhagen with the purpose
of discussing and promoting Danish linguistics
and strengthening relations with linguistics
abroad (cf. the series Travaux du Cercle Lin-
guistique de Copenhague, TCLC, 1944-). Here
he met the Danish phonetician Hans J0rgen
Uldall, and their collaboration until the Second
World War was decisive for the development of
Danish linguistics and semiotics.
Their first work was on phonematics, the basic
idea of which was, in opposition to the Prague
School, that phonemes ought to be described
according to their function, that is, according to
the rules for their combination in the language
text. In phonematics, phonemes are considered
as elements of the language system without any
regard to the way in which they are symbolized,
116 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
because this belongs to linguistic usage. This
leads to the claim that there is no necessary con-
nection between sound and language (regarded
as a system). On the basis of the study of the
expression plane of language Hjelmslev and
Uldall worked on the so-called glossematic the-
ory of language, but together they only managed
to write a twelve-page exposition, entitled "An
Outline of Glossematics" (1936).
There is no room in this chapter for a long
discussion of glossematics and the work of
Hjelmslev, I but only for a sketch of some of the
basic ideas in his most important book, Omkring
sprogteoriens grundltEggelse (2.1943), (English
translation, Prolegomena to a Theory 01 Language,
2. 1953). In this book Hjelmslev attempts both
to define what uniquely characterizes natural
languages and to describe the necessary prereq-
uisites for the foundation of linguistics as an exact
science. With regard to the first point, Hjelmslev
claims that even from the point of view of its
purpose, language may be regarded primarily as
a sign system, from the point of view of its imma-
nent structure, it is made up of two systems of
"figura:." This is a consequence of the fact that
one of the most fundamental principles of glos-
sematic analysis of the linguistic text is the con-
tinuous partition and making of inventories of
entitites that can take the same "place" in the
language chain, for example, sentences, clauses,
words. In these cases the inventories will be
unrestricted, although they will include a
decreasing number of entities as the partition
proceeds. At some point in this partition, how-
ever, an inventory will be made of entities which
are not signs themselves, that is, do not fulfill
the criterion of being a link between expression
and content, and these are called figura::
In order to be fully adequate, a language must likewise be
easy to manage, practical in acquisition and use. Under the
'A bibhography of Hjelmslev's work is found in Louis
Hjelmslev: Essais linguistique (Travaux du Cercle Linguis-
tique de Copenhagen, 12, Copenhagen, 1959, pp. 250-270;
2nd edition, 1970). Biography in Eh Fischer-J0fgensen,
"Louis Hjelmslev, October 3, 1899-May 30, 1965," Acta
Linguistica Hafniensia, 9 (I), Copenhagen, 1965, pp. iii-xxii.
A comprehensive exposition of glossematics is [ound in:
H. Spang-Hanssen, "Glossematics," in C. Mohrmann,
A. Sommerfelt, and J. Whatmough ,eds., Trends in European
and American Linguistics 1930-1960 (Utrecht and Antwerp,
1966), pp. 128-164, and in B. Siertsema, A Study ~f Glosse-
matics (The Hague: Mouton, 1955).
requirement of an unrestricted number of signs, this can be
achieved by all the signs being constructed of non-signs whose
number is restricted, and preferably, severely restricted. Such
non-signs as enter into a sign system as parts of signs we
shall here call figura:. (Hjelmslev, 2. 1953, § 12)
This analysis into figura: can be carried out both
on the plane of expression and on the plane of
content. The expression figura: will, in the case
of speech, be more or less equivalent to pho-
nemes, and, on the content plane, Hjelmslev
claims that the same principle of reduction can
be used:
While the inventory of word-contents is unrestricted, in a
language of familiar structure even the minimal signs will
be distributed (on the basis of relational differences) into
some (selected) inventories which are unrestricted (e.g.,
inventories of root-contents) and other (selecting) invento-
ries, which are restricted (e.g., inventories embracing con-
tents of derivational and in flexion al endings, i.e., derivatives
and morphemes). Thus in practice the procedure consists in
trying to analyze the entities that enter into unrestricted
inventories purely into entities that enter the restricted inven-
tories. (Hjelmslev, 2.1953, §14)
This follows from the double dichotomy between
form and substance on the one hand, and expres-
sion and content on the other. Hjelmslev defines
language as consisting of two planes, the expres-
sion plane and the content plane. Within each
plane he makes· a distinction between form and
substance, for example, the sound chain of actual
speech is considered to be one of the substances
of the expression plane, and the system of pho-
nemes is the form (in precise glossematic ter-
minology: taxemes of expression). On the content
plane the form is constituted by the specific divi-
sions made within a given language, whereas the
substance of the content is regarded as amor-
phous meaning. The sign function is a link
between expression form and content form, and
the minimal formal units on both planes are found
by using the commutation test, which establishes
the number of invariants within the categories
of both planes.
The expression form of a language being the
specific way in which, for example, the phonetic
zones of purport (i.e., expression substance) are
divided into two different figura: of expression
(e.g., phonemes), and the content form of a lan-
guage consisting of specific divisions made with
regard to its designative or referential function,
 DENMARK
EXPRESSION CONTENT
A B A B
:1
P t a woman
b
I d
I b girl
Figure 1
~jelmslev claims that there exists an isomorph-
1sm between expression form and content form.
This parallelism between expression and content
is clearly seen in the way in which it is possible
t~ analyze them below the sign level (see
F1gure I). Both expression and content are ana-
lyzed in such a way that each element (phoneme
and lexeme) is defined relationally, differen-
tiaIly, and negatively with respect to the other
elements in the paradigm, and it can be further
divided into constitutive components. In this
example, the content can be analyzed into four
elements (semes, or, in Hjelmslev's terminology,
pleremes)-A: male, B: female, a: adulthood, and
b: childhood. The expression paradigm can be
analyzed into A: bilabial, B: labiodental, a:
unvoiced, b: voiced.
Hjelmslev's definition of the sign as a link
between expression form and content form was
quoted above. This means that the sign is defined
aso the minimallinguistic unit having a meaning.
HJelmslev does not-of course-identify sign
with word. For example, he regards prefixes and
suffixes as signs. The Latin suffix-ibus is a sign
which can be analyzed into two content figur~,
the plural and the dative/ablative, and into four
expression figur~, i, b, u, s (here phonemes).
HJelmslev, however, does not regard the sign as
the basic linguistic unit.
Languages, then, cannot be d~cribed as pure sign systems.
By the aim usually attributed to them they are first and
foremost sign systems, but by their internal structure they
are first and foremost something different, namely systems
of figurre that can be used to construct signs. The definition
of a language as a sign system has thus shown itself on
dos er analysis, to be unsatisfactory. It concerns onl/ the
external functions of a language, its relation to the non-
linguistic factors that surround it, but not its proper, internal
function. (2. 1953, § 12)
. According to this point of view glossematics
1S ~efined as a deductive theory of language,
Wh1Ch means that Hjelmslev was aiming to for-
mulate an algebraic calculus to describe the sys-
117
~em ~ehind the language process, the text, that
1S, fimte sets of elements, functives, and rules for
their combination both within the system and
within the text. Three general combinatory pos-
sibilities are mentioned: determination, inter-
dependence, and constellation. The first principle
of the ~heory is the so-called empirical principle,
accordmg to which the description must be self-
consistent, exhaustive, and as simple as possible.
The deductive character of the theory is due to
the procedure, which, after a primary partition
of the text into expression plane and content
plane by means of the commutation test, consists
in continuous partition of each plane separately
until the text is completely analyzed and the
minimal units on each plane are found. But the
subject matter of linguistics is, in Hjelmslev's
opinion, only the two forms-the expression form,
and the content form-because they alone,
toge~her with the sign function established by
the hnk between them, constitute language as a
structure sui generis, whereas the substances
should be the subject matter of other sciences
(e.g., physics and psychology).
This procedure is initially applied to natural
languages, which are defined as consisting of two
planes, neither of which are languages them-
selves, but systems of figur~; however, Hjelms-
lev widens the scope of the theory by taking into
account languages in which either the expression
plane is itself a language, the so-called conno-
tative language, or the content plane is itself a
language, a metalanguage (see Figure 2). In this
way a hierarchy of semiologies is established. It
should, however, be noticed that Hjelmslev's def-
inition of connotative language is extremely
broad, covering both differences in style and
medium (speech, gesture, writing), as weIl as
different nationallanguages. The so-called con-
nota tors can be defined as a set of specific fea-
tures and the rules for their combination which
constitutes the individuality of the text or wh ich
defines it as a member of a given set of texts
(e.g., the set of Danish texts).
That the study of language according to
Hjelmslev is the study of the linguistic form, not
of the substance, will be very dear from the
following quotation:
Substance is thus not a necessary presupposition for lin-
guistic form, but linguistic form is a necessary presupposition
for substance. Manifestation, in other words, is aselection in
118 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN

connotative language metalanguage

content expression I content content
expression
~----~r-----~
expression
L -_ _ _ _ ~
l content
____ ~
L-_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _~ expression

Figure 2

which the linguistic form is the constant and the substance
the variable. (2. 1953, § 21)
As to the linguistic sign, Hjelmslev regards it as
a link between the expression form and the con-
tent form, and in this way the sign is defined as
a purely formal entity:
The sign is then-paraodoxical as it may seem-a sign for
a content-substance and a sign for an expression-
substance .... The sign is a two-sided entity, with aJanus-
like perspective in two directions, and with an effect in two
respects: "Outwards" toward the expression-substance and
"inwards" toward the content-substance. (2. 1953, § 13)
This definition is clearly formal, but in a later,
important paper, "La Stratification du langage"
(1954, reprinted in Hjelmslev, 2. 1959), he dis-
tinguished four strata within language: expres-
sion substance, expression form, content form,
and content substance. The expression form and
the content form are analyzed in the same way
(cf. above). The expression substance and the
content substance are each subdivided into three
levels, the expression substance into (1) the
apperceptive or auditive, (2) the physiological or
articulatory, and (3) the purely physical or
acoustic. The content substance is divided into
(1) the apperceptive level or the level of collec-
tive understanding or meaning-this level is also
called the direct semiotic substance, (2) the sec-
ond level, called the social-biological, that is, the
social-biological conditions and psycho-
physiological mechanism, which, through nat-
ural dispositions and acquired habits, allow the
members of a linguistic community to create and
reproduce the elements of the apperceptive level,
and (3) the third level, which is the physical.
The language model or the model of the lin-
guistic sign is represented in Figure 3. It is
important to emphasize that when Hjelmslev
talks about substance, he is defining it as semiot-
ically formed substance is contradistinction to
unformed substance, which he calls purport (Fr.
matiere), that is; matter of different kinds, which
does not reftect a form.
According to Hjelmslev one of the character-
istics of the relation between form and substance
is that one form can be manifested in several

substance 3) physical, acoustic }

~
... _ _ _ _ _2_)_P_hY_S_i_O_IO_9_iC_a_l'
1) apperceptive, auditive
y
_a_r_ti_c_u_la_t_o_r_ levels
EXPRESSION
form = structure of differentially
relative and negatively defined the relation between
elements: FIGURiE two strata is called
the sign function or,
form = structure of differentially in natural languages,
relative and negatively defined denotation
elements: FIGURJE

},~','
CONTE NT
substance 1) apperceptive, collective understanding
or meaning, called "direct semiotic
substance"
2) sociobiological
3) physical

Figure 3
 DENMARK
different substances, for example, language in
the letters of the alphabet or in signal ftags coded
in such a way that every letter is represented by
one ftag. This example also shows what Hjelms-
lev me ans by semiotically formed substance,
because the system of differences (the expression
form) is projected on to the manifesting sub-
stance. When it is said that one substance can
manifest different forms, this is true only of the
semiotically unformed or amorphous substance.
Although neither the Prolegomena nor the other
works of Hjelmslev offer a complete theory and
a method for the description of language and
other semiotic systems, and although his work
raises just as many problems as it solves, it has
been very inftuential both in Denmark and
abroad (e.g., its inftuence in France, especially
on Greimas). This is due to its strict adherence
to a li mi ted set of ideas and principles, for exam-
pIes the definition of linguistics as the immanent
study of language form, the principle of contin-
uous partition, the claim of the isomorphism
between expression and content, the formation
of inventories at different stages in the analytical
process, the formulation of a few combinatory
rules which are supposed to be operative on
both planes of language, and so forth. Another
reason is that the formal approach to language
and other semiotic systems is combined with an
attempt to see language as an immanent totality
and to cover within one theory all aspects (pho-
nematics, morphology-syntax, however, has no
prominent place within glossematics-and
semantics). In this way Hjelmslev's work offered
(and still offers) achallenge to linguistics,
semiotics, and the other disciplines within the
humanities, by aimingat theoretical compre-
hensiveness and consistency.
Because of their separation during the war
and because of a difference of opinion on
which algebra to use, Hjelmslev and Uldall did
not continue their collaboration after the war,
and Uldall finally published his own version
of glossematics, Outline 01 Glossematics. The
book was called "part one," and Hjelmslev
was supposed to write the second part, but never
did.
Next to Hjelmslev the best-known member of
the circle is the Danish phonetician Eli Fischer-
J0rgensen. In addition to her own very im-
portant work in phonology and phonetics
(among others) Almen fonetik (General Phonetics,
119
2. 1958) and Trends in Phonological Theory: A His-
toricallntroduction (2. 1975), she did much to make
known the work of Hjelmslev and Uldall,
although she did not agree completely with either
one.
Among the other members of the circle was
Knud Togeby, who in aseries of works, the best
known of which is Structure immanente de la langue
franr;aise (2. 1951), has attempted to realize as-
pects of the glossematic project through aseries
of analyses. The Slavicist Hans Christian S0ren-
sen's works, Aspect et temps en slave (2. 1949) and
Figures, Numbers and Names: Glossematic Studies (2.
1969), also lie within the glossematic tradition.
The work of Henning Spang-Hanssen, who has
written an excellent short account of glossemat-
ics (cf. footnote 2), Recent Theories on the Nature 01
the Language Sign (2. 1954), and Probability and
Structural Classification in Language Description (2.
1959), should be mentioned. Also marked by this
tradition, but very much inftuenced by Viggo
Bmndal and starting from a syntactic model of
a more language-usage-oriented and stylistic
nature, is Paul Diderichsen, whose works have
been devoted to the Danish language. He has
written an Elementary Danish Grammar (2. 1946),
and the senten ce scheme made use ofin this book
also forms the background for his History 01 Dan-
ish Prose (2. 1968), where development is seen as
aseries of choices which are found within aseries
of given possibilities (which were to a great extent
al ready fixed by the late Middle Ages), all ac-
cording to the period and genre being discussed.
Glossematics has also inftuenced literary stud-
ies. The Slavicist Stender-Petersen's monumen-
tal Den russiske litteraturs historie, 1-111 (History
of Russian Literature, 4. 1952) is strongly inftu-
enced by Russian formalism, but also by glos-
sematics. Stender-Petersen wrote the article
"Esquisse d'une theorie structurale de la litter-
ature" in the Festschrift for Hjelmslev, Recherches
structurales (Stender-Petersen, 4. 1949) in which
a number of important articles on glossematics
are collected. The Romance philologist and lit-
erary scholar Hans S0rensen's thesis, "La Poesie
de Paul Valery" (4. 1944) was also inftuenced
by glossematics. Both Hans S0rensen and Svend
Johansen (cf. below) were instrumental in ensur-
ing the continuity between the glossematics of
the forties and the new emergence of semiotics
in the sixties.
120 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
11. Factors Contributing to the
Development of Semiotics in
Denmark
The most essential basis for the Danish
semiotics of the sixties was the interaction of
Danish (glossematics) and international tradi-
tions occurring among teachers and students
within literary circles at the University of
Copenhagen in the mid-sixties. Of the teachers,
SvendJohansen merits special mention. A mem-
ber of the Department of Romance Philology,
J ohansen had belonged to the circle around
Hjelmslev, and had, as early as 1949, attempted
to compare semiotics and aesthetics in the
important article, "La Notion de signe dans la
glossematique et dans I'esthetique" (4. 1949).
He had, furthermore, been a lecturer in Danish
at the Sorbonne, and was deeply familiar with
French philosophy and criticism. Of similar
importance was the fact that another from the
circle around Hjelmslev (also, incidentally, with
a lectureship at the Sorbonne behind hirn), Pro-
fessor Hans Sorensen, assumed the professors hip
in general literary history at the U niversity of
Copenhagen in 1964 and, with aseries of exer-
eises on the theory of the novel, opened the way
for the structural investigation of literature.
Among those students who were also involved
in introducing what is now called "classical
structuralism," Per Aage Brandt and Peter Mad-
sen merit special note. Also, both appear as
members of the first editorial staff of the journal
Poetik (see below).
That structuralism developed first and fore-
most in literary circles lies partly in its very tra-
dition from Russian formalism to Barthes, and
partly in the situation of Danish literary history
at that point in time, which was a blending of
traditional positivism, in the biographical var-
iant, and of a new criticism along Anglo-Saxon
lines. The latter was partially able to penetrate
into the research milieu when its pretentions were
more pedagogical (directed towards text studies
in high schools) than seien tific.
The most important expression of this very
active research milieu was the founding of the
journal Poetik (l[b). 1967-1977). As its title indi-
cates, this journal was, in the beginning, closely
centered on the study of literature. Its intention
was put forth in the Foreword as folIows:
Poetik's starting point and area is the study of literature.
Since neither its goal, its grounding, nor its relationship to
the other sciences, especially the humanistics ones, is par-
ticularly clear, it will be an essential task to discuss these
problems, amongst other things in the light of the fields of
inquiry of other sciences (e.g., structural linguistics, lin-
guistic philosophy, psychology, and sociology) and the gen-
eral theory of cognition. (Poetik, 1[1], 1967, p. 4)
Similarly, the reftections of the journal's foun-
ders in connection with the name of the pen-
odical were pointed out in the Foreword:
The name of the periodical has been chosen with Aristotle
in mind, and in reference to "poetics" as used in more recent
Anglo-Saxon literary science, and to poetika as used by the
Russian formalists. (ibid., p. 4)
A look at the first three or four volumes makes
the main tendency (in spite of a certain variety)
rather clear. Theoretical articles and concrete
analyses in connection with French structural-
ism (and its tradition) predominate. The devel-
opment is primarily an elaboration and consol-
idation of the procedures of structural analysis,
and a gradual assimilation of the theory for-
mation of semiotics (Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan,
et al.). However, there was never a question of
unambiguous continuous development. On the
contrary, there were marked differences in the
theoreticaIlmethodological basis of various con-
tributors and editors, a difference which even in
the first year expressed itself in an assortment
ranging from "classical" semantic structuralism
to an attempt at founding a text theory, the the-
oretical basis of which was far from clarified.
Rather than constituting a unity, it was more a
collection of theoretical articles and analyses, the
solidarity of which consisted primarily in certain
common references and moreover in a common
understanding of the study of literature as pri-
marily immanent and synchronie.
Because Poetik was edited by students and
strongly linked with the Department of Litera-
ture at the U niversity of Copenhagen, it is not
surprising that the "student uprising" (1968, an
uprising that was comparatively peaceful, but
which resulted in aseries of university reforms)
had a decisive, immediate inftuence on the jour-
nal. Previously, most of its contributors were left-
ist intellectuals, but whereas the previous posi-
tion had for so long been predominantly char-
acterized by viewing science or scholarly work
as a strictly autonomous activity, the political
 DENMARK 121
development of students brought a radical change. occurred through an attempt to unite structural
Not only was the dogma of the absence of value semantics as developed by Greimas with a
rejected, but later structural analysis was explicitly Marxist theory formation und er the inftuence of
associated with an ideological-critical aim (natu- modern French as weil as modern German
rally, too, not without relation to the French research.
development). This development occurred grad- For the circle surrounding Poetik structuralism
ually, but openly manifested itself in the Fore- has, after they began to concern themselves with
word to the fourth volume (No. I) of 1971. The its epistemological problems, been regarded for
first thing that strikes one's notice is that where- the most part as an operation al system, a meth-
as the first three volumes carried the subtitle odology which could serve in connection with a
'Journal for Esthetics and the Study of Litera- given point of origin grounded in cognition and
ture," this had now been changed to "Literary aesthetics (e.g., dialectic materialism). At the
Science-Semiotics-Marxism." The Foreword same time, semiotics developed differently at the
provides the justification for this, and because it second of Denmark's old universities, Aarhus,
seems quite informative, it will be cited here in and in connection with a second journal, Exil
full. (l[b). 1966-1976). Thisjournal was begun as a
forum for existentialist debate, but when Niels
Semiology-Semiotics. We can allow the replacement of the suffix Egebak took over editors hip in 1970, after a res-
to indicate an extension of the field of inquiry from semiol- iden ce of several years in Paris as holder of a
ogy's treatment of the exchange of meaning to semiotics' s,cholarship at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes
treatment of sign production (and the exchange of signifi-
Etudes and as librarian at the Bibliotheque Nor-
cation), through which the entire complex of problems con-
nected with production becomes of primary importance. dique, the journal changed its character. This
was expressed among other things in the new
Marxism. A science involved with the production of signifi- subtitle, "Nordic Journal for Phenomenalist
cation of texts must ground itself in and hold itself to a Debate," and in the Foreword to Volume 4,
science invGlved with production in general. Thus, semiotics No. I, 1970:
meets Marxism as a science concerned with the organization
of the various historically specific so ci al formations, a meet-
ing which is not unproblematic and whose theory is in the By making Exil a forum for phenomenalist debate rather
process of formation .... the various tendencies toward a than for existentialist debate, the Editor hopes to widen the
Marxist-based literary science must be taken into consid- perspective considerably, so that "phenomenology"-in
eration in the light of the science's development in other accord with the intention of Hegel in entitling one of his
areas (Iinguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis). This is true not main works The Phenomenology of the Spirit, and with the inten-
solely with regard to the development of semiotics, but also tions of the founder of modern phenomenology, Edmund
with regard to the development of Marxism's approach to H usserl-will co me to be regarded as a radical and conse-
signification-attempts which in the long run coincide, but quential reflection of symbol behavior: that fundamental
which at first might seem like a sort of theoretical bricolage, complex of problems from which alone human existence can
a tangle of seemingly incompatible conceptual formations. be adequately described and understood. (p. I)
In as much as Marxist theory is taken to be an essential
foundation for understanding the problems in question-an
As is brought out in the Foreword, Exil at this
understanding which for its part will adopt and adapt Marx-
point in time bound itself closely to a decidedly
ist theory-we insert the name into the subtitle, which in its
epistemological tradition within sign theory, and
entirety, rather than designating an established theory for-
mation, notes the field of tension within which the work is
throughout its development the journal has, to
conducted. (Poetik, 4 [I], 1971,2)
an even high er degree than Poetik, reftected the
French debate. For example, writing as a field
An attempt has been made at realizing this goal of inquiry according to Derrida's view has played
in subsequent volumes, but in the discussion of a much more central role here than it has in
the concrete presentation, the heterogeneous basis Poetik.
for the theoretical work itself has caused diverg- Besides the university mileu and the publi-
ing views to be clearly marked (thus, for one cation of the two journals, the third decisive fac-
thing, shifts have occurred in the editorship- tor in Danish semiotics has been the Scandinavian
Per Aage Brandt and the author of this article institution Nordisk Sommeruniversitet (Nordic Sum-
have retired). This hasmeant a greater homo-' mer University). This institution, with which all
geneity in the journal's line, which has primarily the Scandinavian universities are affiliated, serves
122 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN

as a forum where younger scholars and students in Denmark, because the individual scholars
meet to study aseries of problems of a social as proceed from heterogeneous theoretical and ana-
well as an investigative nature. The work is orga- lytical bases, so much so that these diverse ten-
nized through the formation of aseries of "cir- dencies operate not only within the various
des," each with its own topic, which run along "schools" in Denmark, but even internally in the
parallel lines at each university together with a work of the individual scholar. This means that
weekly colloquium for one or two semesters. In an overall survey such as this must perforce be
addition to the separate work at each university, somewhat simplified, because it has to focus on
common sessions are held once or twice a year the work of a given author according to that
in which the group leaders and others from all author's primary interests. This must be kept in
over Scandinavia gather for a common discus- mind when the following branches of research
sion of the subject. From 1968 onward struc- are brought up for discussion: semiotic research
turalism and semiotics have been discussed every in methodology, semiology marked by phenom-
year, and several problem areas in which semiot- enology, and in wider perspective, the complex
ics is induded have been handled simultaneously of problems about writing, and the connection
(semiotics and psychiatry, semiotics and Marx- between semiotics and Marxism.
ism, etc.). This work has expressed itself mate- In principle one cannot, in the final analysis,
rially in the publication of aseries of reports and isolate a methodology as something autonomous
papers from the individual cirdes, which have from the scientific basis of a given branch of
provided a point of departure for the discussions research, inasmuch as the methodology, under-
at the joint sessions. stood as a more or less limited set of analytical
A fourth factor in the development of Danish procedures, rests on the theoretical constitution
semiotics has been the contact with European of the subject as an object of scientific inquiry.
semiotics. This has, of course, been primarily Practice shows, however, that it can be both
effected in writing, through readings and trans- advantageous and necessary at a given point in
lations (see Bibliography); but direct commu- the research process to concentrate on method-
nication has also played an important part. It ological questions as a continuation of the defin-
has been brought about partly by the residence ing of the theoretical.
of a number of Danis,h semiologists at the Ecole The work in semiotic methodology in Den-
Pratique des Hautes Etudes as holders of French mark has primarily formed itself as an adapta-
state scholarships, and partly by aseries of guest tion of the analytical procedures of "dassical"
instructors from among the foreign semiologists structuralism Uakobson, Levi-Strauss, Greimas,
(Greimas, Barthes, Kristeva, Eco, etc.). In this et al.). As early as the first issue of Poetik, Peter
connection the Center for Semiotic Research at Madsen presented and exemplified the general
Urbino might be mentioned, summer sessions of structural and especially thematic principles of
which have been attended by many of the Dan- text analysis (primarily taken fromJakobson) in
ish semiologists, some of whom have taught (for a broad survey article ("Structural Poetic
example, Michel Olsen). Description," l[b). 1967); and later, with knowl-
edge of Greimas's Simantique structurale, there fol-
lowed a long series of works from the cirde around
Poetik in which thematic as well as narratological
III. Character and Tendencies analysis was discussed and exemplified. The
of Danish Semiotics majority of these works fall unceremoniously
within the boundaries delimited by structural
The preceding should have given so me idea semantics, without really adding much that is
of the factors which encouraged (and still new.
encourage) the development of semiotics in Den- On the other hand, the studies of Viggo Roder
mark, and at the same time certain differential in structural semantics and especially in narra-
features within this development have been tology merit special attention, as his three stud-
pointed out. Difficulties arise when one is to give ies ("On Propp's Morphology ofthe Folktale," "The
an account of the character of semiotic research Boundaries of the Text," and "La Semiotique

categories categories
Figure 4
du conte"; R0der, 4.1970,1972,1973) represent
the most exhaustive reftection on and criticism
of narrato1ogy in Denmark.
R0der's work concentrated on Greimas's
bip1ana1 models for narrative structures, and it
has an aspect grounded in methodo1ogy as weH
as in the theory of science. With regard to the
first, R0der undertakes, in "La Semiotique du
conte" (4. 1973), a reformu1ation of Greimas's
model for the base structure of meaning, when
he, in conformity with Greimas's own und er-
standing of a type of sequentia1 model in "An
Outline for a Narrative Grammar" (4. 1972),
rep1aces the never satisfactorily defined "contra-
dictory" elements with the modal categories of
narratology. Figure 4 is the basic model for a
narrative sequence according to R0der. Through
a specification of Greimas's modal categories, in
the normal sequence, over the course of the folk
tale, R0der arrives at the narratological model
for the folktale, as seen in Figure 5. As is shown
by the model, it is applicable to an "exemplary"
text, through which the complete four-directional
transformation sequence runs. It is also appli-
cable to texts which merely concern themselves
with simple transformations. Another strong
point of the model (which scarcely plays the
dominant role in analysis of the folk adventure)
is that it is recurrent, a characteristic which
increases its applicability to more complicated
texts.
From the narratological analysis on the
anthropomorphic level, R0der moves on to an
I><
=
(A + C)4
have
(A + C)4
((A
I
+ C)3 "(have))=(A
I~
can
DENMARK 123
analysis of the folktale's ideological level (cor-
responding to Greimas's "logical deep struc-
tures"), and here it is shown, according to R0der,
that the historically conditioned ideological
structure of the adventure tale, the relationship
between the individual and society with respect
to the law and the production and development
of value, does not create a reversible sequence
in which the subjective action would be able to
determine a transformation of the social values
and production. Characteristic of the folktale,
according to R0der, is the correlation between
the individual creation of value (the figure in the
hero's trial) "and a common social object ofvalue
(the figure of the princess). The transformations
of the adventure tale can then be interpreted on
an ideologicallevel as a presentation of the sub-
jective production of value (and destruction of
values) as it must appear from the vantage point
of the unchanging social structure. This points
to an especially developmental stage of society
as the grounding for the beginning of the folk
adventure:
It is perhaps a little hasty to seek, against the background
of this analysis, a historical determination of the field of
inquiry of the adventure tale, but within the limits of the
abstract-general character of the analysis the perspective can
nevertheless be delineated. The transformation al point of
origin of the adventure tale is, socially, an agrarian society
with small autonomous economic units (the farm, the vil-
lage), where the economic structure is so little developed
that the collective integration of the individual value-
production is not a great problem. There is an immediate
relation between production and consumption. In the mean-
time, the adventure sequence begins with the hero's leaving
this society and beginning a journey into the city, and this
is depicted in aseries of situations (e.g., a group of parallel
or antiheroes, diverse helpers and givers, ete.) as a so ci al
system with a different economic basis, in which value pro-
curement therefore raises real problems. If this is set in
relationship to the fact that individual, immediate con-
sumption appears as value-negating and socially destructive,
_
+ C)3
t
((A + C)2"(can))=(A + C)2
I -------------------- +t C)\"(will))=(A_ +
will~((A C)
kn~w:::><=: kn~w
Figure 5
124 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
and that value integration is effected through the hero's
value-production being directed towards the society as a
whole, it can be concluded that the complex of problems
presented by the adventure tale can be seen as an ideological
moment in the creation of a commercial society. If this con-
clusion is held, one must at the same time resist the temp-
tation of putting the transformational model into a closed
model, the ground structure of signification, in order to
attempt to formulate it as a general text-thematic model.
Transformation cannot be used as such a model; it expresses
determined sequence and is therefore irreversible. (R0der,
unpublished)
If one relates this conclusion about the basic
ideological level to the model set up for the
anthropomorphic level (cf. Figure 5) there seems
to be a certain contradiction between the irrev-
ersibility of the first and the reversibility of the
second, but according to R0der this contradic..
tion is just the point:
When transformations on the anthropomorphic level can be
formulated in the ground structure of signification, and can
thereby be attributed to a general redundancy, it has thus
been precisely shown that transformation on the ideological
level can be regarded as an irreversible sequence. The expla-
nation for this diachronie discrepancy is that in relationship
to society, the actions of the single subject are a redundant
sequence, the transformations of the subject stand in relation
to, but do not transform, the structure of society. If the
subject, there/ore, is socially integrated, it is in a structure
which is identical with that in which the actions of the subject
took their beginning. The sequence may therefore be repeated
for every replacement of the subject. The social transfor-
mation is on the other hand not included in a more encom-
passing relationship of signification which could make this
transformation redundant, and the sequence is, therefore, as
has earlier been determined, irreversible. (R0der,
unpublished)
In these works R0der exceeds the typical think-
ing of reductive structuralism in the sense that
the ideologicallevels stand out not only as a more
abstract ground structure of the variably artic-
ulated anthropomorphic level, but also as a force
that determines the concrete content of the indi-
vidual texts. The fact that R0der speaks, unlike
Greimas, in terms of an ideological and not a
logical level is in itself significant.
Another work of even higher quality is Peter
Brask's monumental doctoral dissertation "Text
and Interpretation" (4. 1974), in which an
attempt is made to integrate a long series of
points of view and considerations of the attitudes
of the his tory of criticism and psychology of the
reader with structural linguistics and mathe-
matical group theory. The most important start-
ing point can be said to be Hjelmslev's
considerations based on the theory of science
and philosophical linguistics on the whole from
Frege on, especially where this is thought of in
connection with considerations oflogical algebra
and mathematics:
We are of the opimon that it is permitted and good for
thought to perceive the autonomous work in analogy with a
system ofaxioms. This does not mean that the literary work
is alleged to be such, nor is there any talk of derivation of
theories. It does mean that the description of the work which
corresponds to the determinations of formalism and the new
criticism, and which we have here understood as the pro-
duction of the autonomous work, in part uses work rules
which correspond to the demands which are placed on the
axiom systems with alegebra, and in part results in a system
in which the work statements are seen as determined by (if
not yet being derived from) a lesser number of ground state-
ments and regularities, which serve as the existential and
formal "axioms," of the work. (Brask, 4. 1974, I, p. 48)
As a consequence of this point of view, (but, in
and of itself to an equally high degree, as a con-
dition for being able to maintain it), Brask intro-
duces a sharp distinction between tydning
(deciphering) and tolkning (interpretation). The
former is expressed in a "description" of the work
proceeding from the abovementioned principles,
and is carried out as a stratification, in which
hierarchically high er structures rest on lower ones
in such a way that the analysis is built up step
by step, the lower levels of which appear with
evidence. Tolkning on the other hand,
is the result of an analytical activity, the goal of which is to
explain the existence and properties of the autonomous work
as secondary phenomena, that is, as forms of appearance for
something outside, possibly as the causal product of some-
thing. (ibid., p. 63)
The theoretical boundary between decipher-
ing and interpretation creates a basis for a proj-
ect in two parts. The richly encompassing
dissertation is only devoted to deciphering; a sec-
ond volume is to follow. The first part deals with
the problems of deciphering, that is, the prin-
ciples for text description, especially as it stands
in the description of literary, artistic texts. The
second part will deal with the problems of
interpretation.
 DENMARK
After an attempt to clear an epistemological
place for the work, there follows a systematic
presentation of the principles of text description.
These are first presented in a collected abstract
overview, and thereafter the indiviudal work
concepts are gradually introduced in aseries of
text descriptions. The texts are chosen in such
a way as to make the usefulness of certain tools
particularly stand out, but in the course of the
book the working concepts are gradually brought
together. The basic thought is that for each of
the "levels" which were worked with in the new
criticism, and which to some degree correspond
to various literary and linguistic disciplines, one
can work out a conceptual calculation, the man-
ifestation of which can, in the course of the text,
be stated by the attribution of values to the tex-
tual dimensions of a sequence. (This idea is also
basic in Hjelmslev, 1943.)
Common sentence syntax can also be taken
as an elementary example; here the conceptual
calculation encompasses such dimensions as
"subject," "verbal," "object," and so on. The
projection of the concepts to the sequence of the
text is traditionally expressed by attributing to
given segments of text the values "subject," "ver-
bal," and so on. The new thing here is that this
techniq ue is expanded to the other theoretical
conceptual creations as well, that is, the other
"levels" in the text are described in a similar
fashion. It is especially remarkable that this can
also be carried through for the semantic portions
of the texts. The structuring of the semantic con-
ceptual calculation occurs through the presen-
tation of semantic models for the semantic ground
structure of the text. Specific values are taken
from here, which are assigned to the sequence.
Thereafter it becomes possible to examine
whether the distribution of the values in the text
as such can be described by a system. This is
proven to be largely the case, especially with
artistic texts.
In the description of the structure in these
calculations, which are to be considered as meta-
systems for the system and sequence of the text,
it has been found that algebraic group theory
can be profitably used. This means, for example,
that it can be shown that the semantic, gram-
matical, oral, formal-logical, and graphic struc-
tures of a given poem, in some instances, can be
regarded as manifestations of one and the same
125
abstract structure, and that the properties of this
can be described in a purely group-algebraic
mann er. This method can only be effected if one
allows working with defective manifestation, just
as in the analysis of a phonetic inventory one
must at times, for the sake of the system, work
with nonmanifested theoretical dimensions. In
many cases, however, defective manifestation of
the text's metasystem either can be explained,
in certain value fields (within a determined
"level" of the text), by a "material necessity,"
that is, by a demand which arises from the trans-
formation from deep structure to surface struc-
ture; or results in considerations which carry over
into problems of interpretation, in that the cause
of the "defect" can be a matter of ideology or
personal psychology. On the other hand one can-
not, in any mechanical way, make the degree of
regular manifestation of the posed metasystem
a criterion for the esthetic value of the text.
The metastructure can be understood as supe-
rior control systems for the text. The same struc-
tures are found again, however, in a number of
other areas. It is partly possible to describe the
fields of signification in such structures, the entire
first-order-logic can be in part described by them,
and finally they can be pointed out in the visual
arts and in music. (Brask has published a treatise
on "The Ground Structure of Twelve-Tone
Music" [4. 1973], in which group algebra is
used in adescription of the dodecaphonic serial
structure.) When, furthermore, the principles of
the Piaget school are made the basis for the the-
ories of developmental psychology, there nec-
essarily arises the problem of the epistemological
status of these systems. Brask deals with this in
the final chapter of his book, seemingly without
reaching a conclusive opinion. He does, how-
ever, seem to move with certainty against an
attempt at the Platonization of these structures,
in that he leans toward regarding them as a com-
mon principle of structuring which may have a
neurological basis (the investigations into aphasia
could suggest this), but which are also contained
in the language as such, and therefore work
themselves in a possibly indissoluble manner into
the cognitive forms which depend on the lan-
guage, or are language-like. The author is con-
sequently not blind to the theoretical problems
to which the strict carrying through of a struc-
tural text-description has given rise, but it ought
126 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
to be stressed that the greater part of the book
consists in the concrete presentation of system-
atic text description.
Roder and Brask can be said to share a com-
mon point of origin, structural linguistics, and
their works both turn out to be very stringent
(and partly "technical':) elaborations of its
methodological problems; but it is true of both
that this point of origin leads to the positing of
aseries of theoretical questions at a high level.
Although research originating in structural
linguistics and glossematics had at its beginning
a comparatively limited theory formation of a
methodological character and therefore rather
quickly developed some analytical procedures
which were effective and could br repeated with
comparative. ease, it is characteristic of semiot-
ics, with its origin in Continental philosophy-
and first and foremost phenomenology in its var-
ious nuances-that it manifested itself primarily
as a theoretical reflection supported by a few
examples, and that there does not yet exist in
this tradition a common conceptual apparatus,
nor is it utilized in a methodology. It would be
quite wrong, however, to dismiss the movement
on this basis, when one of its principles here-
tofore has been precisely a reflection on, and an
attempt at going further than "classical" struc-
turalism. This situation means, however, that
there is in Denmark a rather heterogeneous
application of that line (Hegel, HusserI, Hei-
degger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida), where
attempts at formation of a theory are further
linked with various other philosophical tradi-
tions (Nietzsche, Bataille, Deleuze), as they are
linked also, for example, with American semiot-
ics (e.g., Peirce). One must even further recall
that writing as a field of inquiry, even if it derives
from phenomenological reasoning without regard
to this, has been combined with this and that.
The Danish semiologist who without a doubt
has most eagerly attempted to uni te semiology
and phenomenology is Niels Egebak, who has
introduced phenomenology and French philos-
ophy and criticism in a long series of articles and
books. He has further been responsible to a high
degree for the characters of the semiotic milieu
at Aarhus University. This account will, how-
ever, concern itself with one of his books, From
Sign Function to Text Function (4. 1972c), because
it seems to the author of this chapter that this
is where he most comprehensively and thor-
oughly states his point of view.
The book forms an introduction to continental
semiology, in which the middle section consists
of three chapters on Barthes, Greimas, and Kris-
teva, whereas the first section and conclusion are
devoted to linguistically philosophical and
semiological problems seen from a phenome-
nological angle. Egebak takes his starting point
in this regard from Husserl, whose philosophical
project he defines as folIows:
Husserl's presentation must be regarded as a linguistic phi-
losophy, or more precisely a philosophy of symbol behavior.
For what his theory is about is the appearance of language
and its development from simple to steadily more compli-
cated structures through a process of structuring, which sets
off steadily more complicated systems of signification without
ever completely being identifiable with these systems, because,
on the contrary, as productivity it points beyond its products
and back to its own conditions of possibility-conditions
which phenomenology saw as its own perhaps insoluble task
to theoretically prove and account for. (Egebak, 4. 1972c,
p.60)
With this, Egebak's posItlon and the tradition
to which he attaches hirnself are defined. He
further draws the line to Merleau-Ponty's
thoughts on the relationship between body con-
sciousness and language, and underlines his
understanding of language as gesture:
To speak is, then according to Merleau-Ponty, to engage
oneself in things and surroundings with one's body, not to
copy them, but to articulate them in a new register: the
register of language. It is, then, in such a manner that one
should und erstand the origin of language, according to his
understanding. It is this problem which positivitistic lin-
guistics has rejected as being a priorislic and therefore outside
the scope and reach of a positive sc;ence. Merleau-Ponty
states that one can (with formulae which clearly anticipate
for exampleJulia Kristeva's theory on gestures as anaphora)
find the first sketches of language in emotional gesticulation,
through which man "covers" the given material world with
a human world of symbols. (ibid., 68-69)
For Egebak, Merleau-Ponty's philosophical
project is most deeply seen to be the following:
One could say that Merleau-Ponty, with a point of origin
in the a posteriori-that which is given for experience and
thought-seeks a theory on, and as exhaustive a description
as possible of, the apriori, without which this aposteriori
cannot be understood and therefore cannot be satisfactorily
described. (ibid., 70)
The decisive problem in connection with this
becomes thereafter the definition of "the apriori,"
 DEN MARK 127
and adetermination of its status. In connection Fem kapitler aj en Freud-ld!sning (Psychoanalysis
with the latter, Egebak makes it clear (among and Theory of Science: Five Chapters of a Read-
other things through aseries of critical obser- ing of Freud [4. 1980]), which should be
vations on Lenin's Materialism and Empirical Crit- mentioned.
icism) , that "the apriori" is to be considered as
a model, not as an objective structure. 2 In the
Per Aage Brandt was a cofounder of Poetik,
first case he especiaHy cites Lacan's psychoa-
and together with Peter Madsen was the most
nalysis and grammatology. Egebak cites Miller's
energetic and internationally oriented editor in
article "Action de la structure" in an attempt to
the first years of the journal. The point of origin
define the text as an "entour d'un manque," just as
for his research was to a high degree the glos-
Egebak speaks of "the apriori" as the "struc-
sematic milieu and Danish and French pheno-
ture," that "regularity" which is known only by
menology, rather than literary criticism. His most
its effect, but which is the logical condition of
important contribution is in the further devel-
symbolic activity.3 In the final analysis, this
opment of problems connected with the fields of
"regularity" is identified with Derrida's concept
of "differing" or with Peirce's conception of an inquiry of speech, writing, and subject, in terms
of text theory as well as linguistics, in short,
infinite sign process, inasmuch as what is com-
those aspects-style, and use of symbols-which
mon to both Derrida's and Peirce's conception
go beyond the third-person statement. Accord-
is that neither a "transcendental signifie" nor an
ing to Per Aage Brandt, the determining limit
"absolute presence" is provided by them.
of glossematics, structural linguistics, and
Wh at Egebak has done in this book (and in
semantics is their "objectivistic" character.
his other writings) is to attempt to work through
Consequently, Brandt has sought to develop
this tradition to the abovementioned conclusion,
an utterance-act analysis of the relations hip
but the theory and analytical procedure which
between first, second, and third person in the
were to convert the epistemological positiori into
text. In the article "On Text Analysis" written
a text theory and and analytical practice are not
with Dines Johansen (Brandt, 4. 1971a) the
yet at hand. Nevertheless, Egebak attempts
starting point is a simple three-level model of
(much like Kristeva) to include still another per-
the text (see Figure 6).
spective, by combining the phenomenological
With the help of this model one can describe
tradition with dialectical materialism, and of this
time and mood relationship (by stating the
project he says the following:
arrows' relationship to each other) and state the
If man, moveover, as it has often been said, is fundamentally
axiology of the text as a play between three
characterized by being a symbol-creating animal, who through instances-not merely, as in structural seman-
his language and language capability, as weIl as the production tics, through the opposition of "objectivized" and
and use of tools, distinguishes himself from other animals, reduced invariables. This view of the text as a
and if one therefore presents the theory that language and
dialogical phenomenon or, as it is called by
tools are functions of one and the same process of transfor-
mation and symbolization (which is the basis for categorical Brandt, the text as a "theater", he has extended
process), such a working together of semiology, grammatol- as aseries of analyses of a linguistic as weH as
ogy, and dialectical materialism willlie within the limits of a text-theory type. In the perspective of text the-
possibility. But it is likely that this will also demand the self- ory, utterance-act analysis means a changed view
overriding of the previous dialectical materialist theory-
and, not least, a less doctrinaire position by those who invoke
of the text, where structural consideration of the
this theory as if they believed they held the ultimate truth. "objectivized" text (Greimas's expression for the
(ibid., 176) text converted to a statement in the third person)
resulted in hierarchical text models which would
In Egebak's later work the use of psychoanalysis ostensibly produce a generation from a "logical"
in text theory has played a prominent part, espe-
cially in his book, Psykoanalyse og videnskabsteori.
1. PERSON _ _ _ _ _ _P_R_ES_E,NT,T_E_NS_E_ _ _ _ _ _ SENDER

2Lenin, V.I. Materialismus und Empiriokritizismus, Werke, Band 2. PERSON -----,------l----r----- RECEIVER

74. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1977. 3. PERSON _ _ _ _ _-'--_--'-_--'-_ _ _ _ _ STATEMENT

"Miller,]. A. "Action de la structure," in Cahiers pourl'analyse,
9, Paris: Seuil, 1968, pp. 93-105. Figure 6
128 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
deep structure. Brandt's inelusion of utterance-
act means a radically changed conception of the
text, in that the text is no longer, so to speak,
subsumed und er one global model, but, on the
contrary, is viewed as having different genera-
tors which bind themselves to different positions
in the utterance-act, so that the text is not seen
as an expression for a linear transformation, but
as the result of a recursive movement, a contin-
uous articulation and rearticulation through an
overdetermined production process.
The concept of writing is no less central than
that of utterance-act to Brandt's work in semiot-
ics. The concept seems to be continuously rede-
fined by hirn, in that the determination is
sometimes elose to that of Derrida and at other
Ümes more reminiscent of Barthes. However, it
is possible to present some themes which are
implied in the concept of writing, namely a for-
mal ("logical"), a material, and a transforma-
tional ("overriding") aspect. With regard to the
first, writing is considered practically operative
as a "differing." In another connection, the
material/physical character of writing is empha-
sized, in which a metaphysical understanding of
the sign is opposed (see his introduction [4.
1970d] to the Danish translation of Derrida's On
Grammatology) , and finally he seems at times to
reserve the concept of writing for the poetic over-
riding of ideological structures (cf. "Marx's Use
Value," 4. 1973).
The third field of inquiry which runs through
Brandt's writings is that of the subject (inspired
by Lacan, whom he has been instrumental in
translating). In several artieles he has tried to
sort out the ideas of Lacan and in his latest
collection of essays, Den talende krop (The Speak-
ing Body [4. 1980]), he has worked on what is
called the syntax of desire in combination with
the analysis of discourse (in the sense of Lacan).
U tterance-act, writing, and subject-these
topics, in that sequence, can be said to constitute
a semiotic project (not a result), which at the
same time presents itself as a steadily more
encompassing and more radical thinking-
through of the field of inquiry of the sign. As it
appears, Brandt's semiotic research go es on as
a complicated thinking together and working up
of all the themes of French semiotics and phi-
losophy, from early Barthes to Kristeva, Der-
rida, and Lacan. From article to article it proceeds
as a continual formation of models and view-
points (and it is therefore useless to cite any) by
means of a combination of sharp conceptual
analysis and an analogical, intuitive form of
thought. I t is impossible at this time to under-
take an estimation of Brandt's semiotic work,
but it can be stated without hesitation that his
inftuence, both positive and negative, has been
ra ther ex traordinary.
Svend J ohansen was named in the beginning
of this artiele. Through his connection with the
cirele around Hjelmslev and his work as a uni-
versity instructor he has had a great inftuence
on Danish semiotics. In his later work his reftec-
tion on the concept of writing is cont31ined in
three small but meaningful artieles, "Ecritures
dans 'Un Coeur simple,'" "Ecriture et fiction
dans 'SaintJulien I'Hospitalier' ," and "Saga and
Collapse" (on a short story by the Danish poet
Holger Drachmann) (S. Johansen, 4. 1967b,
1968). Comparing SvendJohansen's concept of
writing with that of Per Aage Brandt, it appears
less broad and better defined, in that it is describ-
able in terms of specific verbal structures. In the
analysis of "Un Coeur simple," SvendJohansen
designates what he calls "absolute linearity" as
a main principle in the structuring of the text.
The following is quoted as an example:
"et resta fidele a sa maitresse,-qui cependant n'etait pas
une personne agreable. Elle avait epouse un beau gan;on
sans fortune, mort au commencement de 1809 .... " Qui est
cette elle? Invariablement, chaque fois qu'on relit le conte
sans s'en rappel er les details, on croit que c'est FeJicite, le
sujet de tous les verbes accumules dans I'alinea precedent,
et qui vient d'etre si fortement reevoquee par I'introduction
de la nouvelle forme verbale "et resta fidele." Mais il s'agit
de Mme. Aubin, le passage se faisant a partir de la petite
relative specifiant un simple complement du dernier verbe
de la longue serie. Et remarquons qu'il n'y a pas d'autre
motivation pour passer ici de Felicite aMme. Aubin, que
cette seule relative a iaquelle la transition s'accrache. De
nouveau, c'est linearite plane, avec "oubli" de ce qui precede.
(S. Johansen, 4. 1967, 109)
Through a long series of other examples of a
similar type, it is shown how this linear, con-
sciously and meaningfully discontinuous method
of writing constitutes an overordered principle
of structuring for the text, a structure which seems
to be of a special type, which is characterized in
the following mann er:
Ainsi, le conte se trauve lie maintenant au plan que nous
explorans, soit directement par les phenomenes que nous
avons commence par analyser, soit indirectement a travers
 DENMARK 129
ces articulations des chapitres et des grands episodes, aux-
the sender's code, but rather puts the text into
quelles les phenomenes d'abord etudies ont donne leur sens.
an interpretation paradigm, which "renders it
Comment caracteriser ce plan? Tout se passe comme s'il etait a
probable" in the sense that the interpretation
mi-chemin entre le plan du langage et le plan de la fiction: "au-
makes it "intelligible" (e.g., the dream becomes
dessous" du langage, puisqu'il porte les liasons, qui ont lieu
intelligible by being placed in the interpretative
dans le langage, acette reflexion sur soi ou thematisation
laterale que nous avons reconnues; "au-dessous" de la fic-.
paradigm of psychoanalysis). From this point of
tion, puisque nous avons pu l'analyser sans dire un seul mot
view, the text only has meaning in relationship
de la fiction, de son espace et de cette Felicite qui s'y meut
(emphasis added). (S. Johansen, 4. 1967, 113) to a theory about it, and a great deal of the book
is an attempt to formulate the general interpre-
tative operations which comprise the formal con-
It is obviously a question of the use of certain ditions for making the text intelligible. The four
linguistic mechanisms (in the example, pro- primary operations with which Dines Johan~en
nominal constructions) which secure for the text works are substantialization, reduction, interpolatIOn,
a linguistic continuity, which is in a relations hip and homology. The first refers to the establishment
of tension with the discontinuity 0] signification, and of overordered "logical" and/or genetic concepts
this is accentuated by the description of the main which form the theoretical base of reference for
character's form of experience being determined the interpretation of the text. By means of this
as a "dizziness," astate of shock with respect to substantialization there occurs the decisive clos-
the concurrences, a fragmentary, discontinuous ing of signification which is the necessary b~sis
perception and signification. The relationship of for the establishment of a form of understandmg,
tension in writing is a means by which Flaubert an isotopy for the text. In relations hip to this,
characterizes the main character. It is, however, the second operation, reduction, is carried out
also a way of expressing the lack of coherence on variable elements, just as interpolation, the
and signification that characterizes life accord- third operation, is an insertion of nonmanifested
ing to Flaubert's own point of view. In other but theoretically necessary elements. Finally, the
words, an existential correlation between author establishment of the structural homology is the
and fictional work is produced by me ans of this condition for establishing a connection between
ecriture. Therefore it can be maintained that structures of different levels. Dines Johansen
Flaubert, through his writing, is able to w~ite in regards such a closing of the text as an inevitable
the strict meaning of the concept, that IS, to necessity with respect to signification, proceed-
formulate through the structure of writing both ing from an interpretation paradigm; but at the
his character's "being" and his own. same time this constitution is for hirn one "logic"
What is of most value in Svend Johansen's for the text, apart of the research process, in
work on the concept of writing is the union of that the texts are principally perceived as het-
analytical precision with what is he re called the erological and impossible to subsurne with the
"existential correlate." These detailed investi- help of a single interpretation paradigm. Through
gations open a wide perspective by making c~n­ this, the signification-constituting process of
crete aseries of meaning-bearing structures whlch interpretation itself al ready implies a self-
neither pert<1.in to fiction nor are formulated as overriding, which would preferably take the form
astatement, but appear precisely as an effort of of a dialectic entry of the interpretation into an
certain "formal" principles of organization. overordered interpretation paradigm, or express
Through this, the research of Svend Joha~sen itself in an indication of the contradiction-
points toward a widened concept of the vanous structure of the text.
forms of the processes of symbolization. In his la test work, Dines Johansen has espe-
cially tried to combine three areas of research,
The point of origin for the semiotic work of the semiotics of C. S. Peirce, European herme-
Jorgen Dines Johansen has been a sceptis~ neutics, and pragmatics (e.g., the universal p~ag­
towards the structuralist code concept. In hIs matics of J ürgen Habermas, whom he has edIted
book, On the Situation 0] Interpretation [4. 1972b), in Danish), and psychoanalysis (cf. below). This
he seeks, through a critique of the cognitive sta- research is a continuation and working through
tus of the code concept in structuralist models of themes and problems contained in On the Sit-
of communication, to show how literary analysis uation 0] Interpretation. The fullest exposition of
does not reestablish a code lying behind the text, this approach to semiotics is contained in two
130 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
articles, "Sign Concepts, Semiosis, Meaning" (4.
1979b), "Semiotique et pragmatique univer-
selle" (4. 1980a). In these he has tried to rep-
resent the sign concept of C. S. Peirce in a
diagrammatic model to show how fruitful it can
be for the study of literary texts, overcoming the
narrowness of the dyadic sign concept which is
so common within European structuralism
(Saussure, Hjelmslev, Greimas). The aim of these
studies is to show that the meaning of a text can
only be analyzed by combining the view of it as
a chain of signs with the view of it as an utter-
ance embedded in a communicative context. In
"Semiotique et pragmatique universelle" (4.
1980a) the model is combined with Habermas's
views on the pragmatics of language. As Haber-
mas, among other things, reformulates the the-
ory of speech acts (Austin, Searle) within his
own theory of communicative competence and
the presuppositions of the validity of utterances,
the combination of semiosis, regarded as a sig-
nifying process, and the so-called universal prag-
matics offers, according to Dines Johansen, the
possibility of analyzing text meaning as the out-
put of the relation of language as a system and
language as speech, in this way combining a
linguistique de la langue with a linguistique de la parole.
Peter Madsen was one of the founders of Poe-
tik. His first works are marked by Russian for-
malism and "classical" continental structuralism,
and he has especially occupied himself with
Greimas, having written a compendium of
Simantique structurale (mimeograph). At any rate
his work in this field is scarcely as meaningful
as that of Viggo Roder and Peter Brask; instead,
his main theoretical contribution should be seen
as an attempt to effect a coupling of structural
semantics with Marxist ideological criticism. He
has described this project in aseries of articles
and a single book (Semiotics and Dialectics, 4.
1971a), among which the article "Ideolinguis-
tics" (4. 1970a) is the first and is to a certain
degree programmatic, in that it contains a cri-
tique of scientific atomization, and especially a
critique of structural linguistics' "formalistic"
constitution of its topic. Instead Madsen sug-
gests a consideration of the texts as ideological
manifestations, and at the same time recom-
mends that an attempt be made to join literary
criticism and linguistics into a new discipline,
ideolinguistics, or text theory:
A combination of linguistics and literary criticism as a result
of these considerations will express itself differently than a
combination of these two disciplines as they are traditionally
. understood. In both cases it will be a question of regarding
a certain number of texts as manifested non-textual struc-
turings. Otherwise formulated: it will be a matter of seeing
text structures in relationship to non-text structures. (These
two formulations suggest the general problem, which is bound
to concepts like signification or signification and meaning
[signification and sens]). (Madsen, 4. 1970a, 67-68)
The more recent works of Peter Madsen can be
seen as attempts to realize this project in various
ways. The book Semiotics and Dialectics (4. 1971a)
is a presentation of aseries of approaches and
works (Marx's concept of commodities, the
marxist understanding of subject-object espe-
cially according to Lukacs, the critique of
Horkheimer and Adorno, and Benjamin's stud-
ies of Baudelaire, with regard to semiotic
research: Bakhtin, parts of Julia Kristeva's works,
Derrida's sign reflection and Pleynet's works on
Lautreamont and Rimbaud). Besides these
introductory sections, the book contains consec-
utive concluding segments and a short summary.
Here Madsen attempts to characterize text the-
ory in general by comparing it with Marx's
reflections on labor and with the concept of ide-
ology, where the latter is seen as an overdeter-
mined product of subjective as weil as objective
factors, where consciousness, just as the mani-
fested dream, is seen as a result of influence or
censorship (or, in the case ofideology, as a result
of the various instances of censorship). He
concludes:
Text theory can thus be seen as a defining of the basic
conception of dialectic materialism: consciousness is created
through work with material reality, a defining which stresses
the special status of the linguistic (material) field of reality
in this connection. (I stress for the final time that the concept
of materiality, which text theory works with, should be han-
dled with care, as the immediate illustration in linguistic
(denotative) expression no longer holds when the concept of
"writing" is generalized. The important thing to maintain
is that it is not a question of a manifestation of consciousness
(externalization) in complete independence of the already
given structure of the field in question. (Madsen, 4. 1971a,
164)
The article "The Poetics of Contradiction" (also
published in French, 4. 1973a) is a direct (self-
critical) extension of Semiotics and Dialectics. In
addition to what will be discussed here, it con-
tains a critique of the concept of contradiction
as it has been understood by the New Criticism
 DENMARK
and by the Frankfurt school (Adorno and Mar-
cuse), and one purpose of the article is to show
how the concept of poetry as a contradiction-
structure is articulated differently according to
the historical and ideological assumptions of the
critics. The final section of the article is con-
cerned with contradiction according to semiot-
ics' conception ofit, as well as within text theory,
especially the work of Kristeva. But now the
point of view is critical:
This paragrammatical practice is formally determined by
Kristeva, it is determined purely formally ... as adeparture,
a contradiction which abolishes itself, etc. When this practice
is called revolutionary, it must be emphasized that it is no
more revolutionary than abstract anarchism, which invokes
continuous departure in the same way. (Madsen, 1972, Poe-
tik, 2, p. 203)
Thus the object becomes specific-a historical
analysis of the character of contradiction in texts
from various periods-while at the same time
maintaining the connection of these textual con-
tradictions with other (more fundamental) ones
which are derived from social structure and indi-
vidual conflicts. This is precisely the topic of the
article "What is Determining the Text?" (4.
1972), where Marx's analysis of capitalist pro-
duction and Freud's analyses of unconscious text-
controls are indicated as the theoretical basis for
the analysis of the structure of contradiction.
The specific text-analytical procedure that these
two theoretical viewpoints are joined with is pri-
marily structural semantics as developed by
Greimas, where the author, for example, points
to the logical plan in Greimas's generative text
mocl.el as an analysis form from which an indi-
vidual (or person-centered) description of the
text transcends, so that Greimas's presentation
of the exchange of value, according to Madsen,
opens possibilities for the joining of semantic
with social analysis.
The greatest collected presentation of Poetik's
project in text theory is, however, attributable
to Ralf Pittelkow, but it can be said to consist
in large part in an expansion of the ideas sketched
out by Madsen. Pittelkow has written aseries
of articles in the structuralist and semiotic tra-
dition, but the article which is most noteworthy
here is "Social Theory and Text Theory" (4.
1973a), because, in addition to its own qualities,
it is a good expression of Poetik's view of text
131
theory at that time. The starting point for the
article is a description of the relationship between
basis and superstructure, and of "capitalist
totality." The concept of ideology is worked out
proceeding from these political-economic con-
cepts with special regard to the concept of fetish-
ism and so ci al equality, which are seen as the
basic forms of "capitalist ideology," and it is
further stated that
In addition to the given determination of the basic ideolog-
ical forms, it must be stressed that these basic forms and the
forms derived from them are always effected dass-specifically
(and with regards to dass section and level). The experience
of the independent function of goods, money, and capital,
does not have, for example, the same character among the
petite bourgeoisie as among the industrial workers. These dass-
and level-specific forms are determined in their specificity
not simply by placement in, or relationship to, the process
of creating capital, they are overdetermined by various
moments (among these not the least are the political dis-
crepancies) in the "articulated dominant structure"
(Althusser).
As a starting point for a doser determination of this rela-
tionship it is necessary to operate with a broader concept
than that which Marx used in the characterization of polit-
ical economy, and instead of "thought forms" it will be nec-
essary to speak of "signification forms," since the latter do
not merely encompass the linguistic significations in the cur-
rent sense, but also other forms of meaningful behavior (in
general: ways of action and reaction, attitudes). For an
understanding of the dass-specific features of the thus deter-
mined immediate reproduction, it seems insufficient to oper-
ate merely with the category of consciousness-even if one
speaks of a jalse one. Rather, reproduction must be defin~d
as the mediation of presentation forms in a specific social
relationship between psychic instances (id, ego, superego )
and a social structuring of drives. (Pittelkow, 4. 1973a,
19-20)
Thus a conception of text science is revealed
within an attempt to embed semiotics, princi-
pally psychoanalytically based semiotics, in a
common historic-materialistic formation of the-
ory (cf. the discussion of "a so ci al structuring of
the drives"). How such a coupling of Marxism
and psychoanalysis shall be concretely und er-
taken, and how the analytical procedures of that
semiotics which will result from it shall appear,
is not foretold, and is a task that seems to be at
hand for the editors of Poetik as well as for many
other Danish semiologists. What is characteristic
of Pittelkow (and the editorship of Poetik, for
that matter) is the immediate subordination of
psychoanalysis in a conscious, sociological form
of thought. One could say that to a certain degree
they are working with a general semiotic theory,
132 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN

one which contains a total-consciousness model; Gelding oJ Death (Holmgaard 4. 1971a), is one of
but what predominates is a general Marxist soci- the most thorough examples of this early struc-
ology of the capitalist totality, and through this, tural-ideological critical-analysis, the basis of
the text is presented as an expression of the forms which is Greimas's semantics. Another is the
of consciöusness specific to this mode of collective study of Knut Hamsun's works by
production. Morten Giersing, John Thobo-Carlsen, and
Mikael Westergaard-Nielsen, The Reactionary Ris-
ing. On Fascism in the Works oJ Hamsun (Giersing
et al., 3. 1975), in which structuralism and ide-
IV. Applied Semiotics in ological critical analysis are combined. Niels
Denmark Egebak has written two monographs, one on
Beckett (Beckett palimsest, 1969, published in
The previous section has sketched aseries of French) and the other on the Danish expres-
general viewpoints and tendencies in Danish sionist Tom Kristensen (Tom Kristensen, 4. 1971).
semiotics. This section will discuss in brief the The book on Beckett is subtitled "A Contribu-
results and extent of its application. tion to the Phenomenology of Writing, A Semio-
As should be evident from the two preceding logical Analysis," and in both this book and the
sections, semiotics in the sixties and seventies one on Tom Kristensen there is an attempt at
was primarily linked with the attempt to estab- an analysis of authorship in light of Derrida's
lish a text science in connection with literary concept of writing and Kristeva's considerations
science and, to a lesser degree, with linguistics. on text theory in connection with a modernistic
It is also in light of the former that structuralism understanding of poetry. Within the field of con-
and semiotics have given the most immediate crete literary genres of a historical period, two
and convincing results, because their superiority weighty doctoral dissertations in classical and
for text analysis has been evident with regard to romance studies may be mentioned. La Fable
what was in the past a largely amethodical or antique, 1-11 by Morten N0jgaard (4. 1964 and
guardedly neocritical analytic practice. Both 1967) is based on structural principles (inspired
Poetik and Exil have printed long series of anal- by glossema ti es ), and Les Transformations du tri-
yses of poetic texts; but their structural/semiotic angle irotique by Michel Olsen (4. 1976) is a nar-
reading of the Danish literary tradition has been ratological plot analysis of a large number of
even more decisive. The goal of this work has collections of short texts with erotie motifs rang-
been to produce an alternative interpretation to ing from the fableaux to Cervantes' Novelas ejem-
the traditional, bourgeois literary science, so that plares, an inquiry inspired by French structuralism
semiotics, in this case, has been bound up with (Greimas, Todorov, etc.).
ideological, critical, and to some extent directly One is in a bit of a paradoxical situation with
Marxist epistemological interests. This work has regard to structuralism/semiotics within Danish
first and foremost resulted in three anthologies linguistics after glossematics, because it is evi-
of analyses of Danish literature, in historical dent that on the one hand all Danish linguistic
order, Text Anafyses (ed. J0rgen Holmgaard, 3. research is "structuralistic," whereas on the other
1971), Anafyses of Danish Short Prose, 1-11 (ed. hand it has not, in recent years, been advertised
J0rgen DinesJohansen, 3. 1971-1972), and Novel/ as forcefully as that text theory which is derived
Novel? (ed. Bodil Bang, 3. 1974). These anthol- from literary criticism (which naturally does not
ogies can be representative of the semiotic and indicate any value judgment). The basis for this
Marxist-oriented practice of text analysis because relationship is simply the greater continuity
they show among other things the great variety within linguistic research, the structuralist tra-
of views on the text-theory project and the ana- dition going back to the thirties and forties, to
lytical procedures connected with it. Naturally Brondal and Hjelmslev. Hjelmslev's glossematic
there also exist larger treatises of a practical- viewpoints especially have been of very great
analytical sort, only a few of which will be men- importance from the formation of the cercle lin-
tioned here. J0rgen Holmgaard's study of Hen- guistique to the present. Transformational gram-
rik Pontoppidan's novel Lykke-Per (the "classic" mar has naturally played an important role in
naturalistic Bildungsroman in Denmark) , The the later development of Danish linguistics, but
 DENMARK
this can scarcely be said to pertain to a struc-
turalist or semiotic tradition in the narrower
sense.
There does exist, on the other hand, a socio-
logically oriented linguistics in both Aarhus and
Copenhagen which to a certain degree builds
upon a structuralist tradition. In the first place,
it is a matter of analyses from the standpoint of
communications criticism, which, among other
things, seek to integrate viewpoints from gen-
erative semantics (Frands Mortensen "Analysis
of 22 News Bulletins from the Standpoint of
Communications Criticism," 4. 1972). In the
second place, this work has created nothing short
of a new discipline within Danish studies-
pragmatics-whose field of study is primarily
nonfiction prose, and which especially concerns
itself with the textual and nontextual contexts 01 the
text, in an attempt to uncover the dcterminants
of a communication situation. The elements of
which the theory of pragmatics is primarily com-
posed are the structural consideration of lan-
guage, as exemplified by Diderichsen, the
investigation of speech acts, and sociological
considerations. A certain understanding of the
project and its theory-formation is given in an
article by N. E. Wille and P. Harms Larsen,
"Introduction to Pragmatics and Pragmatic
Analysis" (4. 1970-the journal NyS [1. 1970]
in which it appeared is the most representative
of the modern N ew Danish studies). Peter Brask,
whose scientific text studies have been discussed
in previous sections, has undertaken a compo-
nential semantic description according to the
same principles, "Principles of Semantics
Description" (4. 1972), in which the structural-
glossematic point of view is logically extended
according to mathematical set theory. Per Aage
Brandt has attempted to create a semiotic lin-
guistics in his sentence semiotics, in opposition to
both glossematics and generative grammar,
although it is influenced by the latter. There is
an attempt to replace the linear generation proc-
ess of transformational grammar with a cyclical
process of generation, where what is genera ted
is assumed to pass through the three components
(phonological, semantic, and syntactic) several
times (see especially L'Analyse phrastique (Brandt,
4. 1973b).
One can scarcely speak of a structuralist or
semiotic trend within philosophy. Rather it could
133
be said that the other fields of research described
in this chapter have philosophical implications.
However, it may be of so me use to mention Arne
Thing Mortensen's dissertation, Perception and
Language (4. 1972), as it seeks to combine a struc-
turalist (glossematic) consideration of language
with a philosophy of ordinary language. Struc-
turalism and semiotics have given rise to phil-
osophical considerations in another field as weil,
namely, hermeneutics. Aseries of distinguished
essays bY]0fgen K. Bukdahl on hermeneutic as
wen as semiotic approaches to problems (4. 1969,
1973) was published in the journal Kritik (1.
1967- ), as were Peter Kemp's reflections on
French hermeneutics and semiotics. The latter
has translated, among other things, Sartre and
Ricoeur, and has himself written a book on lan-
guage, The Dimensions 01 Language (Kemp, 4.
1972.) The French debate over the philosophy
of history (Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Foucault) has
also especially played a role, and has been
reported and commented upon in Kaj Aalbcek-
Nielsen's phenomenologically oriented History.
Structure and Existence (4. 1970). In addition, much
work has gone into presenting and introducing
French thought, both in journals and in inde-
pendent publications. Apart from the already
mentioned Festschrift for Svend ]ohansen, Sign,
Text, Signification (ed. T. Ditlevsen et al., 3. 1972)
Esbern Krause-]ensen's book French Structuralism
(4. 1973a) may be mentioned.
The theory of architecture, and image and film
semiology, has also been cultivated. In the case
of architecture, a treatise which was awarded
thc Academy's gold medal, The Practice 01 Archi-
tecture by L. Marcussen, J. Sestoft, Allan de Waal,
and Per Aage Brandt, dissolves the tradition al
differen tia tion in archi tectural theory between
function and values (artistic, ideological) in favor
of a conception of building as a type of "junc-
tion" into which the economic, political, and ide-
ological practices all enter, so that architecture
is seen as a performance of symbols which is
dependent on a specific manner of production.
In image and film semiology, the analyses of the
Aarhus semiologist Niels Lykke Knudsen war-
rant mention, for example, "Advertising and
Meaning" (4. 1971 b) as do those of the Marxist
film semiologist] ens Toft, such as "Some Prob-
lems of the Semiology of Images: Non-Verbal
Formation of Ideas" (4. 1972a), and of Peter
134 J0RGEN DlNES JOHANSEN
Larsen (4. 1973, 1974a, b, 1976). But we owe
the most comprehensive presentation of film
semiology to the Danish philosopher and sign
theorist S0ren Kj0rup, whose book Film Semiology
(1975) not only competently presents and
criticizes international image and film semiology
but also offers an original contribution to the
development of the theory. Finally, it should be
mentioned that procedures of semiological anal-
ysis have made their way to some extent into
drama studies, as witnessed by Jytte Wiin-
gaard's book, Semiology 01 the Theatre (4. 1976),
which contains among other things an analysis,
based on semiological principles, of Ingmar
Bergmann's production of Moliere's Le Misan-
thrope at the Royal Danish Theatre. Steen Jan-
sen's important articles on the semiotics of the
theatre, especially French classicist and roman-
tic drama, should also be mentioned (cf. bibli-
ography). An ambitious analysis of comic strips,
Comic Strips: History of an Expansion U. F. Jensen
et al., 3. 1973), by a research collective at the
Department of Scandinavian Studies, Aarhus
University, should also be mentioned. Though
the aim is primarily ideological criticism, the
analysis proceeds to a great extent according to
structuralist principles.
Further, it must be mentioned that psychoa-
nalysis, also of the semiotically inspired French
variety, has come to playa greater role in the
study of psychology. Within psychiatry a research
project (financed by the Research Council) on
the language of schizophrenics has been carried
out according to the principles of text theory
and of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The investigation was made jointly by the psy-
chiatrist B0rge Rosenbaum and the text theorist
Harly Sonne at the Central Hospital in Copen-
hagen. It was published under the title This 1s a
Tape Speaking (4. 1979). Apart from this, psy-
choanalysis has mainly inftuenced text theory
and literary studies. A few publications should
be mentioned: a selection of Freud's metapsy-
chological wri tings ha ve been edi ted, in tro-
duced, and annotated in an exemplary fashion
by O. Andkjcer Olsen, S. Köppe, and B. Kjcer
(Metapsychology, 1-11 [1975-1976]).J0rgen Dines
Johansen has edited the book Psychoanalysis, Lit-
erature, Text Theory, 1-11 (4. 1977a), ofwhich the
first volume is areader which brings together
British, American and French articles about the
subjects mentioned in the title, and the second
volume is a dictionary of psychoanalytic and
linguistic terms, with an extensive comment on
the articles. Another approach that has been and
is being attempted is to make use of and to inte-
grate psychoanalysis into both semiotic theory
and concrete (e.g., literary) studies. Some note-
worthy, French-inspired attempts to bring
semiotic and psychoanalytic ideas together may
be seen in the collective collection of essays Sub-
ject and Text (Knudsen et al., eds., 1974), which
is made up, incidentally, of proceedings from a
session at the Nordisk Sommeruniversitet (contri-
butions by E. Svejgaard, O. Andkjcer Olsen, Per
Aage Brandt and Niels Egebak, and others); and
in a special issue, on psychoanalysis, of the lin-
guistic (and semiotic) journal Papir 1(4), 1975.
Psychoanalysis is also studied by the Poetik group.
Attempts are being made to incorporate it into
Marxism, mainly, however, in concrete literary
analysis. Finally, it may be mentioned that apart
from editing the volumes already mentioned,
J 0rgen Dines J ohansen has also worked on the
relation between structuralism/semiotics and
psychoanalysis (4. 1977b), bu t the point of
departure in this article was a reftection on the
communicative situation rather than on the
notion of signifiant.
The foregoing pages document an exceedingly
lively research activity within structuralism and
semiotics, and one might say that there has thus
occurred a radical change in the disciplines of
central humanistic research. It must be stressed
once again, however, that the research which is
carried out in this field is extremely heteroge-
neous, so much so that one can scarely speak of
a Danish structuralism or semiotics, but rather,
several directions of research.
V. Current Situation and
Future Prospects
Ifwe were to try to summarize the above tend-
encies and results, one starting point could be
to look at the fate of the journals mentioned at
the beginning of this article. In more recent years,
Poetik has increasingly become a forum of soci-
ological and so ci al history research on a Marxist
 DENMARK
basis, so that as a consequence of this devel-
opment its name was changed in 1977 (8[1]) to
Kultur og klasse (Culture and Class).
On this occasion an editorial preface was writ-
ten from which so me excerpts may be quoted.
First a historical sketch of the development of
the journal was drawn with a certain polemical
sting:
The third and fourth years (1970-71) were times of change
for Poetik. At least four positions may be distinguished on
the basis of content. First, the one, with Per Aage Brandt
as its main representative, which functioned as a Danish
variety of the avant-garde, formal-extremist thinking about
writing done by the French Tel Quel group. Second, and
broadly represented in the editorial board, a detailed concern
with thematic analysis and with narratology. third, literary
analyses of a more marxist orientation, but characterized by
abstract ideological criticism. This strand is most noticeable
in Tekstanalyser-ideologikritiske tekster (Textual Analyses-Text
of Ideological Criticism), Vol. 4, 2/3,1971, which is a major
contribution to Danish marxist literary criticism in its
ideology-critical phase. Fourth, a sm aller group of histori-
cally directed marxist analyses of literature. Both the third
and the fourth group have adopted viewpoints from thematic
analysis.
In its fourth year 'the journal acquired a new subtitle,
Litteraturvidenskab-Semiotik-Marxisme (Literary Science-
Semiotics-Marxism), which indicated the conflicting tend-
encies. Since the fifth year there have been no subtitles to
the name.
The editorial board changed several times during the third
and fourth years. After the fourth year Per Aage Brandt left
the board following deep-rooted dis agreement with the edi-
torialline the other editors wanted to pursue. Of the original
board only Peter Madsen remained (and remains). Since the
fifth year (1972-1973), a reasonably coherent main line has
prevailed-apart from occasional relapses. (Kultur og klasse,
8[1] 1977, pp. 5-6)
Later, the line the journal now represents is made
dear. The editors say:
The journal Gulture and Glass is edited from a fundamental
Marxist outlook, and"it attempts to be accessible to everyone
seriously interested. I t is a forum of Marxist sociology of
consciousness broadly applied to the analysis of all types of
experience according to the contemporary as weil as-and
particularly-the historical cultural practice. The journal
wishes also to offer assistance towards communicating and
promoting socialist culture in all relevant areas of society.
The journal itself must be of use in spheres outside the
universities, and it must help promote the development of
socialist intellectuals who can do other things and more than
teaching and research at advanced levels of the educational
system. (ibid., 8)
These excerpts express the aim of the group and
its present attitude toward structuralism/
135
semiotics. What has happened is that it has
seemed sufficient to work on the basis of the-
matic analysis following the principles sketched
out by Greimas, and this analysis has then been
combined with considerations from psychoanal-
ysis and social history. But there has been no
development, either of structuralist methodol-
ogy, or of reftections on the theoretical founda-
tion of semiotics, or even of attempts to unite
structural (thematic) analysis and social-history
analysis into an explicit theory of the relation
between the two levels of analysis. This impres-
sion is confirmed by the manual Text Structures
by Torben Grodal, Peter Madsen, and Viggo
R.0der (3.1975), which appears as a presentation
of French structuralism (primary thematic anal-
ysis, myth analysis, and narratology, with an
appendix of Propp's analysis offolktales) and in
the collective collection of essays on the Danish
novel, Ana(yser aJ danske romaner I-IH (Analyses
of Danish Novels, ed. J. Holmgaard, 3. 1977).
Therefore it must be conduded, with regard to
the group centered around Culture and Class, that
their project is the development of a Marxist
literary science and sociology of consciousness,
which makes use of the results obtained by "das-
sical" French structuralism, but whose decisive
interests and merits lie elsewhere.
As for the journal Exil, it was forced to dis-
continue publication for economic reasons. The
last issue (1976), symptomatically, had psycho-
semiotics as its theme. The other journal, Matieres,
representing a French-oriented line, no longer'
appears from a publishing house, but as mimeo-
graphed pamphlets from the Department of
Romance Philology at Aarhus University. Exil,
however, was continued as aseries of mimeo-
graphed prepublications under the name of Sprog,
subjekt, ideologi. Tvteifaglige arbejdspapirer. (Lan-
guage, Subject, Ideology. Interdisciplinary
Working Papers, 1-3, Aarhus 1977-80). It was
edited and published by some members of the
group around Exil, although Niels Egebak no
longer took part in it. On the other hand Per
Aage Brandt joined the group, and in 1980 the
"Working Papers" were renamed Semiotik-Psy-
koana(yse, Litteratur, Politik, which is scheduled to
appear three times a year, with Per Aage Brandt
as Editor-in-Chief. Connected with this new
journal is the so-called Semiotic Cirde of Copen-
hagen (also with Per Aage Brandt as prime
mo ver ), a forum for informal discussions of
136 J0RGEN DlNES JOHANSEN

semiotic topics. Characteristic of the group con- romanists Michel Olsen and Morten N0jgaard
nected with the journal and the cirele ·is a preoc- have been mentioned, but beyond that N0jgaard
cupation with the theory of the subject, that is, has written a general introduction to the meth-
Lacan's version of psychoanalysis combined with ods of literary study, The Literary Universe (4.
discourse analysis. Apart from the work concen- 1975), which is an impressive presentation of the
trated around Exil, the working papers, and now results of international research in the field, where
Semiotik, there is lively research going on in this an attempt is made to systematize analytical pro-
field. Witness, for example, the collectively writ- cedure and viewpoints from Russian formalism,
ten Narrative Theory (1975, with sections written the New Criticism, German narrative analysis,
by N. Egebak, S. E. Larsen et al.), which is a and-of course-French structuralism. If to this
comprehensive introduction to the problems of one adds the works of Peter Brask, with his com-
structural text analysis (containing sections on pliance with the strictest demands for consist-
structurallinguistics-Saussure, Hjelmslev, and ency and formalization (a heritage from both
Greimas), and it has a more thorough and more glossematics and mathematics) and his readi-
problem-oriented discussion and presentation of ness to formalize (at the level of textual mani-
the same material which was presented in the festation, so that reductions are avoided as much
abovementioned Text Struetures (published by the as possible), then it becomes evident that "elas-
Poetik group). Apart from this collective work sical" structuralism is still playing an important
there is a long list of artieles aIl written within role in semiotic research in Denmark.
this tradition, and from among longer works the FinaIly, a fourth trend must be distinguished.
following three individually written books may As was the case with the trend described above,
be mentioned: Per Aage Brandt's Sign, Sentence, this one is not represented by adefinite group
Subjeet (4.1974a), Svend Erik Larsen's Literary of people associated with a particular journal,
Semiology (4. 1975a), and Niels Egebak's Text and but if one looks at the work of S0ren Kj0rup and
Economy, Contributions to a Materialist Theory oJtheJmgen Dines Johansen (as weIl as the philo-
Text (1976a). A general characterization of cur- sophical work of Arne Thing Mortensen), what
rent work within this branch of Danish semiotic is common to them is the Anglo-Saxon and
research must focus on its attempt to unite psy- American inftuence. Kj0rup studied with Nelson
choanalysis (in its modern French variety) with Goodman at Harvard and besides his work on
structural analysis, and its attempt to uni te thesefilm semiology, he has written a book an aes-
with an equally French-inspired reading of Marx thetics, Aistetiske problemer (Problems of Aesthet-
and the works of authors like Foucault and ics, 4. 1971), which was inftuenced by ordinary-
Baudrillard. Whether such a project can suc- language philosophy. His artiele "Iconic Codes
ceed, no one knows. Certainly it may be stated and Pictorial Speech Acts" (in Danish Semiotics,
that so far only some interesting though as yet l[c). 1979, cf. bibliography) is an accurate cri-
inconelusive attempts have been made. tique of U mberto Eco's theory of iconic codes
based on the line of thought found in Nelson
If the fate of these journals has been taken as Goodman's Languages 01 Art (1968). Dines J ohan-
a starting point for a description of the current sen has also been inftuenced by Goodman's book,
situation of semiotics in Denmark, it is because but in his case the strongest inftuence has been
much lively research activity and popularizing the semiotics of C. S. Peirce. Characteristic of
work have been carried out in more or less elose this trend is its connection with ordinary-Ian-
association with them. But from what has been guage philosophy, theory of speech acts, prag-
said above it is also elear that these trends do matics, and theory of action.
not by themselves give a full portrait of semiotics Comparing modern Danish semiotics with the
in Denmark. First of aIl a somewhat (though not glossematics of the thirties and forties, the basic
much) older generation than that associated with difference is that whereas glossematics looked at
the journals continues very seriously to do language as a structure sui generis, and the aim,
research work in linguistics and literary science in Hjelmslev's formulation, was to find the sys-
on the explicit basis of a slightly older structur- tem behind the text, now the signifying process
alist tradition (glossematics and French struc- is seen as symbolic action embedded in a wider
tural research). The major works of the two context consisting of the social praxes, norms,
 DENMARK
and ways of communication within the society
in question. On this point all the above-
mentioned tendencies or trends agree.
No agreement, however, has been reached with
regard to the question of what is going to serve
as a theoretical foundation for the analysis of the
signifying process. Instead, four different answers
are being offered: A Marxist theory of society
and consciousness, the psychoanalysis of Lacan,
a structuralist theory of language as a system,
and a pragmatic theory of knowledge and action.
This diversity of points of view, however, is not
a special feature of the present situation in Den-
mark, but characterizes semiotics all over the
world.
VI. Bibliography
1. Periodicals
[al Periodicals in the major languages edited in Denmark
(none of the journals below with the exception of MatiCres
are exclusively semiotic)
(1939-) Acta Linguistica Hafoiensia (founded by Bmndal and
Hjelmslev), Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
(1943-) Orbis Litterarum, Copenhagen, Munksgaard.
(1944-) Travaux du cercle linguistique de Copenhague
(abbreviated TCLC), aseries, not a periodical;
Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag.
(1967-) Revue Romane, Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag.
(1973-) Matieres (now available only as stencilled pamphlets
from the Department of Romance Philology at Aar-
hus University)
(1977-) Journal rif Pragmatics, Amsterdam: North Holland.
[bl Journals in the Danish language (only Exil, Poetik, Fallos
and Semiotik are exclusively semiotic)
(1962-) Meddelelser fra danskll1!rerforeningen (Bulletin of the
Association of the Teachers of Danish) Copen-
hagen: Gyldenda!.
(1966- Exil, continued as working papers from the Human-
1976) ities at Aarhus U niversity under the tide Sprog, sub-
jekt, ideologi (Language, Subject, Ideology), and
transformed into a new journal, Semiotik in 1980 (er.
below); Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag.
(1967- Poetik, continued as Kultur og klasse (Culture and
1977) Class) from 1977 (cf. below), Copenhagen:
Munksgaard.
(1967-) Kritik (Critic) Fremad, from 1979, Copenhagen:
Gyldendal
(1970-) NyS (i.e., Nydanske Studier: New-Danish Studies),
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
(1974-) Papir, Kongerslev: G.M.T.
(1977) Kulturog klasse (formerly Poetik, 1967-1977), Copen-
hagen: Medusa.
(1978-) p"allos. Religiologisk Skriftrrekke (Phallos. Papers in
the Study of Religion). Aarhus University.
137
(1978)- Agrippa. Psykiatriske tekster (Agrippa, Psychiatrie
Texts), Copenhagen: FADL's Forlag.
(1980)- Semiotik, psykoanalyse, litteratur, politik (cf. Exil).
Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag.
[cl Special numbers, on semiotics, of journals not exclu-
sively devoted to the subject.
(1967) Langages, No. 6. "La Glossematique. L'heritage de
Hjelmslev au Danemark." Ed. Knud Togeby (H. C.
S0rensen, H. Prebensen, P. Levin, J. Holt,
P. Skarup, K. Heltberg, E. Hansen, H. Spang-
Hansen, G. Boysen, N. E. Christensen, A. Thing
Mortensen, P. Zinkernagel) Paris: Larousse, Didier.
(1968) Revue Romane, No. 2. "Immanence et structure."
(selected articles by K. Togeby) Copenhagen: Aka-
demisk Forlag.
(1969) Kritik, No. 11. "Fransk kritik" (French criticism)
(N. Lykke Knudsen, E. Krause-Jensen, P. Madsen)
Copenhagen: Fremad.
(1970) Vindrosen, No. 7. (H.J. Nielsen, M. Pleynet,
R. Pittelkow,J.-L. Baudry, P.Aa. Brandt, Ph. Soll-
ers, P. Madsen) Copenhagen: Gyldenda!.
(1973) Poetics, No. 6. "Copenhagen Studies in Poetics"
(R. Pittelkow, P. Madsen, V. Relder, P. Aa. Brandt,
J. Dines Johansen).
(1975) Papir, I, No. 3. "Hjelmslev" (P. Harder,J. Kadev,
P. E. Kristensen, M. Levy, P. Aa. Brandt,J. Rischel,
A. Häger) Kongerslev: G.M.T.
(1979) Orbis Litterarum, supp!. 4. "Danish Semiotics." Ed.
J. DinesJohansen and Morten N0jgaard. O. Dines
Johansen, N. Egebak, M. N0jgaard, M. Olsen,
A. Thing Mortensen, S. Kj0rup, P. Brask, P. Aa.
Brandt) Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
(1980) Degris, No. 21. "Communication et sujet." Ed.
J. DinesJohansen, S. E. Larsen, Morten N0jgaard.
(M. N0jgaard, J. Dines Johansen, Bent Rosen-
baum, H. Sonne, S. E. Larsen,J. Toft, S. Kj0rup).
2. Works in Linguistics and
Glossematics
Bmndal, Viggo. Essais de linguistique generale. Copenhagen:
Munksgaard, 1943.
- - - . Les parties du discours. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1948.
Diderichsen, Pau!. Elementl1!r dansk grammatik (Elementary
Danish Grammar). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1946.
- - - . Sproget- Virkeligheden-Fantasien (Language-Reality-
Fantasy). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1964.
- - - . Helhed og struktur (Totality and Structure). Copen-
hagen: GAD, 1966.
- - - . Dansk prosahistorie I, I (History of Danish Prose).
posth. ed., Universitetets fond til tilvejebringelse af
lreremidler. K0benhavns U niversitet, 1968.
Ege, Niels. "Le Signe linguistique est arbitraire." In Recherches
structurale. Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag.
Ege, Niels, H. J. Uldall, K. Togeby, P. Diderichsen, A.
Stender-Petersen, S. Johansen, et al. Recherehes structurales.
Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 5.
Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog- og Litteraturforlag, 1949.
Fischer-J0rgensen, Eli. Almen fonetik (General Phonetics).
Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1958.
- - - . Trends in Phonological AnaiJsis. A Histoncal Introduction.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1975.
138 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
Hjelmslev, Louis. Omkring sprogteoriens grundllPggelse (Eng. trans.
Prolegomena to a Theory oj Language, 1953). 2nd ed. Copen-
hagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1966.
- - - . Essais linguistique. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique
de Copenhague 12 (1959),9-249.
- - - . Sproget (Eng. trans. Language, 1970). Copenhagen:
Berlingske F orlag, 1963.
- - - . Sprogsystem og sprogforandring (Language System and
Language Change). Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de
Copenhague, 15, 1972.
- - - . Essais linguistique 11. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique
de Copenhague, 14, 1975.
- - - . Risumi of a Theory of Language, Travaux du Cercle
Linguistique de Copenhague, 16, 1975.
Hjelmslev, Louis and H. J. Uldall. "Synopsis of an Outline
ofGlossematics," Aarhus. Pamphlet written for the Fourth
International Congress of Linguistics, Copenhagen, Sep-
tember 1936.
Sorensen, Hans Christian. Aspect et temps en slave. Diss. Aar-
hus: Aarhus University Press, 1949.
- - - . Tal, numre, nave (Figures,Numbers and Names).
Kobenhavns Universitets Festskrift, Kobenhavns Univ-
ersitet, 1969.
Spang-Hanssen, Henning. Recent Theories on the Nature oj the
Language Sign. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copen-
hague,9 (1954), 11-142.
- - - . Prob ability and Structural Classification in Language
Description. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1959.
Togeby, Knud. Structure immanente de la langue fran~aise. Tra-
vaux du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, 6, 1951.
- - - . Mode, aspect, et temps en espagnol. Copenhagen: Munks-
gaard, 1953.
- - - . "Immanence et structure." Revue Romane, No. 2.
Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1968.
3. Anthologies and Collective Works
Based Totally or in Part on Semiotics
Andersen, M. Brunn, ed. Filmanalyser. Historien ifilmen (Anal-
yses of Movies: History in the Movie). (P. Larsen,
T. Grodal, P. Madsen, S. Kjorup et al.) Copenhagen: Rode
Hane, 1974.
Andersen, M. Brunn andJ. Poulsen, eds. Mediesociologi (Soci-
ology of Mass Media). Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1974.
Bang, Bodil, ed. Roman/Roman? (NoveI!Novel?). 0. Dines
Johansen, P. A. Brandt, P. Madsen, N. Egebak, et al.)
Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag, 1974.
Berthelsen,J., H. Hyllested, N. Egebak, S. E. Larsen, L. W.
Horsner, E. Svejgaard, el al. FortlPlieteori. ForudslPtning og
perspektiv. Viborg (Narrative Theory: Foundations and
Perspective) Copenhagen: Arena, 1974.
Bohn, 0., ed. Fra modemismen til nymarxistisk kritik (From
Modernism to Neo-Marxian Criticism). (N. Egebak et al.)
Copenhagen: Schultz (Temaboger), 1970.
Brandt, P. Aa., L. Marcussen, J. Sestoft, A. de Waal. Arki-
teklurens praksis. Copenhagen: Borgen, 1974.
Ditlevsen, T., J. M. Pedersen, and B. Svendborg, eds. Tegn,
tekst, betydning (Sign, Text, Signification). (T. Grodal,
T. Ditlevsen, P. Madsen, O. Ankjaer Olsen, P. Aa. Brandt.
J. Toft, K. Hvidtfelt Nielsen, J. Dines Johansen, J. Thobo-
Carlsen, J. Monster Pedersen, B. Svendborg, T. Bogeskov,
et al.) Copenhagen: Borgen, 1972.
Egebak, Niels, ed. Aspekter af nyere fransk kritik (Aspects of
Newer French Criticism). (E. Krause-Jensen, M. Olsen,
N. Lykke Knudsen, K. Larsen, and N. Egebak) Copen-
hagen: Munksgaard, 1972.
Friis, P., Walter Seeberg, and J. F. Kragholm. TV-analyse
(Analysis of TV). Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976.
Gerlach-Nielsen, M., H. Hertel, and M. Nojgaard, eds.
Romanproblemer (Problems of the NoveI). (H. Boll-Johansen,
J. Pedersen, N. E. Wille, M. Nojgaard, P. Madsen,
S. Schou, et al.) 1966; 2nd rev. ed. Romanteori og romanalyse
(The NoveI, Theory and Analysis). Odense: Odense Uni-
versity Press, 1977.
Giersing, M., J. Thobo-Carlsen, M. Westergaard-Nielsen.
Det reaktionlPre oprer. Omfascismen i Hamsunsforfatterskab (The
Reactionary Rising: On Fascism in the Works of Ham-
sun). Grenaa: G.M.T., 1975.
Giersing, M. and R. Pittelkow, eds. Litteralurkritik. Aspekter
af de 20. aarhundredes litteraturkritik (Literary Criticism:
Aspects of 20th Century Literary Criticism). (M. Giersing,
T. Grodal, Elo Nielsen, R. Pittelkow, J. Thobo-Carlsen,
M. Westergaard-Nielsen). Copenhagen: Borgen, 1979.
Grodal, T., P. Madsen, and V. Roder. Tekststrukturer. Intro-
duktion til tematisk og narratologisk analyse (Text Structures:
Introduction to Thematic and Narratological Analysis).
Copenhagen: Borgen, 1975.
Hastrup, K., J. Ovesen, K. E. Jensen, J. Clemmensen,
K. Ramlov. Den ny antropologi (The New Anthropology).
Copenhagen: Borgen, 1975.
Holmgaard, Jorgen, ed. "Tekstanalyser-ideologikritiske
tekster." Poetik, 4, No. 2/3 (Text Analyses-Ideological-
critical Texts). 0. Holmgaard, T. Grodal, P. Brask,
O. Andkjrer Olsen, P. Aa. Brandt, P. Madsen, J. Dines
Johansen, S. Schou:, et al.) Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1971.
- - - , ed. Analyser af danske romaner, 1-3 (Analyses of Dan-
ish Novels). (T. Grodal, J. Holmgaard, R. Pittelkow,
M. Giersing, M. Westergaard-Nielsen, et al.) Copen-
hagen: Borgen, 1976.
Jensen, J. Fjord, H. Hyllested, L. W. Horsner, et al. Tegne-
serier. En Ekspansions historie (Comics: History of an Expan-
sion). Grenaa: G.M.T., 1973.
Jensen, J. Fjord, N. O. Finnemann, B. Hedeboe et al., eds.
Sendags-B. T. Rapport om en succes (Sondags-B. T. Report of
a Success). Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1971.
Johansen, Jorgen Dines, ed. Analyser af dansk kortprosa, 1-2
(Analyses of Danish Short Stories). (P. Aa. Brandt,J. Dines
Johansen, M. Giersing, P. Brask, S. Johansen,
J. Holmgaard, T. Grodal, R. Pittelkow, E. Nielsen, et al.)
Copenhagen: Borgen, 1971-1972.
Karlsson, T., V. Klitgaard, P. S. Lauridsen et al. "Udsigelse
og discurs" (Enunciation and Discourse). Litteratur og sam-
fond, 30 (1979), 7-70.
Krause-J ensen, E., ed. Omkring Althusser-skolens videnskabsteori
(On the Theory of Science of the Althusser School).
(E. Krause-Jensen, J. K. Bukdahl, et al.) Copenhagen:
Rhodos, 1977.
Olivarius, P., O. Rasmussen, and P. Rugholm, eds. Masse-
kommunikation (Mass Communication). (P. Larsen,
F. Mortensen, et al. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1976.
Olsen, P., ed. Analyser af modeme dansk lyrik, 1-2 (Analyses of
Modern Danish Poetry). (P. Aa. Brandt,J. Kr. Andersen,
N. Egebak, O. Petersen, J. Dines Johansen, E. Nielsen,
S. E. Larsen, P. Brask, et al.) Copenhagen: Borgen, 1976.
 DENMARK
Schou, S., ed. 60'ernes danske kritik (Danish Criticism in the
Sixties). (S. Hejlskov Larsen, P. Brask, S. Johansen,
N. Egebak, P. Aa. Brandt, P. Madsen, R. Pittelkow, et al.).
Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1970.
4. Individual Works
These are merely selections according to personal discretion;
omitted, with a few exceptions, are introductions and indi-
vidual analyses of Danish texts. The journals must again be
referred to, in which it is absolutely necessary to orient one-
self in order to acquire a knowledge of Danish semiotics.
Aalb<ek-Nielsen, Kaj. Historie. Struktur og eksistens (History:
Structure and Existence). Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1970.
Andkj<er 0lsen, 0., B. Kj<er, & S. Koppe. Metapsykologi l-
U. (Metapsychology I-lI) Translation and editing of Sig-
mund Freud. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1975-1976.
Boll-Johansen, Hans. "Modelt<enkning" (Thinking in
Models). Meddelelser Jra dansklt2rerflreningen, 11, No. 1 (1973),
319-338. (See Seetion I[b], above.)
- - - . "Sproget, 10gikken og romanens teori" (Language,
Logic, and the Theory of the Novel). In Romanteori og
romananalyse. (see Seetion 3 above, Gerlach-Nielsen), pp. 59-
78.
Brandt, Per Aage (see Sections I[b], I[c], and 3, above).
"Fiktivitet og semiologi" (Fictivity and Semiology). Poetik,
2, No. 2 (1969a), 44-59.
- - - . (with J. Monster Pedersen). "Narratologisk note"
(Narratological note). Poetik, 2, No. 2 (1969a), 24-39.
- - - . "Greimas og videnskabens struktur" (Greimas and
the Structure of Science). Poetik, 2, No. 3 (1969c), 91-93.
- - - . "Tekstens teori" (Theory of the Text). Poetik, 2,
No.4 (1970a), 21-50.
- - - . "Barthes og den semiologiske model" (Barthes and
the Semiological Model). Poetik, 3, No. 1 (1970b), 87-95.
- - - . (with J. Monster Pedersen). "Flaubert i skriften"
(Flaubert in the Writing). Poetik, 3, No. 3 (1970c), 251-
276.
- - - . "Introduktion til den danske overs<ettelse af
J. Derrida De la grammatologie" (Introduction to the Danish
translation of J. Derrida's De la grammatologie). Copen-
hagen: Arena, 1970d, pp. 7-34.
- - - . (with J.l?ines Johansen). "Om tekstanalyse" (On
Text Analysis). In Analyser af dansk kortprosa 1 (see Seetion 3,
Johansen) (1971a), pp. 12-80.
- - - . "Historien, friheden, teksten. Noter om praksis"
(History, Liberty, Text: Notes on Practice). HäfienjOr kri-
tiska studier, 1-2 (Booklet for Critical Studies), Stockholm,
1971b, pp. 75-83.
- - - . ".<Estetik og ideologi" (Aesthetics and Ideology).
Exil, 4, No. 4 (1971c), 37-54.
- - - . "Proposition, narration, texte." In Doc. de travail, B,
4, Urbino, 1971d. (Pamphlet)
- - - . "Pour une chromatique, note sur les prepositions
fran~aises." Lingua e stile, 6, No. 2 (1971e), 355-358.
- - - . "Mode, textualite: Note sur la modalite romane."
Revue Romane, 6, No. 2 (1971f), 145-168.
- - - . Tekstens Teater (The Theater of the Text). Copen-
hagen: Borgen, 1972a.
- - - . "Don Juan, ou la force de la parole." Poetique, 3
(1972b),584-595.
139
- - - . "The White-haired Generator." Poetics, 6 (1972c),
72-83. (See Section I[c].)
- - - . Efterskrift til overs<ettelsen afG. Bataille: L'expirience
interieure (Postscript to the Danish translation of G. Bataille).
Copenhagen: Rhodos, (1972d), pp. 315-333.
- - - . "La revue Tel Quel." Orbis Litterarum, 27 (1972e),
296-310.
- - - . "Om Englenes kon" (On the Sex of the Angels). In
Tegn, tekst, betydning, (1972f), pp. 155-183. (see Section 3).
- - - . "Marx' brugsv<erdi" (Marx's Use Value). Vindrosen
XIX, 1, No. 73 (1973), 17-29.
- - - . "Discours du sujet." Matüres I, No. I (1973a), 21-
36.
- - - . L'Analyse phrastique. Bruxelles: AIMAV and Paris:
Didier, 1973b.
- - - . "The Agony of the Sign." Scandinavica (special issue
on modern Danish Poetry), 12 (1973c), 3-22.
- - - . "Conditions d'un concept du referent." Degris, 4,
(1973d), gl-gI5.
- - - . "Grammaire tex tu elle et p~oblematique du sujet."
In Le Discours social 3-4. Paris: Editions Galilee 1973e
pp. 77-83. ' ,
- - - . "?emioti'lue de la verite." In Le Discours social, 3-4,
Paris: Editions Galilee, 1973f, pp. 154-161.
- - - . "Tegn, tekst, betydning" (Sign, Text, Signification)
Norsk filosojisk tidsskrift (Norwegian Journal of Philosophy,
Oslo), (1973g), pp. 21-42.
- - - . "La pensee du texte." In Essais de la theorie du texte.
Ed. C. Bouazis. Paris: Edition Galilee, (1973h), pp. 83-
215.
- - - . "L'Analyse phrastique." Acta Linguistica Hajniensia,
14 (1973i), 63-98.
- - - . "La chanson de I'exil." Lingua e stile, 8, No. 3 (1973j),
539-544.
- - - . Tegn, st2tning, subjekt (Sign, Sentence, Subject). Gre-
naa: G.M.T., 1974a.
- - - . "Kon, sandhed, subjekt" (Sex, Truth, Subject). Exil,
7, No. 3 (1974b), 63-80.
- - - . "Tekstvidenskab og videnskabstekst" (Text Science
and Science Text). Exil, 8, No. I (1975a), 32-51.
- - - . "Seymour Sliced the Salami with a Knife." Papir,
1, No. 3 (1975b), 64-85.
- - - . "Lingvistik og psykoanalyse" (Linguistics and Psy-
choanalysis). Papir, 1, No. 4 (1975c), 39-56.
- - - . "Fiction et philosophie." Revue Romane, 12, No. 1
(1977), 14-38.
- - - . "Seksualiteten eksisterer ikke" (Sexuality Does Not
Exist). Sprog, subjekt, ideologi, 2, (1978), 116-122. (see Sec-
tion I[b].)
- - - . "On Deriving." Orbis Litterarum (1979), pp. 273-294.
(see Section I [c].)
- - - . Den talende krop (The Speaking Body). Copenhagen:
Rhodos, 1980.
Brask, Peter. "Om logiske konstruktionsforskelle mellem tal-
esprog og skriftsprog" (On the Logical Difference of Con-
struction between Speech and Written Language). Poetik,
2, No. 1 (1969), 19-31.
- - - . "Semantiske beskrivelsesprincipper" (Principles of
Semantic Description). Poetik, 5, No. 1 (1972),78-117.
- - - . Tolvtonemusikkens grundstruktur (The Basic Structure
of Twelve-Tone Music). Festskrift jra Knbenhavns Universitet,
1973.
140 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
- - - . Teksl og Tolkning 1-11 (Text and Interpretation).
Diss. Roskilde University. Roskilde: RUC-Boghandel og
Forlag, 1974.
Bukdahl, Jorgen K. "Videnskab og ideologi" (Science and
Ideology). Kritik, 10 (1969), 90-107.
- - - . "Den strukturelle kausalitet" (Structural Causality).
Exil, 5, No. 3 (1972), 38-54.
- - - . "Frihandsskrivning" (Free-hand Writing). Kritik, 25
(1973), 116-128.
Bogeskov, T. and Svindborg, B. "Derridas grammatologiske
begrebsproduktion" (Derrida and the Grammatologieal
Production of Concepts). In Tegn, lekst, betydning. Eds.
T. Ditlevsen et al., 1972, pp. 65-88. (see Seetion 3.)
Davidsen, Oie. "Religionssemiotik" (Semiotics of Religion).
Diss. Aarhus University, 1977.
- - - . "Penis' poetik" (The Poetics of Penis). Sprog, subjekt,
ideologi, 2 (1978),48-56.
- - - . "My te og historie" (Myth and History). Fallos, 2
(1979),47-85.
Egebak, Niels. Indskrifler (Inscriptions). Copenhagen: Arena,
1967.
- - - . Beckett Palimpsest (The Palimpsest of Samuel Beck-
ett). Copenhagen: Arena 1969.
- - - . "Merleau-Ponty's sprogfilosofi" (The Philosophy of
Language of Merleau-Ponty). Kritik, 6 (1968), 75-101.
- - - . Anti-mimesis (Antimimesis). Copenhagen: Arena,
1970.
- - - . Tom Kristensen. Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1971.
- - - . "Skriftarbejde og fiktion" (The Work of Writing and
Fiction). Exil, 5, No. 3 (1972a), 45-62.
- - - . "Skriftsyndernes forladelse" (The Pardon of the Sins
of Writing). Exil, 5, No. 4 (1972b), 45-62.
- - - . Fra tegnfunktion lil tekstfunktion (From Sign Function
to Text Function). Berlingske Leksikonbibliotek, 67.
Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag, 1972c.
- - - . "Tel Quel og semanalysen" (Tel Quel and the
Semanalysis ). In Aspekter af nyere fransk litteraturkritik. Ed. - - - . "Karakter og handling" (Character and Plot). Poe-
Niels Egebak, 1972d, pp. 143-179. (see Section 3.)
- - - . L'Ecriture de Samuel Beckett. Copenhagen:Akademisk
Forlag, 1973.
- - - . Hejholts metode (The Method of Hojhoit). Copen- . - - - . "Genreteori" (Theory of Literary Genres). Poetik, 3,
hagen: Schonberg, 1974a.
- - - . "En materialisme uden reservationer" (A Materi-
alism without Reserve). Exil, 7, No. 3 (1974b), 81-103.
- - - . Tekst og ekonomi (Text and Economy). Copenhagen:
Arena, 1976a.
- - - . (with S. E. Larsen). Sprog, materialitet, bevidsthed (Lan-
guage, Materiality, Consciousness), Introduction to the
translation of two essays by Derrida. Copenhagen: Vinten,
1976b.
- - - . "Le eoncept de travail en general chez Marx."
Mati"es,4 (1977), 56-108.
- - - . "The Semiological Project." Orbis Litterarum (1979),
pp. 45-56. (see Section I [c].)
- - - . Psykoanalyse og videnskabsteori (Psyehoanalysis and
Theory of Seience). Berlingske Leksikonbibliotek, 142.
Copenhagen: Berlingske Forlag, 1980.
Gemzo, Anker. "Dialogen og den tragiske farce" (The Dia-
logue and the Tragic Farce). Poetik, 4, No. I (1971), 3-
44.
Grodal, Torben. "Tcmatisk tekstanalyse" (Thematic Text
Analysis). Poetik, 4, No. 4, (1971),40-56.
- - - . "Asdiwal-sagnet" (The Myth of Asdiwal). In Tegn,
lekst, betydning. Eds. T. Ditlevsen et al., 1972, pp. 9-33. (see
Section 3.)
- - - . "Claude Levi-Strauss og litteraturanalyse" (Claude
Levi-Strauss and the Analysis of Literature). Meddelelser
fra danskl!2rerforeningen (1974), pp. 22-34.
Hansen, Borge. Folkeeventyr. Struktur og genre (The Folktale:
Structure and Genre). Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1971.
Hartvigson, Gudrun. Introduction to the Danish translation
of A. J. Greimas's Semantique structurale. Copenhagen: Bor-
gen, 1974.
Holm, Oie. "Lov og evangelium i Galaterbrevet" (Lawand
Gospel in the Epistle to the Galateans). Fallos, I (1978)
64-77.
Holmgaard, Jorgen (see Section 3 above), "Introduktion til
numismatikken" (Introduction to Numismatics). Poetik, 3,
No.4 (1970), 363-382.
- - - . Dodens gilding (The Gelding of Death). Copenhagen:
Munksgaard, 1971.
J ansen, Steen. "A. de Musset, dramaturge." Orbis Litterarum,
21, No. 1/2 (1966),222-254. (see Section I[c].)
- - - . A. de Musset, dramaturg (A. de Musset as a Drama-
tist). Studier fra Sprog- og Oldtidsforskning No. 265.
Copenhagen: GAD, 1967a.
- - - . "Sur les röles des personnages dans Andromache. Orbis
Lilterarum, 22, No. 1/4 (1967b), 77-87. (see Seet. I[e].)
- - - . "Esquisse d'une theorie de la forme dramatique."
Languages, 12 (1968a), 71-93.
- - - . "L'unite d'aetion dans 'Andramaehe' et dans 'Loren-
;;accio'." Revue Romane, 3, No.I/2 (1968b), 16-29 and 116-
135.
Jensen, Hans Jorgen Lundager. "Fra formhistorie til gener-
ativ poetik" (From Form History to Generative Poetics).
Fallos, I (1978), 24-63.
Johansen, Jorgen Dines. "Det fortaltes struktur" (The strue-
ture of the Narrative), Poetik, 1-2 (1967), 55-75.
tik, I, No. 4 (1968),17-24.
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 DENMARK
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142 J0RGEN DINES JOHANSEN
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143
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 CHAPTER7

Semiotics in Finland
Eero Tarasti

The foothold gained by semiotics in Finland dur- of folklore studies: Kaarle Krohn' and AnttiJ.
ing re cent years justifies an examination of the Aarne, 2 whose reputation has extended even as
special conditions and nature of this movement far as Brazil (a whole chapter has been reserved
in the scholarly atmosphere of Finland. Semiot- for "escola finlandesa" in the book lnteligencia de
ics, as is weIl known, has come to adapt to var- fllclore 3 by Renato Almeida).
ious local traditions, which has led to the As is weIl known, the methods developed by
emergence of clearly national schools of semiot- AnttiJ. Aarne were the basis of Vladimir Propp's
ics. However, it is hardly possible to speak yet work Morphology rif the Folktale--just as the prin-
of a Finnish school of semiotics, although con- ciples for the classification of folk songs devel-
ditions for the development of such a movement oped by Ilmari Krohn 4 were used by Bela Bart6k
already exist. In surveying the history of semiot- and Zolt~m Kod~tly in their fieldwork in Hun-
ics in Finland, one has to make a distinction gary. One has therefore to consider Aarne's
between two kinds of semiotics: the explicit one, method as being one of those which gave rise to
which overtly assumes a semiotic jargon with the study of narrative structures in general (see
specifically semiotic methods and which can con- for example, Logique du dcit by Claude Bremond,
sequently be recognized as "semiotics" in the or Simantique structurale by A. J. Greimas). Even
current sense of the international use of the term; today Finno-Ugristics, folklore study, and
and the implicit one, on the other hand, which anthropology are some of the most important
only touches or has in some other way inftuenced fields with semiotic interests in Finland.
the development of explicit semiotics, or which At the beginning of the century-and in a
can be interpreted in retrospect as apre-stage certain sense outside the scientific context-one
or as a related phenomenon. J ust as elsewhere has to mention the solitary figure of the author
in the world pioneers of semiotics are sought out
and identified, and forgotten scholars are dis- I Kaarle Krohn, Die Folkloristische Arbeitsmethode (Oslo: Insti-
tuttet for sammenlignende kulterforskning, sero B: 5,1926).
covered who suddenly appear to be semioticians 2 Antti J. Aarne, Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (Helsinki: FF
in advance of their times, in Finland too one Communications [No. 3J, 1910).
may find precursors of semiotics. 3Renato Almeida, Inteligencia do F'olclore, 2nd ed. (Brasilia:
Perhaps best known outside Finland are the Companhia Editora Americana MEC, 1974).
4Ilmari Krohn, Suomen Kansan Sävelmiä I-IV (Helsinki: Fin-
representatives of the so-called Finnish school nish Literary Society, 1893-1933); see also his doctoral dis-
sertation, "Über die Art und Entstehung der geistlichen
Eero Tarasti • Department of Musicology, University of Volksmelodien in Finnland" (Helsinki: Helsingfors Akad.
Helsinki, 00170 Helsinki, Finland. Abh., 1899).

145
146 EERO TARASTI

Henry Parland (1908-1929), who deserves a he reveals the game-theoretical foundations of

place of his own in the his tory of Finnish semiot- Peirce's philosophy, and which may be al ready
ics as the first person to introduce some of the seen as a study in explicit semiotics.
ideas of Russian formalism to Finland. In his
brief essays, published in Swedish, 5 Parland dealt
When does explicit semiotics start in Finland?
with the problem of form in phi1osophy and
First of all a comment must be made concerning
poetry, and also in music. He even .spoke about
one chara~teristic feature of scientific life in Fin-
forms, that is, the semiotics, of feehngs. Never-
land. A school or approach which ftourishes and
theless Parland did not have time enough to
enjoys a wide acceptance elsewhere may be rep-
exert ~ more permanent inftuence in Finland
resented in Finland by only a handful of schol-
because of his premature death at the age of
ars. The small scale does not, of course, preclude
twenty-two while he was studying in Kaunas,
quality, but it is at least partly owing ~o this
Lithuania. Henry Broms has since disentangled
circumstance that explicit semiotics in Fmland
the problem of where Parland had come into
began rather sporadically.
contact with the ideas ofRussian formalism, and
The first essays, mostly reviewing structural-
the connecting link appears to be his uncle, Wil-
ism, appeared as early as the s.ixti.es. We. m.ay
helm Sesemann, who later published in Lithu-
perhaps also include as part of Fmmsh semlOtl~s
anian a study of aesthetics-under the name
the important article "Structural Models m
Vassili Sesemanas-with apreface by Zirmun-
Folklore" by Finnish-born Elli Köngäs-Maranda,
skij hirnself. 6
which was published in Midwest Folklore in 1962. 10
In the field of linguistics one mayaiso find
This essay presents abrief history of structural
abundant evidence of imp1icit semiotics, even
studies in folklore, from the concept of type as
though it' was on1y during the sixties that struc-
it was formulated by AnttiJ. Aarne, Propp's
turalist ideas and transformationa1 models started
functions, and Thompson's motifs; to the
to inftuence 1inguistics (see, for examp1e, Paavo
mythemes of U~vi-Strauss or the motlfe~es. of
Ravila's book Truth and Method 7 in Finnish). Gen-
Dundes. The article focuses on the exammatlOn
erally speaking, the Anglo-American positivist
of the algebraic formula of mythic~l thought
orientation which has been dominant in the
developed by Levi-Strauss, and partlcularly on
scholarly atmosphere in Fin1and since the Second
the analysis of various mediation models.
W orld War has retarded in particular the coming
Thomas A. Sebeok's study of a eheremlS ' sonnet 11
of the ideas of European semiotics to Finland.
is used as a basis for the whole investigation
In phi1osophy this orientation has been evi-
(note that Sebeok too started as aFinno-l!gri~t).
dent ever since Eino Kaila, although the works
Köngäs-Maranda's study forms a connectmg lmk
of Georg Henry von Wright in the field of modal
to the post-Proppian analysis of narrative~, not
logic (Norm and Action,8 for example) .are to .be
only in folklore but in the literary domam as
regarded as implicit semiotics, e~peclally. wlth
well.
respect to their impact on the mter?atlOnal
In the field of literary research good, if brief,
deve10pment of semiotics: consider, for mstance,
studies of structuralism started to appear towards
the inftuence of his theories on the recent devel-
the end of the sixties, such as an article dealing
opments for Greimas's semioti~s. This .holds true
with Barthes and Goldmann by Irma
also of the most important phIlosophlcal works
Rantavaara l2 and the first structuralist studies
of Jaakko Hintikka, with the exception of his
essay published recently in the Monist,9 where
lOElli Köngäs-Maranda and Pierre Maranda, "Str~ctural
'Henry Parland, Säginteannat, Samlad prosa 2, Collected Prose, Models in Folklore," Midwest Folklore, 12 (Bloommgton:
ed, Oscar Parland (Borga: S. & Co., 1970). Indiana University, Fall 1962), 133-92,
6Henry Broms, "Kaikki elämässä on vain muotoa," Helsingin "Thomas A, Sebeok, "Decoding a Text: Levels and Aspects
Sanomat, 8July 1979, p, 17. ., n in a Cheremis Sonnet," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A,
7Paavo Ravila, Totuusja Metodi (Porvoo: Werner Soderstrom, Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 221-35; s~e
1967), , , also, by the same author: "The Texture of a Cheremls
BGeorg Henry von Wright, Norm and Action. A Logzcal Enquzry Incantation," in Memoires de la SocietC Finno-Ougrienne, 125
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963). (1962),523-27. ,
'Jaakko Hintikka, "C. S. Peirce's 'First Real Discovery' and 12Irma Rantavaara, "KirjallisuudentutkImuksen Struktur-
Its Contemporary Relevance;" The Monist, 63 (1980), 304- alistisista Metodeista," in Yearbook rif the Literary Research
15, Society (Forssa: Finnish Literary Society, 1969), pp, 5-20.
 FINLAND
of Aatos Ojala (On the Systematics 01 Basic Lin-
guistic Concepts in Poetry,13 in Finnish). In other
respects too Ojala was probably one of the first
to initiate the teaching of semiotics at univers-
ities in Finland. His publications show a elose
contact with the international development of
semiotics-of his works one should mention the
Introductions to the Linguistic Study 01 Style, 14
Structuralist Literary Studies,15 and Text Theory.16
His most re cent study discusses the pedagogical
thoughts of Goethe from a semiotic point of
view. 17 All these publications are in Finnish only.
In other fields of research there also arose an
interest in structuralism and semiotics towards
the end of the sixties. I~. philosophy, Lauri
Routila published a study Uber Zeichen, Sinn und
Wahrheit,18 which belongs to the field of phenom-
enological semiotics, seldom represented in Fin-
land. Routila has since discussed the sign
character of works of are g and reflected the influ-
ence of the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce.
In the linguistics of that period, mention should
be made, for example, of Esa Itkonen's study of
Hjelmslev's glossematics. 20 The best review ar ti-
ele of the early phases of structuralism in Finnish
linguistics at the end of the sixties and the begin-
ning of the seventies is to be found in the essay
by Raimo Anttila and Esa Itkonen, Finnish Struc-
turalism: Present and Past,21 which was originally
intended for the book Structuralism Around the World;
13 Aatos Ojala, "Sanataiteen lingvististen peruskäsitteiden
systematiikasta," (with German summary) Virittäjä,2
(1968), 125-40.
14 Aatos Ojala, Johdatus Lingvistiseen Tyylin Tutkimukseen, Pub-
lieations of the Departtnent of Literary Studies, Jyväskylä
University (Jyväskylä, 1971).
15 Aatos Ojala, Johdatus Strukturalistiseen Kirjallisuustieteeseen,
Publieations of the Department of Literary Studies,Jyväs-
kylä University (Jyväskylä, 1971).
'"Aatos Ojala, Johdatus Tekstin Teoriaan, Publieations of the
Department of Literary Studies, Jyväskylä University
(Jyväskylä, 1974).
17 Aatos Ojala, "Goethen Pedagoginen Provinssi," Kasvatus
ja sivistys, published by the Assoeiation of Students atJyväs-
kylä University, 1980.
'"Lauri Routila, Über Zeichen, Sinn und Wahrheit, Studia Phi-
losophiea Turkuensia Fase. I, Institutum Philosophieum
Turkuensis, Annales Universitatis Turkuensis series B, 117
(1970).
'''Lauri Routila, Miten Teen Taiteesta Tiedettä (Turku: Soeietas
Philosophiea et Phaenemonologiea Finlandiae, 1979).
2°Esa Itkonen, "Zur Charaeterisierung der Glossematik,"
Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 3 (1968),452-72.
21 Raimo Anttila and Esa I tkonen, Finnish Structuralism: Present
and Past (Helsinki: Department of General Linguisties,
University of Helsinki, 1976).
147
however, because this anthology was canceled,
the essay was published only in the monograph
series of the Department of General Linguistics
of Helsinki.
Nevertheless, it was not until the beginning
of the seventies that the discussion of semiotics
grew more lively in Finland, partly owing to the
spread of Swedish anthologies introducing
semiotics 22-one has to remember that Finland
is abilingual country; besides Finnish, Swedish
is gene rally understood-like Den Frllnvarande
Strukturen. Introduktion tilt den Semiotiska
Forskningen 23 (La struttura assente) by Umberto Eco,
and the anthologies edited by the Gothenburg
epistemologist Kurt Aspelin 24 together with
Bengt A. Lundberg. In this way, so me texts of
Russian formalism and the Prague school were
introduced in Swedish; but as regards French
structuralism (Greimas and Kristeva) the authors
assumed a slightly critical attitude. Likewise it
was a pity that Levi-Strauss was introduced to
Finnish readers through a translation of the book
about Levi-Strauss's life and main ideas written
by Edmund Leach,25 and not through transla-
tions of his original works. Even now not one of
them has been translated into Finnish.
The ideas of French structuralism were trans-
mitted to Finland perhaps first by J ohanna
Enckell,26 who at the end of the sixties and begin-
ning of the seventies worked at the University
of Oulu together with Pertti Karkama, a spe-
cialist in Marxist semiotics in literary studies,27
but later taught in the Department of Literature
and Aesthetics at the U niversity of Helsinki.
In the beginning of the seventies, the so-called
Structuralist Cirele also started its activities in
Helsinki, at first for several years as a totally
unofficial reading group.28 The cirele consisted
mostly of students of philosophy; the central texts
by Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Eco, Barthes, Althus-
ser, Sebag, Greimas, and Lacan were discussed
22Kurt Aspelin and Bengt A. Lundberg, Form och Struktur
(Stoekholm: Bokförlaget Pan/Norstedts, 1971).'
23U mberto Eeo, Den Frdnvarande Strukturen. Introduktion till den
Semiotiska Forskningen (Lund: Bo Cavefors, 1971).
24Kurt Aspelin, Textens Dimensioner (Stoekholm: Pan/Nor-
stedts, 1972).
25Edmund Leaeh, Levi-Strauss (Helsinki: Tammi, 1970).
26Johanna Enekell, "Onko strukturalismi uutta humanis-
mia?" Polljoinen, 1 (1969), 7-9.
27Pertti Karkama, Metodi ja Maailmankatsomus. Kirjallisuud-
entutkimuksen Suuntaviivoja (Oulu: Pohjoinen, 1974).
28Jöns Carlson, "Strukturalistiseen Veljessarjaan!" Hälläp-
yörä, Hämäläisen osakunnan lehti 4 (1974), 7-8.
148 EERO TARASTI

in weekly sessions. The meetings were also vis- A. J. Greimas, who gave lectures on the semiotic
ited by semioticians from abroad, like Vilmos school of Paris and French studies in mytho1ogy.
V oigt (H ungary), Boris Gasparow (Soviet Both lectures were later published in Finnish. 33
Union), and Kristian Suda (Czechoslovakia). Publications have multiplied, particularly
The first real achievement of this circle, which translations of the semiotic classics. A selection
started so modestly, was the editing of the first of the most important essays by Mihai1 Bahtin
Finnish semiotics anthology, which consisted of appeared in 1979,34 edited in Finnish by the pub-
articles by Aatos Ojala, Satu Apo, Eero Tarasti, lisher Edistys (Progress) in Moscow, and in 1980
Osmo Kuusi, Johanna Enckell and Pertti Kar- the Finnish translation of Semantique structurale,35
kama, in addition to the semioticians mentioned by A. J. Greimas, was published by Gaudeamus.
above. The anthology was entitled Strukturalis- The publication of the essays by Bahtin has
mia, Semiotiikkaa, Poetiikkaa and it was published to be seen in connection with the Bahtin renais-
by Gaudeamus in 197429 (the book contains sum- sance in Fin1and in recent years and the lively
maries in Eng1ish). The work received a good discussions of his concept of the polyphonic novel
deal of enthusiastic attention, and two years and camivalized culture. Bahtin's ideas have been
later the Association ofTeachers ofFinnish pub- discussed and elucidated by Erkki Peuranen,36
lished another anthology (the editors were Anna- Pekka Pesonen,37 and Henry Broms. 38 Broms is
Liisa Mäenpää, Kirsti Mäkinen and Eero one of the leading specialists in Soviet semiotics
Tarasti), Strukturalismi: Tutkimus ja Opetus 30 in Finland. He has published several essays on
(Structuralism: Study and Teaching). This book Juri Lotman in different magazines, and applied
focused on problems in linguistics and literary Bahtinian ideas to the analysis of American pop-
studies. ular culture. 39
The increase in semiotic discussion was also Two semiotic-structuralist dissertations came
caused by visits and lectures of semioticians from out towards the end of the s~venties: Myth and
abroad. In 1971 Vilmos Voigt, invited by Pro- Music: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics 01 Myth
fessor Matti Kuusi, gave aseries of lectures on in Music, Especially that rif Wagner, Sibelius and Stra-
structuralism in folklore studies (in Finnish) at vinsky, by Eero Tarasti,40 and the ethno1ogical
the Helsinki University Institute of Folklore, and dissertation, Prl!fossional Winter Seine-Fishing on Lake
later (in 1978) at the Institute of Comparative
Religion. Another influential visit was that of
the Polish semiotician and logician J erzy PeIe, 33 A. J. Greimas, Lecture~ Held in the University if Helsinki (4-
5 May 1979), Suomen' Semiotiikan Seuran J ulkaisuja I
organized by the Department of Swedish Lan- (Helsinki: 1979).
guage and Literature, in 1974. 34Mihail Bahtin, Kirjallisuudentutkimuksenja Estetiikan Ongelmia
In 1978, a colloquium on musical semiotics (Moscow: Progress, 1979). (A selection of essays.)
was started at the Department of Musicology, 35A. J. Greimas, Strukturaalista Semantiikka (Helsinki: Gau-
deamus, 1980).
University of Helsinki, first in a rather infor-
36Erkki Peuranen, "Bahtinin Sosiologinen Poetiikka," Kult-
mal framework, but later as part of the official tuurivihkot, I (1980), 16-28.
university syllabus. 31 Jean-Jacques Nattiez from 37Pekka Pesonen, "Mihail Bahtin, formalisti, anarkisti vai
Canada visited the group in 1978 and gave marksilainen," Tiede & Edistys, 2 (1982), 39-52; see also
two lectures on musical semiotics. 32 A year by the same author "Uusmytologismi: näkökulma mod-
ernismiin. Venäläisen symbolismin 'mytologismin' tarkas-
later, the University of Helsinki was visited by telu," Kirjallisuuden Tutkijain Vuosikirja, 34 (Pieksämäki, 1980)
153-168.
29Satu Apo, Johanna Enck~ll, Osmo Kuusi, Eero Tarasti, 3BHenry Broms, "Mihail Bahtin," Parnasso, I (1978) 26-32;
eds., Strukturalismia, Semiotiikkaa, Poetiikkaa (Helsinki: Gau- "Carnivalized Culture," Kanava, 3 (1979) 141-47; "Bah-
deamus, 1974). tin's Linguistic Philosophy as a Form of Messianism," Turun
30 ~nna-Liisa Mäenpää, Kirsti Mäkinen, Eero Tarasti, eds., Sanomat (12 Feb. 1980).
Aidinkielen-Opettajainliiton Vuosiki7ja XXIII. Strukturalismi: '9Henri Broms, Osmo Kuusi, Olli Niitamo, Hellevi Yrjölä,
Tutkimus ja Opetus (Helsinki: ÄOL, 1976). "A New Database for Myths and Values," forthcoming in
31 "Musiikkisemiotiikan Kollokvio 1978" (A collection of stu- a special issue of Semiotica ("Semiotics in Finland").
dent papers presented in the seminars organized at the 4OEero Tarasti, Myth and Music. A Semiotic Approach to the Aes-
Department of Musicology, U niversity of Helsinki; unpub- thetics if Myth in Music, Especially that if Wagner, Sibelius and
lished material). Stravinsky, Acta Musicologica Fennica, II (1978); reprinted in
32Eero Tarasti, ed., "An Interview ofJean-Jacques Nattiez," Approaches to Semiotics, No. 51, (The Hague: Mouton,
Musiikki,3 (1978), 125-47. 1979).
 FINLAND 149

Puruvesijrom 1900 to the '705,41 by Jukka Pennanen. social sciences in general, but only a few studies
In the former book a theoretical model for the have used explicitly semiotic concepts and meth-
investigation of the interaction of myth and music ods. Lauri Honko (Professor of Cultural Studies
is developed, based on Greimas's concepts of at the University of Turku) and Juha Pentikäi-
seme analysis and isotopy, Bremond's and nen (Professor of Comparative Religion, the
Propp's narrative models, and Levi-Straussian University of Helsinki) published a textbook
ideas. In the second part of the book, the model entitled Gultural Anthropology47 (in Finnish) in
is applied particularly to the aesthetics of roman- 1970, where structural analysis is introduced as
tic music by Liszt, Wagner, and Sibelius, but one of the central approaches in contemporary
also to the neoclassical period of Stravinsky, anthropology. Among Pentikäinen's studies is a
especially the opera oratorio Oedipus Rex. Pen- methodological article, "Depth Research,"48
nanen's study is also based on the transforma- where a communication-theoretical program is
tional models of Levi-Strauss and J akobson and presented for the analysis of the communication
the idea that the general features of a culture of tradition. In the analysis of deep structure he
exist only at a structural deep level and not as distinguishes four levels: texture, style, content,
manifest traits. and structure, and applies this program in his
Several semiotic-structuralist analyses of book Marina Takalon Uskont0 49 (later published
poetry have appeared in recent years. Among as Oral Repertoire and World View,50 where the rep-
them mention should be made of the analyses ertoire of one Karelian woman is analyzed and
by Matti Kuusi (of a Finnish folk poem, "Man- it is shown how she selects, transforms, and com-
alan neiti"),42 and Eero Tarasti (a poem by Eeva- bines old ingredients into new wholes).
Liisa Manner, a well-known contemporary In the field of sociology it was Paavo Löp-
poet) ,43 both inspired by the analysis of Bau- pönen who first introduced structuralist ideas.
delaire's "Les chats" by Levi-Strauss andJakob- Several theses using structuralist and semiotic
son. Pirjo-Maija Toivonen has published an approaches have been submitted at the Univer-
extensive analysis of poems by Aila Meriluoto, sity of Helsinki; especially noteworthy is the study
also a well-known poetess in Finland, applying by Osmo Kuusi 51 dealing with the theory of con-
the methods developed by Greimas, Lotman and sistency and inspired not only by philosophy and
Roland Posner. 44 Also noteworthy is Pentti Lei- social politics but also by the semiotic methods
no's analysis of the metrics of Kaarlo Kramsu,45 of Umberto Eco. In the context of anthropology,
a Finnish poet who lived from 1855 to 1895. mention must be made of Erkki Pekkilä's mas-
Leino's doctoral dissertation dealt with the prin- ter's thesis, The Methods rif Analysis in Ethno-
ciple of alliteration in Finnish folk poetr/6 and musicology52 (in Finnish), which is the first study
consequently can also be classified as a struc- to introduce a music-semiotical approach to the
tural study in a wider semiotic sense. study of folk and popular music in Finland.
A certain interest in semiotics has also The field of anthropology already reftects the
appeared in the field of anthropology and the inftuence of American traditions in Finland, and

41J ukka Pennanen, Proftssional Winter Seine-Fishing on Lake
Puruvesi from 1900 to the '70s (Helsinki: Kansatieteellinen
Arkisto [30], 1979).
42Matti Kuusi, "Manalan neiti," Parnasso, 3 (1972), 129-34.
13Eero Tarasti, "Strukturalistinen Analyysi Eeva-Liisa Man-
nerin Runosta," in Äidinkielenopettajainliiton Vuosikirya, 23
(Helsinki, 1976), 151-58.
HPirjo-Maija Toivonen, "Aila Meriluodon Runouden Eksis-
tentialistinen Rakenne." (Thesis presented to the Depart-
ment of Literary Studies, University of Jyväskylä, 1978).
45Pentti Leino, "Kaarlo Kramsun Metriikka," in Yearbook of
the Literary Research Society (Pieksämäki, 1980), pp. 7-91.
46Pentti Leino, "Strukturaalinen Alkusointu Suomessa"
(Structural Alliteration in Finnish), Diss. University of
Helsinki, Forssa, 1970; see also Hannu Launonen, Hirvi-
poika. Tutkielma Unkarin Kiryallisuudesta (with English sum-
mary) (Pieksämäki: Finnish Literary Society, 1976).
47Lauri Honko and J uha Pentikäinen, Kulttuuriantropologia
(Porvoo: Werner Söderström, 1970).
4"J uha Pentikäinen, "Depth Research," Acta Ethnographica
Academicd! Hungaricae Scientiarum 21 (1-2), 1972, 127-51.
49J uha Pentikäinen, Marina Takalon Uskonto (Helsinki: Fin-
nish Li terary Society, 1972).
5°Juha Pentikäinen, Oral Repertoire and WorLd View. An Anthro-
pological Study 01 Marina Takalo 's Lift History (Helsinki: FF
Communications [219], 1978).
510smo Kuusi, "Yleinen Konsistenssiteoria" (A General
Theory of Consistency) (master's thesis, Department of
Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki, 1974).
52Erkki Pekkilä, "Musiikkianalyyttisistä Menetelmistä ja
Niiden Problematiikasta Etnomusikologiassa" (On the
Methods of Musical Analysis and their Problematics in
Ethnomusicology), (master's thesis, Department of Musi-
cology, University of Helsinki, 1980).
150 EERO TARASTI
this is manifested even more clearly in linguistics53
and philosophy. Esa Itkonen has published sev-
eral books dealing with epistemological prob-
lems in linguistic research, and thus also
implicitly touching semiotical questions. In his
work Grammatical Theory and Metascience 54 he dis-
cusses the philosophical foundations of the con-
cept of language, social control versus variability
of language, and the ontological status of lin-
guistic descriptions. At the moment he is inves-
tigating the concept of the language of thought
(mental language/representation) , which serves
as the common denominator for the functioning
of any sign/communication system. In fact, this
already leads one to Peircean thoughts, dis-
cussed from the linguistic viewpoint especially
by Raimo Anttila in his books An Introduction to
Historical and Comparative Linguistici 5 and Anal-
ogy.56 More particularly, Anttila has examined
the applicability of the Peircean sign categories
icon/index/symbol to the sphere of language, and
also Peirce's principle of abduction. Because,
according to Anttila, any learning must proceed
via abduction, this forms the basis for und er-
standing both language acquisition and lan-
guage change, both of which require such use
of human mental capacities in particular con-
crete cultural and historical environments. He
has studied the principle of abduction more
closely in his essay "Generalization, Abduction,
Evolution, and Language.,,57
The third Finnish linguist who has dealt with
semiotic problems is Nils Erik Enkvist, professor
at Abo Akademi, Turku, who has developed a
structural approach to stylistics. Among his books
"See especiaUy, among others, the works by Kari Sajavaara,
Professor of English Philology, University of Jyväskylä,
who represents the contrastive approach to linguistics in
Finland; for example, see his Psycholinguistic Models, Second
Language Acquisition and Contrastive Ana0'sis. A Preprint
Oyväskylä, 1980).
54Esa Itkonen, Grammatical Theory and Metascience (Amster-
dam: Benjamins, 1978).
55Raimo Anttila, An Introduction to Historical and Comparative
Linguistics (New York: Macmillan/London: Collier-
MacmiUan, 1972).
56Raimo Anttila, Analogy (The Hague: Mouton, 1977).
57Raimo Anttila, "Generalization, Abduction, Evolution, and
Language," in The Transfirmational-Generative Paradigm and
Modern Linguistic Theory, ed. E. F. K. Koerner and J. P.
Maher, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, (Amsterdam:
Benjamins).
the most relevant perhaps are Linguistic Srylistici 8
and Tekstilingvistiikan peruskäsitteitä. 59 I t is espe-
cially the notion of text strategy formulated by
Enkvist that is highly interesting from a semiotic
viewpoint, and not only because it is reminiscent
of the model of parcours giniratif developed by
A. J. Greimas. Enkvist's teaching since the end
of the sixties has also exerted some inftuence in
making the concept of dis course analysis known
in Finland.
In the field of philosophy, semiotics appears
in Finland mostly as the inftuence of Peirce's
philosophy upon a few scholars. In addition to
Lauri Routila, mentioned above, Risto Hilpinen,
also from the U niversity of Turku, has in several
lectures (so far unpublished) discussed Peircean
semiotics, and is at present preparing an exten-
sive monograph on Peirce's philosophy.60 At the
U niversity of Helsinki courses on Peircean prag-
maticism have been given by Ilkka Niiniluoto,
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy.
Semiotic approaches have also proved fruitful
in studies in various fields of art, not only lit-
erature and poetry but also music and cinema.
One may consider the poet Kari Aronpuro as a
sort of avant-garde structuralist, who in the six-
ties published a collection of poems entitled Aper-
itif.!, Avoin Kaupunki (Aperitiff, the Open City)61
and whose production at the end of the seventies
entered areal "semiotic" phase. This is clearly
seen in his collections, Kalpea Aavistus Verenkier-
rosta (A Pale Foreboding ofBlood Circulation) ,62
and Galleria: Henkilökuvia Tampereen Historiasta 63
(Gallery: Portraits from the History of Tampere);
the latter book even introduces a semiotic aspect
of the writing of history, showing that historical
documents are, in fact, signs and semiotic units.
58Nils Erik Enkvist, Linguistic Stylistics (The Hague: Mouton
1972).
59Nils Erik Enkvist, Tekstilingvistiikan Peruskäsitteitä (Helsinki:
Gaudeamus, 1975).
6°Risto Hilpinen, "On C. S. Peirce's Theory of the Propo-
sition: Peirce as aPrecursor of Game-Theoretical Seman-
tics," in The Relevance of Charles Peiree, eds. E. Freeman, J. E.
Smith and J. Hintikka (La SaUe, Ill: Open Court, 1981);
see also Risto Hilpinen, "Charles Peirce," in Dictionnaire des
Philosophes, ed. Denis Huisman (Paris: P.U.F., 1984).
61Kari Aronpuro, Aperitif!, Avoin Kaupunki, 2nd ed. (Helsinki:
Kirjayhtymä, 1978).
62Kari Aronpuro, Kalpea Aavistus Verenkierrosta (Tornio: Tor-
nion Kirjapaino, 1977).
6'Kari Aronpuro, GaUeria. Henkilökuvia Tampereen Historiasta
(Helsinki: Kirjayhtymä, 1979).
 FINLAND
In his prose poem about the life and system of
Sigfrid Aronus F orsius, a Finnish philosoph er
from the beginning of seventeenth century,64
Aronpuro also uses semiotic concepts as a method
of producing poetry. Moreover, his poems reveal
interesting analogies with the system of objects
devdoped in France by Jean Baudrillard.
Semiotic methods have also been und er exper-
imentation in the field of dramaturgy. At the
Institute of Dramaturgy, University of Tampere,
Kari Salosaari has applied Greimasian semiot-
ics, for example, to the staging of comedies by
Carlo Goldoni. 65 In musical semiotics several
essays have appeared by Eero Tarasti in the
magazine Musiikki and an anthology of musical
semiotics published by the Institute of Musi-
cology, University of Jyväskylä. 66 The publish-
ing company Gaudeamus has published most of
the semiotic studies in Finnish since Struktural-
ismia, Semiotiikkaa, Poetiikkaa, in 1974. It has also
published, in Finnish, Meaning in Cinema by Peter
Wollen, translated by Tarmo Malmberg, one of
the few specialists in film semiotics in Finland. 67
In the visual field, that is, the semiotical anal-
ysis of painting, film, television, and advertising,
Dan Steinbock,68 Altti Kuusamo, and Erkki
Huhtamo have also obtained interesting results.
Thc journal Synteesi Oournal for the Research in
the Interrelations of the Arts), founded in 1982
and published by the Finnish Society for Studies
in Arts Education, is continuously publishing
"'Kari Aronpuro, "Vähäfysiikka" (A prose-poem about the
system of Sigfrid Aronus Forsius in his book Physica) (Hel-
sinki: Kirjayhtymä, 1982).
"'Kari Salosaari, "Semioottinen rakentaminen teatteri-
työssä," Tampereen Teatterin Aikamerkkejä 1904-1979 (Tampere:
Tampereen Teatteri, 1979).
G" Eero Taras ti, "M usiikisemiologia-M usiikin tu tkimuksen
Uusi Alue," Musiikki, I (1973), 10-26; "Semiotiikka ja
Musiikinestetiikka," Musiikki, 4 (1978), 187-210; Musiikin
soivat muodot, ed. Eero Tarasti, publication series A, the
Institute of Musicology, University of Jyväskylä, 1982. See
also by Eero Tarasti, "De I'interpretation musicale," Actes
semiotiques, Documents du Groupe de Recherches Semio-
linguistiques, 5, No. 42, 1983; "Sur les structures eJemen-
taires du discours musical," Semiotique Musicale, Bulletin du
Groupe de Recherches Semio-linguistiques, 6, No. 28 (Dec.
1983), 6-13; "Pour une narratologie de Chopin," Interna-
tional Review Jor Aesthetics and Soäology of Music, 15, No. I
(1984),53-75.
67Peter Wollen, Merkityksen Ongelma, trans. Tarmo Malmberg
(Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 1977).
68Dan Steinbock, Televisioja psyyke. Televisio, illusionismija anti-
illusionismi (Espoo: Weilin & Göös, 1983).
151
semiotic texts dealing with semiotics in arts and
aesthetics. A special issue devoted entirely to
semiotics in Finland appeared in 1982, consist-
ing of 21 essays by Finnish semioticians. 69 Among
them one should cspecially mention those writ-
ten by Oscar Parland about his unde Vassili
Sesemann, who taught philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Vilnius (until 1963) and who may be
considered a sort of presemiotician in Lithuania,
during which time A. J. Greimas entered the same
university as a student of law. 70
Semiotics in Finland gained a more official
footing with the foundation of the Semiotic Soci-
ety of Finland as late as 1979. Thc primary aim
of the society is, according to its rules, "to serve
as a link between Finnish semioticians, to pro-
mote semiotic research in Finland and maintain
international contacts." It is especially this last
aim that has been emphasized in the functions
of the society, which is not, however, oriented
towards any special school of semiotics but fol-
lows the whole range of international develop-
ment in the field. Of semiotic institutions abroad
the Society has had most contacts with the
Groupe de recherches semio-linguistique, in
Paris, and the Research Center for Language
and Semiotic Studies, at Indiana University,
Bloomington. Since the foundation of the Society
the President has been Eero Tarasti, the Vice-
president Henry Broms, and the Members of the
Board Pertti Ahonen, Osmo Kuusi, Hannu Rii-
konen and Erkki Pekkilä.
The Semiotic Society of Finland organized its
first symposium in August 1980 in Helsinki, with
the theme "The Semiotics of Finnish Culture."
Although there had been discussion about
semiotics earlier, at various congrcsses (as in the
congresses arranged by the Academy of Finland
atJyväskylä University, for example, on the phi-
losophy of art in 1973 and on the concept of
image in 1978), this was the first time that Fin-
nish semiQticians had gathered for a discussion
69Eero Tarasti (ed.), "Suomalaista semiotiikkaa," Synteesi 2-
4, 1982, published by the Finnish Society for Studies in
Arts Education and the Institute of Arts Education at the
University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
700scar Parland, "Tieto ja tietäminen V. Sesemannin filo-
sofiassa" Synteesi, 1-2 (1984),6-20; "Psykiatria ja sen tie-
teidenvälinen asema V. Sesemannin filosofian valossa"
Synteesi, 3 (1984) (a special issue for Psychoanalysis and
Arts) , 2-34.
152 EERO TARASTI
couched in explicitly semiotic terms. Conse-
quently this symposium not only dealt with the
semiotics of Finnish culture, but also allowed
Finnish semioticians to present various theoret-
ical views, and accordingly served as a survey
of the present state of semiotics in Finland.
The theses on the semiotics of Finnish culture,
published before the Congress, raised lively dis-
cussions among semioticians representing dif-
ferent fields. 71 Thus the symposium had a clearly
interdisciplinary character. In the theses, Fin-
nish culture was examined from the mythical
and historical, that is, ethnosemiotic and socio-
semiotic viewpoints; and manifestations of the
national identity in various arts, Finnish spec·
"Henry Broms and Eero Tarasti, "Teesejä Suomalaisen
Kulttuurin Semiotiikasta," Kanava, 5 (1980),368-70.
tacles, and other signs of being Finnish were also
discussed in detail. During the congress Finnish
literary texts, films, historical novels, and such
were analyzed according to different semiotic
frameworks. Adecision was made by the organ-
izing committee to arrange such symposia reg-
ularly in the future and with a variety of themes.
Semiotics in Finland cannot be characterized
as a very unified phenomenon, nor does it form
in any sense a dominant scientific school. The
teaching of semiotics in universities has been so
far rather sporadic, depending on individual
teachers interested in the subject. Only the Uni-
versity ofJyväskylä has included the foundations
of semiotics as a regular course in its curriculum.
The results of this teaching will thus only become
evident in several years' time.
 CHAPTER8
Semiotics in France
Anne Henault
I. Early History of French
Semiotics
French semiotics came into being in the 1960s,
following a new reading of the works of Louis
Hjelmslev and helped notably by the publication
in BSL (1946)1 of a deepened presentation of
Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory 01 Language by
A. Martinet which was quickly followed by an
English translation of the book. Thus the origin
of French semiotics is to be found in the
researches of French structuralism, which for its
part can be understood as the development of
all that had been achieved in the linguistics
schools of Prague and Copenhagen, reaching into
new fields such as comparative mythology
The first part of this chapter, "Early History of French
Semiotics" follows closely, sometimes word for word, the
historical account given by Jean-Claude Coquet in his
"Introduction a L'Ecole de Paris" (Paris, Hachette 1982). I
wish to thank hirn for having made this work available to
me prior to publication and for having contributed so gen-
erously to the drafting of this chapter.
The translation of this chapter was revised by E. D' Arcy
(M. A., Oxon).
1A. Martinet, "Au sujet des fondements de la theorie lin-
guistique de L. Hjelmslev," Bulletin de La Sociiti Linguistique
deParis, 42 (1946), 19-42.
Anne Henault • Universite de Paris X - Nanterre,2 rue
de Rouen, 92001 Nanterre, France.
153
(G. Dumezil), an thropology (Cla ude Levi-
Strauss), psychoanalysis Oacques Lacan) and
literature (Roland Barthes).
This stage of maturation in the shadow of
structuralism, which was concerned with all the
branches of knowledge called human sciences,
enabled semiotics to develop from a combination
of linguistics postulates into a reflection upon all
human practices which are said to "signify."
Therefore it will be possible to find two sources
of inspiration for early semiotics, the first coming
from the linguists and logicians of the beginning
of this century, who, from Saussure through the
Prague school to Hjelmslev, furnished the first
lines of research and the first operating concepts.
The second connection, to which we shall refer
later, is to be sought among anthropologists and
mythologists, such as Propp, Dumezil, and Levi-
Strauss.
A. Early Semiotics and Saussurian
Linguistics
In 1960, researchers such as the linguists J. Cl.
Chevalier, J. Dubois, H. Mitterand, and A. J.
Greimas got together and created SELF (Society
for the Study of the French Language). Char-
acteristic of his group was its determination to
undertake the analysis of natural language by
methods at that time unusual. For so me (such
154 ANNE RENAULT

as J. Dubois)2 this meant defining "the formal PRocEs SYSTEME

system of the language," making use of the les- Communication of warnen Structures of parenthood
sons of the American linguist, Zelig Harris, a Communication of goods and services Economic structures
folIower of Leonard Bloomfield. For other mem- Communication of messages Linguistic structures
bers of SELF, following Saussure, linguistic facts
had to be related to general principles, without Figure 1
which they could not be interpreted. Linguistics
could be nothing but apart of a vast theory of
OpposItIOns between langue and parole, signifiant
language.
and signifie. The part played by Saussurean ideas
What, then, becomes of the notion of linguistic
in the constitution of early semiotics can be clearly
fact, if confronted with the fundamental teaching
judged thanks to an important article published
of Saussure, according to which "Ianguage is a
by A.J. Greimas in 1956, "L'Actualite du
form and not a substance?" There are no natural
Saussurisme. ,,4
facts, that is to say, no given facts. In linguistics,
Three major orientations emerged from this
as in other sciences, a fact is defined as a con-
epistemological restatement: (I) Language is a
struct. Therefore, the most rigorous proceeding
formal system, and because it is a form, can be
should be to explain this construct.
This is what flows directly from certain state- the object of scientific analysis. (2) Language is
a semantic system, "a construct of forms laden
ments in the Gours de linguistique generale 3 (Course
with meaning." (3) Language is a so ci al insti-
in General Linguistics), as for instance:
tution which "only exists by virtue of some kind
(I) "Language exhibits the strange and strik-
of contract among the members of the
ing characteristic of not presenting immediately
community."
perceptible entities." (2) "One must look for
These basic principles, generally accepted by
concrete unity (Iinguistic unity) elsewhere than
the whole scientific community, had the advan-
in the word." (3) "One must not isolate terms
tage of being sufficiently wide in scope to allow
from the system of which they are apart, for
the insertion of the theory of language into the
this would be to imagine that one can begin with
wider context of significant social practices. In
the terms and build up the system by bringing
parallel with these linguistic researches, there
them all together, whereas, on the contrary, it
developed a work bearing on other social prac-
is from the whole that one must start, in order
tices, in which these too were looked upon as
to obtain, by analysis, the elements contained in
it. " carrying meaning (point 2),and as ordered sys-
tems of communication (point 3).
Therefore the fundamental question, main-
Thus, the thesis of Levi-Strauss on the Struc-
tained by semiotics from the beginning, is that
tu res elementaires de la paTente" (Elementary Kin-
which is first expressed in the Memoire sur le rys-
ship Structures) had applied the opposition langue
teme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes
vs parole to social facts, in the form systeme vs
(Saussure, 1978) and to which Saussure refers
proces. The sociologist was thus led to oppose the
constantly: "How should a theory of language
proces of the exchanging of women to the struc-
be built up?"
tures of kinship rysteme, the proces of exchanging
goods and services to the economic-structures
All the formal models, fastened to this or that rysteme, according to the schema in Figure I.
particular plane of language (phonology, syntax The organization of the social system appeared
or semantics), come to be seen as partial and thus to be divisible into significant structured
fragile in the face of this basic question, which areas which it became possible to describe as so
has to be resolved. While insisting on this pri- many "Ianguages" (systems of mythology, reli-
mary question throughout his work, Saussure gion, literature 6 , etc.).
presented the first operative concepts essential
for the launching of semiotics, especially the
4A.J. Greimas, "L'Actualite du Saussurisme," Le Franqais-
moderne, No. 3 (1956), pp. 191-203 ..
'J. Dubois, Grammaire structurale dufranqais (Paris: Larousse 5Claude Levi-Strauss, Structures tUmentaires de la parente (Paris,
1965), I: Le Nom et le pronom. Presses U niversitaires de France, 1949).
3F. de Saussure, Cours de linguislique generale, nouvelle ed. 6R. Barthes, Le Degre zero de I'ecriture (Paris, Seuil, 1953),
(Paris: Payot, 1967). p.24.
 FRANCE
. In the same way, reflection upon Saussurian
Ideas was for Greimas an encouragement to widen
t~e fi~ld. of semantic research, to leave the strictly
hngUJstlc domain and attempt to consider all
language theory as related to that general
"semiology" which Saussure so urgently desired.
A communication presented to SELF in 1966 7
allowed Greimas to propose another fundamen-
tal concept for further research. Greimas asserted
that the time had come to construct a trans-
phr~stic semiotic, a task that was a current prob-
lem In France, although for the moment it aroused
little interest in the United States. He stated then
that "human discourse often appeared to possess
an algorithmic structure, the sequences of dis-
course following a certain finality."
By adopting this point of view, semiotics was
able to break away from the phrastic and inter-
phrastic dimensions which remained those of the
analysis of discourse, similar to Zelig Harris, for
whom the research into surface regularities aimed
at describing in the discourse the "specific whole"
consisting in a "sequence of linguistic forms
arranged in successive phrases." Harris's asser-
tion of the existence of the entity "discourse"
was not sufficient in practice to decentralize the
researches from the phrastic dimension, which
was that of the transformational grammars. 8
The daring notion of algorithmic structure thus
freed semiotics from the syntax of surface struc-
tures (phrastic and interphrastic dimension).
Now it might attain to those logico-semantic
structures which, once postulated, ought to be
found underlying the phrastic realizations
according to schemata which would not neces~
sarily have much connection with those of a
grammar elaborated out of the study of phrases.
At th~ same time, it was found possible to adopt
a radlcally semantic point of view, contrary to
the formal approach still prevalent-as it had
been for a long time-in American research.
Correlatively, it was accepted that there are
distinct levels, articulated according to different
systems, which uphold the dis course beneath the
plane of expression (which interests the lingu-
ist). This plunge into the depths below the con-
cret~ ':li.nguistic data" implied that the proto-
semlOtlclan was committing hirnself to a kind of
7A. ]. Greimas, "Differents niveaux d'analyse semantique,"
compte-rendu de la seance du 19 Novembre, 1966 (SELF).
"]. C. Milner, "Quelques reflexions apropos de la nation de
'Iexis' et de la nature contradictoire du langage," in his
Arguments linguistiques (Paris: Mame, 1973), p. 219ff.
155
research radically different from that of the lin-
guist. Turning away from the linguistic datum
he dedicated hirns elf to a constructive semiotic:
B. Early Semiotics and Anthropology
. The second source of inspiration which pro-
vlded support for semiotic reflection is to be seen
among the mythologists, ethnologists, and folk-
lorists. A mythologist such as Dumezil starts from
a medley of heterogeneous observations in order
to define an enigma concerning a mythological
character. Then, on the basis of comparative
work, "he manages to correlate the character's
form and behavior with certain specific traits of
the social organization of the people under
study."g With the help of an exemplary and
experimental methodülogy, the mythologist gives
us the first clues toward solving problems of the
functional organization of a specific world of
thought. The comparative approach of Indo-
European mythology nourishes a line of meta-
linguistic reflection bearing on the process of
r:constituting a god's sphere of activity (func-
tlOnal model) and the aggregate of his qualities
(qualificational model), in which it is possible
to read the axiology of a particular social group.
The references to Dumezil 1u are sufficiently fre-
quent in the works of the French school of
semiotics to allow us to take into account for
example, the part played by his methodical s'tud-
ies of mythological characters and the trifunc-
tional scheme derived from these studies. In 1963
Greimas justified the interest given to studies oi-
myth in an article dedicated to Dumezil. 11 Here
?rei~as postulates apriori "the methodological
IdentIty of any description of semantic substance
. ... What especially argues in favor of the iden-
tity of methods is the similar starting point of
the research, and notably, the obvious care taken
in this particular sort of description of content
which is mythology, to elaborate its own ter~
minology and system of coherent references."
Among,the folkorists, it was the Morphology of
the Russian Folk Tale of V. Pro pp (1928), trans-
lated in the United States, (1958),12 which caught
9Claude Levi-Strauss, Anthropologie s/ructurale (Paris: Plan,
1958), p. 349.
iOSee for instance, A. ]. Greimas and]. Courtes, Simiotique,
dictionnaire raisonni de la theorie du langage (Paris: Hachette,
1979), p. 91, 288, 415, ete.
"A.]. Greimas, "La Mythologie Comparee," in his Du Sens
,,(Paris: Seuil, 1970), p. 132.
InternatlOnal Journal of American Linguistirs, 1958.
156 ANNE HENAULT
the attention of Levi-Strauss. In his article "La
Structure et la forme" (Structure and Form),13
Levi-Strauss emphasizes the methodological
interest of the theses of this learned Russian.
Propp had urged the researcher to pay attention
to structural factars, and to assert carrelatively
the constancy of the form and the variability of
the content ("the characters and their attributes
change, but not the actions and the functions").
Furthermore, the reader had been urged to make
use of the notion of substitution and transfor-
mation ("Propp discovered, and this is his great
merit, that the content of these folk-tales is per-
mutable"). Finally, these theses had the advan-
tage of showing, in a way that one could call
"concrete," that the description of a corpus of
folk-tales required the postulation of a logical
plane, deep and predictable, parallel to the
unpredictable surface plane. Hence the appre-
ciation of Levi-Strauss: "the publication of Mor-
phology 01 the Folk Tale has rendered an immense
service to the human sciences."
Cl. Levi-Strauss draws from Propp's model
certain highly original counter-propositions. The
criticism directed at Propp by Levi-Strauss is
that his farmalism, too centered on the syntag-
matic dimension, on the concatenation of func-
tions, lent itself too readily to mechanical
applications, and ran the risk the restricting the
analysis to the level of surface structures. But
research carried on in comparative mythology
imposed the restoration of latent, far more
abstract structures, and, as a corollary, the con-
struction of paradigmatic, logical models.
In an article of 1955, entitled "The Structural
Study of Myth,,,14 an analysis of the Theban
myth of Oedipus, Levi-Strauss offers the first
model of a structural interpretation of myth,
bringing to light a double semantic structure;
one, syntagmatic and similar to the work of
Propp, shows the play of motifs in the life of
Oedipus, such as the marriage with his mother,
the murder of his father, and the riddle of the
Sphinx. The other one, paradigmatic (and orig-
inal), aligns the recurring facts in the whole The-
ban myth according to a logical schema,
13Claude Levi-Strauss, "La Structure et la forme," Cahiers de
L'!nstitut de Seienee Eeonomique Appliquee, No. 99 (1960). Now
included in his Anthropologie structurale II (Paris: Pion,
1973).
I'Claude Levi-Strauss, "La Structure des mythes," in his
Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Pion, 1958), p. 227.
correlating two binary categories of contrary or
contradictory semes, (a) parenthood and non-
parenthood, (b) autochthony and non-
autochthony.15 In other wards, the over-valuation
of blood parenthood is to the under-valuation of
it, as the effort to escape from autochthony is to
the impossibility of succeeding. Thus a binary
complex of a-chronic relations provides the
paradigmatic structure of signification. From this
instance, one might "generate," taking careful
note of the necessary levels, all the myths of
Oedipus, including the Freudian version ("These
categaries are located at such a depth that they
are capable of generating every Oedipus
myth") .16 This work is fundamental for the
development of the narratological component of
semiotics, and far the thesis proposed by that
model of the generation of signification, the
"generative pathway."
How far should we extend this panorama of
the sources of semiotics? Beyond the known and
proclaimed inftuences, there remains far every
researcher those which are held back knowingly
and those which remain unconscious. This defines
the limits of the exercise. Seemingly it would be
useful to try to sharpen it further, and we now
come to a synchronie exposition of semiotic the-
ory while pausing all the same at one last dia-
chronie question. This concerns the evolution of
terminology, which led a researcher such as A. J.
Greimas successively to rename his area of study,
from lexicology to semanties, from semantics to
semiotics.
C. Lexicology, Semanties, Semiotics
In 1956, Greimas saw lexico1ogy as the dis-
cipline which wou1d perhaps be capab1e of fur-
nishing the theoretical and methodological
instrument required by the human sciences. In
1966, he substituted semantics far lexicology and,
from 1970 onwards, semiotics for semanties. The
three discip1ines deal with signification, but
their range of va1idity and their theoretica1 import
are in each case different. One engulfs the other,
semiotics being the most encompassing of the
three. The aim of 1exicology was essentially to
classify, and it 1imited itse1f to the study of the
ward (which in the Saussurian tradition did not
15Ibid, p. 239.
16 A. J. Greimas, in Herman Parret, Discussing Language (The
Hague: Mouton, 1974), p. 76.
 FRANCE
constitute a linguistic unity). In constructing
semanties, the researcher was taking a step
toward the analysis of logical systems. He had
recourse to the binary phonological model of
Roman Jakobson. The postulate could be for-
mulated thus: it is at the level of immanence
which underlies the level of linguistic manifes-
tation that the complex or elementary units con-
stituting language are ordered. The homological
relations hip made it possible for Greimas to rep-
resent this organization by saying that the pho-
nemes (complex units of expression) are to the
phemes (elementary units of expression) what
the sememes (complex units of content) are to
the semes (elementary units of content) .17 In this
way, semanticists sought to get their field rec-
ognized as an autonomous and necessary lin-
guistic discipline (necessary because the fact of
language obviously presupposed the conjunction
of the two latent planes of expression and con-
tent). Things did not go easily. The Dictionnaire
(p.326) speaks· of a "revolution of the
intelligences."
Such a semantic effortlessly enveloped lexi-
cology, the specific object of which now became
the study of lexemes, understood as configura-
tions of sememes. And yet the status of seman-
tics was still undefined: one attributed to
semantics an aptitude for description which it
did not have and which could never belong to
it. "The great illusion of the 60s was the belief,
on the one hand, that the organization of the
meanings of a natural language could give rise
to a scientific description ... on the other hand,
that such adescription could, somewhat in the
li ne of phonology, account for the totality of the
significations carried by the language." 18 Or in
other words: "One had soon to give way to the
evidence that the semantic universe covered by
a natural language is coextensive with the cul-
ture of the community, and that if semantics is,
strictly speaking, capable of giving a fairly sat-
isfactory representation of the modes of exist-
ence, of articulation, and of production of
the form of the signified, it cannot in any sense
supply an exhaustive description of those
l7In Greimas's terminology phonemes are made up of bundles
of phemes (distinctive features) and phemes in binary oppo-
sition are what relate phonemes to one another. Phemes
thus constitute the semiotic elements in the formal con-
struction o[ phonology in which they are, however, not
manifest, but immanent.-Ed.
1Blbid, p. 327, par. 6.
157
forms which are organized in systems and
cons tella tions." I 'l
Therefore the analyst had to elaborate a
stronger theory in which a place would be
assigned to semantics, but in a role better suited
to its means. The research er was then led to seek
the passage from semantics to semiotics, the sci-
entific task of which was to take account of the
different languages, verbal or non-verbal, made
use of by the different semantic micro-universes
to be chosen henceforth as objects of study. This
meant requiring from all other semiotic systems
a rational division of the semiotic universe into
"subsets" (sous-ensembles), easier to describe
because of the deli mi ted boundaries of their
respective areas (cl6ture).
Is it reasonable at the present time to try to
draw up an outline of semiotic theory? The Dic-
tionnaire answers in the negative 20 : a semiotic the-
ory worthy of the name does not yet exist, and
one can hardly hope to see this realized for a
long time yet. But this does not mean that the
researches carried out in France over the last
twenty years do not deserve a systematic outline.
11. Semiotic Theory: A General
Outline
A. Basic N otions
The scientific description of the phenomena
of signification began much later than the dis-
ciplines which dealt with the material appear-
an ce of language: phonology, grammar, and
linguistics. This was the case mainly because
of the non material character of significations,
which appears to dis courage us from appre-
hending them in any other way than by recourse
to intuition.
If the everyday experience of signification is
an inward, intuitive one, seemingly not amen-
able to research, it is also true that work such
as that of the Prague schooe l had inspired great
ho pe among researchers in the human sciences;
for it offered a first ex am pIe of what adescription
19 A. J. Greimas, interview in Pratiques, 11/ J 2 (1976), 5.
"'Greimas, Dictionnaire, p. 345.
"See Claude Levi-Strauss, "L' Analyse structurale en lin-
guistique et en anthropologie," Anthropologie structurale, p. 37fI
158 ANNE HENAULT
of the systems of relations which govern a sig-
nifying set in a regular though not conscious way
might be like.
An additional difficulty which arises whenever
it is necessary to describe the intellectual side,
the "signified," the "content" of a signifying set,
is due to the so-called substantial and continuous
aspect of the domain of signification. The deci-
sive move-which made it possible to launch a
scientific attempt to describe meaning-was to
allow the "effects of meaning" (ifftts de sens) to
be treated as formal and discontinuous construc-
tions, even if current mental habits had always
looked upon them as substantial and continuous.
Thought is as formal as speech. Meaning is itself
a form, a language, a semiotic articulated with
that other form which is natural language,
according to modalities which semiotics must
also describe.
1. The Formal Nature of the
Signified
The knowledge of this formal nature of me an-
ing in general passed through the experience of
the formal nature of linguistic signification, which
could itself be obtained by reflections on the
variability of ways of semantically dividing up
the natural world. 22 We could mention the weIl
known observations of Hjelmslev about the
diverse ways of articulating different semantic
areas, such as the spectrum of colors, in French
and in Gaelic. 23 Repeated observations of such
variability led researchers to regard the content,
or meaning, of a natural language as a form as
weIl as a substance. With reference to this sub-
stantial aspect, one can up to a certain point
agree to call "content substance" meaning, inas-
much as it seems to isolate, by an immediate and
spontaneous apprehension, vast amorphous zones
of sense. If we agree to stop the regressus ad infin-
itum which analytic reflection entails, the notion
of substance of the content appears at the precise
point where the denomination does stop--exactly
as a physical object becomes substantial at the
very point where our senses stop the discrimi-
nation of its component parts. (Compare a drop
of water as seen by the naked eye and under a
microscope. )
"See in the present article, sect. II F., The Notion of a
Semiotic of the Natural World.
"'Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomenes aune theorie du langage (Paris:
Minuit, 1971), p. 7L
Thus, if we agree to apply the term "content
substance" to thought as al ready differentiated,
although not discursively expressible, from the
very moment it is expressed it is articulated
according to logico-semantic forms which
semiotics attempts to bring to light.
Having postulated that the relation between
form and substance of content is comparable to
the relation linking form and substance of
expression as described by phonology, it became
possible for theorists to draw up an initial formal
methodology of description, derived from the
phonological model. With regard to the stage
reached by these investigations, it has now been
made clear that besides the very general artic-
ulations which are common to both aspects of
language, each of them carnes specific
articulations.
2. The Relational Nature of the Form
of the Signified
The application of the phonological model to
the description of meaning leads to a preliminary
statement bearing on the fact that the organi-
zation of meaning is entirely relational. Just as
phemes are abstract units, deductively derived
from their reciprocal differences, so the elements
of signification are defined in a formal way by their
reciprocal oppositions. As Greimas put it,
Structure, if it can be defined as a network of relations
latent in manifestation, becomes the only basis upon which
one can posit reflection about the conditions under which
signification emerges-while being at the same time the main
factor which makes possible a group of semiotic objects.
Structure is no longer an epistemological concept accounting
for the possibility of knowing the significant world, but an
operation al concept requiring that for every semiotic unit an
underlying relational network be postulated. 24
This affirmation of the relation al nature of
the elements of signification prohibits any leaning
towards a covert return to an intuitive substan-
ti al description according to which, if there were
nothing but relations, there would be no object
cif signification. This or that notion (let us say
"knowledge" or "wisdom") has no meaning by
itself for semioticians, who can only describe it
by realizing the network of relations pertinent
to this notion in a particular universe of dis-
course. This "protects semiotics from any return
24 A. J. Greimas, interview in Structures itementaires de la sig-
nification. ed. Frederic Nef (Brussels: Complexe, 1976).
 FRANCE 159
to atomism"25-or, as Hjelmslev has it: "The outside the regularities of immanent semiotic
examined object (of signification), as weIl as its structures constructed rationally that underlie
components, only exists by virtue of these con- the plane of manifestation. The diverse systems
nections or dependents. The totality of the exam- of signs which are the objects of semiology enter
ined object is only the consequent sum, and each into semiotics only so far as it is possible to see
of its parts can only be defined by the connec- in them different languages differentiated by cer-
tions which exist: (I) Between itself and other tain structural peculiarities in their particular
coordinated parts; (2) Between the totality and plane of expression.
the parts of the following degree; (3) Between In the last analysis, the aim of semiotics is to
the whole extent of the connections and depend- constitute a descriptive catalogue of those var-
ents and these parts. ious abstract relations which give form to any
"The objects of naive realism are thereby meaningful phenomena-if possible und er the
reduced to the points where bundles of these guise of a simple and exhaustive model.
connections intersect (... ). These connections This theorization of the relation al system is
or dependents, which naive realism holds as sec- inseparable from the idea that these relations fit
ondary and as pr~supposing the objects, for us together according to the differential levels of
become essential. These are the necessary con- abstraction. In order to characterize the exist-
ditions for the existence of points of ence of different levels in discourse, Levi-Strauss
intersection. ,,26 and A. J. Greimas both employ the same met-
This structural and formal point ofview, when aphor, that of a structure in "puff pastry,,27:
applied to the study of significations, explains "Semiotic theory is led to conceive discourse as
why there cannot be any plain fact for the semi- 'puffpastry,' constituted out of a certain number
otician. Every fact which is capable of analysis of superimposed levels of depth of which only
is first and foremost a constructed fact. This is the last, the most superficial, can take a semantic
all the more important when semiotics begins to representation comparable grosso modo to deep
turns its attention to non-verballanguages, espe- linguistic structures (in Chomsky's perspec-
cially the visual ones. Nothing is to be taken for tive)." We shall now attempt to enumerate briefty
granted, that is to say, control of all evidence is the different characteristics which allow for such
a methodological priority of semiotics: The ana- regroupings as "discursive level," "narrative
lyzed effect of meaning will have been first judged level," or "logical and deep level."
analyzable, and isolated according to explicit
procedures, in keeping with the principle of
abstraction. This principle consists in defining B. The Structuring of Signification
very exactly the point of view from which one is on an Elementary Level
examining this or that fact in order to bring it
1. The Binary Category
into line with other facts evidencing the same
abstract component. In this way, the results of Wehave seen that the postulate of Roman
a semiotic study-whether a description of a ver- Jakobson, derived from phonology, allows an
bal text, of a painting, or of a piece of music- equivalent of the phemes belonging to the plane
consists always in a kind of highly abstract focus- of expression to be found in the semes of the
ing of the elements observable in the "text" plane of content. The semes are quite exactly
(broadly understood). the opposite poles of relations of binary oppo-
sition, like the distinctive oppositions of phon-
ology, which are situated at the intersection of
3. The Notion of Semiotic Levels two types of relations: relations of similitude-
This also explains why French semiotics is not or conjunctions-and relations of dis simili-
a theory of the sign. I t is not a case of building tude-or disjunctions. The elementary struc-
a doctrine of signs; on the contrary, one must tures which inform these relations will be called
free oneself from the sign which, as an element "semantic categories." Thus the category of
of the plane of manifestation, lies by definition /aesthetic quality/(this common denomination

25Ibid., p. 19. 27 Dictionnaire, p. 103. Levi-Strauss, Mythologiqnes I (Pion: Paris,

26Hjelmslev, p. 36. 1964), p. 346.
160 ANNE HENAULT
covers the conjunctions) breaks out into an
opposition connecting the two poles /beauty/ vs
/ ugliness/.
This application of the phonological model to
the semantic plane was initially suggested by
Hjelmslev who, from the Prolegomena onward,
showed how the application of the procedure of
commutation allows for the isolation of the min-
imal unit contained in a lexeme. (If, for instance,
the two lexemes "mare" and "sow" have in com-
mon the seme /female/, the transition from one
to the other can be brought about by commutation
of the seme /equine/ to the seme /porcinel.)
This work, carried out, at the lexical level, on
the semantic stock of a linguistic system, will
have as its goal, according to Hjelmslev, the con-
stitution of an inventory of the semantic cate-
gories pertaining to a given language. The Danish
linguist postulates that these categories are fixed
in number and constitute the basis of semantic
universals and that they are capable of produc-
ing several million sememic combinations.
2. Semic Analyses
This example has been followed by French
semiotics from its beginnings, thus giving rise to
a certain number of semic analyses; among those
which are better known are the analyses of the
lexical field of "seat,,28 by B. Pottier (1963), and
that of the lexeme "head" of A. J. Greimas
(1966).29 Five semes appear to constitute the
sememe /chairl in French: SI (with a back), S2
(on legs), S3 (for one person), S4 (to sit on), Ss
(solid). It is these semes which are the differ-
ential traits that allow for the organization of
the lexical field of the word seato Their combi-
nations, if one adds a sixth seme /with arms/ (S6),
generate the sememe "seat" (SI + S2 + S3 + S~
+ Ss), the sememe sofa (SI + S2 + S4 + Ss +
S6), or the sememe "pouf" (S2 + S3 + S4)'
Analysis of the word head by A. J. Greimas
lays down far more general semes, such as/sphe-
roidicity/ + /extremity/ + /superativity/. These
come closer to Hjelmslev's cataloguing, for their
'HE. Pottier, "Recherches sur I'analyse semantique en lin-
guistique et en traduction mecanique," Travaux de Linguis-
tique et de litterature de l'Universite de Strasbourg (1963), pp. 107-
138.
29 A. J. Greimas, Semantique struclurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966),
p.42ff.
generality allows them to enter into a much larger
number of combinations.
The excessive demands of such an enterprise 30
were very soon to bring researchers to a stand-
still. Nevertheless, a retrospective vision of this
sort must not lead us to distort the relationship
of contemporary French semiotics to its early
beginnings. It would be inaccurate to say that
this semantic categorization of the world, as sug-
gested by Hjelmslev, has ever constituted the
whole of the scientific project of French research-
ers, even when semiotics was called semantics.
This tentative semantic description was but one
component of an ambitious project, of which
Semantique structurale (Structural Semantics) brings
out the full magnitude-as much by the impor-
tance of its axiomatic refiection as by the studies
bearing no longer on semantics, but on narrative
syntax. One should therefore not say that the
passage from the "semantic" to the "semiotic"
moment represents the recanting of a first phase
exclusively attached to the lexicallevel. I t would
be equally false to assert that the first recognized
"reverses" were followed by an abandonment of
semic analysis.
This procedure 31 is a conceptual instrument
always present in discourse analysis as soon as
one refrains from giving an account of the entire
semic system of a given language in order to
interest oneself in this or that particular discourse.
As it is, there is no longer any problem of closure
of the corpus. If the semantics of a given lin-
guistic system is open, hence incalculable, it is
obvious on the other hand that the number of
semic categories used in a micro-universe of dis-
course, such as the entire production of an author
in adefinite period, is indeed a closed corpus,
for which this technique of deducing semantic
structures is appropriate. In this connection we
might recall Fran<;ois Rastier's conclusions
regarding the structuring of sensorial codes
peculiar to Mallarme's poems after 1866: 32 "A
30See note 19.
'liTo quote only some reeent examples, an important plaee
is given to semie analysis in A. J. Greimas, Maupassant: la
semiotique du texte: exereiees praliques (Paris: Seuil, 1976), pp. 27,
30ff. Jacques Geninasea, "La Poele et le tamis," in Docu-
ments du Groupe de Recherches Semio-Linguisliques de L'EHESS
[Ecole des Haut~s Etudes en Seienees Sociales de Paris],
No. 1 (1979) [Hereafter Documenls G.R.S.L. EHESS] , p. 33.
"Fran<;:ois Rastier, Essais de semiotique diseursive (Tours: Mame,
1973), p. 45.
 FRANCE 161

single opposition, /presence of color/vs/non- (RICH..)·············

A : X · · ·:B(POOR)
,, ,,,
presence of color/, articulates all the diverse lex- ,,, ,
icalizations of the code of colors in Mallarme, , ,,
and its manifestation will be differentiated by a (NONPOOR) B"! .................... ! A (NONRICH)
category hierarchically superior: /luminosity/vs Figure 2
/non-luminosity/ ... Let us note the simplicity
of the description: Four semes can constitute two In 1968, A. J. Greimas, in an article, "Le Jeu
nuclear figures represented by about fifty dif- des contraintes semiotiques," in collaboration
ferent lexemes of syntagms." with F. Rastier,33 suggested the topological rep-
resentation of contrary and contradictory oppo-
3. Constitution of the Semiotic sitions in the form of a square. The two contrary
Square semes A and B prSlject th~ir respective contra-
dictories, written A and B, and this generates
The binary oppositions which give form to the Figure 2 (in which we have supplied a meaning
content (semes), like those for the expression for A and B in order to increase the legibility of
(phemes), are apparently relations empty ?f the square).
meaning. But their formulation presents a dlf- Figure 2 shows six logical relations: two rela-
ficulty which phonology escaped. tions of conjunction/disjunction, characteristis;
When either semantics or phonology sets up, of the contraries and subcontraries (A ,,:s B, A
in the abstract, the relation A vs B, it can be vs B); two relations of exclusion CA vs A, ~ vs
interpreted in two ways: B = non-A, (contra- B); two relations of implication (B ~ A, A ~
dictory of A) or B = contrary of A. In phon- B).34 This schema, which determines different
ology, for example, A ("voiced") is in opposition points as geometrical intersections of relations,
to B ("unvoiced"), and A ("acute") is in oppo- empty of meaning, and different paths between
sition to B ("grave"). The first opposition is more these points, makes up the constitutional model
formal, the second, more qualitative. of meaning. .
Logical differences underscore the distinction The constitutional model has a wide general-
between these two ways of considering the rela- ity, because it is built in a deductive way an? is
tion of opposition. "Non-acute" is the contra- based on the intrinsic properties of the logICal
dictory of "acute" because normally one excludes relations brought to light. This model refers to
the other. 'On the other hand, in poetry and in a small number of concepts, considered non-
all mythic discourses, a term and its contrary definable, such as /conjunction/vs/disjunction/,
are often posited jointly, so that "life" and or /relation/. Not taking into account the unan-
"death," "beginning" and "end," or a and ware ticipated theoretical modifications which can
given as equivalents. This means that the rela- result in the progress of research, one can at once
tion of contrariety is not an exclusive one. Quite affirm that the constitutional model is in every
otherwise, a simultaneous grasp of these two case independent of all semantic investment, and
poles generates effects of meaning which that, inversely, it is capable of giving form to
the logicians designate as complex terms. How- any substance of meaning, thus transforming it
ever French semioticians have not maintained into a semantic micro-universe. This would be
the hexagonal figure of V. Bröndal, in which the the "elementary structure of signification." Thus
complex term (both A and B) finds its place it can be regarded as "a canonical form" and as
alongside the neuter (neither A nor B) and the "a path into fundamental semantics.,,3S
two complexes, negative and positive, which are By adopting this model, French semiotics. for
added to the two binary poles of the opposite the first time entered the realm of theoretlcal
relation. This hexagonal scheme endeavors to
substitute a graded scale for the strong opposi- ;:lA. J. Greimas and F. Rastier, "Le Jeu des contraintes
tion A vs B, but this way of solving the polar semiotiques" published in English in Yale French Studies,
opposition bears no heuristic fruit outside the No. 41 (1968), under the tille: "The Interaction ofSemiotic
Constraints." Included in Greimas, Du Sens, (Paris, Lar-
zone of meaning for which it may have been ousse, 1970), p. 135ff.
intentionally constructed-namely that of crit- 'l'Greimas, Du Sens, p. 137.
ical evaluations. 'l'Ibid., p. 161.
162 ANNE HENAULT
abstraction which it had aimed at since its begin-
nings under the inftuence of symbolic logic, nota-
bly that of Hans Reichenbach who, mentioning
"semiotics" in L'Avenement de la philosophie scien-
tifique (The Advent of Scientific Philosophy,
1933),36 assigns it an objective comparable to
that of mathematics. This means bringing to
light those structuring relationships, themselves
empty of meaning, which, "though evident, are
nonetheless very difficult to find."
Concluding this rapid survey of the organi-
zation of signification on an elementary level, we
shall say that all mental activity, in the final
analysis, makes use of this quaternion which
jointly gives the polar categories of any taxon-
omy and the obligatory paths of all transfor-
mation, source of becoming. This double, static
and dynamic nature of the semiotic square is at
one and the same time the most difficult 37 and
the most rewarding point of the whole theoret-
ical construct. Here the semantic components-
elements somewhat neglected by scholars today-
and the syntactic component, which is to be
described now, are tied together.
111. Structuring of the
Meaning at the Narrative Level
A. The Notion of Transformation
When one considers the semiotic square from
a taxonomie standpoint, the connections between
the poles are seen as static relations. But the same
relations can also be considered as the operations
of affirming or negating which are presupposed
by the institution and constitution of the four
poles. No longer taxonomie, the semiotic square
now becomes the matrix which can account for
becoming, itself identified with the transition
from one state, figured by one pole, to another
state, either contrary or contradictory. A theo-
retical proposition of this kind proceeds from a
movement of intense abstraction derived from
Propp's conclusions in his Morphology oJ the Folk
Tale.
3"H. Reichenbach, L 'Avenement de la philosophie scientijique (Paris:
Flammarion, 1955), p. 192.
37See the critical analysis of this point by P. Ricoeur in "La
Grammaire narrative de Greimas," Documents G.R.S.L.
EHESS, No. 15 (1980).
Many minimal definitions of narrativity
include the notion of"transformation." Now this
central notion of Semantique structurale (Structural
Semanties) has much to do with the problematic
of the Levi-Strauss paradigm, even if it is very
different from what Levi-Strauss hirns elf calls
"transformation." Levi-Strauss makes full use of
this term throughout his works, especiaHy in the
Mythologiques 38 (Mythologics), without taking
much trouble to define it. This term, as weH as
its innumerable synonyms, such as commuta-
tion, permutation, or homologization, is very elose
to "metamorphosis," considered as a way of giv-
ing as equivalent two heterogeneous sememes of
a given myth made somehow homogeneous by
the logic specific to their sensible qualities. So a
fish can take the place of an otter (I, 116) or the
water serves as a substitute for fire (M 1 and
M 124).
Th~ second half of Structural Semantics basically
suggests a further reading of Propp's analysis in
the light of studies such as those devoted by
Levi-Strauss to the myth of Oedipus. In his work,
Greimas proposes the reduction of the mechan-
istic portrait of the folktale, established by Propp,
into a formulation according to which the two
sequences-initial and final--Df the tale would
be made of two semic categories first under their
negative and then their positive form:
Initi~l seq~ence Final sequence
A+C C+A
where A = contract, C communication. This
can be understood in the following way:39 "In a
world without law, values are reversed. The res-
titution of values makes possible areturn to the
reign of law."
This atemporal structure of the narrative
recalls the formula established by Levi-Strauss
for the myth of Oedipus, with the difference that
Structural Semantics superimposes the semantic
categories of the anthropologist onto the syn-
tactic viewpoint of Propp.
In his "Levi-Strauss et les contraintes de la
pensee mythique,,,40 J. Courtes shows the impor-
tance of semantic thought in the work of Levi-
3SCf. Courtes, Livi-Strauss et les contraintes de la pensee mythique
(Paris: Mame, 1973), p. 1l7ff.
39 A. J. Greimas, Semantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966),
p.207.
4'l Courtes, Levi-Strauss, p. 151ff.
 FRANCE 163
Strauss. In this way, the research of the anthro- production of statements and by their combi-.
pologist, and especially his Mythologiques, con- nation into discourse; it is relayed in its course
s ti tu tes an irreplacea ble record of primary by the narrative structures and it is these which
semanticisms which could contribute to a logic produce meaningful discourse, articulated into
of sensible qualities. Inversely, the syntactic various statements."
dimension is sacrificed. The explanatory syntac- It is therefore this syntactic process that sets
tic basis is oversimplified and consists of two the stage for narrative transformation. "Trans-
terms: First, an opposition al relation of disjunc- formation" will be defined in various ways
tive nature between two given terms, for instance according to the different levels of the generation
the sun and the earth in the myth of the pirogue of meaning. 44 "On the level of deep structures,
(111,155-160). Second, a relation of conjunction transformation is thus the path from one term
in which the two elements initially opposed are of the square to another, by way of the opera-
reunited, thanks to a mediating term; this inter- tions of negating and asserting. On the surface
mediary (here, the pirogue itself) participates in level of the narrative, it is, on the contrary, rep-
the qualities of the two poles and consequently resented under the form of chains of conjunc-
realizes the complex term of the opposition, tions and disjunctions, between subjects of state
which, in this case, is resolved by harmony and (sujets d'itat) and objects ofvalue (objets de valeur):
continuity, exactly as in Plato's mythology,41 and there is a narrative transformation when astate
not by rupture and dialectic, as in the narrative defined by the conjunction or disjunction with
models of Propp and Greimas. an object ofvalue is succeeded by astate defined
While there seems to be ci certain fit between by the contrary (disjimction where there had
the simplicity of U~vi-Straussian syntactical the- been conjunction and vice-versa)."
ory and the logic peculiar to the mythic universe, This means that narrative transformations are
one can nevertheless question the range of Levi- innumerable punctuations (or ruptures) in what
Strauss's scientific project; overly dependent on is erroneously supposed to be the continuous
the basic binary concept of phonology, it submits chain which constitutes the threads of stories.
an exceptionally rich semantic experience to the Therefore every narrative can be broken up into
taxonomic screening of a theory which ignores an infinite number of segments thus defined.
the generativist point of view. 42 Ethnological narratives are not the only on es
Greimas keeps the paradigmatic dimension of which lend themselves to this dissection. It will
Levi-Straussian analysis, and this gives semiotic suffice to leave aside the figurative aspect of folk-
theory the logical and atemporal basis which is tales (with their objects of value such as treas-
one of its most powerful components. All the ures or princesses) and to adopt a more abstract
same, starting from Semantique structurale, Grei- point of view: the conjunction can be that of the
mas affirms the importance of elaborating a truly scientist with the recognition of his discovery, or
formal theory of the narrative, that is to say a the consumer with the taste of a tasty dish-the
theory as little dependent as possible upon narrative result of a cooking recipe. The variable
semantic considerations. This formalism will then semantic inputs change nothing in the indefi-
be found in syntax. Such syntax is nothing more nitely repeated mechanism of the rupture by
than an ordering of discourse, also called "inter- deprivation of the desired object and of the res-
mediary stage of meaning" (palier intermidiaire de toration by reconquest of this object; because
la signification), which is described as obligatory such is the representation of becoming in the
for the el abo ration of any discourse. This affir- polemical schemes of narrativity. This stepwise
mation takes the form of a postulate: 43 "the gen- division of change no more saves the spectator
eration of signification does not proceed by the from the ups and downs than did the first
attempts of silent films ... and perhaps in both
4\Plato, Symposium, 202-203. cases the production of movement is very much
42In its French meaning, "generativist" implies the recon- the same.
stitution of all semiotic operations necessary for the codi- Therefore, from the publishing of Du· sens45
fication of a meaningful message; cf. Thomas Pavel,
"Modeles generatifs en linguistique et en semiotique" Doc-
uments G.R.S.L. EHESS, No. 20 (1980). Dictionnaire, s.v. "Transformation": par. 5, p. 401.
44
• 3 Du sens, p. 159. 45Greimas, Du sens, p. 39 .
164 ANNE HENAULT
onwards, semiotic theory put aside the exclusive
consideration of the tangle of semantic-sensorial
structures which characterizes the musical type
of thought of Levi-Strauss, and was directed
towards a more constructivist approach. It has
been observed that, at least in the West, many
messages point towards something with a reg-
ulated and algorithmic unfolding. As was sensed
by P. Claudel: "that which we call his tory is not
a succession of varied images, but the develop-
ment of an order and composition, accordingly
as things fall out of time and cease to belong to
it.,,46 Thus, in semiotics, the term "transforma-
tion" adds to the logical sense of the path of a
binary category, the anthropomorphic represen-
tation of the operations required for the reali-
zation of this transformation.
At this stage of reflection, there is no concep-
tu al difference between the verbal account of an
action and the intelligent observation of the
enactment of a visible action. Whether the
meaning be actual or verbal, the signified is in
both cases a programmed proceeding, broken up
into micro-transformations: a clever artisan,
capable of organizing a more or less complex
program, is in fact building a cognitive con-
struct and therefore an implicit complex rea-
soning, an algorithm of transformations of which
a verbal account is never more than a linguistic
simulation.
As seen above, studies of narrative syntax have
gone far beyond the field of ethno-literary nar-
rative, in order to deal with all other significant
systems: there is therefore no domain which
remains foreign to semiotics. Such expansionism
can lead to theoretical discussion. The actual
response of French semiotics will be of an all the
more practical nature: semiotics proves its
momentum by going forward, proving also by
the fertility of its analyses, which can be appre-
ciated realistically, the opportunity that exists to
apply its method to other fields.
Owing to the postulate which has been enun-
ciated (see note 43), and to the idea that these
"intermediary structures" must go far beyond
the verbal domain in order to be capable of giv-
ing form to all the other systems of expression,
semiotics has posited a kind of universal quan-
tification beneath the components of the nar-
rative machinery, which have been taken to
'6p. Claudel, La Ville, version 2-377/23, as quoted by J. C.
Coquet, Semiotique lilleraire (Paris: Mame, 1973), p. 153.
pieces. This extension of narrative syntax to all
imaginable sorts of transformation (practical and
conceptual) results from the concrete observa-
tion that these are all at a more superficiallevel,
the object of one and the same "stage setting,"
which rules an unchanging play of parts, the
repetitive process of which is, therefore, com-
pletely predictable.
B. The Process of ]unction
Our introduction to this rather complex con-
ceptual instrumentation presents two phases: on
the one hand a synthetic, and in some ways par-
adigmatic presentation of the semantic cate-
gories brought into play, and of the discrete
elements proceeding from these; on the other
hand, adescription of the systematic adjustment
of these elements, that is to say, the direction of
use of the various parts of the narrative process.
1. Components
Four oppositions, distinguished by their seman-
tic inputs, account for the whole of the narrative
"stage setting.,,47 These are the oppositions Isub-
jectl vs lobject, Idoingl vs Ibeing,/pragmatic I
vs I cogni tive,1 modal! vs I descriptivel. These
four categories enable one to construct the lin-
guistic simulation of an act.
ISubjectl vs IObject/. We should now give a pri-
mary definition of the predicate, which in turn
can go back to a conc~ption of the structure of
the elementary utterance. Bearing in mi nd the
fact that the predicate is at one and the same
time a semanticism and a formal relation of a
logical type, called function, to which we shall
return, we are here concerned only with seman-
ticism. The relation S-O covers the semanti-
cism of the basic predicate. Sand 0 appear as
soon as something is lacking and thus a certain
value-desire is created. What is valuable to the
subject is the object. The two terms, grammat~
ical or philosophical, are to semiotics no more
than terms delimiting the relation of junction.
As a semic category, this relation of junction
forms two contradictory terms: conjunction
(SI\O) and disjunction (SVO), the second terms
of each pair being called actants.
47The dramaturgie metaphor is reeurrent in Tesniere's
grammar.
 FRANCE 165

><
MARY FEEDS THE CAT TRUTH
= MARY
-.- ACTS IN SUCH A WAY THAT THE CAT HAS ITS FOOD
-..- -..- BEING SEEMING
Subjecl 01 Objecl 01 Objecl 01
Doing Being Value SECRECY LIE

Objecl
NONSEEMING NONBEING
Figure 3
FALSITY

Figure 4
I Doingl and I Beingi. The semanticism of the
relation-predicate which unites Sand 0 breaks
into a new semic category, Ibeingl vs Idoing/, the pragmatic dimension in a regulary way. The
and leads to the distinction between purely junc- cognitive dimension appears as a component of
tional statements of being (enonces d'etat) and the acquisition of competency by the subject-
statements of doing (enonces de faire), or state- whether this subject receives an element of
ments of transformation. knowledge from an actor specially designed for
The statement of doing is characterized by the this (witch's curse, or advice given by a fabled
fact that its actant-object is itself a statement of animal, etc.), or the subject is subjected to cog-
being (see Figure 3). In this way, the subject of nitive manipulation by another subject.
doing appears as a kind of communicator-the The category Ipragmaticl vs Icogni~ivel artic-
subject transferring the object of value to its ben- ulates the second pair of actants, sender (destin-
eficiary, who is the subject of being. ateur) vs receiver (destinataire), creating between
I Pragmatic/ us I Cognitiuel. This category serves sender and subject a more semanticized variant
to characterize the cases where the narrator of the relation of manipulation. The sender is
introduces into the narrative a dimension of the anthropomorphic form of the presence of
knowledge about the events. This cognitive values recognized by his ability for participative
dimension can adopt as an object the pragmatic communication, i.e., to give without losing. While
dimension (that of the events themselves). The the relation S-O is omnipresent, the relation
cognitive dimension is thus, by definition, hier- sender-receiver pertains to a dass of figurative
archically superior to the pragmatic dimension. discourses, indicating astate of culture (with the
The distribution of knowledge, realized by the social thematic of exchange and gift); on the
subject of enunciation, between the different contrary, the relation S-O may likewise be seen
actants of communication (narrateur, narrataire) in the relation of prehension and nutrition
and of action (mainly, the various subjects) must according to the state of nature of the living
be considered as one of the organizing principles being. A dog, a social animal, hunts for a receiver
of the narration. at the command of asender; the cat hunts on
This cognitive pivot of the narrative-which its own account, and keeps within the range of
is none other than the recognition (anagnoresis) S-O.
of Aristotelian poetics-allows for the narrator As to notions, i.e., as to points of fixation of
to play on the Ibeingl and the Iseemingl of the semantic categories, the subject, the object and
characters. When there is no distance between the sender have all been studied in depth. We
the Iseemingl and the Ibeing/, one comes upon shall do no more than indicate that "object of
an effect of truth. On the contrary, when there value" and "sender" are the principal themes of
is a distance between these two, this is the domain an important artide by Greimas, published in
of secrecy or untruth. The square of truth Langages, 31. 48 For the description of the subject,
accounts for this particular articulation of nar- the whole of J. C. Coquet's works (see especially
rative messages (see Figure 4). his contribution to the study of modalities in
The cognitive plane, if present, can possess a Langages, 43 49 ) show a very complete grasp of
true autonomy with regard to the pragmatic the question.
plane. This autonomy is characteristic of abstract
discourses such as the scientific type. But this
48 A. ]. Greimas, "Un probleme de semiotique narrative,"
does not eliminate the possibility that in figur- "Les Objets de valeur," Langages, 31 (1973), 13ff.
ative discourses such as ethnological literature 49]. C. Coquet, "Les Modalites du discours," Langages, 43
the cognitive dimension may be articulated with (1976), 64.
166 ANNE RENAULT
Let us add further that subject, object, sender
and receiver are the principal characters, "dra-
matis personae," made evident, und er the term
"actant," in Structural Semanties. When the still
primitive discipline of narratology was giving its
attention exclusively to the analysis of figurative,
especially mythological dis course, the list of
actants also included the adjuvant and the oppo-
santo These last two actants are no longer main-
tained in the theory. The opposant is henceforth
the anti-subject, and the adjuvant has been absorbed
by reflection of the modalities.
/ Modal/ vs / Descriptive/. A simple predicative
statement can be called a descriptive one. On
the other hand, the statement which presents a
complementary assertion bearing on the descrip-
tive statement is a modal one. Therefore,
expressing modality creates a hierarchy of pred-
icates. Reflection on the modalities holds a major
position in current semiotic research, although
semiotics is not really concerned with differen-
tiating itself from the positions of related dis ci-
plines (Iogic and linguistics) on this point.
The way semiotics deals with modalities is in
harmony with the avowed "bricolage" charac-
teristic of all its theoretical constructions, at least
initially. The semiotic problematic of modalities
sterns from the observation of a recurrent char-
acteristic of folk-tales: before performing his
action, the hero is constantly shown endeavoring
to acquire know-how, the ability to act, the will to
act, or the obligation to act, which are constant
components of the acquisition of competence.
Is it at the cost of an analogy that these units
of the form of content can be brought closer to
the linguistic modality which appears as the
phrastic unity of a predicate governing another
predicate in the infinitive? Is it an abusive exten-
sion which brings out in knowing how to be [savoir-
itre] the epistemological modality of the logician,
and in must be [devoir-etre] his aleatory modality?
But if the term "modality" still raises a problem,
what it designates is henceforth necessary to
semiotic theory, for it covers: (a) the pragmatic
superdetermination of the /doing/ (vouloir-jaire,
devoir-jaire, savoir-jaire, pouvoir-jaire) which char-
acterizes the phase of acquisition of competence;
(b) the pragmatic superdetermination of the
/being/ (vouloir-etre ... , etc.) essential to a semi-
otic of passions; (c) the cognitive superdeter-
minations of /doing/ and /being/, governed by
the category of /being/ vs /seeming/ which, as
we have shown, allows the construction within
a text of the effect of meaning: "veridicality."
In the present state of research, the four
semantic categories that we have just outlined
determine the main components of verbalization
of action.
2. The Layout of Components of the
Narrative System
The first act in representing a transformation
which characterizes the narrative relates a sub-
ject to an object which only takes on value
through its relations hip with the subject. (It is
only for the subject that there is a value-and
contrariwise, there is no subject except by its
relation to the object of value.) Prior to such an
association, there is only indifference, that is,
lack of meaning. The relation established between
these two terms makes up the so-called minimal
statement which can be formalized as F (S,O)
where F is either "junction" (for statements of
being), or "transformation" (for the statements
of doing).
The staging of the act of transformation con-
sists in placing statement of being in the posi tion
of an object with regard to a statement of doing.
This is what is called the narrative program,
which is symbolized
in which, according to our example on p. 165,
SJ = Mary; S2 = Cat; 0 = food.
One can distinguish the "basic" NP, or prin-
cipal program, from the programs of usage, or
intermediate programs, that is, sub-programs
that have to be carried out before the realization
of the principle program. An intermediate pro-
gram is called a supplemental program if it is
carried out by a distinct subject acting for the
main subject. The basic NP, whether simple or
complex, is the subject's performance or making
(faire-etre). This central act presupposes the com-
petence of the subject, or maker (etre-du-jaire)-
which is an organized hierarchy of modalities in
which a will to act (vouloir-jaire) commands a
know-how (savoir-:foire) or the other way around;50
different combinations are possible.
50Ibid, p. 70.
 FRANCE 167
There is no complete narrative without the certain appearance of paradox, is the analysis
concatenation competence-performance, as just of a cooking recipe by A.J. Greimas 53 (the tra-
defined. Such a chain is called a narrative path- ditional receipe for "pistou soup"). This text,
way (parcours narratij). As we shall see, the nar- which apparently "teIls" nothing, can be broken
rative pathway is a canonical model to be formed down into a tangle of narrative programs, lead-
in all kinds of discourses, abstract or figurative, ing to partial transformations, ordered within a
in scientific texts, in tales, and in linguistic hierarchy leading to a global program. This recipe
messages as weIl as in gestural (or other) types finds its place in the sub-groups of narrative
of communication. This statement is a funda- discourses, which are programming discourses
mental proposal of French semiotics, which is (discours de progammation).
distinct from semiotic investigations in the Soviet
Union (Meletinsky) and the work of American
researchers (A. Dundes, for instance). Once C. The Theory of Functions
again, for Greimas, the narrative level, called
the surface level, is a necessary passage for set- Up to this point, the components of narrativ-
ting up any discourse. ity, and especially the relation Isubjectl vs
Together with the narrative pathway the term lobject/, have been dealt with as mere semantic
narrative schema (schema narratif) will be used categories. In fact, there is more to be found in
specifically for figurative discourses and espe- the aforementioned relation Isubjectl vs lobject/,
cially for the field of ethnoliterature. A refor- something which is absolutely central, called
mulation of Propp's work brings out the canonical function. Function is more often defined as "the
form of the folktale as necessarily made up of constitutive relation" of any given statement,
the sequence of three trials: qualifying (figura- which implies that function takes the place of
tion of the acquisition of competence), decisive the tradition al representation of the statement
(performance), and glorifying (sanction by the as subject and predicate. This substitution, the
sender); this sequence is called the narrative effects of which do not all appear at first glance,
schema .. raises many difficulties. The expression "con-
stitutive relation" does not mask the variation
of meaning of the term "relation." Are we deal-
3. Some Examples of the Extension ing with a pure relation, empty of any semantic
of Narrative Syntax to Non-Figurative investment? Or on the contrary, are we dealing
Discourses with a relation defined by a verbal semanticism?
To these queries the Dictionary provides answers
Among the countless analyses of non-figurative which generally take the direction of the second
discourses, three command our attention because solution. On the other hand, the preface to
they are very explicit: the first is the analysis 51 J. Courtes'54 book does away with the verbal
by F. Bastide of Claude Bernard's proof of dimension for the benefit of pure logical relation.
the glycogenic function of the liver (Acadimie des Such hesitations reflect the debates taking place
Sciences, 24th September, 1855): narrative theory in this theoretical area since the catalogue of 31
applies to both the relation of experience (where functions proposed by V. Propp in his Morphology
a non-anthropomorphic subject, "liver," "acts" if the Folk Tale. For Propp, "function" is at on ce
and performs its trials), and to Claude Bernard's both the action of any given character, insofar
act of persuading his listeners. The second anal- as it can be linked to his determined sphere of
ysis is a narrative reading of a psychotherapy action, and a requisite as weIl as programmed
session, which is entirely gestural. It is to be moment in a chain of other necessary and pro-
found in the comprehensive research of I van grammed moments which make up the recurrent
Darrault52 in this field. The third, which has a thread of a folktale. As the first meaning prevails

Fran<;oise Bastide, "Approche semiotique d'un texte de sci-

51 53A. J. Greimas, "La Soupe au pistou," Documents G.R.S.L.
ences experimentales," Documents G.R.S.L. EHESS, 7 (1979). 5 (1979).
52Ivan Darrault, "Pour une approche semiotique de la ther- 54J. Courtes, Introduction a La semiotique narrative et discursive
apie psycho-motrice," Documents G.R.S.L. EHESS, 8 (1979). (Paris: Hachette, 1979), p. 7.
168 ANNE RENAULT

over the second, function is in fact the act-verb, At the same time, logicians had arrived at
whereas the character is the actant. Propp's comparable conclusions. In the Avenement de la
acceptation goes some distance toward meeting philosophie scientifique (Advent of Scientific Philos-
Tesniere's grammatical meaning. The recur- ophy-see note 36, above) Reichenbach showed
rence of Propp's characters can be related to the how recent advances in logic stern from its appli-
recurrence of grammatical "characters" which cation to the grammatical analysis of language.
are the actants which make up the verbal junc- Such progress was only made possible by the
tion. Those actants are also limited in number rejection of the Aristotelian representation of the
and always the same (from one to five at the minimum statement as subject and attribute, and
most). by the substitution of a logic of relations for the
In laying the foundations of what now appears logic of classes. For his part, S. C. Kleene has
as a pre-semiotic theory, L. Tesniere distin- demonstrated how putting an end to the repre-
guished two types of conceptual activities, one sentation of statement as subject and predicate
conscious, and responsible for the production of opened up the possibility of a calculus of pred-
ideas, the other unconscious and forming a deep, icates, that is a logic of propositional functions.
fundamental and necessary phenomenon, escap- The parallel evolution of logic leads the notion
ing from any control by human volition, making of grammatical function toward the dimension
up the very life of speech, and which can only of pure relation-void of meaning but describ-
be apprehended by an intuitive reftection which able by its logical properties-a "necessary rela-
is not part of the natural order of things. tion in between two terms," as defined by
Nevertheless, for Tesniere, grammatical func- Hjelmslev. The notion of function totally dis-
tions pertain precisely to this second conceptual cards the figurative dimension which was char-
order, the proof being that whereas other gram- acteristic of Propp's work, along with the residual
matical categories vary considerably with each grammatical dimension to be found in Tesniere's
language, these functions remain identical. For writing, and tends to become formal.
Tesniere it is possible to delimit as an object of The fact that terms like subject and object have
research adynamie syntax, i.e., the conceptual order been taken from traditional grammars has noth-
which recurs more or less identically in all lan- ing to do with a mere analogical transfer of sen-
guages. Such a dynamic order bears no relation tence gramm ar to transsentential syntax. This
to the motionless taxonomy of traditional mor- only acknowledges the identity of very abstract
phologies in substantives, verbs, or prepositions. relations, equally present in sentence grammar
On the contrary, this order is that of the inner and in any narrative message. This allows us to
form of language. Following such a line of posit that the relation known as function is of a
thought, Tesniere has carried out a thorough very great generality.
study of verbal junction. Each statement is a The setting aside once and for all of any spe-
mini-drama which includes a proceeding (verb) cific verbal semanticism (and the existence of
as weil as ac tors (the actants). Any participant, archaic languages with no verbs at all provides
active (subject) or passive (object), or benefici- an added argument) allows us to see that the
ary in such a proceeding, is an actant. The point functives (fonctifs) subject and object can be
of application of the action carries as much weight described as the opposite terms of anormal
as the subject, for without it there can be literally binary category which will be called /transitiv-
no place for action. 55 ity/, and which, like any other semantic cate-
This reftection purports to do away with the gory, is discriminative. But at the same time, a
tradition al primacy of the subject, "the excessive double relation of presupposition connects these
importance attached to the subject is immedi- two opposite poles in such a way that it is impos-
ately contradicted by the linguistic fact of pas- sible to find one without the other. This mutual
sive transformation, which brings out the assertion generates the second sort of meaning,
interchangeability of actants.,,56 which is no longer discriminative, but algo-
rithmic and constructive of transformations.
55Lucien Tesniere, EUments de syntaxe strueturale (Paris:
This double logical relation is not specific to
Klincksieck, 1959), Chap. 25-27. /transitivity/: the real nucleus of narrativity, it
56Ibid., chap. 49 (9). can be observed between /being/ and /appear-
 FRANCE
ingl when asserted together for the operation of
verification-or between "junction" and "trans-
formation" (alias Ibeingl and Idoing/) when
constituting the narrative program. The exact
extension of this sort of relation, which is char-
acteristic of narrativity, has not yet been explored.
But here and now, function appears as the key
component of the narrative mechanism."7
Narrative transformation, which amounts to
the transfer of objects, is the equivalent of setting
in motion at least one function. But in most cases
narrative transformation takes pi ace through a
combination of functions.
D. Narrative Level and Discursive
Level
If the narrative level appears to be deductively
describable, the discursive level is on the con-
trary a terra incognita in this respect. The main
ins trumental concept,' "isotopy," describes
coherence at this level as a very simple collection
of repeated (similar or identical) elements of
meaning. Isotopy is used to describe the sem an-
tic part of this level-as for example the syntactic
one, which is supposed to include actorialization
(semantic specification of actants ), spatializa-
tion, and temporalization (any kind of locali-
zation of the mentioned actants). Its
formalization is totally linked to the conversion
from narrative to discursive level-which we shall
now encounter in summarizing the "generative
pathway."
E. The Generative Pathway
Our description of semiotic theory puts
together two constructions which are extremely
heterogeneous in their origin as weil as in their
specifications; one, more logical, dealt with the
elementary structure of signification, the other,
more anthropomorphic, concerned the narrative
level.
This theoretical heterogeneity is a problem
clearly established in Semantique structurale, and
was ~upposed to have been solved from Du sens
onwards, in the article "Elements d'une gram-
maire narrative" (1969) .5B The Dictionary main-
"7Cr. Anne Henault, "Narratologie, semiotique generale,"
(Les Enjeux de Semiotique, 2,) (Paris: P.U.F., 1983), Chap. IV.
"HA. J. Greimas, Du sens, pp. 157-183.
169
tains the same thesis, in the article "Parcouts
generatif' and diagram (see Figure 5).
Having accepted the idea that any transfor-
mation can only be the path from astate of
junction to its contrary or its contradictory, the
narrative alterations appear as conversions of
the several poles of the constitutional model. As
for the transforming actions, they are the anthro-
pomorphic equivalent of the operations on the
square. These operations, which at the elemen-
tary level can only be denial (or negation) and
assertion, are precisely the movement which gen-
erates the square itself. (The relation between
the taxonomie square and generation is the same
as that between Spinoza's natura naturans and
natura naturata.)
A first element of homogenization of logical
and anthropomorphic components is to be found
in this double equivalence between the various
narrative states <ind the several poles of the tax-
onomy, and between operations upon the square
and acts of transformation. The generation by
the narrative algorithm can thus be predicted by
adding up the four semantic categories which we
have pointed out. Another element of the har-
monization might be expected from the reex-
amination of the function. This component of
the narrative morphology might as weil be con-
sidered a component of the fundamental mor-
phology, which would bring the two levels much
closer together.
On the contrary, articulations at the discur-
sive level, whether syntactic (actorialization,
temporalization, spatialization) or semantic
(thematization, figurativization, iconization),
cannot yet be described deductively; on this level
empiricism still prevails, and rules are nothing
but non-weakened constants. For instance, the
organization of spatiality seems somehow reg-
ular in folk-tales. The qualifying test does always
happen in astrange pi ace (forest, desert, or
island) distant from the social space of the begin-
nings and ends-and also different from the space
of the principal trial. The social space of the
beneficiary of the action is called "heterotopic,"
whereas qualifying space and principal perform-
ance space are the two components of the "topic"
space, the qualifying space being distinguished
as "paratopic," the second as "utopie" (in the
myth the latter type of space is very often some-
how unreal, subterranean, subaquatic or celes-
tial). These regularities can even be observed in
170 ANNE HENAULT

GENERATIVE COURSE

Syntactic Semantic
Component Component

Semio- FUNDAMENTAL FUNDAMENTAL

Deep Level SYNTAX SEMANTICS
narrative
structures
Surface SURFACE NARRATIVE
Level NARRATIVE SEMANTICS
SYNTAX

DISCURSIVE DISCURSIVE
SYNTAX SEMANTICS

Discursivization Thematization
Discursive
structures
,o<o',",,,'ot I \ Figurativization
temporalization

spatializati on

Figure 5

any story (cf. Maupassant's "La Ficelle,,,s9 as
analyzed by A. J. Greimas).
Besides the spatial localization, temporal
localization seems equally predictable in relation
to narrative structures. As for actorialization, or
semantic investments of the actants, the notion .
of thematic role gives an "anchoring." A the-
matic role belongs to socio-cultural connota-
tions. Compare the thematic roles of a peasant
in French Normandy and in China today. The-
matic roles are very difficult to systematize, for
the same reasons which prevented any semiotic
of connotations from reaching their aim. More
widely discursive configurations, in which the-
matic roles can be included, are an important
stock of virtual isotopies which the narrator
brings into accord with narrative structures60 and
which the listener has to decode according to a
similar connotative competency.
Despite thorough research such as that of
Courtes on the motif in folktales, or of
J. Geninasca61 on poetic figurativity, the pro ce-
dures of "conversion" and their rules have yet
to be brought to light. 62 Another element of com-
59 A. J. Greimas, "Description et narrativite," Documents
G.R.S.L. EHESS, No. 13 (1979).
60 Dictionnaire, S.D. "Configuration," par. 8, p. 60.
61Jacques Geninasca, "Mise en clair des messages. Analyse
du recit et analyse du discours poetique," in his Le Lieu et
laformule (Neuchatel: Ed. de la Baconniere, 1978).
62Dictionnaire, s.v., "Conversion," p. 72.
plexity concerning the discursive level comes from
the fact that this level combines a maximum of
either figurative or abstract (in the case of con-
ceptual dis course) semantic articulations-and
at the same time it is the level where constraints
pertaining to the chosen signifier appear: if for
a film and for a novel the narrative structures
can remain the same, it is obvious that "la mar-
quise sortit a5 heures" ("the marchioness went out
at 5 o'clock") takes a much different visual-
cinematic discursivization in a film.
Speaking of "generative pathway," one must
stress that its meaning here is areal one: "Grei-
mas's algorithms are given as real, and offer a
description of the semiotic process as definitely
taking place.,,63 On the other hand, they are
regarded as universal, the same for any lan-
guage; to this extent the ambitions of French
semiotics are not less than those of generative
grammars; the difference is that french theory
views its description of general semiotic com-
petence as something that must be achieved prior
to its description of linguistic competence, as the
second is presupposed by the first.
In presenting the different levels of signifi-
cation, we have dwelt more upon syntactic than
semantic aspects. This semantic component, by
the way, frequently appears as the "poor rela-
63Thomas Pavel, "ModeJes generatifs en linguistique et en
semiotique," Documents G.R.S.L. EHESS, No. 20 (1980).
 FRANCE
tion" of semiotic theory: for certain theoreticians
it is almost absorbed in the syntactic component,
as its morphological part. 64
F. The Concept of a Semiotics of the
Natural World
In fact, the whole of semiotic theory is coun-
terbalanced by a major concept, the importance
of which has been appreciated by too few
researchers; we are referring here to the notion
of a semiotics of the natural world.
1. Against the Notion of Referent
Human sciences such as linguistics or semiol-
ogy, which attempt to describe the relations
between reality and its representation through
dis course, posit the notion of referent to desig-
nate the real world, which is not verbal but mate-
rial and consistent. Ogden and Richards, as weH
as J. B. Grize,65 equate "referent" with real
context-and this reality imposes itself beyond
• 66
any questlOn.
2. For a Semiotics of the Natural
World
French semiotics considers this massive notion
of referent to be of no use in describing the human
relation to the natural world. Starting from the
observation that this relation can be decomposed
into perceptions and expressions, i.e., represen-
tations, one must admit that those perceptions
cannot be taken for raw sensation, because what
reaches sensibility is necessarily not-indifferent,
that is to say, it is already differentiated. By
definition, it is not easy to translate this differ-
entiation into intellectual terms, since aH this is
literaHy beyond words. Trying to give a meta-
phorical representation of this idea, we might
imagine a primitive condition of humanity where
the perceptions approximate to a very rough dif-
ferentiation through lack of vital experimenta-
tion, the sort of experimentation which makes it
«4J. Courtes, Introduction, p. 45.
65J. B. Grize, in Grammars and Descriptions (Berlin: W. de
Gruyter, 1977).
Gült is true that Saussure criticizes in advance any "naive
realism," including that which pertains to the nonlinguistic
sphere.
171
possible to distinguish which food, which space,
which shelter is good or bad for oneself, thus
creating the proprioceptive differentiation which
gives form to the natural world. Semiotics gives
the name "thymic category" (articulated into
euphorie vs dysphoric) to this proprioceptive
differentiation.
Thus, perception itself could be represented
semiotically, as a first pre-verbal articulation of
the continuous, raw, and meaningless sphere of
sensation. This leads us to postulate that the
whole of this perception, pre-verbal but already
thoroughly differentiated (the favorite domain
of Gaston Bachelard's "reverie" about elements),
is already a kind of semiotic having its form and
substance of content as weH as its form and sub-
stance of expression. This will be called the
semiotic of the natural world (semiotique du monde
naturel) .
Under these conditions, the relation between
perception and expression is no longer that of a
bidimensional mirror reflecting a poly-
dimensional reality. It is nothing but the artic-
ulation of two forms: the form of the semiotic of
the natural world and the form of the expressing
semiotic. In an article of 1968, "Conditions d'une
semiotique du monde naturel,"67 Greimas reckons
that "the figures of expression of the natural
world correspond to figures of content of natural
languages." This proposition is acceptable if one
gives to the conceptual articulation which dif-
ferentiates items of the natural world the quality
of a form of expression. The corresponding form
of content should be the sensorial, i.e., thymic
discrimination of the meaningless and continu-
ous impressions received by the different senses.
The effect of conceptual articulation would thus
be to express a zone of sensation about to be
differentiated.
Thanks to this division, sensation takes a form,
because to the articulation of the plane of expres-
sion (here conceptual) there corresponds-
according to the rule of isomorphism between
plane of expression and plane of content-a par-
allel articulation of the plane of content (here
sensorial); meaning being w here the parallel dis-
continuity oftwo (i.e., expressing and expressed)
forms appears.
67 A. J. Greimas, "Conditions d'une semiotique du monde
naturel," Langages, 10 (1968); "Pratiques et langages ges-
tuels," reprinted in Du sens, pp. 49-91.
172 AN NE RENAULT
The sensory signified is taken up by a con-
ceptual signifier which in turn functions as the
mental signified represented by any sensorial sig-
nifier. This raises the question whether it is per-
tinent to assign the privileged position to verbal
semiotics in relation to other semiotics. U ntil
now, natural languages have had an obvious
superiority of "translation."68 Nevertheless, the
actual conclusions of studies dedicated to non-
verbal, especially visual semiotics foreshadow
what can be gained by getting away from the
specific form of expression which belongs to nat-
ural languages.
3. Verbal and Non-Verbal Semiotics
Here and now, the semantic categorization of
the world is beginning to shift, owing to a new
approach to visual phenomena, for instance. Does
this mean that there should be specifically visual,
besides musical or gestural, signifiers? One can
think of certain signifieds-Iet us say visual: How
to speak of colors to a blind man?-which might
not be interpretable by another semiotic. This
does not mean that "signifieds" are specific. 69
One must admit that the nature and organiza-
tion of signifieds is the same for all semiotic
systems, since they are apparently centralized
by one mental center of activities-a guarantee
of the communicability of signifieds. If a non-
verbal semiotics seems, at first glance, to convey
its own signifieds, this can only be due to the
differences in the manner of articulating their
various levels of expression. And this will be the
first topic to be taken up by the semiotic studies
dealing with them.
Therefore, the substitution of this concept
"semiotic of the natural world" for the unana-
lyzed notion "referent" allows us to modify the
semantic categorization of the world, and we can
hope for a revival of semantic study as a result.
Among the studies dealing with nonverbal
semiotics, we shall mention I. Darrault's70 work
on the application of narrativity to the therapy
of psychomotricity. Several groups have already
6BE. Benveniste, "Semiologie de la langue," in Problemes de
linguistique generale II (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), pp. 43-67.
69Even as a provision al practical concept. This attitude is
characteristic of the "New Psychology" as led by Jacques
Mehler of the CNRS, Paris.
70See note 52.
published 71 experimental studies on architecture
and spatiality. The same is true of music and
the problems of its notation. 72
4. The Example of Visual Semiotics
We would like to speak more specifically about
visual semiotics, the first steps of which consist
in reformulating some apparently genuine ques-
tions. Aiming at a deductive reconstitution of
the form of expression specific to the visual text,
semiotics attempts to discover how something
becomes "visible" on a blank, two-dimensional
surface. This means that procedures which are
technically not very far from the highly abstract
graphism of normal writing, or of colored or
black patterns on a white sheet of paper, create
an iconic signifYing system which seems to appeal
directly to visual competence. What particular
sort ofwriting, then, is a drawing, a photograph,
or a painting?
Until now, all those who dealt with images
which common sense considers figurative did not
regard this iconicity as creating any problem,
and they took it for granted. In fact, visuallike-
ness is not as obvious as it seems. Thus visual
semiotics postulates that semiosis is as arbitrary
for visuallanguages as for any other. In one case
as in the other, the relation between plane of
expression and plane of content is not motivated.
The image of a cat is not closer to the real cat
than the word "cat." It is merely produced by
a different type of abstraction, a fact that com-
mon sense wants to ignore.
This postulate should permit us to avoid the
dead-end of Barthes' semiology.73 Ignoring the
typically visual qualities of an image, this
semiology took for gran ted the characteristics of
the plane of expression, and was satisfied with
naming one by one the various items which could
be "seen." Such a lexicalization by transforming
the visual text into a linguistic text, made semiol-
ogy of image nothing but a variant of linguistic
semiology.74 This theoretical dead-end pre-
vented us from ever encountering visual species.
7lSemiotique de l'espace, ed. Jean Zeitoun (Paris: Denoel-
Gonthier, 1979). Alain Renier, "Semiotique de l'architecture, "
Documents G.R.S.L. EHESS, No. 10 (1979).
"C. Miereanu, "Text Komposition, voie zero de I'ecriture
musicale," thesis, U niversite de Vincennes, 1978.
73R. Barthes, "Rhetorique de I'image, Communications, 4 (1964).
74Ibid, p. 2.
 FRANCE
So the first task of visual semiotics is to es tab-
lish the semiotic status of the constituent parts
of the visual plane of expression. These constit-
uents must be looked for in their (present but
not immediately readable) manifestation-i.e.,
in the concrete articulation of the particular geo-
metrie plane, which is an image.
In order to distinguish these constituents, the
eye must come back to a genuine perception and
avoid seizing upon the would-be figures of con-
tent, which might be verbalized at once. On the
contrary, one must forget that this photograph
shows a railway, or a female torso, which lan-
guage would call units of meaning; this is the
prerequisite for "sallying forth from the citadel
of language" and allowing perceptions to appear
for which verbal automatism makes no provision.
This morphological phase has the double pur-
pose of recognizing typically visual units, and
naming them. If one accepts the idea that this
naming is areal one, such a phase is properly
demiurgic, because obviously the lexemes which
are used or created on this occasion can no longer
be considered parts of a naturallanguage. They
are parts of an ad hoc metalanguage. The objec-
tion that visual semiotics is thus once again pris-
oner of the verbal system has only a provisional
validity. As research proceeds, it must become
possible to build a logico-symbolic representa-
tion of the visual semantics categories, thus per-
mitting us once and for all to put the linguistic
deviation into proper perspective. As it is, the
present phase in the elaboration of a metalan-
guage leads to the invention, for example, of
names for colors-creativity which is in itself
extremely rewarding. Three recent analyses 75 by
J. M. Floch give an account of the state of visual
researches. They constitute a sort of demonstra-
tion showing how it is now possible to solve prob-
lems bearing on ways to avoid reducing visual
species to linguistic ones, or how to isolate the
levels of visual expression in order to describe it
separately from the level of content. This leads
us to build a theory of the visual "formant," and
particularly, to distinguish the "figurative" from
7S]. M. Floch, "Semiotique poetique et discours mythique
en photographie. Analyse d'un nu de Boubat," Pripubli-
cations d'Urbino, No. 95 Oune 1980); "Kandinsky bricole sa
composition IV," Communications, 34 (December 1981);
"Semiotique plastique et langage publicitaire," Documents
G.R.S.L., EHESS, No. 26, 1981.
173
the "plastic" formant. The first one is a con-
junction of traits, colors, and forms considered as
showing figures 01 the natural world, whereas the
second is nothing but a group of visual traits
which can be opposed to one another on the basis
of their visual qualities alone, and which thus delimit
properly visual items.
The first pages of the analysis of Boubat's
photography are exemplary of "cette ascese du
regard" (the ascetic eye) which endeavors to be
guided by the sensory qualities alone. More
interesting than the paradigmatic inventory of
the visual categories (colored, geometrieal, etc.),
what the researcher aims at is the contrast or
co-presence of the identified polar terms of oppo-
sitive categories. In this case, for instance, the
perceptive contrast "in relief" vs "flat" delimits
topographical zones, with some elements of the
plane of content thematically (and not figura-
tively) defined. This allows us to see that the
figurative items ("bust" or "hair") have a the-
matic meaning such as "adorned vs non-adorned."
These investigations lead us to turn anew to
a question until now neglected by semiotics, that
of the various modes of relating level of content
to level of expression through the act of semiosis.
This question, stated very elearly by F. Rastier
in Langages, 10 76 forms the center of another anal-
ysis by J. M. Floch bearing on some advertise-
ments for "News" cigarettes. He is able to show
that both the visual dimension of the advertise-
ment, and the temporality of the meaning lin-
guistically conveyed by the phrase "take a break
from the rush," are organized by the same
abstract articulation. The conelusions of this
extremely accurate analysis is that a semiotic is
first of all a network of conceptual oppositions
which can as well articulate the level of expres-
sion as the level of content-or, as is the case
here, it can bring expression and content together
into an absolute parallelism of reciprocal perme-
ability of the two planes of language, whereas
most often the way in which they are united is
perfectly arbitrary.
Thus, visualists appear to be very elose to
a problematic which has been regarded until
now as specific to poetic semiotics. Strongly
infl uenced by Roman Jako bson' s s tu dies on
poetics, this special part of semiotics unites a
76F. Rastier, "Comportement et signification," Langages, IO
(1968), 78.
174 AN NE RENAULT

number of different researchers,77 among whom "abstract painting" is a "catch-all" applied to

Cl. Zilberberg is conducting some extremely very heterogeneous types of semiosis: the pic-
original research into rhythm. torial textualization can occur at any level of the
Another question raised by recent studies in generative pathway, deep structures (Malev-
visual semiotics concerns the problem of a def- itch), semio-narrative level (Lissitzky's
inition of abstraction in painting. If it is true "Prouns"), or thematization considered as the
that abstract painting is meaningful without most abstract component of the discursive level
bearing any likeness, one can wonder what sort (Klee, Kandinsky).
of meaning this is, and how such a meaning can One of the dominant tendencies in French
be constructed. The analysis of "Composition semiotics is to be seen in this no longer pro-
IV" of Kandinsky, historically one of the first grammatic extension to any verbal 80 or non-ver-
abstract paintings, proceeds like the deciphering bal domains, not to mention, in addition to all
of day tablets written in an unknown language the works we have already quoted on nonverbal
and writing. The lines and colors deliver a mes- disciplines, those dealing with the semiotic of
sage which is not properly visual. At the end of spectacles. 81
his patient work, J. M. Floch shows how a dou-
ble visual discourse, linear and chromatic
(opposing two types of colors and two types of IV. Conc1usion
lines) provides a sort of code which allows us to
see in this painting two different statements: on
In his presentation of the "Ecole Semiotique
the left a fight against evil, on the right heavenly
de Paris," J. Cl. Coquet finds himself reluctant
bliss. Apart of this abstract code is in fact a
to accept this "unitarian" denomination. Never-
derivation from the formants of the plane of
theless he adds: "it is true that this reductionism
expression of Russian traditional religious icon-
is in no way scandalous for a slightly distant
ography (four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Rus-
observer," meaning to show by these words that
sian cross, saints and bodies risen from the dead,
a consensus has in reality been effected around
etc.) .
the term "semiotics," to designate the important
One has to admit that if such a painting has
(at least numerically) group of researchers who
ever reached any audience independent of any
work on the theoretical basis that we have briefty
systematic explanation it must be because it
presented here-in accordance with the studies
reaches the spectator in those infra-verbal zones
carried out in conjuncJion with the semi!lar of
characteristic of the semiotic of the natural world,
A. J. Greimas at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
where the first semantico-sensual categorization
en Sciences Sociales of Paris (EHESS).
takes place. In the case of this particular paint-
This will explain why we have not so far men-
ing, we might say that Kandinsky figuratizes,
tioned certain weil known researchers whose
through his borrowing from the religious code,
works are similar, at least thematically, to those
this sensory-abstract dimension. This fact would
which we have presented. It is because they
allow us to speak, in a non-paradoxical way, of
themselves would probably not want to be placed
abstract figurativity-a notion of wide scope-
under the banner of "semiotics": Cl. Bremond
which might be a strong characteristic of any
dedicates himself mostly to the logic of actions
artistic form of expression. 78
in French fairy tales, following a methodology
In order to outline this semiotic approach to
dose to that of Propp and without a general
abstract painting, one should also consider the
theory of discourse to darify the degrees of
studies carried out by F. Thurleman on three
paintings by Paul Klee. The comparison of these
79
"OBiblical exegesis offers semiotics a wide field of application.
two groups of works shows how the label Cf. A. and D. Patte, Pour une exegese structurale (Paris: Seuil,
1978); Groupe d'entrevernes-Signes et pmüboles, (Paris: Seuil,
77Cf. Essais de semiotique poitique, ed. A. J. Greimas (Paris: 1977); and the review called Semiotique et Bible, Centre pour
Larousse, 1972). l'analyse du discours religieux (C.A.D.I.R.), Lyon.
'BAnne Henault, Enjeux 11, chap. 5. 8lE. de Kuyper, "Pour une semiotique du spectaculaire,"
79F elix Thurleman, "Trois peintures de Paul Klee, essai and E. Poppe, "Analyse semiotique de l'espace spectacu-
d'analyse semiotique," These de 3me cycle, (Paris: Ecole laire," two theses in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci-
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1979). ences Sociales (Paris, 1979).
 FRANCE
abstraction in the analysis. J ulia Kristeva,
although one of her books is called ~T)f.LELWTlK1'i,
has a very different scientific praject: to build a
"semanalyse" which rejects the semiotic theory
of signification and aims at the integration of
psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism; but
until now this construction appears to be more
literary than demonstrative.
There has been no attempt in our outline to
disguise the fact that we owe the essentials of
175
what has been discovered in French semiotics to
A. J. Greimas's rereading of Hjelmslev, or that
the greater part of the researchers mentioned
herein may be regarded as Greimas's followers.
Must it therefore be concluded that French
semiotics is tied to this strang personality? I t
seems clear that the axiomatic character of the
theory has already been sufficiently consolidated
to allow us to avoid the risk of any such
personalization.
 CHAPTER9
Semiotics in East and West
Germany and Austria
Annemarie Lange-Seidl
I. The Semiotic Tradition in
German-Speaking Countries
More than is usually done in present practice,
we should distinguish between the his tory of
semiotics as a scientific discipline, and the tra-
dition of reflecting on sign concepts, sign use, or
sign constitution, in a given country or culture.
A. History of Semiotik As a Scientific
Discipline
Over the past century, there have been two
German books bearing the tide Semiotik, one by
Husserl (1890/1970), the other by Hermes (1938).
For Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Semiotik was
the logic of signs. Husserl offers a catalogue of
sign polarities which should be investigated:
unequivocal and ambiguous signs (Husserl 1970,
p. 342), simple and composed signs (p. 343),
direct and indirect signs (p. 343), identic and
nonidentic signs, equivalent and nonequivalent
Annemarie Lange-Seidl • Language Center, Technical
University, Munieh, West Germany.
177
signs (p. 344), natural and artificial signs (p. 345,
349), formal and material signs (p.345). His
investigations into expression versus meaning,
Bedeutung (meaning) versus Bezeichnung (signifi-
cation), the Sinnhorizont (horizon of significance;
cf. Trabant 1975, pp. 277-285), independent and
dependent meanings ("selbständige und unselbstän-
dige Bedeutungen"), and "Logik der Bedeutungskate-
gorien" truly belong to a his tory of German
semiotics.
German phenomenology, deriving from Hus-
serl's ideas and promoted by his students, has
not yet been treated sufficiendy from a semiotic
point of view. Husserl's publications and still
unpublished manuscripts cover such a wealth of
semiotic topics that symposia on Husserl could
become a bonanza for semioticians.
In connection with Carnap, Tarski, and Gödel,
Hans Hermes (1912-) presented his Semiotik
(1938) as a system ofaxioms from which all
sentences belonging to a general theory of Zei-
chengestalten (sign forms) may be developed, and
by means of which all concepts can be defined
and any syntax of any special 1anguage can be
constructed (Hermes, 1938, p. 5).
178 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
Hermes insisted on the leere Gestalt (empty
form). It seemed easier for hirn to handle a the-
ory with a Zero-Gestalt (zero form). Hermes
regarded Verkettung (adjunction, cf. Walther,
1974, p. 143) and Substitution (substitution) as
the most important concepts of his Semiotik. (Ver-
kettung was also one of Tarski's basic concepts.)
Hermes used substitution less universally than
Quine.
The history of semiotics as a scientific disci-
pline corresponds, on the one hand, with the
institutional framework of that discipline in the
country concerned, which will be described in
section III, "Institutionalization." On the other
hand, it is dependent on research projects at
universities and publication possibilities in the
publishing houses of that country, as well as on
the availability of internationalliterature in the
field.
1. Austria
For a long time there were no semiotic research
projects at the universities; in 1983, however, a
project entitled "Zeichentheorie und Zeichen-
praxis" was announced. Yet publishing houses
remain uninterested in semiotic problems. Inter-
national literature in semiotics is only available
when (as for the Vienna Congress) exhibitions
have been organized, but would never be ordered
by the bookshops themselves; they are not even
available in the university libraries.
2. East Germany
The start, after World War II, was good for
semiotics, and interest in the field was keen dur-
ing the sixties. University institutes were much
better equipped for research than in the West,
especially for the formalized branches of the dis-
cipline. But in the seventies everything changed:
a fear of formalizing human life too much swept
away semiotics, equipment had to be given away.
This statement would al ready be politically dan-
gerous for those colleagues who gave me the
information.
Publishing houses are not interested in semiot-
ics. In the Gesamtkatalog-DDR, the index ofbooks
available from East German publishing houses,
the keyword "Semiotik" does not appear. Inter-
nationalliterature is not available at bookshops,
but it seems to be present in university libraries
and institutes. Reference lists contain interna-
tional semiotic publications even if the authors
do not make use of them in the text.
3. West Germany
University chairs for semiotics are planned.
(The offerings in semiotics at West German,
Austrian, and Swiss universities are investigated
each year by the author and the results published
in Zeitschrijtjür Semiotik.) Projects are still co m-
bined with other disciplines such as human com-
munication, linguistics, literature, information
theory, or data processing. Publishing houses are
slowly becoming interested in semiotics; in the
Verzeichnis liifCrbarer Bücher, 1981/1982, the index
of available books used by German booksellers,
we find 76 books under the keyword "Semiotik."
The catalogue for 1982/1983 has divided the field
between Semiotik and Zeichen, together listing
about 80 books. University bookstores organize
exhibitions of national and international semiotic
literature in connection with semiotic meetings
at their universities; they keep these books in
stock for sale, but they do not yet order them on
their own initiative from the publishing houses.
In university libraries and state libraries, more
than in university institutes, international
semiotic publications are found in the original
American, French, Italian, and Russian versions
as well as in German translations.
B. The German Tradition in the
Theory and Application of Signs
The German tradition in sign concepts, as well
as in proposals for the use of signs in philosophy,
sciences, and the arts has always been rich. But
we do not want to call this tradition "his tory of
semiotics. "
In the period of German rationalism, reftec-
tions on signs were indispensible constituents of
philosophical treatises, and from that time on,
such reftections have been numerous in Germany.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
defined signum as something perceptible from
which something imperceptible may be derived.
For Leibniz, signs presuppose a being con-
sciously using them. A "character" is a visibly
perceptible and producible sign. To think means
to relate and to substitute "caracteres" like visible
words and pictures. Leibniz considers signs as
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
instruments for metaphysical cognition, includ-
ing the cognition of the deficiencies of human
intelligence. Leibniz deals with signa especially
in his dissertation De Arte Combinatoria (I666)
and in Characteristica Universalis (1667) (cf. Leib-
niz 1930 and 1966). I
Christian Wolff (1679-1754) trans la ted nor-
mallanguage into a rationallanguage, an "ideal
scientific language."2
Hermann S. Reimarus (1694-1768), the foun-
der of modern animal psychology, expected indi-
viduals to protest against general rules for sign
use. Further research into his published findings
could be useful. cl
Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) distinction
between Bild and Schema, and his epistemological
remarks on sense perception 4 and experience
remain essential, and not only in Germany.
Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777) theoretically
tried to support Leibniz's claims, but saw him-
self restricted to verballanguage, though he con-
sidered it a "defective tyrant" (Lambert, 1764).5
Johann Gotdieb Fichte's (1762-1814) "sche-
matism of the picture" contains the idea of lan-
guage as the expression of our thoughts by
arbitrary signs. For Fichte, our reality is a pic-
ture reality; a system of knowledge is a system
of mere pictures. 6
The inftuence of Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767-1835) on modern linguistics is too weIl
known to require stress here. For Humboldt, lan-
guage is not the work of a few persons but the
activity of a community. It is an active ema-
nation (energeia) of the human spirit, not a prod-
uct (ergon) of activity. The human being only
understands himself after having tested the intel-
ligibility to other beings of what he says. Inno-
vations can sprout from the simultaneous activity
of speakers; the actual status of a civilization is
discernible from the state of the language used. 7
Kar! Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832),
who had a considerable inftuence in Spain and
'On Leibniz see Poser (1979), Heinekamp (1976).
'Cr. Arndt (1979).
"The Hanser-Verlag Munich is preparing a new edition of
Reimarus's publications (Reimarus, 1979-).
'Cr. Lange-Seidl (1976c).
"On Lambert see Hubig (1979) and Coseriu (1972), vol. 2,
pp. 140-149.
IiCr. Oehler (1981) on Fichte.
7S ee Humboldt (1963), pp. 191-203,217-229,384-440; Cos-
eriu, "Über die Sprachtypologie Wilhe1m von Humboldts," A plant and an animal may be so constructed
in Coseriu (1972), pp. 107-135; Conte (1976).
179
Latin America (where Krausismo is a philo-
sophical direction), proposed a human language
(Wesenssprache) which should avoid the mistakes
of naturallanguages. I t should have first, an oral
exponent and second, a written exponent which
does away with the traditionalletter system. The
Wesenssprache should be transferred into nonver-
bal sign systems for various human domains (cf.
Krause 1890 and 1901).
Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848) demands sim-
ple signs for all fields, to provide surveys of them
and to avoid language redundancy. He wants
these signs to be easy to represent, free from
secondary notions, and readily distinguishable
(Wissenschaflslehre sections 336, 640, 644). He
rejects different signs for one concept, but con-
siders it a more serious mistake to have fewer
signs than concepts. A purely metaphorical use
of signs could not exist in the framework of Bol-
zano's Wissenschaflslehre (1837/1970).
With Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) our survey
on German sign tradition enters the 20th cen-
tury. As professor of physiology, psychology and
philosophy, Wundt in 1879 founded the first
German laboratory for experimental psychology
in Leipzig. His comparison of Neapolitan and
West Indian gestures, newly published under the
English tide Language of Gestures (1921/1973),
must be seen in the framework of his favorite pro-
ject, the Völkerpsychologie (ethnopsychology). The
ten published volumes of this (1900-1920) need
to be investigated from a semiotic point of view.
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) dis tinguishes
between Sinn and Bedeutung, a distinction which
has remained crucial for semiotics and semantics
ever since. His opposing of objects and their
functions (which can be true or false values for
the objects), his "Formelsprache des reinen Den-
kens" (language of formulae for pure thinking),
in which sentences involve multiple generality,
are equally important (Frege, 1879/1964).
Jakob von U exküIl (1864-1944), a teacher of
Konrad Lorenz, has emerged as one of the fath-
ers of modern ethology as a result of his research
into the relationship of organisms to their envi-
ronment, the integration of animals in their sur-
roundings. In U exküIl's Bedeutungslehre (1934/
1970) the relation between the subject and the
bearer of significance is guaranteed by the anat-
omy of the animal species (U exküIl, 1970; p. 171).
as to suit each other. On the basis of this natural
180 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
law, Uexküll decides that there cannot be a
development of species from the imperfect to the
perfect (p. 173). Decidedly, Bedeutung is a natural
factor everywhere. Further, Uexküll's idea that
apart of the body cannot be regenerated when
its function no longer exists might hold some
relevance for sign systems and their existence in
cultures.
According to U exküll, actions are not mere
movements but consist of Merken and Wirken
(noting and effecting) (in German, both verbs
are bundles of meaning). Actions are not
mechanical, but are controlled by significance
("bedeutungsvoll geregelt," p. 178).
Even in his first publication Richard Gät-
schenberger (1865-1936) had al ready embarked
on the study of sign perception. His main book
was called Symbola. Anfangsgründe einer Erkenntnis-
theorie (1920). Some of the Leitmotive published
therein display Gätsclienberger's views. Sym-
bols consist in signs; symptoms are not signs; the
deepest questions are sematological ones. 8 Gät-
schenberger's book Eine Absage an die Philosophie
(1932), that is, a break with existing philosophy,
was reprinted in 1977 under the tide Zeichen,
Fundamente des Wissens, and is intended as a sug-
gestion for modern sign-oriented scientific methods.
From 1918 on, Karl Bühler (1873-1963) was
interested in the Leistungen (efficiency) of lan-
guage which we now tend to call "functions" (if.
Busse, 1975, pp. 207). In the twenties, Bühler
was distinguishing "Kundgabe (manifestation),
Auslösung (initiation), Darstellung (expression)"
(Bühler 1927, p. 51). Finally, in his best-known
book, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der
Sprache (1934), the functions of language are
called "Ausdruck," "Appell," and "Darstellung"
(expression, appeal, and presen ta tion). The
interactivity of the "Sprachgerät" (Bühler, 1934,
p. xxiv) is now called Organonmodell.
For Bühler, every action of an animal or human
being is actuated by signals (Bühler, 1934, p. 25).
The complex verbal sign is a symbol because it
is attached to objects and circumstances; it is a
symptom due to its dependence (Abhängigkeit) of
asender; and it is a signal because it appeals to
the hearer by actuating his outer or inner behav-
ior (Bühler, 1934, p. 28).9
HThe "Leitmotive" are edited in the reprint of Zeichen, Fun-
damente des Wissens (1977), p. 175.
"For a critical commentary on Bühler's "Organonmodell" see
Busse (1975), pp. 222-228.
The Organonmodell, which in Bühler's words
means the interactivity of the Sprachgerät (instru-
ment of language/language device) (Bühler,
1934, p. 24), has inftuenced European linguistics
ever since. 10 Incidentally, Bühler's Ausdruckstheo-
rie (1933) has nothing to do with, "history," but
with the face and its expressive motions and
functions. 11
Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) wanted to make
it possible to regard culture as an objective real-
ity through his concept of "symbolic forms," a
claim which has been evaluated as a semiotic
transformation of both traditional philosophy and
cultural studies. Cassirer distinguishes three
functions for the symbol: expression, presenta-
tion, and meaning. For hirn, the sign is not in ci-
dental to the thought, but its necessary and
essential instrument. 12
I am currently preparing a publication on the
importance of the Vienna Circle for semiotics,
with reftections on how electronic data process-
ing could have developed differently on a general
signbasis instead of a combination of language
and computer techniques, if the Vienna Circle
had not been disbanded for political reasons.
According to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-
1951), what is common to thinking and to being
can be seen or shown by symbols. After having
exercised a widespread inftuence on the arts and
scientific disciplines, the language games are
being discussed at the moment because of their
tautological character. German semioticians and
linguists have recently raised doubts as to whether
Wittgenstein's liquidation of sign concepts by
action does not rather destroy than construct a
sign theory. The Wittgenstein Symposia at
Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, ought to be
attended by semioticians.
As an analytic philosopher Rudolf Carnap
(1891-1970) assigns concepts like truth and
10Most German linguists are influenced by Bühler's Orga-
nonmodell, all teachers of schools with curricula in com-
munication or in linguistics have used and explained it,
and in Germany it has been considered one of the foun-
dations for language and other sign systems.
IIThe subtitle of the book has often been quoted erroneously
as "Das System an der Geschichte ('history') aujgezeigt" (cf.
Eschbach 1974, p. 53, no. 1265), instead of an der Gesichte
(the face).
12Cassirer distinguishes three manners of the function of
symbols: the function of expression, the function of pres-
entation, and the function of meaning, On Cassirer, espe-
cially on these functions, see Paetzold 1981, pp. 93-96.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 181

logical congruence to semantics (Carnap, 1972, First Semiotic Colloquium in Berlin, 1975, he
p. 10), and allocates the science of language to sent a telegram in which he regretted his absence
semiotics (1942, p. 9) whereas in other circum- and stated that "German thought has played
stances he claims that semiotic analysis is a task such an important part in the his tory of this
of philosophy (1942, p. 250). field," namely semiotics (Posner, 1977, p. 10).
As noted earlier, Husserl's ideas and the Ger-
man phenomenology derived from them and fos-
tered by his students have not yet been sufficiently 3. Saussure and Structuralism
investigated within the framework of a semiotic Saussure's structuralism is still alive among
tradition in Germany. German linguists. Structuralism has been
regarded as asolid foundation for linguistics by
Eugenio Coseriu (Tübingen) and his students
C. International Influences
who are professors at German universities: Horst
1. Charles S. Peirce Geckeler (Münster), a specialist in semantics;
Brigitte Schlieben-Lange (Frankfurt), special-
For two decades, philosophers at the Univer-
izing in sociolinguistics and linguistic pragmat-
sity of Hamburg have been interested in Peirce's
ics; Jürgen Trabant (Freie Universität Berlin),
Collected Papers. Among them was Elisabeth
one of the early German semioticians; Harald
Walther, who brought her interest in Peirce to
Weydt (Freie Universität Berlin), specializing in
Stuttgart and won Max Bense over to Peirce's
particles. Hansjakob Seiler (Köln) and Harald
position. Together they worked out for the Stutt-
Weinrich (München) are well known represen-
gart school what has been called the Basistheorie
tatives of the structuralist direction in German
of semiotics (on the Stu ttgart school, see
linguistics, both with a certain interest in semiot-
section III. D. I, below).
ics. A new impulse for the Saussure tradition in
Although the Hamburg philosophers have
Germany has come from E. F. K. Koerner's stay
always gone back to the original Collected Papers,
at Regens burg Uni versi ty 14 and from Georg
Apel's introduction to the German edition of
Stötzel (Düsseldorf) and his students Ludwig
Peirce has had a constant influence on the
Jäger (Aaachen) and Christian Stetter (Aachen).
younger linguistic and semiotic generation in
Many Germans have become acquainted with
West Germany. Interest in Peirce is still
• 13 French structuralism, with the semiotic ideas of
growmg.
Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss,
through Günther Schiwy's books, Derfranzösische
2. Charles Mords Strukturalismus (1969), with texts by Saussure,
Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Jacques
Still in Jena, in the fifties, Georg Klaus and Lacan, which was a best-seller in the Rororo
Max Bense discovered Morris for themselves.
paperback series, and Neue Aspekte des Struktu-
Unfortunately, a translation which they had
ralismus (1971) which reported on the reception
arranged for could not be published. When start- of structuralism in Germany and aimed to
ing his West German career in Stuttgart Bense observe structuralism asa process in action in
continued his reflections on Morris's concepts of
its connection with linguistics, anthropology, and
slgn. theology.
Posner's and Eschbach's translations of Mor- German semiotics of architecture was attacked
ris have had considerable influence, especially by the Stuttgart School for having modelled itself
in the semiotics of literature. As with Peirce, the on Saussure's structuralism and the branch of
best known is Apel's introduction to Zeichen, linguistics which follows it. The Stuttgart School
Sprache und Verhalten (Morris, 1946/1973).
wanted Saussure's dichotomies replaced by
On the other hand, Morris has acknowledged
Peirce's trichotomies for the semiotics of
the German sign tradition. For the start of the architecture.

'''In the two volumes Zeichenkonstitution (Proceedings of the

La grande syntagmatique by Christian Metz is
Second Semiotic Colioquium, Regensburg), edited by still being discussed by German film semioticians.
Annemarie Lange-Seidl (l98Ia), the index shows far more
re'-rences to Peirce than to any other author. "Cf. Koerner's Bibliographia Sau55ureana 1870-1970 (1972a).
182 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
4_ Roman Jakobson
Jakobson's influence on German linguists and
semioticians is due to early German editions of
his articles and to his alterations of Bühler's
Organonmodell (see section I.B., above). For
Jakobson, the constitutive factors of verbal com-
munication between asender and a receiver are
context, message, contact, and code. Bühler's
complex verbal sign is replaced by the "mes-
sage": verbal signs are no longer symbols by
their being attached to objects; they are signs
which by their meaning are able to designate.
The remaining factors constituting the speech
event are conditions for the effectiveness of the
message.
Six language functions correspond to J akob-
son's six constitutive factors of verbal commu-
nication: For most German semioticians, the
emotive function refers to the speaker's attitude
toward the contents of his utterance. The refer-
ential function concerns the connection between
message and context. The phatic function serves
to start and maintain a communication act. The
metalinguistic function guarantees agreement on
the utterance. The poetic function reflects the
receiver's attitude toward the message, project-
ing the principle of equivalence from the selec-
tion axis to the combination axis. Finally, the
conative function is directed to the receiver. 15
5. Louis Hjelmslev
I agree that Hjelmslev's glossematic concep-
tion of the sign and his Inhalts- und Ausdrucksseite
(content and expression aspects) of the sign
influenced many German semioticians and
linguists.
From my studies and scientific work in Copen-
hagen I knew Hjelmslev and the original book
Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse, (1943/1966)
but I cannot remember there being anything on
semiotics in the book. The Danish original does
not use the concepts "semiotic" or "semiotics"
(Lange-Seidl, 1977b, p. 44, n. 18).
However the English version of Hjelmslev's
book by Francis J. Whitfield (1953), with its pro-
nounced semiotic accent, has had a great influ-
ence on German semiotics in literature, e.g., on
"See Roman Jakobson, "Linguistik und Poetik" (1960) in
Jakobson (1979), pp. 88-94.
Jürgen Trabant's Zur Semiologie des literarischen
Kunstwerks. Glossematik und Literaturtheorie (1970).
6. Umberto Eco
Jürgen Trabant deserves thanks for having
translated and transformed Eco's two books, La
struttura assente and Le forme de contenuto into one
German book, Eiriführung in die Semiotik (1972).
For many Austrians and West Germans this
really was a first introduction to modern semiot-
ics. From this book, theories considered to be
originally Eco's have been further developed. In
German publications on semiotics, the book is
often quoted as "Eco's Introduction to Semiot-
ics" and has contributed enormously to the rep-
utation of the discipline.
11. Applied Semiotics
A. Philosophy since 1945
German philosophy before 1945 has already
been treated in Section I. B., on the German
tradition of signs. I would have preferred to see
some of the names mentioned in what follows
placed under the title "tradition of signs" and
others under aseparate heading "philosophy"
rather than in the section, Interdisciplinarity in
Sign Theory. But as this would me an splitting
up philosophy too much, I decided to cover them
all in this section.
1. Austria
Among Austrian philosophers after 1945,
Rudolf Haller, now Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Graz, published the first article
on the sign tradition, "Das 'Zeichen' und die
'Zeichenlehre' in der Philosophie der Neuzeit"
(1959).16 He and his colleague Karl Achatz, Pro-
fessor for Sociology and History at the same uni-
versity, would be most apt to do fundamental
semiotic work on a large scale.
Paul Weingartner who has been Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Salzburg since
lnHaller, (1959).
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
1966, is considered one of the foremost specia1-
ists in the field of phi1osophy of science. 17 When
Weingartner was present at the Austrian Semiotic
Symposia (cf. Section III. B., below) he mani-
fes ted his interest in semiotic research. For the
International Research Center in Salzburg he
has organized colloquia in which sign problems
have been discussed. An an organizer of the 7th
International Congress of Logic, Methodology,
and Phi1osophy of Science, he gave large room
to linguistics and semiotics.
Ota Weinberger, Professor of Legal Philoso-
phy at the U niversity of Graz, has had consider-
able inftuence on young semioticians in the legal
fie1d (cf. section II. C. 4. b, below).
Ilmar Tammelo, of Estonian origin, the 1ate
Professor of Legal Philosophy at the U niversity
of Salz burg, considered semiotics "the discipline
of thought concerned with formalized languages
of signs such as logica1 calculi" (Tamme10, 1978,
p. 9). He believed that the problems discussed
in the first part of his book Modern Logic in the
Service ofthe Law (1978) are "syntactic," whereas
"semantic and pragmatic problems" in the sense
of Morris were discussed in the second part
(Tammelo, 1978, p. 10).
2. East Germany
Georg Klaus has tried to use cybernetics,
information theory, and semiotics for a general
methodology of sciences. In his Semiotik und
Erkenntnistheorie (1963, 2d ed. 1969) he begins
with Morris, whom he did not quite understand,
however, and did not accept. For Klaus, every
artificial 1anguage needs a natural 1anguage
which connects it to the means of social com-
munication. But when the artificial1anguage has
been constituted, it works without constant
recourse to the meta1anguage (Klaus 1969, p. 21).
Klaus considers Zeichenexemplare (sign-exemplars)
to be elements of dasses of abstraction, as weIl
as realizations of the sign form (Zeichengestalt) .
Each sign form may have many such realiza-
tions. A sign form is the structure of equivalent
sign patterns (Klaus, 1969, p. 58).
For Klaus, Syntaktik (syntax) describes the
relations among signs in a given 1anguage.
l7See Weingartner's Wissenschaftstheorie; val. I was published
in 1971, val. 2 in 1975.
183
Semantik describes the relations of the elements
of a certain language to the concepts and state-
ments presented by them, Sigmatik treats the
relations between the signs and the designated
objects or circumstances. (Klaus et al. 1969,
p. 722), and Pragmatik describes a language in
relation to the human beings using it (Klaus,
1969, p. 60).
These views were transferred from Klaus's
book to the artide "Semiotik" in the Kyberne-
tisches Wörterbuch which appeared in 1969 and
was edited by Klaus with other scientists, indud-
ing Manfred Bierwisch and Wolfdietrich Har-
tung (cf. Section II.C.2.c., below). The artide
on "Zeichen" in the same dictionary states that
sign is a "dass of equivalence of all physical
signals which refer to the same subject or factua1
situation .... Only signals which carry infor-
mation are signs" (Klaus et al., 1969, p. 721).
Iconic signs have a certain similarity with what
they designate, whereas semantic signs are ver-
bal signs, the most important of all. A condition
for the exchange of information is a common
repertoire. Signs have different functions, the
research into which is Semiotik. Sigmatic, syn-
tactic, semantic, and pragmatic sign functions
can be discerned (Klaus et al., 1969, p. 722, and
Kalkofen 1979, pp. 81-91).
The Philosophisches Wörterbuch (1964), and i ts
sixth edition (1969), both edited by Georg Klaus
and Manfred Buhr, also contain essential semiotic
concepts.
Wolfgang Segeth, one of Klaus's collabora-
tors, thought that for Klaus Semiotik was a gen-
eral theory of verbal signs and of their relations:
with each other, with thinking, with objective
reality, and with human beings. For his own
part, Segeth writes in his Elementare Logik (1971)
about language in science (1971, p. 13). Segeth
regards thinking as inherently in language.
Thoughts can only be stored by verbal means
(1971, p. 14). Semiotik is a subdiscipline of epis-
temology (1971, p. 15); it does not investigate
reallanguages, but problems which occur in all
languages (i.e., language universals). All signs
are material shapes which mean something and
designate something (1971, p. 15).
In his book Aufforderung als Denkform (Appeal
as a Form of Thinking) (1974), Segeth contin-
ually refers to Morris (1955) and to Klaus (1964).
Much of the book could be used as a foundation
184 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
to semiotic thinking, and not only in East
Germany.
Ernst Albrecht's Sprache und Philosophie (1975)
shows how German research in language and
sign theory is connected to European philosophy.
3. West Germany
Hugo Dingler (1881-1954) demanded a meth-
odology of science from a mathematical and
physical point of view; exact fundamental sci-
ences were his goal. 18 His construction of ideal
sciences using different sorts of Zeichen, Zeichen-
reihen (Dingler, 1955/1969, p. 127), ideas on
Musterbewegung (p. 143), and universal compar-
ative patterns for movement (p. 145) is useful for
modern semiotics.
Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen (a stu-
dent of Dingler), both professors of philosophy
at the University of Erlangen, published a small
book w hich since 1967 has served as an in tro-
duction to philosophical thinking for many
younger German scientists: Logische Propädeutik
oder Vorschule des vernünftigen Redens. From the
understanding of speech compared with the
understanding of actions, Kamlah and Lorenzen
turn to actions which are intended to be under-
stood-" Verständigungshandlungen." They call them
Zeigehandlungen (1967, p. 57), actions in which
something is shown by the use of signs. Com-
prehension leads from tacit agreement to explicit
terms (p. 58). Signs are "Zeigehandlungsschemata,"
schemata of action to show something (p. 62).
The transfer from Zeigehandlungen to Zeigehand-
lungsschemata consists in meaningful forms of
action processes, which may be repeated and
recognized-this transfer can be called an
abstraction (p. 99). It is to this chapter on "Sign
and Meaning: Schemata of Action" (pp. 94-100)
that Jürgen Trabant refers in his Elemente der
Semiotik in the chapter "Zeichen als Handlung"
(discussed below).
Friedrich Kaulbach distinguishes a physical
sign presentation (Zeichengebilde) from the pure
general sign (reines allgemeines Zeichen) in his Phi-
losophische Grundlegung zu einer wissenschaftlichen
Symbolik (1954, p. 96). According to Kaulbach,
the complete aetualization of symbols cannot be
achieved without the participation of a physical
18Hugo Dingler demanded an ideallanguage of science. See
Dingler 1949, pp. 27-31.
individuality; but the entire burden of symbolic
meaning rests exclusively on the pure sign
(Kaulbach, 1954, p. 96). For Kaulbach, the dif-
ference between an individual shape and the
general form of the sign, between the empirically
perceptible design and the pure schema, is
important. The pure figure is embedded in the
empirical perceptible form which should be
transparent through all special permutations. The
structure of presentation participates in the
structure of the pure sign.
Max Bense, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Stuttgart, developed his Basiszei-
chentheorie in connection with Peirce's sign tri-
chotomy. Bense and his students constantly stress
this sign trichotomy: the central sign relation,
the object relation and the interpretant relation.
A complete sign must have this trichotomy. Every
sign is an element of a sign repertoire and pre-
supposes a set of other signs to which it belongs.
To repeat a sign means to operate with it. Of
sign operations, the most important is the sub-
stitution of one sign for another. Adjunction
chains signs together, whereas the condensation
of signs into a new entity on a higher degree is
called superization, the product, a supersign. The
iteration of signs leads to a system of rules.
Semiosis is a process of sign production, sign
generation, and sign use which must not be con-
fused with sign transformation. 19
Wolfgang Stegmüller, Austrian by birth, Pro-
fessor at Munich University, in his weil known
two-volume, Hauptsträmungen der Gegenwartsphilo-
sophie, mentions Zeichen once in connection with
Husserl (Vol. 1, p. 61), once with Wittgenstein
(Vol. 1, p. 579), and Semiotik once in connection
with Carnap (Vol. 1, p. 414).20
Karl-Otto Apel, Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Frankfurt, reflected on the his tory
of problems as a history of concepts, even before
the appearance of his introductions to German-
language editions of Peirce and Morris. Through
these introductions Apel has influenced many
German students.
Jürgen Habermas is Professor of Social The-
ory at the University of Frankfurt. His "Vor-
bereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der
19Cf. Bense (1967) and Walther (1974), passim.
2°Since students of all disciplines consult these two volumes
to keep in touch with current philosophy, this attitude toward
sign-oriented philosophy is regrettable.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
kommunikativen Kompetenz" (1971 a) is an
amplification of Austin's theory of speech acts
(1963) and the presentation of dis course as a
support of problematic opinions and norms. The
article has been quoted in nearly every West
German publication on verbal communication
during the past ten years. Habermas is con-
vinced of the primacy of verbal signs. In his
opinion, nonverbal signs are "preverbal" and it
is "prescientific" to give them any consideration. 21
One of Lorenzen's students is Kuno Lorenz,
Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Saarbrücken, whose Elemente der Sprachkritik
(1970) has won hirn the consideration of lin-
guistically oriented semioticians in West
Germany.
It is certainly too early to determine the fu11
inftuence of hermeneutics, phenomenology, the
Frankfurt school, and the Erlangen school on
younger semioticians in West Germany, and even
a preliminary attempt to do so would fi11 another
book.
B. Interdisciplinarity in Sign Theory
Some German semioticians have given con-
sideration to interdisciplinary problems con-
nected with signs, without being philosophers. I
want to mention them in this section.
1. East Germany
At his Institute for Information Theory at the
Humboldt University, Berlin, Klaus Fuchs-Kit-
towski and his co11aborators have endeavored to
work· out sign theories for a11 scientific disci-
plines. Fuchs-Kittowski is also one of the leading
personalities at the renowned Institut für Infor-
mationswissenschaft, Erfindungswesen und
Recht at Ilmenau (Institute of Information The-
ory, Inventions, and Patent Law).
Franz Schmidt, of the Goethe- und Schiller-
Archiv at Weimar, in his book Zeichen und Wirk-
lichkeit (1966), asks some fundamental questions:
How can signs and reality be coordinated in a
clear way? Which sign systems represent which
21The author had a "discourse" on t1~is problem withJürgen
Habermas while preparing her manuscript for Approaches
10 Theories JOr Nonverbal Signs (1977b), where she presents
the opinion that nonverbal signs may be on a higher level
of abstraction than verbal signs.
185
reality? How can reality-distorting sign systems
be corrected?
2. West Germany
Part of what Helmut Schnelle published
belongs to the discipline of linguistics and will
be mentioned under that heading (in secÜon
II.C.2.c, below). But his book Zeichensysteme zur
wissenschaftlichen Darstellung (1962) is a funda-
mental reftection on sign systems appropriate for
scientific presentation.
Siegfried Maser is Professor of Systems
Research and Planning Theory at the Ge~!lmt­
hochschule in Wuppertal. His Numerische Asthe-
tik" (1970) offers new mathematical processes
for the quantitative description and evaluation
of esthetic conditions. Maser's Grundlagen der
allgemeinen Kommunikationstheorie (1971) will be
mentioned under the heading "Human Com-
munication," (section II.C.2.b). His article
"Arten der Superzeichenbildung" (1977) aims
at systematizing superization processes, which
he undertakes by the method of algorithmic alge-
bra. By synthesis we get supersigns, by analysis
subsigns (1977, p. 91). Complexity is an impor-
tant parameter for superization processes.
Jürgen Trabant planned his book Elemente der
Semiotik (1976a) as an introduction for students
of education. One chapter of the book "Zeichen
als Handlung" (57-101), starting from Kamlah
and Lorenzen (1967) (see above in section II.A.3,
"Philosophy since 1945"), has meanwhile taken
on a fundamental character for younger German
semioticians.
Trabant begins with the difference between
the German word Vorgang, which describes a
process such as sleeping, breathing, or blushing,
and the word Handlung, used for an intentional
action with a goal such as producing something,
constructing something, or driving a car (1976a,
p.57). For an action, responsibility must be
taken; it must be accounted for. If other persons
do not accept the reasons for our actions, com-
pulsory measures will be taken (p. 58). Most
actions fo11ow action patterns. There is a certain
kind of action whose intention is to cause under-
standing in another human being. Trabant, in
accordance with Kamlah and Lorenzen, ca11s
these Zeigehandlungen-semiotic actions or signs.
These Zeigehandlungen are co operative, that IS,
186 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
directed to other persons who are expected to
understand their meaning (p. 51).
The persons participating in the Zeigehandlung
must have 1earned it; it must be their common
property (p. 52). Zeigehandlungen may have dis-
tinct dimensions of space, time, and person
(p.53).
Zeichen are schemes of action, Marken are
"erstarrte Zeigehandlungen," namely, solidified
indicating actions (p. 77), which relieve human
beings of the need to repeat indicating actions
(p. 77). So Trabant divides the "semiotic field"
(Eco) into direct indicating actions (Zeichen) and
indirect indicating actions (Marken). Direct indi-
cating actions need notation to be actualized
again in similar situations. Marks can be used
in direct indicating actions. For Trabant, this
semiotic field is not a field of objects but of
actions, with synchronism as its distinctive fea-
ture (p. 79).
Though not himself German, Mihai N adin
(Providence) succeeded, with the original Ger-
man edition of his book Zeichen und Wert (1981),
in reintegrating the concept of "va1ue," which
the structuralists had long excluded, into Ger-
man semiotics.
In several articles, Annemarie Lange-Seid1 has
taken up general sign problems. She asks what
it means for a culture to have no signs for facts,
to have more signs for nonexistence than for
existence, in "Kein Zeichen ist auch ein Zeichen"
(1977a) and in "Signe du zero, zero de signe"
[1974] (1979b).
She wonders whether verbalization brings any
advantage when ascending from the level of
operation to the level of theorization, or whether
it is rather a retrogression from a high er level of
abstraction to a lower one, or to the level of
intelligibility, in "Grenzen der Transferierbar-
keit von Zeichensystemen" (1975b). "Transfe-
rierbare Zeichensysteme und das Wesen der
Kunst" (1975a) poses similar questions as to the
aesthetic effectiveness of signs.
She considers the steps from sign perception
to sign conception and vice versa in "De la
perception a la conception des signes" (1975c),
presents idio1ect as a multimedia opportunity for
the individual to act as a flexible identoid con-
tinuum, in "Idiolektkomponenten" (1978a). The
concept multimedia means use of units from more
than one sign system in one situation (cf. Hess-
Lüttich 1981b and 1982). The concept
identoid is used when the identity of individuals
or objects is submitted to changes due to time.
She extends the problem of individual scope to
the culturallevel in "Individuum und Zeichen-
realität" (1984b). Another paper, "Situations-
und Bedingungsabhängigeit von Zeichen"
(1978b) deals with the influence of situations
and circumstances on the meaning and use of
signs, whereas personal preferences, attitudes,
the effectivity of signs, sign integration, and sign
use are discerned as causes of passive and active
competence in "Passive und aktive Zeichenkom-
petenz" (1979a).
Lange-Seid1 has also edited two vo1umes on
Zeichenkonstitution (1981a). Among the questiqns
discussed in her introduction "Konstitutions-
begriffund Zeichenkonstitution" (1981b) and in
"Sign-Constituting Factors" (1983a) are: What
qualities must signs have to justify their use and
continuance? and, How are signs estab1ished in
groups, communities, and cultures? Another
problem is taken up in "The Ideal Sign" (1984a):
Is a sign ideal because it is perfect, or because
it is the counterpart to existing signs?
C. Fields of Application
The 1ate Peter Faltin, German specialist in the
semiotics of music, stated that "Every orga-
nization structure of sections and discip1ines
contradicts the main idea of semiotics as an
interdiscip1inary approach" (Faltin, 1978,
pp. 18).22 And yet, to divide an interdiscip1inary
science into discip1ines is a technica1 instrument
that must be emp10yed in a summary of this
kind. If we regard the perception, production,
use, introduction, mediation,.and constitution of
signs from the interdiscip1inary standpoint a10ne,
we wou1d never get beyond the section Sign The-
ory in Interdiscip1inarity and would do an injus-
tice to many approaches that are worthy of
mention. So let us say, again with Peter Faltin,
"Having finished this manuscript, I was informed of Peter
Faltin's sudden and unexpected death. Thus, I am glad to
have started this seetion with a quotation of his. He always
fought for an interdisciplinary science, and against building
up sections in the German Society for Semiotics.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 187
that "Specialization has always been the coun- (normative properties) (1975, p. 129), and tries
terpart of interdisciplinary integration: it may, to prove his statement "Die Genesis der Ordnung
mareover, be its prerequisite" (Faltin, 1978, ist das notwendige Gegenstück zur Entropie"
p. 19). (1975, p. 340), that is, the genesis of order is the
We want to begin with a discipline in which necessary counterpart to entropy, by examples
an exact demarcation of scientific fields is in which symptoms and signs are not exactly
extremely difficult: biology, the science of life. distinguished.
There are scientists who restrict themselves to East Germany. With the initiative of the Inter-
one kind of living being: to plants, to animals, national Committee on Biological Acoustics
to human beings. Other scientists proceed from founded in 1956, and by means of audiovisual
lower to higher farms of life, some stating inde- aids, bioacoustics was able to develop quickly.
pendent rules of behavior for each kind of living The bioacoustic laboratory of the Institute for
being, others trying to transfer rules from lower Zoology at Humboldt University, Berlin, used
to high er forms, or vice versa. The principles Günter Tembrock's book, Tierstimmen. Eine Ein-
they use may lead to another field: ethology. For fohrung in die Bioakustik (1959) as an introduction
still other scientists, it is the name of the dis ci- for students. While getting acquainted with
pline itself that decides their principles of semiotics, Günter Tembrock concentrated on
research: wh at makes a living being and dis tin- animal communication (see below, section
guishes it from dead material? Is such a distinc- II.c.2.a).
tion possible at all? A further question, how West Germany. To begin with, let us recall the
disturbances in the life process can be identified complex attitude toward living beings outlined
and cured, leads to another field: medicine. in Jakob von Uexküll's publications, as men-
Finally, the question of the differences between tioned above in section I.B. 23
living beings and weil functioning machines gives More recently, the group LOG ID has devel-
rise to a new field: cybernetics. oped a model to investigate how far human beings
Semioticians are interested whenever the are able to live in harmony with plants (Kram-
answers to these questions postulate symptoms pen et al., 1981, and see below, section II.c.3.f,
(signs perceived but not set) relaÜve to the "Archi tecture").
behavior of each kind of living being, symptoms Hansjochem Autrum, Director of the Zoolog-
relative to the transfer of rules of behavior across ical Institute of Munich University, has done
species boundaries, symptoms for disturbances research in zoology and in human physiology
in the life process. But more so, they want to concerning nerves, sense organs, and brains as
know the level of existence at which living beings perceptors, transport organs, and producers of
begin to be able to perceive and use innate sig- signs (cf. section II.c.2.a, below, Animal
nals, as weil as the level at which they become Comm unica tion).
able to create and use signs. These questions lead
on to other scientific fields, to neurophysiology
and neuropsychology, where perceptors and sign- b. Medicine. Difficulties still arise in Ger-
producing organs, nerves, and chemical proc- man-speaking countries from the fact that med-
esses for the transport of signs are analyzed. icine continues calling symptomatology Semiotik.
The next section will deal with communica- This may be the reason why quite weil known
ton, both animal and human. German semioticians still have difficulties in dis-
tinguishing between symptoms and consciously
set signs.
1. Sign and Nature Austria. Leo Navratil, director of an asylum
for mental patients in Lower Austria (Kloster-
a. Biology. Austria. Rupert Riedl, Director neuburg) has used his contact with the patients
of the Zoological Institute, University of Vienna,
in his book Die Ordnung des Lebendigen (1975), "Dietmar Todt (Berlin) writes in the tradition of U exküll
comprehends signs as NormeigenschaJten in his book Das Leben-Werden und Vergehen (1972).
188 AN NE MARIE LANGE-SEIDL
to test their abilities in literature and visual arts,
and to encourage their creative activities. A short
film on "Zeichen tests im Behandlungsverlauf von
Psychosen" (1965) has a double meaning in Ger-
man: Tests in drawing (zeichnen) are shown, but
on the other hand semiotic (Zeichen-) methods
are used.
In the same year, Navratilpublished the book,
Schizophrenie und Kunst (1965) and a year later,
Schizophrenie und Sprache (1966). In both books-
which were bestsellers in West Germany-the
author pleads for the creativity of mental patients,
and compares their pictures, drawings, and
poems with modern art and literature.
For Erwin Ringel, the Viennese Professor of
Medicine and specialist in suicide prevention,
failures in human communication are the pri-
mary causes of suicide. In his book Das Leben
wegwe1ftn? Reflexionen über Selbstmord (1978), com-
munication is presented as a multimedia system.
West Germany. Thure von U exküll is not only
the editor of his father's publications (cf. Jakob
von Uexküll, section I.B, above), but has done
his own research in psychosomatics. His contri-
butionto the Milan Congress of 1974, "Signs,
Symbols, and Systems" (197gb, pp. 487-492)
presents signs and symbols from a psychoso-
matic point of view. For Thure von Uexküll,
signs represent actual processes; symbols rep-
resent facts independent of their actual presence.
Difficulties in psychosomatics may result from
mistakes in translation between sign systems and
symbol systems (p. 490).
C_ Ethology. Ethological research cannot
be carried out by individual scientists alone; it
needs organization. So, Max Planck Institutes
for Ethology have been established in West Ger-
many: Max-Planck-Institut rur Verhaltensphy-
siologie at Seewiesen, Bavaria, and its branch
(Humanethologie) at Percha, Bavaria. Most of
the ethologists working in these institutes have
studied zoology, biology, or cultural disciplines
in relation to which they are able to investigate
human behavior. Sometimes they have trouble
freeing themselves from the attitudes and view-
points of these disciplines.
The leading West German ethologists, Kon-
rad Lorenz and Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, are both
Austrians by birth, and have both studied zool-
ogy (see below under Animal Communication,
section II.C.2.a, for chronological order).
Konrad Lorenz's work at the Seewiesen Insti-
tute can be easily understood, considering that
he lived with animals for many years, and that
the three scientists who inftuenced hirn most were
Jakob von Uexküll (see section I.B, above), the
bird specialist Oskar Heinroth (1871-1945),21
and Kar! von Frisch (see below).
American critics have attacked Lorenz for his
distinction of Instinkt and Lernhandlung in animals
and human beings (cf. Wieser, 1976, p. 62). He
hirnself has substituted "adaptive modification"
(Lorenz, 1975) for Instinkt.
Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt is responsible for
human ethology at the Max Planck Institutes of
Seewiesen and Percha. As one of Lorenz's stu-
dents, he has done research in animal behavior.
He points to the fact that many animals become
more aggressive in isolation. That means that
communication is necessary for their well-being.
To study human behavior, Eibl-Eibesfeldt has
undertaken many expeditions to human societies
far from the path of tourists and from modern
civilization. He has stated that with human
infants the facial expressions for different emo-
tions are much the same in all cultures, and has
shown in several films that forms of greeting,
welcoming, and thanking are similar over wide
distances.
In my opinion, Eibl's films are much more
semiotic than his books (see section II.C.2.a,
below).
Wolfgang Wies er is Professor of Zoology,
Ecology and Physiology and Director of the
Institute for Zoophysiology at Innsbruck Uni-
versity. He does not work for the Max Planck
Institute and he has lived neither with animals
(Lorenz) nor with "primitive" tribes (Eibl-
Eibesfeldt) for as long a time as these two sci-
entists. His books are much more theoretical.
Wieser's Organismen, Strukturen, Maschinen (1959)
will be mentioned below (section 2.C.l.e,
"Cybernetics"). His paperback, Genom und Gehirn.
Information und Kommunikation in der Biologie (1970,
1972) was a bestseller in its West German edi-
tion. It is a collection of articles drawing anal-
ogies between genetic information stored in the
living cell which causes biological and chemical
reproduction on the one hand, and verbal com-
munication and the processing of information,
240skar Heinroth and his wife used methods wh ich we can
call semiotic (Heinroth and Heinroth, 1924-1931).
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
on the other, i.e., the proportion of Genom (gen-
ome) and Gehirn (brain).
Wieser's main idea is this: Storing experience
guarantees that the interaction of organism
and environment can enter the current program
of the organism (1970, 1972, p. 26). In his
article on the large brain of dolphins, their
complete acquaintance with motoric activity is
the exact equivalent of their complete perception
of the environment (Wies er, 1970, 1972, p. 36-
43).
Wies er believes that human beings lack innate
instincts, but that their behavior lies in an innate
program which develops in mutual interaction
with environment; environment is necessary to
actualize latent structures. But he admits that
the determination of these structural compo-
nents is an unsolved problem (1976, p. 76).
d. Neurophysiology, Neuropsychology.
East Germany. Lothar Pickenhain was invited to
attend the Erfurt Symposium in 1959 to repre-
sent the neurophysiological position. In the pro-
ceedings (Meier, 1962), he states that wh at
Pavlov calls the "second signal system" co m-
prises all "semiotic systems," that is, all system-
atic relations in which it is not the immediate
character or the stimulus that is the point at issue
for the re action of a human being, but its con-
ceptual contents. Among all these semiotic sys-
tems, language is the primary and the leading
one, whereas all the others have a secondary,
derived character and can only be developed if
a verbal system exists (Meier, 1962, pp. 5-6).
We remember Egon Weigl presenting his
Deblockierungsmethode (method of deblocking) at
the Tenth Congress of Linguists in Bucharest
(1970b), an English version of which was pre-
sented at the Warsaw semiotic work giOUp in
1965 (1970a, pp. 287-290). The prior use of an
intact speech function or other communication
channel "deblocks" a word of the semantic field
in a disturbed speech function. A chain of dif-
ferent speech disturbances may be "deblocked,"
if all the intact and disturbed capacities refer to
the same semantic field. Besides language, Weigl
uses pictures and gestures.
West Germany. After the war, Anton Leischner,
Director of the Rheinische Landesklinik für
Sprachgestörte at Bonn (Rhineland Regional
Clinic for Speech Pathology), himself a specialist
in language pathology, not only installed lin-
189
189
guists and communication specialists from among
the students of Coseriu and Ungeheuer for the
therapy of patients at his hospital, but also sup-
ported their scientific research. In 1974, he orga-
nized a Symposium in memoriam Carl Wernicke
(1848-1905), the German specialist for clinical
aphasia who discovered the sensory language
center in the human brain. One of the linguists
at Leischner's hospital was Günter Peuser, who
in 1976 edited articles on InterdisZiplinäre Aspekte
der Aphasieforschung, in which levels of disturb-
ances in language production are discerned which
had previously been neglected.
Otto-Joachim Grüsser from the Physiological
Institute, Freie Universität Berlin, and Rainer
Klinke have done research on the perception
processes of the human eye and ear. They edited
the proceedings of the Berlin meeting of cyber-
netics (Grüsser and Klinke, 1971). Grüsser's
article on "Neurobiologische Grundlagen der
Zeichenerkennung" (Grüsser, 1977) discusses
processes which may be responsible for the sym-
bolic representation of objects and their circum-
stances (1977, p. 17). According to Grüsser, the
symbolic abstraction of visual signs is achieved
to some degree independendy of the sense organs.
e. Cybernetics. Wolfgang Wieser con-
siders cybernetics "the scientific watchword of
our time" (1970, 1972, p. 51) serving as a link
between scientists in different disciplines. Infor-
mation problems in living organisms and in man-
made machines are thus connected. It is not only
semioticians who find that signs are indispen-
sable for these problems.
Austria. For a long time, Heinz Zemanek,
Vienna, has worked with IBM helping to solve
problems of cognitive processes in human beings
and machines. He has edited The Skyline rif Infor-
mation Processing (1972) and is convinced there
are formal modes in which Shannon's entropy
no longer exists.
Wolfgang Wieser, University of Innsbruck,
(see above, und er "Biology" [section a] and
"Ethology" [section c]) regards cybernetics from
a biological point of view. His Organismen, Struk-
turen, Maschinen (1959) is a synthesis of biological
experiences and reflections on system theory and
cybernetics.
One of the articles in Wieser's book, Genom
und Gehirn (1970) has the tide "Über alte und
neue Systematik." In it he notes that biologists
190 AN NE MARIE LANGE-SEIDL
and technicians come together for the discussion
of control systems under the rallying cry "cyber-
netics" (p. 51). The effects of complex systems
follow from the laws which control the modes of
connection between their elements (p. 53). As a
matter of principle, cybernetics requires a devel-
opment from static to dynamic structures, from
the transfer of energy to the transfer of infor-
mation (p. 54). The functional connections in
a system can only be represented in the form
of a circuit diagram (p. 54). But Wieser criti-
cizes those who take diagrams for reality
(p.68).25
Robert Trappl is Director of the Institute for
Biocybernetics and Bioinformation Theory at
Vienna University. He edited the series, Reports
of the Austrian Society for Cybernetics and was
coeditor with Franz Pichler of Progress in Cyber-
netics and Systems Research (1975). As an active
participant in Tasso Borbe's Viennese Symposia
on Semiotics, he seems interested in the field.
East Germany. Georg Klaus's Wörterbuch der
Kybernetik (1968-1969) has not only been used
in the GDR; the West German edition (1969)
has been a "must" in the FRG for students of
cybernetics, linguistics, economics, information
theory, and data processing. Sign concepts are
presented in the following articles: "Kommuni-
kation," "Kommunikationskette," "Meta-
sprache," "Modell," "Pragmatik," "Programm-
sprache," "Semantik," "Semiotik," "Signal,"
"Sprache," "Symbol," "Syntax," "Zeichen,"
"Zeichenerkennung," "Zeichengestalt, " "Zei-
chennormierung," "Zeichenreihe," "Zeichenträ-
ger," "Zeichenvorrat."
Günter Tembrock's book, Biokommunikation-
Informationsübertragung im biologischen Bereich (1971)
will be mentioned in the section on animal com-
munication (II.C.2.a, below).
Friedhart Klix has edited the Proceedings of
the Berlin Symposium of the Society for Psy-
chology (GDR), 1973, organized within the
framework of our discipline under the title
Organismische Informationsverarbeitung (1974). Some
of the participants take a semiotic point of
Vlew.
Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski has moved from a bio-
logical approach to an identification with data
r'Problems of "Zeichen und Realität" (Signs and Reality)
were discussed at the 1981 Hamburg Colloquium of the
German Society für Semiotics. (See Oehler, 1984 far
prüceedings. )
processing in Informatik und Automatisierung (1976).
For Fuchs-Kittowski, the distinction between
syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects pro-
posed by Morris and Carnap makes semiotics,
as a general theory of signs, an instrument suit-
able for both human communication and bio-
communication (1976, p. 47). The structural
conditions of the signal refer to their meaning,
that is, to the syntactic representation of signs.
Verbal elements coordinate meaning with sign
structures. The elements of human thinking are
not letters, but concepts presented syntactically
by sign-series, "Zeichenreihen" (p. 55).
Fuchs-Kittowski sees semiotics and data pro-
cesses as closely connected. Semiotics is con-
sidered one of the scientific disciplines which
creates the foundations for automated operations.
West Germany. The best known West German
book on cybernetics, in which signs are taken
into appropriate consideration, is Kar! Stein-
buch's Automat und Mensch (1961/1966). Stein-
buch, Director of the Institute for Data Processing
at Karlsruhe University, draws our attention to
German pioneers in cybernetics (I quote from
Steinbuch, 1966, pp. 336-340, adding informa-
tion about present academic status and recent
publications mys elf) :
• The German physicists Rudolf Clausius
(1822-1888) and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-
1906) developed the concept Entropie for
physics.
• Alexander Meissner discovered the princi-
pIe of feedback in 1913.
• Kar! Küpfmüller, Professor of Telecom-
munications at Darmstadt Technische
Hochschule, has developed electronic models
for processes in nerve cells at his institute
there.
• Richard Wagner, Professor of Physiology,
has worked on the connection between nat-
ural and technical processes (Regelprozesse).
• Konrad Zuse constructed the first opera-
tional computer at the Technical University,
Ber!in between 1937 and 1941.
Hermann Schmidt emphasized control
processes in plants, animals, and human
beings, a phenomenon which, seven years
later, was given the name cybernetics by
Norbert Wien er.
• Horst Mittelstaedt, Director at the Seewie-
sen Max Planck Institute (see above,
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 191

1I.C.1.c, "Etho10gy") and President of the artificial intelligence has remained a hermetic
German Society for Cybernetics, has inves- mystery for most Germans.
tigated the princip1e of "reafference." There are three university institutes which for
• W erner Reichard t, Director of the Max nearly two decades have had computers at their
P1anck Institute for Bio10gical Cybernetics disposa1 for scientific research in linguistics and
at Tübingen, has contributed to experimen- literature. At the Institute for Informatics at
tal brain research and mathematical bio- Stuttgart University, Rul Gunzenhäuser has
sciences. His publications on the worked as a specialist in literature (see section
neuroprocessing of sensory information and 1I.C.3.a, below), while Christian Rohrer has
movement perception in insects, and on the elassified Romance 1anguages using the system
processing of optical data by both organisms for generative and transformational grammar, as
and machines, have received international weil as semantics (cf. Coseriu, section 1I.C.2.c,
recognition. below).
• Wolf Dieter Keidel, Director of the Institute At the German Language Institute, Saar-
for Physiology and Biocybernetics, Erlangen brücken University, Wolfgang Haubrichs has
University, has investigated vibratory per- worked with cybernetic models for the his tory
ception, edited aseries on communication of literature and at the moment is doing very
and cybernetics and on the principles and interesting work with the Ritterrenaissance. Hans
practice of bionics, and has worked on aero- Eggers has used the system for his Elektronische
space research. Syntaxanalyse der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (1969).
• Johann Schwartzkopff, Professor for Com- His young collaborators Rainer Dietrich and
parative Physio10gy at Bochum University, Wolfgang Klein have become weH known through
has done research in mechano-reception, their book Computerlinguistik (1974). They think
inner-ear potentials, and dependence on that signs are used subconsciously, and have pre-
metabolism in the representation of infor- sen ted computational linguistics as an end in
mation in the nervous system. itself.
•Wi1helm Fucks, Aachen, has published arti- At the Institute for Mathematical-Empirical
eies on the mathematical theory of world Systems Research, Aachen, Burghard Rieger has
information, on the mathematical analysis worked as a linguist and communication spe-
of literary style (in Kreuzer and Gunzen- cialist, and has been in touch with semiotics for
häuser, 1965; see section 1I.C.3.a, "Litera- years (see section 1I.C.2.c, below).
ture," below), and on mathematicallaws in Felix von Cube, Professor of Pedagogics at
mUSlC. Heidelberg University, refers in his book Kyber-
netische Grundlagen des Lernens und Lehrens (1965)
Steinbuch himself admits that the problem of to Shannon and Wiener's rules of information
sign-identification is much better solved by and redundancy, and to Bense's sign concept,
human beings than by machines (1966, p. 307). whereas for supersigns and supersign red und an-
The structure of invariants in the human eye cies he refers to Piaget. He combines these con-
leads to Gestalt-perception (p. 98). Machines cepts in his formulation of pedagogical rules (see
have more difficu1ties in recognizing signs than section II.C.4.a, "Pedagogy," below).
in reproducing and transmitting them (p. 60).
The fact that Steinbuch's Automat und Mensch 2. Sign and Interaction
has been in the hands of numerous teachers at
all types of schools for fifteen years has consol- a. Animal Communication. Austria and West
idated an attitude in young people toward the Germany. In German universities as recently as
capacity level of data processing which is diffi- 1972, a person would have been considered
cult to overcome. As no other book on cyber- unscientific if he ta1ked about animal
netics has received the publicity of Automat und communication outside the zoological faculty.26
Mensch, educated people in West Germany do 26
1 remember being criticized in 1972, when, at the Academy
not realize there has been any development in of Dillingen, in a training course which I organized for
sign perception and production since it was pub- college teachers, I tried to show connections between ani-
lished. Thus the present state of cybernetics and mal communication and psycholinguistics.
192 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL

Since Frisch, Lorenz, and Tinbergen received siveness of bees transported to far-away conti-
the Nobel Prize in 1973, however, this has nents may be explained by considering Kar! von
completely changed. Animal behavior is treated Frisch's bee dances as regional sign systems which
as a measure for human behavior in the are susceptible to disorientation with respect to
publications of the Max Planck Institutes for food collection. 27
Physiology and Human Ethology at Seewiesen In 1974, von Frisch published a book on Tiere
and Percha, Bavaria. als Baumeister. Animals as architects ought to be
In this domain, West Germany and Austria investigated from a semiotic point of view.
cannot be separated. The most famous scientists Konrad Lorenz was born in Vienna in 1903,
were born in Austria and have worked most of first worked in Austria and in 1961 was named
their lives in Germany. Director of the Max Planck Institute for Behav-
Kar! von Frisch (1886-1982) was born in ioral Physiology at Seewiesen, Bavaria. He is
Vienna and was Professor and Director of the also professor at the Universities of Vienna and
Zoological Institute at Munich University from Salzburg. His books, Er redete mit dem Vieh, den
1925. In 1914 he began to concentrate on honey Vögeln und den Fischen (1949/1964), and So kam der
bees; his most famous publication is a book on Mensch auf den Hund (1950/1965) were bestsellers
the dance language and orientation of these but they were not considered scientific publi-
insects ( 1965). cations. Lorenz's grey geese have become almost
Exact investigations as to the receptors of proverbial. Now his books are the foundation of
signals and the collaboration of sense receptors scientific research at the Institute for Human
belang to zoology (cf. Burkhardt, 1966, Part I). Behavior.
The idea that received movements may change Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt was born in Vienna in
behavior and regulate directions of movement 1928 and is now Director of the Department for
would not in itself amount to semiotics, but would Human Ethology of the Max Planck Institute
still be behaviorism. The investigation of bee for Behavioral Physiology at Percha, Bavaria. In
dances, on the other hand, is semiotics, even if his books human beings have "gone to the dogs,"
von Frisch did not call it that. A honey bee their behavior is measured by Lorenz's grey geese.
returning to her hive informs her hivemates as But his more than one hundred films are a bon-
to the distance, direction, and quantity of her anza and can be used for semiotic classification
find through an exact rhythm, through exact as weIl as for semiotic models of general human
movements in an exact direction. In imitating behavior in different cultures, and different
the dance a number of times, proportional to the behaviors in particular cultures.
quantity of food found, the be es internalize the Hansjochem Autrum, Director of the Zoolog-
model before they set out in search of pollen. ical Institute of the U niversity at Munieh, is a
And this model helps them to find what had been specialist in sense organs and neurophysiology.
announced to them. This reminds us of certain He has done research in receptors of lower ani-
rites, still practiced by human cultures remote mals, and in the comparative physiology of color
from modern civilization, which have been vision. In Sprechen und Verstehen im Tierreich (1955),
investigated by Eibl-Eibesfeldt. Autrum asks whether systems of universal sig-
It is thought-provoking to leam from von Frisch nals can be observed in the animal wor!d. He
that Italian bees have a different rhythm from answers this question for grasshoppers (1955,
German ones. The speed is lower for Italian bees. p. 10), in which the "song" of male rivals can
The round dance used by German bees for dis- be precisely distinguished from the wooing male
tances under a hund red meters signifies dis- and from the answer of the female. 28 More exactly
tances under ten meters for Italian bees. Different
dance figures stand for different distances. For
the same sort of bees, the same units are com- 27We may ask ourselves whether similar aggressiveness does
bined to generate different sign systems with dif- not result from migration of human groups to other ci vi-
ferent meanings in different geographie regions. lizations. These thoughts are subconsciously but constantly
reflected in Eibl-Eibesfeldt's books on human cultures that
We also know from these investigations that the up to now have not had any contact with modern civilization.
crossing of "nationalities" of bees creates con- 28More on grasshoppers and their c6mmunication in Burg-
siderable aggressiveness. The murderous aggres- hardt et al. (1966), 107-108.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
than in the domain of human beings, kinship
relations may be concluded from sign relations
among birds and mammals (Autrum, 1955,
p. 10).
Walther Gerlach, the famous Munich physi-
cist, edited Zeichen der Natur (Signs of Nature,
1972), with contributions by Autrum.
East Germany. In East Germany, Günter Tem-
brock, Professor at Humboldt University, Ber-
lin, is one of the few scientists who openly refers
to semiotics.
Tembrock's Tierstimmen (1959) is still a
description of biological facts and an introduc-
tion to bioacoustics.
His book on Verhalteniförschung (2nd ed., 1964),
is al ready an introduction to animal ethology.
He refers to Morris (p. 121), presents forms of
communication in the so ci al structures of ani-
mals (p. 305), and the color and form structures
of signal motions (p. 388). The connection with
West German and Austrian Verhalteniförschung is
obvious: Tembrock quotes Konrad Lorenz fifty-
four tim es and Eibl-Eibesfeldt thirty-five
times.
In his international book Biokommunikation:
Informationsübertragung im biologischen Bereich (1971),
Tembrock refers to Sebeok's research on animal
communication and gives considerable space to
what we call mimicry, the falsification of signals
by animals, that is, their arbitrary use of signs
(pp. 36,223,227,234,247,248).
For linguists, it is a pleasure to see that Tem-
brock simply presents the signs used for com-
munication by different animals and does not
speculate about Tiersprachen (animallanguages)
as "preforms of human languages" as does the
Austrian, Friedrich Kainz (1961).
b. Human Communication. In German-
speaking countries, the division between verbal
and nonverbal communication is relevant only
for East Germany. There is a difference in the
problems from country to country. For East Ger-
many, the concept of Kommunikation is only used
in connection with linguistics. Austria, on the
other hand, has institutions for research into
legal communication problems and communica-
tion problems between mass media and their
audiences. In West Germany, discussion con-
cerning verbal and nonverbal signs has dimin-
ished considerably in recent years. Communi-
cation is seen as a multimedia complex and
193
process,29 for which notation has been broadly
discussed by a number of research groups:
Thomas Luckmann and the faculty of sociology
at Constance University; the Max Planck Insti-
tute for Psychiatry at München-Schwabing; the
section "Multimediale Kommunikation" of the
German Society for Semiotics, und er the direc-
tion of Ernst W. B. Hess-Lüttich; and the Sec-
ond Semiotic Colloquium at Regensburg (see
Lange-Seidl, 1981 a).
As the concept Kommunikation was overused in
the sixties and early seventies, having been
adopted for curricula in every type of school,
German linguists try at present to avoid it. In
1977, Jürgen Ziegler called communication "a
paradoxical myth," and criticized its didactic
use.
East Germany. Wolfdietrich Hartung and a col-
lective of other authors see communication both
from a linguistic point of view and as a social
entity in their book Sprachliche Kommunikation und
Gesellschaft (1976). Within the framework of lan-
guage and its social tasks, connections between
linguistics and semiotics are presented: Semiot-
ics is considered a general sign themy; language
is the most important sign system and a basis
for many other sign systems derived from it
(Hartung, 1976, p. 96). For Hartung and his col-
leagues, a sign represents an object, and is related
to this object by designation, not casuaIly. Sign
systems can only playa role in social life when
the activities presuming the use of signs are
investigated (p. 97). The authors believe this to
be far beyond the claims and indeed the possi-
bilities of semiotics. When investigating com-
munication, the authors do not want to start
from the structure of language and to see com-
munication as a realization of this system; they
want rather to concentrate on communication as
an activity, and on the peculiarities of language
(p. 104). Hartung proposes methods of text com-
parison and meaning analysis, experiments in
inftuencing conditions for communication activ-
ity, and research into the dynamics of semantic
fields (p. 106). According to Hartung and his
team, every communicative activity is linked to
29In the German Society for Semiotics, communication by
components from more than one sign system, for example,
speech together with gestures and mimics, that is, by a sign
complex, has been studied ardously und er the direction of
Ernest Hess-Lüttich (cf. Hess-Lüttich, ed., 1982).
194 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
the use of natural language (p. 242). There is
an intention to influence one's communication
partner and to und erstand his intentions. One
must be aware of what one intends and of wh at
the interlocutor intends (p. 246).
Werner Neumann asks, How do communi-
cation actions become language actions? He
answers this question by referring to gramm ar
as a semiotic aspect of language (Neumann, 1980,
p.25).
For Manfred Bierwisch, language behavior
results from language knowledge and everyday
knowledge, whereas communicative behavior
results from the cooperation of both systems with
the knowledge of structures of social interaction
(quoted in Neumann, 1980, p. 30).
Austria. In his presentation .~f human com-
munication, Zur Philosophie des Uberlebens (1975),
Ilmar Tammelo, of Estonian origin and late Pro-
fessor at Salzburg University, uses the concepts
"signum," "significatum" and "designatum"
(1975, p. 101). For hirn "signum" is a physical
phenomenon which may be perceived by the
sense organs and is serviceable for human com-
munication (1975, p. 101). Without a "signum,"
human communication cannot be accomplished
(1975, p. 102). Tammelo does not believe in the
presence of a signum when a human being talks
to hirns elf (1975, p. 102). When the partner does
not accept the "signum," the talk may be called
bedeutungsleer (void of meaning) (p. 102). Tam-
melo explains the use of the concept Bedeutungs-
leere for legal purposes (pp. 103-112; for
Tammelo's influence on legal science, see below,
section II.C.4. b).
More and more, Austrian institutions for the
study of mass media and their effect on the audi-
ence are working with semiotic methods.
West Germany. Gerold Ungeheuer and his stu-
dents have built up an institute at the University
of Bonn, where communication has been studied
with new philosophical, physiological, psycho-
logical, and technical knowledge and methods.
Ungeheuer's book Sprache und Signal (1977) is
a collection of articles dating from 1959 to 1975
and therefore reflecting his main interest in pho-
netic problems as well as in phoneme classifi-
cation, in phonetic signals as well as in the
acoustic classification of speakers. Ungeheuer
always used exact sign classification for his pub-
lications, research, and teaching, but I do not
think he would have welcomed being called a
semiotician.
He regarded language and music under the
same aspect of functional vocal science, a com-
bination of physical signal structures (according
to De Groot) , psychocomplexes, and Gestalt-
qualities (cf. Ungeheuer, 1977, p. 263).
Günther Tillmann and Klaus Giiter Schweis-
thaI are working in a similar direction at Munich
University: communication research with a psy-
cholinguis tic tendency and data-processing
methods.
Klaus R. Scherer is located at the intersection
of semiotically oriented communication research
and psychology, the discipline in which he holds
achair at Marburg University. For the Handbuch
psychologischer Grundbegriffi (1977) Scherer worked
out the article on "Kommunikation." His books
and articles, published in Germany and Amer-
ica, deal with social interaction, nonverbal
behavior (1979), human aggression, social plan-
ning, dialogue analysis, personality markers in
speech, vocal communication of affect, and voice-
quality analysis.
Helmut Richter is well known for his publi-
cations on intonation processes, their patterns
and functions for discourse analysis, and prop-
erties of sign occurrences. His book on Grundsätze
und System der Transkription-IPA (G) (1973) is
helpful for the notation of speech and multi-
media communication. 30
Siegfried Maser takes credit for the most
semiotic book on communication theory: Grund-
lagen der allgemeinen Kommunikationstheorie (2d
ed.,1972). Among his foundations for a general
communication theory, Maser explains the sci-
ences for which communication has a certain
actuality. As a student of Bense, Maser presents
Peirce according to the Bense/W al ther in terpre-
tation, and the Bense/W al ther Basistheorie
according to Peirce's semiotics. This looks like
the usual vicious circle which we meet in all
Bense/Walther students. But Maser breaks out
of this circle with his own presentation of "clas-
sic" and "transclassic" argumentation in semiot-
ics. Sign is for Maser a process and a result
(Maser, 1972, p. 52), where a situation may be
lOcr. His and his wife Brigitte Richter's contribution to the
Regensburg Semiotic Colloquium: "Zur Abbildungstreue
von Transkriptionen," in Lange-Seidl (1981), vol. 2,
pp. 110-119.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
the premise for sign use, but also the cause of a
change in the sign use. According to Maser
(p. 52), a semiotic investigation must be made
into the adequacy of the sign, its degree of abstrac-
tion, of precision, of approximation, and into its
significant application for changing reality.
In his article for the proceedings of the First
Semiotic Colloquium in Berlin, "Arten der
Superzeichenbildung" (in Posner and Reinecke,
1977, pp. 83-106), Maser sees the use of signs
in a communicative process which aims at mutual
appreciation as a condition for conscious pur-
posive action. Maser wants superization to be
discussed as a process and as a result, but always
within the framework of communicative pro-
ces ses (1977, p. 83).
Maser distinguishes the goal from the content
and the form of a communication process (p. 84).
Communication as a process of human agree-
ment requires the transfer of messages which are
presented by signs. Mutual understanding can
only result if a common sign repertoire exists
(p. 89). While the classical approach aims at
supersign systems, Maser states, the transclass-
ical approach aims at the systematization of
superization processes. Through synthesis,
supersigns are produced, through analysis, sub-
signs; both supersigns and subsigns receive their
relative value from the communicative situation
in which they are used. The rules of human
communicative action practices will have to be
found. Without their intersubjectivity, commu-
nication as mutual agreement, as a social pro-
cess, would not be possible (p. 91).
After realizing the ways in which inadequate
reference, mutual attitude, human relations, the
ac tu al situation, the mutual ignorance of aims
or purposes are all causesfor the failure of com-
municati<;m, we canjudge how they inftuence the
production and reception of supersigns in areal
communication "game" (Maser, 1977, p. 101).
This knowledge can help us to overcome failures
caused by this inftuence (p. 102).
c. Linguistics. Many German linguists do
not care to be named in connection with semiot-
ics, even those structuralists who believe in lan-
guage as a sign system. As areaction to generative
grammar, several German linguists moved to
action theory. I t is high time for German lin-
guistics to let sign theory and action theory come
together.
195
Austria. Since 1973, Gaberell Drachman, Pro-
fessor at Salzburg University, has been organ-
izing linguistic meetings in Salz burg, where mul-
timedia ideas could be discussed. Linguists from
Austria and West Germany have been invited,
as weil as philosophers interested in semiotics
and linguistics.
At the University of Graz, Norman Denison
and Kar! Sornig have edited the Grazer Lingui-
stische Studien since 1976, with articles by Aus-
trian, West German, and Hungarian authors on
linguistic topics, an exceptionally high number
of which have semiotic relevance as weIl. The
Viennese Linguistische Gazette, however, has shown
no interest in semiotics up to now.
The Austrian linguist with the widest circle
of students and interests which can be called
semiotic is Otto Höfter. His father and his brother
were weil known representatives of the natural
sciences. He himself developed a thorough
knowledge in comparative language theory, in
philosophy (especially morphology) as weil as in
cultural his tory and folklore. He has had such a
wide range of interest and has always been so
full of ideas and linguistic examples to prove
them that, during his teaching activities at the
Universities of Kiel, Munich, and Vienna, he
has created a circle of students who have kept in
touch and who can recognize each other by their
mann er of argumentation and their open-mind-
edness with regard to new scientific methods.
Language change has always been a main
problem for Höfter. Biological factors as well as
cultural behavior have been investigated. He had
his students give their attention to common fea-
tures which can be called symptoms and signs.
Höfter was much interested in Tasso Borbes
Viennese Symposia in Semiotics, in which sev-
eral of his former students took an active part.
East Germany. Before the First International
Symposium "Zeichen und System der Sprache,"
at Erfurt in 1959, the participants were asked
nine questions, the first of which was: What do
you understand by a verbal sign? The answers
have been published in the Proceedings of the
Erfurt Symposium by its organizer, Georg Fried-
rich Meier (1961 b) . Wolfdietrich Hartung
(Meier, 1961b, pp. 69-73) and Werner Neu-
mann (pp. 115-117) head directly for the lin-
guistic sign, whereas Manfred Bierwisch (Meier,
1961 b, pp. 39-45) and Georg Friedrich Meier
196 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
himself (pp. 100-109) offer a more general con-
cept of sign which might also be used for sign
systems other than language. For Bierwisch, a
sign is a distinguishable form, perceptible by
sense organs. Signs arouse certain imaginations,
but these do not belong to the sign (p. 41). A
sign is defined as a socially conventionalized form
which serves as a means for the signalization of
meamng.
According to Meier's personal view (Meier,
1961 b, pp. 100-109), the sign concept is bound
to areal or potential act of communication,
though the outer form of the sign need not be
analyzed. In his, answer to one of the initial
questions Meier (1961, pp. 18-24) asks two fur-
ther questions concerning the sign problem:
(1) How do we get from the concrete level to the
abstract level, from the level of observation to
the level of theoretical constructs? (2) How does
a verbal form, that is, a perceptible utterance,
become relevant? To which event do certain lan-
guage phenomena owe their distinction of a var-
iant and of an invariant group? (1962b, p. 18)
For Meier, a sign system is a system of rele-
vant parts of signs, which means that the irrel-
evant parts have to be eliminated from the
relevant ones; they have to be experienced as not
being essential carriers of information, and are
subdued to a so-called restraint of differentiation
in an ontological process (Meier, 1962, p. 19).
In his summary of the second volume of the
Erfurt Proceedings Zeichen und System der Sprache,
Meier gives several suggestions which are still
relevant for semiotics.
In his book Das Zero-Problem in der Linguistik
(1961a) Meier quotes the internationalliterature
on the zero problem. He investigates cases where
the signal value approaches zero (p.54), and
asks: Is zero always zero? What is zero in math-
ematics need not be zero in linguistics; what is
zero in linguistics need not be zero in
neurophysiology.
A zero form is still a form, so it has a math-
ematical value "greater than zero." Forms are
often reduced to zero. But does this form becom-
ing zero still have the old signal value? In order
to overcome the contrast between communica-
tive intention and communicative effect, a change
may be necessary in the form used. This means
a change in the functionalload for the syntagma
(p.85).
In Das Zero-Problem in der Linguistik the sign is
understood as a minimal unit of a commum-
cative event (p. 169).
Meier is still one of the leading sign theore-
ticians in East Germany. He has the advantage
of knowing many languages; he is interested in
the arts, especially music, and is therefore not
only able to compare verbal sign systems, but
also knows who in East Germany and in other
countries is interested in signs at all.
Manfred Bierwisch has been the official rep-
resentative of East Germany in the International
Association for Semiotic Studies since its foun-
dation. Though a linguist of the systematic Frings
tradition, Bierwisch has always shown certain
semiotic and psycholinguistic interests, even
when writing on structuralism.
Many West German students of the late six-
ties became acquainted with structuralism
through Bierwisch's Kursbuch article on "Struk-
turalismus. Geschichte, Probleme und Meth-
oden" (1966), where he states that the mechanism
of 1anguage acquisition shou1d genera1ize in an
inductive way, that is, shou1d construct classes
of perception and associate them into signs or
sign complexes (1966, p. 133).
Abroad, Bierwisch's name became known
among linguists through his articles on "Seman-
tics" (1970) in Lyons' reader New Horizons in
Linguistics, and on "Generative Grammar and
European Linguistics" in Sebeok's Current Trends
in Linguistics (1972). These were solid introduc-
tions to the then current directions in modern
linguistics, but Bierwisch personally feels more
at ease with articles on "Poetik und Linguistik"
(1965), "Musik und Sprache" (1966), "Sprache
und Gedächtnis" (1977), and "Wörtliche Bedeu-
tung-Eine pragmatische Gretchenfrage" (1979).
In "Sprache und Gedächtnis" (1977), Bier-
wisch states that without language, memory is
not possible and language is the prior condition
for the complex melJlory capacity and for cog-
nitive processes so characteristic of human
beings. Units and ru1es of a language must be
learned and stored in the memory, so linguistics
deals with a direct property of memory.
For Wolfdietrich Hartung, in his article "Die
Wirkung der Sprache als Teil des pragmatischen
Aspekts" (1969), the pragmatic aspect of 1an-
guage is estab1ished in the connection of social
intention with individual intention and 1an-
guage, a connection which surpasses the seman-
tic aspect of language. Some effects in
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
communication processes can no longer be
explained with syntactic or semantic concepts,
but only in a pragmatic way (1969, p. 493).
Hartung's book on Sprachliche Kommunikation
und Gesellschaft (2nd ed., 1976) has been men-
tioned above in the section on Human Com-
munication (II.C.2.b).
Werner Neumann and a collective from the
East German Academy of Sciences have edited
Theoretische Probleme der Sprachwissenschaft (1976),
which in its two volumes takes up the his tory of
language philosophy, the present situation of the
German language, and language systems as sign
systems.
The situation of action (p. 242) is dis tin-
guished from the social situation of communi-
ca ti on (p. 244). Putting the sign system
"Ianguage" on a par with other sign systems in
society leads to denying the development of lan-
guage, to reducing language to the value of any
code. For Neumann's team, language is more
than a combination of signs (p. 294). No attempt
to separate language, thinking, and knowledge
can withstand criticism (p. 296). For them, the
sign may neither be equated with the perceptible
mark, nor with the meaning (p. 370). The "sys-
temic character of sign repertoires" is also dis-
cussed in this book (p. 389).
The complex system of human languages is
not seen in an analytic or structuralistic way,but
as an interaction between signals functioning as
tools, and parts of the language system func-
tioning, so to speak, as tools for the production
of these tools (p. 476). Linguistic signal mani-
festations are only possible insofar as they rep-
resent the sign production of the language system
(p.477).
Under the direction of Dieter Viehweger, a
collective from the Academy of Sciences (GDR)
has edited Probleme der semantischen Analyse (1977).
The bilateral sign concept regards the verbal
sign as a dialectic unit ofform and content (p. 25).
The correlation of form and meaning is based
on social convention. Form and meaning change
independently of each other in a historie process
(p. 26). Meaning exists outside the signs and is
often considered a system of relations (p. 27).
An essential antinomy results from the asym-
metry of the verbal sign: new meanings can
develop for an existent form; new ways of expres-
sion may be innovated for an already established
content (p. 47). The components of the language
197
system cannot be homogeneous, they have to
react to situations and social conditions (p. 52).
West Germany. For two decades, Eugenio Cos-
eriu, Professor of General Linguistics and Rom-
ance Languages at the University of Tübingen,
has been the main representative of a sign-ori-
ented direction in linguistics. This orientation
has led Coseriu toward structural semantics and
the his tory of linguistics.
Coseriu's early Spanish articles from his ten
years of teaching at the University of Monte-
video already show the tendencies of his later
scientific activities: In "Sistema, norma y habla"
(1952), Coseriu disagrees with the dichotomy
which structuralists have retained from Saus-
sure's triad langage, langue, et parole. Coseriu has
his own linguistic triad: system, norm, and
speech. For hirn, speech is the realization of lan-
guage, but language is the condition of speech
(1962a [1952], p. 41). The concept "norm" tends
to be split up into social norm and individual
norm. The distinction between a normal system
and a functional system is discussed.
"Forma y sustancia" (1962b [1954]) presents
Hjelmslev's doctrine of linguistic form and sub-
stance, which has been the starting point of later
research in structural semanties.
"EI plural en los nombres proprios" (1955) is
the origin of Coseriu's Wortfildflrschungen.
"Logicismo y antilogicismo en la gramatica"
(1962d [1958]) refers to Locke, Berkeley, Hus-
serl, Heidegger, Cassirer, and Carnap, and is
thus a beginning for Coseriu's later critical his-
tory of language philosophy.
"Determinacion y entorno" (1962c [1955]) and
"Sincronla, diacronla e historia" (1958) present
the problem of linguistic change and its causes.
Coseriu believes in a constant constitution and
transmission of language during speech and
reflects on the question how innovation becomes
tradition (1962c: p. 289). For hirn this is not a
causal problem; it is a problem of "wherefore"
and "how," but not of "why." Conditions and
reasons of finality are neither "causes," nor do
they influence language from outside.
Coseriu has gone beyond comparable
approach es to structural semantics (Pottier,
Greimas) by proposing diachronic modes of
research, and in designing a typology of possible
word fields.
The sign-theory orientation of Coseriu's lin-
guistics has influenced his students. He has
198 AN NE MARIE LANGE-SEIDL
passed on to them an intense awareness of the
current trends in modern linguistics, a critical
attitude toward too-fashionable linguistic meth-
ods, and asolid acquaintance with several Rom-
ance languages. A number of his students are
professors at German universities now.
One of these, Horst Geckeier, Professor of
Romance Languages at the University of Mün-
ster, has tested principles of structural semantics
in a French Wortflld, and has edited important
research reports and readers in this discipline.
Under his editorship can be found Logos Semän-
ticos. Studia in honorem Eugenio Coseriu (1981):
Volume 1, Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie und
Sprachwissenschafl has been edited by Jürgen Tra-
bant, Professor of Linguistics at the Freie Uni-
versität, Berlin.' Trabant, in addition to being
one of Coseriu's earliest German students, has
also studied Copenhagen glossematics far liter-
ary science. 31 His introduction ofUmberto Eco's
ideas to German semioticians has already been
mentioned above in the section on International
Influences (I.C.6). Trabant's Elemente der Semi-
otik (1976a), as his own introduction to semiot-
ics, will be presented in the section on Pedagogy
(below, II.C.4.a).
Volume 2, Sprachtheorie has been edited by
Harald Weydt, Professor of Linguistics at the
Freie Universität Berlin. Weydt has been inter-
ested in regional variants of German from quite
a different point of view than traditional dialec-
tology. He sees speaking as a multimedia
process 32 and has become weil known among
younger German linguists through his meetings
on Sprachpartikeln. By this he means small words
of the German language which may be con-
sidered symptoms of the situation they are used
in as weil as symptoms of speakers' attitudes,
cü-cumstances, and origins. They mayaiso be
used and valued as subconscious or conscious
signs by a speaker of a certain region or of a
certain sociallevel to express his moods and atti-
tudes. Weydt has edited the proceedings of the
first particle-meeting at Berlin, Die Partikeln der
deutschen Sprache," which were published in 1978.
Volume 3, Semantik, has been edited by Gecke-
Ier hirnself, together with Wolf Dietrich, who like
'" Cf Jürgen Trabant, Zur Semiologie des literarischen Kunstwerks
(Munich: Fink, 1970).
"'Cf Harald Weydt: Mehffochverständnis sprachlicher und nicht-
sprachlicher Zeichen (1975).
hirn is Professor of Romance Languages at
Münster. Dietrich has specialized in the peri-
phrastic aspect of Latin and Romance
languages. 33
Volume 4, Grammatik has been edited by
Christian Rohrer, Professor of Theoretical Lin-
guistics at the University of Stuttgart. Rohrer
understands the concept of sign in a much more
formalistic way than Coseriu and has decided in
favor of formal semantics, the formal analysis of
natural languages, and generative gramm ar.
Even if Coseriu's other students consider Rohrer
an outsider, we must agree that this way ofview-
ing signs stands at the intersection of linguistics
and semiotics.
Volume 5, Geschichte und Architektur der Sprache
has been edited by Brigitte Schlieben-Lange,
Professor of General Linguistics and Romance
Languages at the University of Frankfurt, who
is known far her introductions to sociolinguistics
(1978) and linguistic pragmatics (1979), and who
has collected the work of sign-oriented col-
leagues in her reader Sprachtheorie (1975).
Let us gl an ce briefly at Schlieben-Lange's own
sign concept, as presented in her Linguistische
Pragmatik (1979). After referring to the sign
models of Peirce and Morris, Schlieben-Lange
criticizes philosophical and linguistic definitions
of "pragmatic" for presupposing the existence
of signs, sign agreements, and sign systems which
already include signs and rules for their com-
bination. They suppose that these systems are
brought about and used according to substantial
rules. Sign systems are taken as given objects;
they are used post foctum on account of rules which
have no concern with how they are constituted
(p. 14). Thus, Schlieben-Lange reproaches lin-
guistic pragmatics for being a theory of sign use
only (p. 12). If the speaker uses a preconceived
sign, he is excluded from his role as a subject of
sign production. To ask, How are signs used? is
to cut off the question, How are signs agreed
on? (p. 15).
Schlieben-Lange admits that in histarically
developed sign systems, signs are to a certain
extent predetermined. But they can be changed
by the circumstances of their use, and they can
"Cf Dietrich: Der periphrastische Verbalaspekt in den romanischen
Sprachen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1973).
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
become objects of a metacommunicative dis-
course (p. 15). If pragmatics is to present the
connection between sign and user, pragmaticists
shou1d avoid starting from a primacy of the sigrt.
They shou1d reftect on two questions: How do
senders create signs? and, How are signs used?
In every communication, new levels of meanings
are created by known signs; but on these levels,
old signs transform themselves.
Schlieben-Lange is convinced that sign use and
sign agreement are only possible in a dialogue:
the sign user does not put forth his signs in iso-
lation, but for someone. The receiver tries to
combine his suppositions about the sender, his
knowledge of the signs, and his own experiences.
The dialogue level is constitutive for both under-
standing and interaction (p. 15).
The elimination of the sign user as a subject
of verbal actions was an advantage for the struc-
turalist description of language. But this kind of
linguistics could never concern anyone directly.
As an analytic method, it remained "disinter-
ested pure description." When, however, Ver-
ständigung and Mißverständnis, speech action and
the effect of speaking are discussed, anyone can
fee! involved, anyone can contribute his expe-
riences and discover important problems from
his own experience of speaking and listening to
others (p. 64).
In bilingual regions of Southern France, Spain,
and Italy, Schlieben-Lange has studied the
speakers' consciousness of giving "prestige" or
preference to one language in certain situations
and to the other in others, and of the mainte-
nance or change of sign systems in their actual
use. According to Schlieben-Lange, these atti-
tudes of speakers and listeners determine the
dying out or ftourishing of languages or variants.
She has published numerous articles on these
problems.
Herbert E. Brekle, Professor of General Lin-
guistics at the U niversity of Regensburg, has not
only studied Romance Languages with Coseriu
at Tübingen but his interests tend in the same
directions: semantics and the history of
linguistics.
Brekle's Semantik (1972) is the best-known short
introduction to that discipline in Germany. He
sees Semiotik as a method of cognitive theory with
methods of procedure by sign analysis and sign
synthesis. Brekle's article "No U-Turn," on a
199
special type of iconic element in written word-
formation, is linguistic Semiotik at its best.:l 4
Brekle has been editing the reprint series
Grammatica Universalis: Meisterwerke der Sprachwis-
senschaft und der Sprachphilosophie since 1966.
Helmut Schnelle, Professor of General Lin-
guistics at Bochum University, is one of Unge-
heuer's students (see section II.C.2.b, above,
"Human Communication"). His first book, Zei-
chensysteme zur wissenschaftlichen Darstellung is a
classification of signs used in natural and tech-
nical sciences (1962).
In Sprachphilosophie und Linguistik (1973), the
semantic discussion of meaning is dominant.
According to Schnelle's sign concept, object fields
are structured in a combinatorial manner. They
refer to something e!se and they are connected
in the form of semantic representation (1973,
p. 118). Schnelle takes "idiolect" only as a lan-
guage peculiarity, not as the complete personal
way of expressing oneself. Schnelle proposes: "Let
us simplify things by supposing that H disposes
of the same idiolect as the one F uses in his
utterance, and he also uses it in listening to the
utterance" (Schnelle 1973, p. 274). "Let us sim-
plify things by supposing that ... " is not a
semiotic way of going about things, but Schnelle
does not pretend to be a semiotician, even though
he has published a book on sign systems.
Annemarie Lange-Seidl approach es the prob-
lem of "Idiolektkomponenten" (1978a) in a more
semiotic way, asking: Is idiolect a reality or an
abstraction? Is idiolect the real basis, from which
dialects, sociolects and standard language can
be derived, or does an individual speaker se!ect
from a given repertoire? Does only active com-
petence allow the perceiver to judge whether
stereotypes, group-typical behavior, personal
behavior, individual peculiarities or innovations
have been used? Does the speaker's behavior
allow us to associate hirn with types-age, sex,
profession-or does the speaker manifest hirnself
as an entity in accordance with his behavior and
profession?
For the answers to these questions, Lange-
SeiclI's students have tested 568 persons and have
reftected on the test questions themselves. None
:"cr. Herbert Brekle, "No V-Turn," in Lange-Seidl (1981),
vol. I, pp. 172-179.
200 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
of the persons tested duplicated another in his
mann er of speaking. The static idiolect which is
constant in different circumstances, roles, and
situations can be more easily identified than the
flexible idiolect in which the individual expresses
hirnself in accordance with circumstances, roles,
and situations, but still as an identoid continuum
(Lange-Seidl, 1978a, p. 312).
For years, Hans-Heinrich Lieb has done
research on intonation as a factor in the consti-
tution of meaning. 35 Lieb, Professor of General
Linguistics and German Language at the Free
University of Berlin, and one German linguist
who likes being called a semiotician, character"
izes the relation of German general semiotics to
linguistics in this way: From the standpoint of
the classification of the sciences, linguistics may
be considered a branch of semiotics, and
undoubtedly the most developed branch. 36 On
the other hand, few linguists conceive and han-
dle problems of 1inguistics in a semiotic manner,
whereas scientists who consciously work in
semiotics turn main1y to problems outside nat-
urallanguages (Lieb, 1977, p. 29).
Both Lange-Seidl (1976) and Lieb (1977) plead
for a sign concept which takes into consideration
both sign perception by sense organs and sign
conception in the mind. There are severa1 degrees
of sensibility and abstraction to the perception
of signs (Lange-Seid1, 1976b, p. 260). Sign per-
ception must consider Sinnestäuschungen, sense
illusions, where at the moment of perception the
source of the sense impression does not coincide
with the content of the perception; and hallu-
cinations, where there are no sense impressions
at all at the moment of perception (Lieb, 1977,
p.34).
Sign conception should be distinguished from
sign production as weIl as from semiosis. Con-
ceptions may be potentially void, but we should
use the concept "conception" whenever not only
the idea but also the real existence of the object
can be guaranteed (Lieb, 1977, p. 35). The plans
35A book on this topic is forthcoming.
'·See also Lange-Seidl, Approaches to Theories Jor Nonverbal Signs,
(1977b), p. 42: "We will have theories only when we have
done as much empirical and intellectual work with a prag-
matic intention for a general sign science as has been done
since Saussure for the synchronie examination of single
languages and for the universal problem of human
language."
should guarantee their realization. For a new
sign to be conceived, aH the possibilities of per-
ception, the restrictions of perception thresholds,
the modes of sign mediation and sign introduc-
tion (Lange-Seid1 1976b, pp. 267, 265), as weH
as of sign constitution (Lange-Seid1 1981 b, Vol. 1,
p. 6), have to be taken into account.
But "sign conception" mayaiso have the sense
of a conclusion, an abstraction terminating
reflection on a sign or sign complex-a concep-
tion of what it means, or might mean, to be a
sign for something (Lieb, 1977, p. 35). We can
accept Lieb's conclusion that perceptions and
conceptions "are mental states or events and have
a content. This content is a set of properties or
a set of relations-in-intention, which are grounded
in certain domains of reality" (Lieb, 1977, p. 44).
Burghard Rieger, of the Institut für Mathe-
matisch-Empirische Systemforschung at Aache~
(see section II.C.l.e, above, "Cybernetics"), has
published books and articles on tolerance-topol-
ogy models of natural1anguage meaning, on fuzzy
structural semantics, and on vague lexical me an-
ings. In his article on "Bedeutungskonstitution"
(1977), Rieger's intention is to present a lin-
guistic problem semioticaHy, thus stressing the
increasing semioticization of the sciences (p. 55).
Model-formation in linguistics is a conse-
quence of this semioticization. Meaning is no
longer interpreted as a special qua1ity of signs
or sign-series, but as a result of cognitive pro-
ces ses in which regu1arities bring about relations
which stand as structural connections. It is these
structura1 connections which a sign is able to
refer to as possible extensions of what it intends.
Linguistic models reconstruct these connections
as functions of the re gulari ti es which comprise
the system. When real speakers and hearers want
to communicate in real situations, they use these
systems, constituting regularities to constitute
their own meanings.
Such a reconstruction comes down to model-
ling a system of potential interpretations wher-
ever the three semiotic dimensions can be
described but no longer sharply discerned (Rie-
ger, 1977, p. 62).
The poor definition of the constitution of
meaning in natural1anguages need no longer be
excluded from analysis. What in the phonolog-
ical-syntactical range appears as a problem of
variation, in the syntactical-semantical range as
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
a problem of ambiguities, or in the semantical-
pragmatical range as a problem of vagueness,
may generally be described, analyzed, and rep-
resented in a model as the result of cognitive
processes (Rieger, 1977: p. 63).
At the intersection of linguistics and literary
science, Harald Weinrich, Professor at Munich
University, won a contest with an essay which
is familiar to linguists and literary scientists: Lin-
guistik der Lüge (1966). The tide alone has stim-
ulated semioticians to reflect on the signs which
animals use for mimicry and human beings for
showing off and for conscious lies. Animals do
not use verbal signs for mimicry, but forms and
colors. The too-expensive car in front of the house
or the dress too elegant for the occasion are a
sort of human mimicry using signs for prestige,
which differ from bragging in verbal signs. I
have heard Germans say that they reject semiot-
ics out of the fear that the conscious knowledge
of nonverbal signs (especially gestures and facial
express ions ), would allow people to use them for
lies as they now use language.
In his chapter on irony (pp. 59-66), Weinrich
stresses his concept of Ironiesignal, by which we
indicate that we are using irony. By adding a
signal for irony, we acknowledge the sign func-
tion of language (p. 61). But signals for irony
need not be verbal: a wink, a clearing of the
throat, an emphatic voice, a special intonation
and-in print-italics or quotation marks, are
all used (p. 61). Irony signals comprise a certain
code which must be known to the communica-
tion partner (p. 65). According to Weinrich, lies
have their Lügensignale, which have not yet been
studied sufficiendy.
3. Sign and Art
a. Literature. Though I have been given
several names, I have not been able to discover
any publications on the semiotics of literature
in Austria.
East Germany. In Berlin (East), I was told that
Dieter Schlenstedt, of the Zentralinstitut für
Literaturgeschichte, Berlin, uses semiotic meth-
ods for the analysis of literature and its function
in Funktion der Literatur (1975). For literature on
a particular historical level, Schlenstedt claims
interdisciplinary research.
201
Another East German book, edited by a team
under the direction of Dietrich Sommer, appeared
in 1978 under the tide Funktion und Wirkung. The
book does not include the concepts "sign" or
"semiotics"; but similar methods of analysis and
conclusion could as weH be used by any semi-
otician. Diagrams show the results of inquiries
into motivations for reading books and visiting
art exhibitions, the process of art communica-
tion, and the reception of literature. These could
have their place in any semiotic research.
West Germany. In 1965, Helmut Kreuzer and
Rul Gunzenhäuser published the reader Mathe-
matik und Dichtung, with articles by Jakobson and
F6nagy, Max Bense and Elisabeth Walther,37
Bierwisch and Felix von Cube (see sections
"Cybernetics" [1I.C.l.e] and "Pedagogy"
[1I.C.4.a]). This reader has had a strong influ-
ence on formalized studies of literature in West
Germany. Kreuzer and Gunzenhäuser are both
editors of LiLi, Zeitschriji; fUr Literaturwissenschaft
und Linguistik, where they have al ready published
two numbers on semiotics (1974, 1977) and are
planning a new one.
Summaries of the German semiotics of liter-
ature have been offered by H. Reineke et al., in
Versus, 10 (1975, pp. 101-104); by Eschbach and
Rader in LiLi, 27/28 on Semiotik (1977, pp. 15-
28); by Rolf Kloepfer in Borbe and Krampen's
Angewandte Semiotik (1978, pp. 70-94); and by
Karl Eimermacher and Rolf Kloepfer in Zeit-
schriji;fUr Semiotik, 1 (1979, pp. 109-132).
Numerous publications in this field have
appeared since 1970. In many of them, the
redundancy which belonged to the traditional
science of literature has not yet been given up.
But to put the positive argument immediately:
The outstanding authors of books on literary
semiotics have asolid knowledge of literature.
Walter A. Koch, Götz Wienold, and Winfried
Nöth are Professors of "Anglistik," which, in
Western Germany, means that they have to know
British literature from Beowulf to Synge and
Pinter, and American literature including the
papers of Peirce and Morris-and they must be
linguists too.
Karl Eimermacher is Professor of Slavic Lan-
guages and Literature at Bochum University.
37Kreuzer and Gunzenhäuser were then both employed at
the Technische Hochschule Stuttgart; where Bense and
Walther have been Professors of Philosophy; see section
on the Stuttgart school, III.D.
202 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
When professor at Constance University, he tried
to acquaint German semioticians with the schools
of Moscow and Tartu (see Eimermacher, 1981).
Rolf Kloepfer, Professor of Romance Lan-
guages and Literatures at Mannheim University
knows the French realists as weil as the sym-
bolists; he can judge modern Spanish and Por-
tuguese literat ure from Latin America. His
assistant, Helga Finter (see section II.C.3.d
"Theater," below), is a specialist in the avant-
garde literature of Italy and France.
Since 1970, Walter A. Koch has published and
edited articles and books on various kinds of
semiotics, including two series Studia Semiotica
and Documenta Semiotica. The tide of his first and
best-known semiotic book, Varia Semiotica (1971),
would apply to most of his publications,
throughout which he has retained his "situation
pattern idea." He proposes methods for text
analysis without forgetting the process of text
production and perception.
Koch has engaged in dis course analysis as weil
as in poetic structures, and has distinguished the
"normal" text from the text far theater and film.
His interests extend to comics and mass media
as weil as to serious literature, for he takes mass
media texts seriously in terms of their inftuence.
In his book Semiotik der Literatur (1972), Götz
Wienold tries to emphasize the relations between
meaning and representation in literature which
can be generalized from any other medium (1972,
p. 26). Wienold sees interpretation as an oper-
ation for the production of new texts which are
to contral original texts (p. 27). His claim for a
strategic sign conception has been continued by
other semioticians in the same discipline.
In Poetik und Linguistik. Semiotische Instrumente
(1975), Rolf Kloepfer expresses his belief that
texts of any kind have common conditions for
production and for reception which go back to
the human being's ability far semiosis.
The work of Winfried Nöth, one of Koch's
students, started from conventional text analy-
sis. He likes to analyze advertising texts, as, for
example, in his book Semiotik. Eine Einführung mit
Beispielen fur Reklameanalysen (1975). This work
has had considerable inftuence with advertising
firms. Nöth's book Dynamik semiotischer Systeme
(1977) is a systems theory reftection on closed
and open "semiotic systems"-not sign sYS"
tems-and on their static or dynamic properties.
As far as I understand, "semiotic systems" for
Nöth are systems which are culturally deter-
mined and have an established intention. I doubt
whether communicative pracesses may ever sta-
bilize into a system by aiming at optimal con-
gruity (p. 95), and I have my doubts about Nöth's
understanding of modern literature as only a
disturbance of a Regelkreissystem.
Manfred Hardt states that semiotics provides
a much better basis than linguistics far the
understanding of poetry, with respect to text
analysis on the one hand and conventional the-
ory of literature on the other. It is in this sense
that we must view his approach to poetics in
Poetik und Semiotik (1976). In Hardt's article "Die
Zeit als Faktor der Sinnkonstitution" (in Lange-
Seidl, 1981 a), time and velo city are constitutive
factors not only far meaning but also for sign
production and sign function. Fast, conventional
sign use may be replaced by a sign process which,
within a time continuum, offers instead of one
meaning a plurality of concurring possibilities
(p. 282). Thraugh change of the time factor, the
transfer from static sign use to dynamic creative
sign processes may become visible (p. 283).
Kaspar H. Spinner in his small book Zeichen-
Text-Sinn (1977) reftects on the semiotic foun-
dation of literature instruction. In the same book,
Peter Rusterholz uses semiotic methods to inves-
tigate factors in the constitution of meaning in
literary texts.
b. Music. Here, too, I was given some
names of colleagues in Austria who were said to
be involved in musical semiotics. After scanning
their work, however, I could not see that it had
anything to do with semiotics.
East Germany. In the GDR my attention was
directed to the effarts of Doris Stockmann and
to the "Study Group for the Systematization of
Folk Music," which guarantees an opportunity
for scientific and methodological contacts among
researchers in this field. Stockmann has edited
the proceedings of the third meeting of this group
under the tide Analyse und Klassifikation von Volks-
melodien (Stockmann and Steszewski, 1973). In
her introduction, Stockmann proposes methods
far the notation of folk music (p. 10) which are
similar to those discussed on a broader scale for
multimedia communication in West Germany in
recent years. 38 Stockmann asks the participants
of the meeting to reftect on an optimal Netzstruk-
tur for folk music (p. 11) in arder to represent
and to stress its structural regularity. She claims
'·See the chapter on "Multimedia Communication" in Lange-
Seidl (lg8Ia), vol. 2, pp. 71-212.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
sign theory should be taken seriously as a mod-
ern interdisciplinary science that would be able
to help combat old-fashioned ways of thinking
(p. 23). But she wams of taking partial results
of research for general truth.
At first sight, the volumes on European folk
instruments edited by Ernst Emsheimer and
Erich Stockmann (1967-1979) look as though
they belong to the tradition of Curt Sachs's clas-
sification of musical instruments, which we used
forty years ago. On closer inspection, however,
the publication shows many distinct signs in
instrument production and appearance.
Harry Goldschmidt, in his article on musical
understanding as a postulate (1973), attacks
Susanne K. Langer's symbolic comprehension.
For Goldschmidt, "Ianguages of art" lack both
the vocabulary characteristic of artificial lan-
guages and the univocity of sign systems such
as colloquial speech. In his opinion, all sign sys-
tems use syntax. The results of musical-com-
puter compositions are unsatisfying not because
the semiotic conditions have not been achieved,
but because they have not yet been sufficiently
mastered (p. 77).
Christian Kaden uses the concept of the oper-
ative sign (Georg Klaus) for his construction of
syntactic musical sign systems (1975 and 1977).
The volume Weltbild-Notenbild (1978) is a col-
lection of articles, contributions to congresses,
and radio addresses by Günter Mayer of the
Humboldt Universität Berlin. Mayer claim;; that
Semiotik should be taken seriously as a method
for exact research in music, so that the usual
metaphoric mode of expression in musicology
(Mayer, 1978, p. 138) will not be the only one
available. Music serving aesthetic communica-
tion among human beings constitutes a sign sit-
uation (p. 138). Material, physical sounds, and
sound groups conform to the definition of a sign,
but signs in art systems must be distinguished
from both signs in natural languages and signs
in artificial languages (p. 139).
New musical signs do not start in connection
with either new contents or new functions in
music. This explains their rapid attrition and
the neu tralization of their effect. This fascination
of the new sign as asymptom of creativity, the
urgency of constant revival, recoinage, and fresh
coinage of signs is a fact to be considered in
semiotic research into dimensions of the musical
sign (p. 142).
West Germany. In West Germany, publications
on semiotics as a method for music theory are
203
marked by a distinct sceptlclsm. Most of the
Musikwissenschaftler are not willing to systematize
what in their opinion is not clear; they decline
to make semiotic statements.
The articles on semiotic theory, aesthetics, and
sociology edited by Peter Faltin and Hans-Peter
Reinecke und er the tide Musik und Verstehen (1973)
contain aspects deserving notice. An ostensive
sign presentation is preferred to a structuralist
or any any other strict sign conception.
Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht supposes that with
a science which remains aesthetically at the level
of the analysis of musical meaning, concepts such
as expression and sign, which belong to musical
production, are usually ignored and restricted to
extramusical elements. In music, the musical sign
in its conceptlessness designates itself (Egge-
brecht (1973, p. 52).
Four years later, Eggebrecht expresses an atti-
tude which gives consideration to the semioti-
cian's claim to put musical communication on
a systematic foundation so as to make it com-
parable to other media of communication; but
his scepticism is still obvious (in Posner and
Reinecke, 1977, p. 238).
An acoustic structure, as Peter Faltin stresses,
is not merely a form or a meaning of a sign, but
decides the function of melody, harmony, and
rhythm in sound entities (Faltin, 1973, p. 64).
Four years later (in Posner and Reinecke, 1977),
Faltin sees semiotic interpretation of a musical
composition not in terms of what its elements
designate, but wh at they mean. This should not
lead us to the conclusion that there is a meaning
without connection to something else. In Faltin's
opinion, musical signs do not receive their rriean-
ing by designation, however, but develop it by
themselves in a process of semiosis, that is, in
an interaction between the composer, the com-
position, and the listener. Faltin asks what the
reality is that musical signs are related to, and
how this is realized by me ans of musical material
(1977, p. 250).
Tibor Kneif (1973a) rejects MukarovskY's
concept of an autonomous sign for music, because
it is constitutive for a sign to indicate something
else. If music does not indicate a special exist-
ence, but the entire concept of social phenomena
belonging to a certain environment, there exists
no sign at all, because apart is not the sign of
an entity. In taking apart as a sign for a larger
complex, the sign concept would be worn out,
because there are so many parts which belong
to larger complexes (p. 166). Because there is no
204 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
statement by the author as to whether or not
some part of his composition should be a sign
for something, we are not entitled to take music
as a sign at all (p. 166). Kneif does not believe
in semiotics for music and stresses this impos-
sibility in aseparate article (Kneif, 1973b).
For Rans-Peter Reinecke (1973), verballan-
guage and music are conventional in signs and
form. These conventions may be individual or
group habits and their imitations. The individ-
uals need not be immediately conscious of this
process, but the conventions are agreed on con-
sciously. Reinecke tries to set up models for actual
situations of musical communication (p. 268).
Christoph Rubig (1981) asks what part music
plays in human interaction (p. 247), and states
that transformational rules are an important
constituent of Musikästhetik. The title of the arti-
cle "Das Zeichen wird gezeigt" points to the
aspect of aesthetic intentionality which is obvious
in the "gesture of demonstration.,,39 The prin-
ciple of conscious deviation from the rules of a
system constitutes an individual aesthetic code.
Rubig understands semiotics as a metatheory of
the sciences of art.
c_ VlSual Arts_ Nobody denies that research
on visual signs used in human communication
(see section II.C.2.b) is necessary. But reflec-
tions on the difference between what makes a
sign useful and what constitutes its aesthetic value
are equally necessary.
Austria. Two members of the executive board
of the Österreichische Gesellschaft ftir Semiotik
(see section III.B) have applied their efforts in
this field: Erich Fries has combined culturally
typical signs in collages and photocollages which
he showed in expositions connected with the
Austrian meetings, whileJeff Bernard has given
attention to the aesthetic value of visual signs in
several articles in Semiotische Berichtei. the mimeo-
graphed information paper of the OGS.
East Germany. Erwin Pracht, Professor of Aes-
thetics at Rumboldt University, Berlin, and a
t.~am of collaborators, have published a volume
Asthetik heute (1978). According to Pracht et al.,
the real Gestalt must be considered a Zeichengestalt
in its dominant instrumental use as well as in
its specifically aesthetic use. This Gestalt concept
39The gesture of demonstration needs a competence of dem-
onstrating (Hubig 1981, p. 245).
seems to them typical for semiotics (Pracht, et
al., 1978, p. 268).
Real objects have the function of signs which
are carriers of information, in the sense that they
mean something, they designate something, and
in the sense that this is realized in a communi-
cative action, that is, when they are interpreted
(p. 268). The meaning both of objects and of
persons as well as the syrnbolic meaning of
objects, can be studied systematically and
modelled in precise concepts from a sign-theory
point ofview: Pracht and his team refer to Bühler,
Peirce, Morris, Bense, and Klaus (p. 269). The
formation of invariants gives rise to a hierarchic
structure of Zeichengestalten. Semiotics is used to
explain the aesthetic connection between the real
material Gestalt of the sign and the Zeichengestalt
which in this case is not only the material carrier
of meaning but also receives meaning in the unity
of expression-value and intrinsic value (p. 270).
Metaphors like Bildsprache can be analyzed by
semiotics and should be avoided. Standards of
value and quality-grading of arts would be more
precise if semiotic methods were applied. The
Gestalt-specific criteria of semiotics could have
considerable influence on aesthetic evaluation,
in the opinion of Pracht et al.
West Germany. Two volumes of Bildende Kunst
als Zeichensystem were planned by Ekkehard
Kaemmerling and Peter Gerlach, but only the
first volume, Ikonographie und ikonologie was pub-
lished (1979). This collection of older articles by
Erwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Pächt,
and other authors, edited by Ekkehard Kaem-
merling, does not contain many semiotic ideas
or methods. We hope the second volume, which
has been announced as Semiotik und Semiologie der
bildenden Kunst, will justify its title.
In his article "Panofsky: 'Perspektiven als
symbolische Form' in semiotischer Sicht" (1978),
Peter Gerlach (Aachen) regards perception as a
linear process. We cannot fix our glance on things
far from us and near to us at the same time.
Diachronically perceived details are concen-
trated into synchronie percepts by a consecutive
process of interpretation which consists in the
selection of relevant minimal units. This percept
can be separated from the view as given and
formulated as a rule. The transition from the act
of perception to the construction subject to rules
is a transfer from the diachrony of perception to
the synchrony of presentation (p. 329).
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
In his contribution to the Regensburg Collo-
quium, Gerlach t:~amines "Ästhetisierung phy-
siognomischer Ahnlichkeiten" (1981), the
constitution of figurative simi1arity as an act of
aesthetic interpretation. He refers to Sebeok's
opinion: "There are no pure iconic signs; in fact
no actua1 sign is an icon" (Gerlach, 1981, p. 230).
Gerlach asks how the simi1arity between the
original human being and the portrait has been
constituted. Historie portraits have an actua1 ref-
eren ce to pub1icly motivated action (p. 231). The
physiognomie pecu1iarity of an individual
becomes most evident in the caricature through
the constitution of fields of meaning (p. 235). In
the caricature, ugliness does not become ridic-
ulous by exaggeration, but the social institution
is attacked by figurative and physiognomie
methods of individualization (p. 236).
d. Theater. Although most of Helga Fin-
ter's articles on semiotic problems of literature
and theater have been published in French or
Italian, and though she has observed French
avant-garde theater with regard to the dynamic
character of sign constitution (Finter, 1980), she
is one of the most interesting of the German
theater semioticians. In her contribution for the
Regensburg Colloquium, "Zur Raumkonstitu-
tion im Theater: Zeichenfunktion und Zeichen-
prozess" (1981), she has presented space
constitution in the theater-not only on stage-
as a sign process, where signs have very different
functions. Space manipulation constitutes the
illusion of the absent as something present, con-
stitutes the consciousness of reality and illusion
in the play (1981, p. 308). For Helga Finter the
space of the theater is separated by intersecting
lenses, as in a mirror reflex camera: the lens
between the actors and the spectators and the
lens between the spectators in the parquet circle
and those in the balcony, between the represen-
tatives of the social value system. In the living
modern theater, space is a production which can
be perceived only during the play.
Wilfried Passow (Munieh) regards putting a
play on stage as a text: "Inszenierung als Text"
(1981). He tries to classify both the means of
presentation, as carriers of significance, and the
psychophysical dispositions of the spectator that
may be influenced by these means of
presentation.
In 1979 the Institute for Theater Science at
205
the U niversity of Munich started a project under
the title "Theaterproduktion und Theaterrezep-
tion im Labor der Theaterwissenschaft. "
Machiavelli's comedy, Mandragola was rehearsed
for two months and then presented to the audi-
ence twenty times. Tape and video recording,
controlling interviews and tests investigated the
following problems:
• Communication processes: during rehearsals;
during presentations; feedback effects; pre-
theater attitudes and circumstances; short-
term and long-term effects; variables in
reception and production.
• Audience: the ideal spectator; the expected
real spectator; the implicit spectator; the
concretization and modification of the spec-
tator image du ring rehearsals and
presentation.
Transient actor aphasias and apraxias: consti-
tutive conditions of role presentation as
results of momentary situative orientation;
transfer to a higher grade of role shape.
• Concept flr theater-science instruction: peculiari-
ties and norms.
• Material and signs on stage: multilevel situation
of communication and interaction; sign types
and codes; open reflection on signs and sign
complexes; construction of interpretants (in
Peirce's sense) on stage; tuning of these
interpretants; search for the most adequate
sign constellation; polyfunctionality of signs
on stage; total perception of significant
connections.
The results of the experiment will be presented
in theses for theater science (Passow, 1979).
e. Film. I have decided to put the semiotics
of film among the aesthetic disciplines even
though much of the research at the moment con-
cerns mass media and some of the best research-
ers are working with scientific or instructional
films.
Austria. With her article "Das Wort und die
Sprache des Bildes" (1965), Agnes Bleier-Brody
initiated research into the semiotics of film in
Austria, after having worked together with Enrico
Fulchignoni, the film specialist of UNESCO.
Rather disappointed with semiotic institutions,
she has given up collaboration.
206 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
East Germany. In the GDR, after World War
11, many motion picture producers practiced sign
consciousness. But officially, film semiotics plays
no role at all at the moment.
West Germany. In the FRG, Friedrich Knilli,
Professor at the Technical University, Berlin,
wrote a book on Zeichensystem Film. Versuche einer
Semiotik (1968) and published a reader, Semiotik
des Films (1971), with articles by U mberto Eco,
Sergei Eisenstein, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Ekke-
hard Kaemmerling in his article "Rhetorik als
Montage" in Knilli's reader has tried to transfer
classical rhetoric figures into film and to present
them in the form of mathematical formulae.
Kaemmerling meanwhile has produced several
films and tes ted semiotic rules d uring their
production.
Dieter Wunderlich's article in the same reader,
"Der kinetische Film. Über Analyse und Synthese
von Bewegung im Film" (1971) analyzes film
motion syntactically and semantically. He recalls
Russian systematic rules for action continuity
and H ungarian pro pos als for the transfer of
human action by notation.
In 1971, Walter A. Koch, Professor at Bochum
University, the editor of the series entitled Stu-
dia Semiotica (cf. section III.D.2), published
a collection of articles which he called Varia Semi-
otica. In one of the articles, "Semiotisierungs-
stufen im Film" (Koch, 1971, pp. 471-500), he
discusses models by Metz, Eco, Goffman, Lan-
ger, Jakobson, and Bunuel. The article is full of
suggestions for the use of arbitrary decisions in
the process of communication by film.
Another book has had considerable influence
on film devotees and, because of the attractive
tide, on young readers: Hartrnut Bitomsky's Die
Röte des Rots von Technicolor. Kinorealität und Pro-
duktionswirklichkeit (1972). A young film pro-
ducer, Bitomsky not only discussed the relevance
for film production of concepts from Saussure,
Peirce, Morris, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Metz,
Walter Benjamin, and Mukafovsky, but also
introduces semiotic categories with their poten-
tial for ideological criticism.
As the result of a film analysis project, similar
problems have been discussed by Winfried Schulz
(1976).
Brigitta Mühlen-Achs, who works in the State
Institute for Instruction and Didactic Research
at the University of Munich, analyzes semiotic
aspects of motion pictures produced for didactic
purposes in her book Filmsprache und Wirklichkeit
(1977). The behavior of film spectators-teach-
ers, students, and pupils-their ability to retain
messages transmitted by film, and their iden ti-
fication with moving pictures have been checked
by me ans ofvideo tapes which were taken during
the presentation of educational films, as weil as
through questionnaires. Mühlen-Achs states that
those participants who spend many hours in front
of the television screen lose nearly all their
capacity to criticize a motion picture for school
instruction.
Although in charge of film semiotics at the
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik, Hermann
Kalkofen, working at the Institute for Scientific
Films in Göttingen, has continued to criticize
semiotic methods for film production. He thinks
the label Semiotik is too readily gran ted to meth-
ods that can be referred to in a more tradition al
way. This criticism has lost but has also won
friends for Kalkofen, as well as for German
semiotics as a whole, among both semioticians
and laymen. And he has kept the discussion
gomg.
Christian Metz's influence on German film
semioticians seems to have been considerable.
Many of the contributions to Kalkofen's meet-
ings of the film section of the German Society
for Semiotics have treated Metz's syntagmatics,
both continuing and criticizing Metz's
proposals .40
Karl Friedrich Reimers, Professor of Com-
munication Science, University of Munich, has
organized interdisciplinary courses for the
Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film since 1975.
For the course inJanuary 1981 he invited Martin
Krampen (Professor for Visual Communication,
Hochschule der Künste Berlin), Harry Pross
(Director of the Institute for J ournalism, Freie
Universität Berlin), Hermann Kalkofen (Insti-
tute for Scientific Film, Göttingen) and Günter
Bentele (Freie Universität Berlin).
In the introduction to his own contribution,
Reimers asks for increased efforts of self-assess-
ment for the film sign system, further publication
on the change of meaning accompanying these
efforts, and new aesthetic rules für film.
4I'Cf. Karl-Dietmar Möller: "Ikonische Syntax," 1981, Vol. 2,
pp. 41-48.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
While preparing the 4th Congress of the Ger-
man Society for Semiotics at Munich, Reimers
declared 1984 a semiotics year for the Hoch-
schule rur Fernsehen und Film. He invited semi-
oticians from West Germany to lecture on
"Zeichen im Wandel."
Günter Bentele, at the Free University of Ber-
lin, is concerned with the publicity for film
semiotics in German periodicals. 4 ! His article on
the zoom as a technical and a semiotic element
for different sorts of films (Bentele, 1981a)
deserves mention.
Other publications by Bentele are of more
general interest, such as Semiotik und Massenmedien
(1981 b) and Zeichen und Entwicklung (1983), both
proceedings of meetings he organized for the
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik.
f. Architecture. Roland Posner writes that
configurations of signs are nowhere as solid and
evident as in architecture. Only the process of
design, wherein the architect finds his own con-
ception which at the same time takes into account
all the owner's wishes, gives them their common
sense (Posner, 1977, p. 6).
Austria. Herbert Muck, Professor of Church
Construction at the Vienna Akademie der bil-
denden Künste, specializes in the semiotics of
architectural space (1966), in stereoscopic effects
on human behavior, and in group conflicts caused
by room use and operating in room use. He is
also interested in the notation of situations (cf.
Hess-Lüttich, 1981b). As a result ofhis position
at the Vienna Academy, Herbert Muck's pub-
lications concentrate on modern church archi-
tecture (cf. Schiwy et al., 1976).
Günther Feuerstein is Professor at the Hoch-
schule für künstlerische und industrielle Gestal-
tung in Linz and interested in the signs that
industrial development sets around old town
centers.
East Germany. The Bauakademie Berlin does
not consider semiotics to be essential for pro-
duction in architecture. In the GDR, individual
architects are not expected to do personal
research on semiotic problems. The models for
architecture are given by official institutions; they
"cr. Bentele's survey on film semiotics in ZeitschriftjUr Semi-
otik,2 (1980), p. 119-138.
207
can only be adjusted to suit regional
requirements.
West Germany. After the war, the old Bauhaus
tradition, which had been decidedly sign-
oriented, was resumed in West German archi-
tectural training at universities and "Fachhoch-
schulen" (colleges for professional training on a
modern scientific basis). Bauhaus expositions in
West German cities (e.g., Klee's and Feininger's
pictures), influenced property owners who were
planning to erect new buildings for private,
industrial, or administrative uses.
As Stuttgart U niversity was originally a Tech-
nische Hochschule, students in architecture there
soon became acquainted with Bense's basis the-
ory for semiotics and were familiar with his pub-
lications on Informationsästhetik (1969, 1979), which
they could use as a starting point for discussion.
One of Bense's students, Claus Dreyer, from
the faculty for architecture and city-planning at
Stuttgart University, has published a book on
the semiotic foundations of architectural aes-
thetics, Semiotische Grundlagen der Architekturästhe-
tik (1979). Several of his noteworthy articles treat
the repertoires of architecture from a semiotic
point of view, for example, "Zur Semiotik des
architektonischen Funktionalismus" (1981).
The three volumes of Konzept edited by the
Italian architect A. Carlini and the German
architectBernhard Schneider were planned as
another semiotic discussion forum for young
architects.
Volume 1, Architektur als Zeichensystem (1971),
contains too many articles by Italian architects
who were at that time protesting against the I tal-
ian architectural situation: too many ancient
buildings to be maintained, no support for mod-
ern planning. The only German articles in Vol-
urne 1 were written by Max Bense (1971, on his
basis sign theory) and by the editor, Bernhard
Schneider (1971), who tries to relate architecture
to the discussion on structuralism. Schneider uses
concepts from systems theory and structuralism,
referring to Günter Schiwy, Roland Barthes, and
Claude Levi-Strauss, and using occasional Bense
quotations. Also appearing in Volume 1 of Kon-
zept is Schneider's call for open aesthetic systems
(1971, p. 17).
The only German contributor to Volume 2,
Stadtbild (1976a), is Bernhard Schneider hirnself.
208 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL

The tide of Volume 3 is Die Stadt als Text teachers in various types of schools use semiot-
(1976b), with Schneider's programmatic article ics? Is semiotics valued as an aid to the legal
of the same tide setting the school of Stuttgart sciences? How is the role signs have always played
against the Berlin group. Jürgen Trabant's "Stadt in religion seen by theology? And how do sym-
und Sprache" was planned as an analogy to other bolists value semiotics?
disciplines which were using the semiotic con-
cepts and structures of Saussure. Siegfried J. a. Pedagogics. Austria. Austrian political
Schmidt, a West German linguist who has worked institutions do research as to the importance of
in text analysis, contributed to this volume with mass media for the education of citizens. Slowly
"Ästhetiktheorie und Architekturästhetik: ein the question of what signs are used and how
Diskussionsangebot (Aesthetic Theory and Aes- they are used in the mass media is coming to be
thetics for Architecture: A Proposal for Discus- taken seriously. But as far as I can judge there
sion). This proposal for discussion has not been is no semiotics taught at teachers' training
accepted by the architects, however, who do not colleges.
want their buildings to be called "texts," and East Germany. The Pädagogische Hochschule
attack Bernhard Schneider's Konzept. Potsdam is open-minded about a sign-conscious
education for teachers. There are publications
In another case, a similar concept has been from this PH Potsdam which take semiotics into
accepted-Stadt und Zeichen by Horst Schmidt- consideration.
Brümmer and Andreas Schulz (1976). Here, not West Germany. Bense has always supported the
only does the architect make up signs for con- education of art teachers through his publica-
struction, the whole city (Cologne as an exam- tions, his students, courses which he offers to
pIe) is seen as a world of signs. We are confronted professional colleges of art and design (e.g., the
with signs of many types in the city; signs can Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm), and by con-
be made up explicidy, or they can be present vincing politicians and government agencies to
implicitly. We may look for the "Stadtbild" and set up curricula for art education. In 1972, Nord-
find conventional methods of model processing. rhein-Westfalen was the first state in the FRG
We may select deliberately or we may leave the to introduce a semiotic curriculum for art
selection to our attitudes toward the city; we may instruction in elementary schools.
test the city in experiments by sign use. Hans Brög, one of the most active of Bense's
students, realized what a mathematically ori-
At the intersection of architecture and ethol- ented, systematic sign concept would mean for
ogy there have been some efforts to combine the education of teachers in art and design. Brög
ethological and architectural claims for a living is Professor of Art and Design at Duisberg Uni-
in the future. Among them we want to mention versity and has had much success with a book
the sensational experiments of the group LOG he edited under the tide Probleme der Semiotik unter
ID Tübingen, whose members have been living schulischem Aspekt (1977). Brög had planned this
in a greenhouse for five years in order to test the book as an aid to teachers confronted with the
conditions under which men can live in such a new curriculum who have not had proper
direct contact with plants while they save heat- semiotic training. In his own contribution, he
ing energy, and to test which plants are suited stresses the generality semiotics has even when
to be companions of human beings und er these applied to specifics. Bense's contribution, "Päd-
conditions (Krampen et al., 1981). From the agogische Intentionen in der Semiotik," is the
viewpoint of his "object semiotics," Krampen preprint of a chapter of his own book Die
calls these experiments semiotic. Unwahrscheinlichkeit des Ästhetischen (1979). The
contributions by Manfred Schmalriede and Bar-
bara Wichelhaus to Brög's book are intended as
4. Sign and Institution an introduction to semiotics.
Do social institutions use signs consciously? Manfred Schmalriede, Professor at the Col-
Do institutions in the German-speaking coun- lege for Design (Fachhochschule) Pforzheim is
tries take sign theory into account? How do one of the most accurate thinkers among the
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA 209
German followers of Peirce. His main interest therapies for aphasia. Thus, in the hands of
lies in the semiotic analysis of photosequences teachers in schools of special education, N esde's
and photographic objects. booklets can be a very good start. Nesde's idea
Barbara Wichelhaus, University of Cologne, is to initiate learning processes for the knowledge
has published a book of her own: Zeichentheorie and realization of sign systems. The conditions
und Bildsprache (1970) with analyses of curricula for their constitution should be learned, but their
and instruction models. appropriate use should be learned as weIl. This
Another contribution to Brög's book, by Gün- would be a goal for pedagogics in general.
ter Neuhardt, "Symbolforschung in der Schule,
ein Teilaspekt der Semiotik" (Neuhardt, 1977) b. Legal Science. The connection between
presents a sequence of art instruction in the tenth semiotics and legal science is a West German
grade of a Hauptschule in Cologne. He shows that and Austrian specialty in which East Germany
pupils of 15 to 16 years of age are able to perceive has not yet joined. There are four outstanding
symbols and to distinguish them from other sign names connected with semiotics in the legal field:
types, to find out their meanings, to trace the Theodor Vieh weg, Professor of Legal Philos-
causes which may have led to the connection of ophy at the University of Mainz; Waldemar
signs and meanings, and to figure out a symbol Schreckenberger, professor at the same univer-
connex (i.e. the connection of two symbols from sity and Secretary of State; Ota Weinberger,
different sign systems to a unit used in one cer- Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University
tain situation) as a supersign. of Graz; and Ilmar Tammelo (see the section on
Human Communication, II.C.2.b., above), the
After translating Umberto Eco's book into late Professor of Legal Philosophy at Salz burg
German, Jürgen Trabant, Professor for Linguis- University. Here I shall avoid separating the
tics at the Free University, Berlin (see above, countries, it being more convenient to arrange
sections I.C, "International Inftuences," and the section according to generations.
II.C.2.c, "Linguistics") has written his Elemente Theodor Viehweg's book Topik und Jurisprudenz
der Semiotik (1976a) primarily foruse in educa- (1953), now in its fifth edition, set in motion a
tion. Trabant is the main representative of the most conspicuous interest in linguistic pragmat-
school of German semioticians for whom signs ics and semiotics among legal scientists.
are actions-Zeigehandlungen. Waldemar Schreckenberger's Rhetorische Semi-
Klaus Kowalski is Professor of Visual Com- otik (1978), has also been much noticed by legal
munication in Hanover. His book "Bild und students. Verbal and metalinguistic approaches
Zeichen" (1975) is a contribution to visual com- form the center of Schreckenberger's interest;
munication problems in secondary schools. but he deals much more with linguistic prag-
Gerd J ansen, also from the U niversity of Han- matics (cf. section II.C.2.c, Linguistics, above)
over, started from the Basistheorie of Bense and than with a general sign theory. The tide sug-
the Stuttgart school. He has worked out a syn- gests this attitude-the reverse tide "Semiotic
thesis between those German semioticians for Rhetoric" would perhaps have been more
whom signs are objects and those for whom signs "semiotic" in our sense. Schreckenberger's sign
are actions, in his book Gegenstandsbezogene Hand- concept (1978, pp. 31-32) is based on Peirce,
lung als Zeichenprozess. Ein werkdidaktisches Unter- Morris, Bense, and Walther, but is restricted
richtsprinzjp (1978). He uses his synthesis as a throughout to the verbal sign system. According
principle of instruction, and introduces motion as to Schreckenberger, in a special legal case, the
a constitutive factor for sign processes (1981). pragmatics of the situation decides methods. He
Werner Nestle's tide Umgang mit Zeichensyste- researched the text of the West German Con-
men, Part A: Versuche zu einer didaktischen Theorie stitution and found its syntax a sign connex, pur-
der Zeichensysteme, Part B: Modelle (1978), and the ified from incompatibilities (1978, p. 205).
first chapter of Part A, at first sight seem too Christiane and Ota Weinberger have pub-
pretentious for the booklets on which they appear. lished a book on Logik, Semantik und Hermeneutik
But semiotics can offer help to teachers of hand- (1979). Their schematism of Zeichenexemplaren
icapped children, just as it has helped improve (acoustic waves, ink strokes) and sign objects
210 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
(Weinberger, 1979, p. 15) is too simple to be
called semiotic.
Ilmar Tammelo has proposed the name "par-
aduction" for the method of establishing norms
(Tammelo, 1977, p. 103). Evaluation is the basis
for judgmen ts of val ue (Werturteile) and for norms
(Tammelo, 1977, p. 103). Evaluation is an intel-
lectual action to which sensibility is awarded or
refused by the paraductive method (p. 104). From
early on, the existence of legal norms has been
a problem for Tammelo, whereas the principles
of legallogic have led hirn to general reftections
on the chances for human communication and
survival (1975, passim).
The younger generation, inftuenced by this
kind of legal philosophy, has gone in different
directions: Hubert Rodingen, in Pragmatik der
juristischen Argumentation (1977), refers to Morris's
concept of pragmatics (1977, p. 9) and to Peirce's
sign concept (p. 9); later he discusses the rep-
resentative and sign-bearing character of lan-
guage (p. 28).
Friedrich Lachmayer (Vienna) is keenly intent
on semiotics. With asolid knowledge of the foun-
dations of sign theory, he goes his own way in
trying to visualize legal norms (Lachmayer,
1981a) and sanctions, to present symbols of nor-
mative status (1979a), or to verbalize emotions
of citizens in connection with the symbols of
their nations (1979b). He has drawn diagrams
on communication problems associated with
general legal norms (1981b). Recendy he has
done research on semiotic problems connected
with identification.
Thomas-M. Seibert (Wiesbaden) has pre-
sen ted examples of argumentation in the legal
field (1977), of pragmatic semiotics and legal
action' (1978), and a survey of legal semiotics
(1979). In 1978 he organized the section "Par-
ticipation and Sign Effectivity" for the Regens-
burg Colloquium. In 1980, he edited a special
issue of ZeitschriflJür Semiotik with the tide, "Der
Kode-Geheimsprache einer Institution" (The
Secret Code-Language of an Institution).
Linguists have taken part in the discussion
about whether dialogues between legal special-
ists such asjudges and attorneys on the one side,
and laymen such as the accused and the wit-
nesses on the other, correspond to everyday sit-
uations, or have an institutionalized form of
argumentative conftict solution.
Ekkehard Eggs (Hanover) has examined the
rhetoric of legal and everyday dialogues (1981).
Ludger Hoffmann has offered a conception for
field studies on "Sprache vor Gericht" in his
contribution for the Regensburg Colloquium
(1981), and some results of these studies in his
article "Sprechen vor Gericht" (in ZS, 1980).
The Austrian linguist Ruth Wodak-Leodolter
has published a book, Das Sprachverhalten von
Angeklagten bei Gericht-Ansätze zu einer soziolin-
guistischen Theorie der Verbalisierung (Leodolter,
1975) which is often quoted by German semi-
oticians who have a multimedia concept of sign.
c_ Theology_ Austria. The Austrians are
proud to claim three semioticians in the field of
theology: Kurt Lüthi, Anton Grabner-Haider,
and Günter Rombold.
The Swiss-born Kurt Lüthi, Professor at
Vienna University, is regarded as one of the
Austrian theologians in search of encounters
between religion and art (1963), signs in liter-
ature (1971 a), and religious dialogue with the
modern world (1971 b).
Anton Grabner-Haider's book Semiotik und
Theologie (1973) begins with a his tory of semiot-
ics and ends with theses on semiotics and the-
ology. Quite attractive is his statement (p. 207)
that since analytical philosophy has abandoned
the model of ideallanguage and a universallan-
guage for science and has substituted for it the
theory of a multiplicity of language games, and
since verificational analysis has been replaced
by functional analysis, language analysis has
become applicable to the religious use of lan-
guage. But it is always language use. Grabner-
Haider is not oriented toward other areas of
semiotics nor semiotics as an interdisciplinary
SClence.
Günter Rombold is Director of the Institute
of Anthropology and Religious Philosophy at the
Philosophisch-Theologische Hochschule in Linz.
The book he edited in 1969, KirchenJür die Zukunft
bauen, contains eleven articles on the problem of
building churches for the future. The contribu-
tors Herbert Muck (see "Architecture," II.C.3.f,
above), Ottokar Uhl, and Rombold hirnself are
likewise interested in building modern churches
for modern communities in a process which
involves the financing institution, the architect,
the masons, the church users, and the citizens
in the neighborhood 6f the church.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
In his own article, Rombold asks whether the
separation of sacred and profane art can be
maintained in our time and for the future (1969a,
pp. 69-95). The momentary evaluation of signs
in the same building allows the user to experi-
ence the building as profane or sacred in differ-
ent situations or times.
In his book Kunst als Protest und Verheissung
(1976), Rombold analyzes the functions of mod-
ern art as a protest against present institutions
and situations and as a promise for the artist,
the producer, the spectator, and the user. Only
one who understands the sign system in which
a picture, a symphony, or a cathedral partici-
pates is able to perceive and und erstand the work
of art (1976, p. 90). The entity of a symphony
and each part of this entity are only disclosed
to the human being who knows the formal prin-
ciples that distinguish an aesthetic sign system
from other sign systems.
Semiotics will have to test different aesthetic
codes as to the difference of signs used (1976,
p. 91) and as to the conditions for understanding
a symbolic message (p. 93). In the range of sym-
bolic messages and religious art, Rombold denies
the arbitrariness of signs. The more arbitrary
the signs, the less comprehensive the works of
art.
West Germany. West German linguists know
Günther Schiwy for his introductions to struc-
turalism, Der französische Strukturalismus (1969a),
Strukturalismus und Christentum (1969b), and espe-
cially his Neue Aspekte des Strukturalismus (1971),
which has had considerable influence on scien-
tists and students of all disciplines.
From structuralism, Schiwy easily found his
way to semiotics. Together with the Austrian
architect and professor Herbert Muck, and the-
ologians of both Catholic and Protestant confes-
sions, he participated in a project on signs in
divine service. The results were published by
Schiwy et al. in 1976 under the title Zeichen im
Gottesdienst. The team agreed on a "Semiotik"
which understands and analyzes communication
as a sign process. After a theoretical discussion,
the contributors concentrate on practical tests of
the semiotic method in divine service (p. 7).
Schiwy has added a good annotated bibliog-
raphy to the book.
In 1977, Schiwy published a semiotic analysis
of texts of the Swiss theologian Hans Küng and
of his controversy with the Roman Congregation
211
of the Faith. The book begins with a short sum-
mary of the history of semiotics (Schiwy, 1977,
p. 20) and semiotic methods. Like Eco, Schiwy
supposes that the se1ection of codes and sub-
codes is influenced not only by the circumstances
of communication, but also by the biological
conditions of the percipient (1977, p. 42). An
analysis of the codes used in a communicative
event allows us to reconstruct the ideologies of
the participating speakers and listeners. For such
an analysis Schiwy proposes the following con-
ditions: Ideologies that manifest themselves in
signs accessible for analysis, and should be ana-
lyzed according to Georg Klaus' syntactic,
semantic, pragmatic, and sigmatic dimensions
(see above, section II.A.2).
Rainer Vo1p, Professor of Practical Theo10gy,
University of Mainz, had not yet taken account
of semiotics in his book Das Kunstwerk als Symbol
(1966). He later edited Zeichenprozesse (1977). In
1979, he refers to Peirce, Morris, Eco, Koch,
Schiwy, and Walther, as weIl as to Eschbach's
bib1iographies in his article "Semiotik" in Lurk-
er's Wörterbuch der Symbolik.
Linguistica Biblica, edited since 1970 by Gütt-
gemanns, is slowly turning into a "Semiotica
Biblica." Erhardt Güttgemanns has organized
meetings of theo10gians interested in semiotics.
5. Symbolies
I long reflected whether to discuss symbolics
under "Foundations of Semiotics," or to regard
it as yet another distinct discipline in which
semiotic interest is necessary. In discussions with
members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kunst
und Wissenschaft, I became convinced that so
many symbolists consider semiotics a suitab1e
method for clarifying unso1ved problems in the
fie1d that one would be more justified in inter-
preting semiotics as a foundation of symbolics
than vice versa. So I opted for the discip1ine
symbo1ics, or Symbolik as it is called in German. 42
"We can only understand the discipline if we realize that
in German Symbol is not just another word for sign, but the
opposite of the arbitrary sign, the visible sign of an invisible
reality, the abstract of series of thoughts into a figurative
reduction. Cr. Manfred Lurker, "Symbol," in Lurker, Wör-
terbuch der Symbolik (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1979) pp. 551-553.
212 AN NE MARIE LANGE-SEIDL
Symbolics in itself is interdisciplinary, for we
have symbols in literature, visual arts, and archi-
tecture, both esoteric and exoteric. The same
symbol can be described in literature, repre-
sen ted in visual arts, applied as an ornament in
architecture and as a charm in the secrecy of a
private room or in the hut of a medicine man.
But there are symbols which are more fre-
quently met with in literature, others which have
their greatest representation in painting, others
which are used more in architecture, and others
which appear more frequently in myths or
religion.
Here again, interdisciplinarity may arise. A
religious symbol can be used in religious archi-
tecture, sculpture, or painting, or it can mark a
religious person in literature.
These few considerations show how complex
the field iso
Within the last decade, an obvious revival of
interest can be seen in Austria and West Ger-
many, often carried on by the same persons for
both countries (e.g., Manfred Lurker). For ide-
ological reasons, the revival of symbols has taken
a different direction in East Germany.
Manfred Lurker, vice-president of the "For-
schungskreis für Symbolik" (Salzburg), edited a
bibliography, Bibliographie zur Symbolik, Ikonogra-
phie und Mythologie, in 1968.
In 1971, Gerd Heinz-Mohr published a Lex-
ikon der Symbole. Then in 1972, two books appeared
in small publishing houses, one in Graz, the other
in Göttingen, which show a new tendency: Inge
Schwarz- Winklhofer and Hans Biedermann
published Das Buch der Zeichen und Symbole (2nd
ed., 1975) as a comprehensive collection of black-
and-white drawings. Instead of psychoanalytic
speculation on symbols, this small book offers a
comparison of signs used from ancient tim es with
modern logical and technical signs. If we eval-
uate color and size as constitutive elements of
symbols, we must criticize the fact that only form
has been represented. But these forms do not
seem to have been changed much by their repro-
duction as black-and-white drawings, when we
compare them with the originals.
Peter Croy published a classification of signs
through the centuries: Die Zeichen und ihre Sprache
(1972). With numerous apt examples he dis tin-
guishes marks as memory aids, like the rosary
of Catholics and Buddhist monks (p. 11); house
marks and property marks (p. 11); pictographs
(p. 16); animal marks (p. 20); professional marks
like notary signets, robe marks, chemical, astro-
nomical, botanical, mathematical and electrical
symbols (p.22); communication signs: optical
and acoustic signs are classified as primary; tac-
tile and olfactory signs are classified as second-
ary. Signals and signs can be classified according
to a hierarchy of priorities, registered according
to certain levels of perception. Subordinate signs
have the function of vehicular elements (p. 57);
conscious and systematic design is discussed on
p.60.
The symbols are reproduced in drawings as
weil as in photos of originals. But Croy sees more
arbitrariness in signs than the editors of the con-
temporaneous Austrian book. Croy's book was
planned as an introduction for young designers,
that is, young persons who have to create new
signs for our times.
The Herder Lexikon Symbolik edited by Mar-
ianne Oesterreicher-Mollwo (1978) views sym-
bols from a religious and psychological point of
Vlew.
Manfred Lurker has substituted systematic
explanations for presentations of symbols in his
Wörterbuch der Symbolik (19 79a). He presen ts vis-
ual symbols, symbolic actions (p. 556), symbolic
objects like charms and instruments, personifi-
cations. The symbolic repertoire of religions, of
famous poets and painters, ofpublic and private
institutions are included.
For Rainer Volp (in Lurker, 1979a, p. 513),
Semiotik is an interdisciplinary method of research.
The lower threshold of semiotics is the bord er
between signal and meaning, the upper is formed
by all cultural phenomena. Thanks to the co m-
plex and reliable instruments at its disposal,
semiotics is indispensable for the analysis of
symbols (p. 514).
6. Interdisciplinarity
The separation of disciplines has been used
here as a heuristic device to help avoid repetition
and obtain a clearer picture of activities. But
having considered these activities under its head-
ings of different disciplines, we should realize
that semiotics is interdisciplinary:
• Semiotics is a method of research across dif-
ferent disciplines.
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
• In every field we can do research as to the
perception, production, function, constitu-
tion, and evaluation of signs.
• Signs can be looked at according to the media
used. There are visual signs in different dis-
ciplines, acoustic signs in the same disci-
plines or in others. That we do not at present
care much for olfactory signs does not mean
that they have not played a large part in
different fields at other times. So the dis-
tinction as to media can help the semiotician
with sign-evaluation.
• Signs for everyday use belong to very dif-
ferent fields, but they are signs. Just what it
is that distinguishes aesthetic signs from use-
ful signs is a question for sign theory.
III. Institutional Framework
and Publications
A. International Association for
Semiotic Studies
East and West Germany were from the very
beginning represented in the lASS. About 10%
of the participants of the First Congress in Milan,
1974, came from German-speaking countries.
They decided to get into eIoser touch, to exchange
their publications, and to organize a meeting in
Berlin as soon as possible.
In Semiotic Landscape (S. Chatman et al., 1979),
the proceedings of the First Congress of the lASS,
there are no Austrian or East German contri-
butions; there are however 13 West German arti-
eIes, ineIuding one by a founder of the Stuttgart
school, Max Bense, others by the official rep-
resentatives to the lASS, Hans-H. Lieb and
Roland Posner, two by later members of the
executive board of the German Society for
Semiotics, Martin Krampen and Annemarie
Lange-Seidl, and two by members of the advi-
sory board of the same society, Hermann Kalk-
ofen and Thure von U exküll.
The Second Congress of the lASS was orga-
nized by Austrian colleagues, in particular Tasso
Borbe, at the University of Vienna in 1979. About
15% of the participants came from our three
countries. Since then, East Germany was rep-
resented in the lASS by Werner Bahner and
Manfred Bierwisch, and West Germany by Hans-
H. Lieb and Roland Posner.
213
Tasso Borbe edited the proceedings of the
Vienna Congress under the title Semiotics UrifOld-
ing (1984).
At the 1984 Congress of the lASS in Palermo,
there were no participants from East Germany.
Bierwisch and Bahner remain the official rep-
resentatives. From Austria, Gloria Withalm pre-
sen ted the project of the Austrian Society, "Sign
Theory and Sign Practice." She was elected
treasurer of the lASS and official representative
of Austria, together with Haimo Handl.
From West Germany, the editors of the Zeit-
schriflfür Semiotik, Roland Posner, Martin Kram-
pen, and Annemarie Lange-Seidl, took an active
part in the Congress. Roland Posner and Martin
Krampen are now official representatives of the
FRG.
B. Austria
Not only Austrians, but also international
semioticians and West German researchers from
several disciplines were convoked by Tasso Borbe
for his Wiener Symposien in Semiotik. The first was
held in 1975 under the title "Theory imd Practice
in Semiotics," the second in 1976 under the title
"Verbalization of Nonverbal Communication."
In 1976, the Austrian Society for Semiotics
(Österreichische Gesellschaft für Semiotik) was
founded, with Tasso Borbe as its first president
and a large advisory board of researchers from
diverse disciplines.
The 1977 Symposium on "Sign Typology" had
many participants, as it took place one week
before the International Congress of Linguists,
also in Vienna. The resulting predominance of
linguists could not be maintained by the Aus-
trian Society, however, as it did not correspond
to the real situation in Austria.
The participants in the three symposia regret
that for technical reasons it has not yet been
possible to publish the proceedings. The publi-
cation of these proceedings would have provided
the stimulus Austrian semiotics needs. For his
rather personal symposia, Borbe had always
invited as many Austrian contributors as inter-
national guests, ineIuding famous semioticians
like Bouissac, Eco, Nattiez, Pelc, Rossi-Landi,
Sebeok, and Voigt.
In 1978, the members of the Austrian Society
for Semiotics joined the Regensburg Colloquium
of the German Society for Semiotics. In March
214 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
1981, the fourth Austrian symposium took place
in Linz on the Danube, bearing the tide Didak-
tische Umsetzung der Zeichentheorie (Didactic Trans-
fer of Sign Theory). The fifth symposium of the
Austrian Society for Semiotics was held at Kla-
genfurt University in December 1984.
Its topic was Zeichen/Manipulation (Sign/
Manipulation) .
Austria had been coaxed into semiotics by
Borbe's Viennese Symposia on Semiotics in 1975,
1976, and 1977 as weIl as by the organization of
the Second Congress of the International Asso-
ciation for Semiotic Studies in 1979 (for the pro-
ceedings see Borbe, 1984, Semiotics Unfolding).
For the Linz Symposium, March 1981, the
organizers (Austrian Society for Semiotics)
invited mostly West Germans, with hardly any
Austrians. There was only one famous interna-
tional guest: Ferruccio Rossi-Landi.
In Austria, Zeitschrift fUr Semiotik is acknowl-
edged as the official periodical of the Austrian
society. Besides, Semiotische Berichte, edited for its
members by the executive board of the Austrian
Society for Semiotics, are published irregularly
in offset print. They contain articles and regional
information on semiotic topics.
C. East Germany
Georg Friedrich Meier, the organizer of the
First International Symposium: "Sign and Sys-
tem of Language," Erfurt, 1959, asked every
contributor nine questions before the symposium
started. The first question was: "What do you
understand by a verbal sign?" The answers are
pu bli~hed in the proceedings (Meier, 1961 b).
Since then, no meetings with markedly semiotic
topics or of particular interest to semioticians
have taken place. There is no association with
semiotic goals in East Germany, and no peri-
odical for semiotic topics.
D. West Germany
1. Stuttgart School
Max Bense, assistant at the U niversity of Jena
at the same time as Georg Klaus, tried to acquaint
his students with Charles Morris by having his
work translated for an East German publication.
Unfortunately, this never appeared in print. In
1949, Bense started his West German career in
the newly founded chair for Philosophy and The-
ory of Science at the University of Stuttgart.
Here his interest soon turned to sign systems and
sign processes as a basis for aIl formalized and
terminological languages. Starting from Mor-
ris's sign concept and his use of Peirce's concepts
of icon, index, and symbol, Bense tried an
approach to aesthetics. Through his courses at
the Hochseule fur Gestaltung at Ulm/Donau from
1953 to 1958, Bense became known by architects
and designers and in the foIlowing years had an
influence on curricula for German elementary
and professional schools.
Together with Helmar Frank, Bense has edited
the Grundlagenstudien fUr Kybernetik und Geisteswis-
senschaft since 1960.
It is largely owing to Elisabeth Walther
(Hamburg/Stuttgart) that the Stuttgart Insti-
tute created its semiotische Basistheorie. Starting
from sign trichotomy, the Stuttgart Institute has
worked out sign operations like adjunction,
superization, and iteration. For Bense, up to 1965,
Peirce's semiotic concepts were methodological
tools for aesthetic analysis and text theory. In
his book Semiotik. Allgemeine Theorie der Zeichen
(1967), Bense tries to approach sign functions
and sign operations subsigns, from which the
Institute developed the so-called "small matrix"
and the numerical notation of subsigns. Bense's
and Walther's Wörterbuch der Semiotik (1973) must,
according to the authors and most German semi-
oticians, be considered out of date now.
Walther's Allgemeine Zeichenlehre (1974) was
designed as an introduction for the Stuttgart stu-
dents. Bense's Semiotische Prozesse und Systeme
(1975) sums up the results of the Institute's
research: the "Iarge matrix" associated with the
"complete cirde of signs;" the connection
between the triadic relation as a causal relation
and the trichotomie sign level as a relation of
realization is presented.
Rene Thom's theorie des catastrophes has pro-
moted research in connection with "semioses"
and "morphogeneses" at the Stuttgart Institute.
In 1981 the Stuttgart Institute founded an asso-
ciation for scientific research, Vereinigung rur
wissenschaftliche Semiotik.
In connection with the Stuttgart Institute and
its goals, Walther edited an extensive series of
small red-covered books, called rot. 43 Some of
"See next section, "Serial Publications."
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
the booklets have been in the hands of most
German art students and have thus mediated
aesthetic thought as weIl as the ideas of Bolzano
and Peirce on signs.
Semiosis, founded in 1976 and edited by Bense,
Walther, and a group of their students (pub-
lished by Agis-Verlag, Baden-Baden), has from
the beginning concentrated on Bense's version
of a semiotic Basistheorie. The periodical is open
only to adherents of the Stuttgart school. There
are articles on trichotomic triads in mathemat-
ics, ?"enetic codes, creative processes, poems or
poetlc texts, trademarks, and architectural forms.
2. Serial Publications
In connection with the Stuttgart school,
Walther has edited rot since 1960. Its forty-four
volumes contain extracts from Peirce's, Morris's
and Bolzano's publications, but also experimen-
tal arts and theoretical publications on semiotics.
Gerold Ungeheuer's Forschungsberichte des Insti-
tuts für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik der
Universität Bonn started in 1966 and have reached
more than fifty volumes, which contain contri-
butions in pure communications research, pho-
netics and phonology, and language data-
processing.
Since 1970, Walter A. Koch, Professor of
Anglistics and Semiotics at the University of
Bochum, has edited Studia Semiotica in three series:
(1) Seria Practica, with ni ne volumes from 1970
to 1981; (2) Collecta Semiotica, with four volumes
from 1972 to 1981; (3) Res Semiotica.
Studia Semiotica is aseries with a wide range
of interests: theoretical foundations, poetry,
theater, mass media, comic strips. The series
contains a 1arge program, mainly for language
teaching, and several models for the teaching of
semiotics. 44 Koch works with the classification
of signs, superization, structures. After Eschbach,
he has had the most ample reference 1ists in
semiotics.
From 1975, Roland Posner has been editing
Grundlagen der Kommunikation/ Foundations rif Com-
munication, now with more than 30 volumes, most
of which cou1d also be considered foundations
of semiotic research. Since 1981, he has been
44W. A. Koch 1971 in Varia Semiotica: "Für ein wissen-
schaftstheoretisches und didaktisches Programm eines sozio-
semiotischen Strukturalismus," p. 571-600.
215
assisted by Georg Meggle, a specialist in seman-
tics from the University of Constance. Roland
Posner has started editing a new series, Prob-
leme der Semiotik, the first issue of which is
KlausOehler's Zeichen und Realität, the proceed-
ings of the 1981 Hamburg colloquium of the
German Society of Semiotics, in three volumes
(Oehier, 1984).
Eschbach's Kodikas Supplements have mean-
~hile turned int.o a major series on semiotic top-
lCS. The same IS true of MAKS Publications at
Münster.
3. Bibliographies
In 1974, Achim Eschbach's first bib1iography,
Zeichen- Text-Bedeutung. Zu Theorie und Praxis der
Semiotik was published by Fink-Verlag in Mun-
ich. Even if this bib1iography has often been
criticized for mistakes and for containing too
many entries which have litde to do with semiot-
ics, it is indispensable for the semiotician. With
10,352 titles of books and articles, one must not
be surprised at the minor mistakes found by spe-
cia1ists. Anyone who takes data from such a vast
bibliography into his own reference list without
checking them in the publication is not much of
~ researcher hirns elf. This bib1iography has
Impressed many Germans who imagined semiot-
ics as a smaIl, insignificant branch of learning.
In 1976, Eschbach and Wendelin Rader con-
tinued their bibliographical work with Semiotik-
Bibliographie I, published by Syndikat in Frank-
furt. With 4,000 tides of books and articles this
bibliography is more concentrated. It con~ains
semiotic literature from 1965 to 1976 and has an
author and a subject index.
In 1978, Eschbach and Rader edited Film-
Semiotik, Semiotics oJ Film, Semiologie du Cinema,
published by Saur in Munich. Much of the co1-
lecting work had been done by two French film
semioticians, Roger Odin and Christian Metz,
before Eschbach and Rader took over and com-
pie ted the work according to their bibliograph-
lcal method.
In 1980, Rader started LLINQUA, a Language
and Literature Index Quarterly in his own publishing
house at Aachen. The first edition presents more
than 5,000 articles from international periodica1s.
Kodikas/ Code is a periodical edited by Eschbach
in connection withJürgen Trabant, Ernest E. B.
Hess-Lüttich, and the Rumanian Mihai Nadin.
216 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
Kodikas/ Code was originally planned for reviews
of semiotic literature, in connection with
Eschbach's bibliographies of general semiotics 45
and semiotic disciplines. 46 So reviews take up the
main portion (about one-third) of each issue.
Whereas Semiosis is restricted to the Stuttgart
school and its Basistheorie, and Zeitschriftfür Semi-
otik concentrates on one topic for each issue,
Kodikas is the most open of the German semiotic
periodicals. So it serves weil as supplement: sin-
gle articles of good quality on semiotic topics
have been published here.
4. Deutsche Gesellschaft für
SemiotikJZeitschrljt für Semiotik
The meeting planned by the West German
participants of the International Congress in
Milan was the First Semiotic Colloquium, Ber-
lin, 1975, organized by Roland Posner and Hans-
Peter Reinecke, with more than 350 participants.
In Berlin, it was decided to found a German
Society for Semiotics. The official first meeting
of this Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik e.V.
took place in connection with the Vienna Sym-
posium in J une, 1976. The first president (for
1976) was Roland Posner; for 1977, Lange-Seidl
was president; and for 1978, Borbe. The General
Secretary of the first period was Krampen. Now
the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik e.V. has
more than 280 members.
The edition of a German periodical was like-
wise planned in Berlin. ZeitschriflJür Semiotik was
realized in 1977, with Posner as editor-in-chief,
Tasso Borbe, Martin Krampen, Annemarie
Lange-Seidl, and Klaus Gehler as coeditors.
Among the well-known international partici-
pants in the Berlin Colloquium of 1975 were
Umberto Eco, Paul Ekman, Abraham Moles,
Thomas A. Sebeok, and William Stokoe. The
proceedings of the First Semiotic Colloquium,
Berlin, 1975 were edited by the organizers, Pos-
ner and Reinecke, under the title Zeichenprozesse
(1977).
The Second Semiotic Colloquium, Rege"s-
burg, 1978 was organized by Lange-Seid!. It had
100 active contributors among its 220 partici-
pants. As September is still semester vacation in
"Cf. Eschbach (1974), Eschbach and Rader (1976).
46Cf. Eschbach and Rader 1978 and different summaries in
periodicals.
West German universities, there were fewer stu-
dents than in Berlin, though vacations are an
advantage for active contributors. The Regens-
burg Colloquium welcomed Georges Mounin,
Jerzy PeIc, A. Piatigorsky, and Luis Prieto, and
well-known representatives of American Peirce
Research, including Carolyn EiseIe, Max Fisch,
Jarrett Brock, and David E. Pfeifer.
In Regensburg, the members of the German
Society for Semiotics elected a new execu tive
board consisting of Krampen (president for
1979), Christian Stetter (president for 1980),
Gehler (president for 1981 and organizer of the
next colloq ui um), and Lange-Seidl (General
Secretary for the en tire period ).
The proceedings of the Second Semiotic Col-
loquium, Regensburg, 1978 were edited by the
organizer Lange-Seidl under the title Zeichenkon-
stitution (1981).
The Third Semiotic Colloquium, Hamburg,
1981 (Gct. 4-10) was organized by Gehler under
the title "Zeichen und Realität." There were 15
sections on the following topics: Reiativity and
the Reconstruction of Reality, Semiotics and
Epistemology, History of Semiotics, Semiotics of
Religion, Semiotics of Literature, Word Mean-
ing, Problems of Realism in the Arts, Reality in
Visual Communication, Film Semiotics, Non-
verbal Communication, Multimedia Commu-
nication as a Reality of the Theater, Sign Reality
in Culture and Ethno-Semiotics, Institutions and
Reality, Semiotics of Medicine, Gbjectivity and
Interest, and there was a workshop on Peirce's
Existential Graphs.
The program of the Hamburg Colloquium
showed internationally known names like
Thomas A. Sebeok (USA), Israel Scheffler
(USA), Paul Bouissac (Canada), Kenneth Laine-
Ketner (USA), Herman Parret (Beigium), and
Irene Portis-Winner (USA). Speakers at plenary
sessions were Max Bense and Gerold Ungeheuer.
The executive board of the German Society
elected in Hamburg consists of Roland Posner
(president for 1982), Erika Fischer-Lichte (pres-
ident for 1983), Friedrich Reimers (president for
1984 and organizer of the Munich Congress
1984), and Günter Bentele (general secretary).
The proceedings of the Hamburg Colloquium
of 1981 appeared und er the title Zeichen und Rea-
lität, edi ted by Klaus Gehler (Gehler, 1984).
In addition to the general colloquia of the
German Society for Semiotics, about twenty
 GERMANY AND AUSTRIA
smaller section meetings took place, each with
a scientific program. The film section has orga-
nized a meeting every year; one international
meeting was organized by the medical section,
its title being "Semiotik und Angst." The section
on theater semiotics organized weeks of exper-
imental work at one of the Munich theaters (given
broad coverage by the newspapers, radio, and
television) which ended with a meeting of Euro-
pean theater semioticians.
The section on semiotics and religion has met
twice since Regensburg. Pedagogics met in
Lüneburg in October of 1982. The section on
multimedia communication has continued meet-
ing from time to time since the Regensburg Col-
loquium, as weH as the working group on
participation and sign effectiveness of that
colloquium. 47
Zeitschriftfür Semiotik was founded in 1977 and
the first issue was published in 1979. I t is now
published by Stauffenburg Verlag, Tübingen.
Each issue treats a common semiotic topic and
is about 70 to 100 pages; each number brings
news of German and international semiotics,
reports, and previews of semiotic events.
Zeitschrift für Semiotik (ZS) is the official peri-
odical of the German Society for Semiotics in
association with the Austrian Society for Semiot-
ics. The scientific board of the German Society
for Semiotics along with the Schweizerische
Gesellschaft fur Semiotik comprise the scientific
board of the periodical.
The following topics have already been treated
in ZS:
• Semiotische Klassiker des 20. Jahrhunderts (ed.
Martin Krampen)
• Verhaltenspartituren: Notation und Transkription
(ed. Thomas Luckmann)
• Semiotik als philosophische Propädeutik-Die Zei-
chentheorie der deutschen Aufklärung (ed. Chris-
toph Hubig)
• Ikonismus in den natürlichen Sprachen (ed. Roland
Posner)
• Der Kode-Geheimsprache einer Institution (ed.
Thomas-M. Seibert)
"Cf. these sections in the proceedings of the Colloquium,
Lange-Seidl, 1981, vol. II, 72-212 (Multimedia Commu-
nication); vol. II, pp. 257-308 (Participation and Sign
Effectivity). See also Seibert, ZeitschriftfUrSemiotik, 2 (1980),
pp. 183-196.
217
• Vom Piktogramm zum Alphabet: Semiotik der
Schrift (ed. Florian Coulmas)
• Wahrnehmung und Gesellschaft
• Experimentelle Psychosemiotik: Wahrnehmung-
Vorstellung-Begriff (ed. J ohannes Engel-
kamp)
• Fragestellungen sowjetischer Semiotik (ed. Karl
Eimermacher )
• Die Aktualitäten der altgriechischen Semiotik (ed.
Klaus Oehler)
• Kulinarische Semiotik
• Kodewandel
• Kunst und Wirklichkeit
• Sprache-Schriftsprache-Plansprache (ed.
Roland Posner)
• Semiotik und Medizin (ed. Thure von U exküll)
• Und in alle Ewigkeit . . . Kommunikation über
10,000 Jahre (ed. R. Posner).
Forthcoming topics will be:
• Leistung und Grenzen der Grafik (ed. Mar-
tin Krampen)
• Zeichen und Fiktion (ed. Arnold R. Günther)
• Nullzeichen und Nichtzeichen (ed. Annemarie
Lange-Seidl)
• F rauenkultur-Männerkultur. (ed. L uise Putsch)
• Semiotische Kontroversen der Jahrhundertwende (ed.
Roland Posner)
• Zeichentheorie und Pädagogik (ed. Silke M.
Kledzik)
• Nonverbale Kommunikation in der OJfentlichkeit
(ed. Roland Posner)
• Semiotik und Industriedesign (ed. Holger van
den Boom).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I want to thank all the West German colleagues
who readily sent me their publication lists, of
which I could only use less than one-tenth. My
thanks go as well to those Austrian and East
German colleagues who called my attention to
names and publications which helped to justify
the title of this chapter.
IV. References
Aicher, Ott! and Martin Krampen. Zeichensprache der visuellen
Kommunikation. Stuttgart: A. Koch, 1977.
Albrecht, Ernst. Sprache und Philosophie. Berlin: Deutscher
Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1975.
218 ANNEMARIE LANGE-SEIDL
Ape!, Kar! Otto. "Der philosophische Hintergrund der
Entstehung des Pragmatismus bei C. S. Peirce," Einfuh-
rung zu Peirce. In C. S. Peiree. Ed. K. O. Ape!. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1967-1970, Vo!. I, pp. 13-153.
- - - . "Peirces Denkweg vom Pragmatismus zum Prag-
matizismus." Einftihrung zu Peirce. In C. S. Peiree. Ed.
K. O. Ape!. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1967-1970, Vo!. 2,
pp. 11-211.
- - - . "Szientismus oder Transzendentale Hermeneutik?
Zur Frage nach dem Subjekt der Zeicheninterpretation in
der Semiotik des Pragmatismus." In Hermeneutik und
Dialektik. Festschriftjür Hans Georg Gadamer. Eds. R. Bubner
et al. Tübingen: Mohr und Siebeck, 1970, Vo!. I, pp. 105-
145.
- - - . "From Kant to Peirce: The Semiotical Transfor-
mation of the Transcendental Philosophy." In Proceedings
of the Third International Kant Congress. Ed. L. W. Beck.
Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972, pp. 90-104.
- - - . "Introduction to C. Morris." In Zeichen, Sprache und
Verhalten. Trans. A. Eschbach. Düsse!dorf: Schwann, 1973,
pp. 9-66.
- - - . Der Denkweg von Charles S. Peirce. Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1975.
- - - , ed. Sprachpragmatik und Philosophie. Frankfurt: Suhr-
kamp, 1976.
Arbeitsgruppe Semiotik, ed. Die Einheit der semiotischen Dimen-
sionen. Tübingen: Narr, 1978.
Arndt, Hans Werner. "Die Semiotik Christian Wolffs als
Propädeutik der ars characteristica combinatoria und
der ars inveniendi." Zeitschriftjür Semiotik, I (1979),325-
331.
Autrum, Hansjochern. Sprechen und Verstehen im Tierreich. Fest-
vortrag Universität Wurzburg. Würzburger Universitäts-
reden 19, 1955.
- - - . Biologie, Entdeckung einer Ordnung. Munich: Hanser,
1975.
- - - , et al., eds. Handbook rif Sensory Physiology. Ber!in:
Springer, 1971.
Bar-Hille!, Yehoshua, ed. Pragmatics rif Natural Languages.
Dordrecht: Reide!, 1971.
Bense, Max. Semiotik. Allgemeine Theorie der Zeichen. Baden-
Baden: Agis, 1967. ..
- - - . Einjührung in die informationstheoTetische Asthetik. Rein-
bek: Rowohlt, 1969.
- - - . "Urbanismus und Semiotik." Architektur als Zeichen-
system, Konzept I. Eds. B. Carlini and B. Schneider.
Tübingen: Wasmuth, 1971, pp. 99-104.
- - - . Semiotische Prozesse und Systeme in Wissenschaftstheorie
und Design, Ästhetik und Mathematik. Baden-Baden: Agis,
1975.
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 CHAPTER 10
Semiotics in Great Britain
Christopher Norris
1. Introduction: Questions of
Scope and Method
A. Semiotics, Semiology, and the Problem
of Definition
There is a sense in which every intellectual enter-
prise, beyond a certain point of self-conscious
development, produces and includes a form of
semiotic activity. To reflect on the methods
meaning, or history of any given discipline is t~
ask what precise significance it possesses and
how that significance has been both produced
and effectively understood. Semiotics in this
broad sense has a claim to represent the master-
science and explanatory matrix of all cultural
activity. Such is the ambitious and all-embracing
synthesis proposed by re cent theorists like
U mberto Eco. 1 The semiotician surveys the whole
world of human communicative behavior and
can therefore say, with boundless confidence:
humani nil a me alienum puto.
The risk with this approach is that it tends to
dissolve boundaries and deprive the term
lU mberto Eco, A Theory rif Semioties (Bloomington & London:
Indiana U niversity Press, 1976).
Christopher Norris • Department of English, Univer-
sity of Wales, Institute of Science and Technology, Cardiff,
Wales, Great Britain CF1 3EU.
229
"semiotics" of any clear disciplinary status. It
places everyone in the famous predicament of
Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain, who found to his
surprise (and gratification) that he had been
talking prose all his life without knowing it. Cer-
ta~nly it is possible, with selective hindsight, to
remterpret the his tory of various disciplines and
show how their central discoveries and problems
were bound up with matters of semiotic import.
In the case of British philosophers like Hobbes
and Locke this prehistory is genuinely "there,"
because they had much to say about language,
culture, and such currently debated questions as
the "arbitrary" nature of the sign. Indeed, as we
shall see, this whole tradition of empiricist think-
ing has left a deep mark on British contributions
to the semiotic enterprise. It would likewise be
wrong to ignore the debates on metaphor and
figurative language which were sparked by the
Romantic poets-notably Coleridge-and antic-
ipated some of the most advanced modern think-
ing on matters of rhetoric and epistemology.
(Simpson has given an excellent account of these
parallels.)2 As one comes up to date it is even
more tempting to find semiotic hints and point-
ers in the work of linguists, anthropologists, and
cultural historians working without any firm or
2David Simpson, Irony and Authority in Romantie Poetry (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1979).
230 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
explicit theoretical commitment. In what follows
I have sometimes resisted such temptations, con-
fining my treatment to those thinkers -whatever
their particular disciplin~who have made some
use of semiotic methods and perspectives. This
will concentrate discussion within the space
available and, I hope, give an organizing shape
to this otherwise highly miscellaneous field of
study.
Eco highlights the problem when he asks
whether current semiotics should properly be
regarded as a "field" or a "discipline." If the
field exists as such and its component parts are
clearly mapped out, then it should be possible
as Eco puts it "to define semiotics inductively
by extrapolating ... aseries of constant tend-
encies and therefore a unified method."g On the
other hand, if semiotics is conceived from the
outset as a discipline setting its own bounds and
prescriptive limit, then the process is one of
deduction whereby the model, once established,
has power to exclude irrelevant topics of interest.
Eco very reasonably argues that a balance must
be found between these two positions, allowing
the construction of exploratory systems (or
"research models") which set up a coordinated
field of inquiry without too dogmatically defin-
ing its limits. The model must always be open
to contradiction, to phenomena which "do not
fit in with it and which force it to restructure
itself and to broaden its range.,,4 Without the
directive impetus of theory semiotics would be
merely an amorphous and proliferating dis-
course, unable to stake out its own field of inter-
est. An excess of theoretical rigor, on the other
hand, would tend to narrow its practical scope
and create a situation of deadlocked abstract
argument.
Eco's reftections are of further use when we
come to consider the different kinds of semiotic
research which have grown up in different coun-
tries over the past half-century or so. Generally
speaking, the British approach has emphasized
the "inductive" (or empirical) side and avoided
the extremes of theoretical involvement. This
attitude runs deep in the British tradition, espe-
cially that of philosophy, where the native strain
of tough-minded commonsense empiricism has
often thrown up barriers against the rationalist
SEeo, p. 7.
4Eco, p. 8.
systems of Continental thought. It may be useful
to distinguish he re between the broad-based
semiotic wh ich Eco describes and the form of
"semiology" practiced by recent French theorists
and those under their inftuence. ("Semiotics" and
"semiology" are terms often used interchange-
ably, but they do have different implications when
viewed in this comparative context.) Semiolog-
ical theory, deriving from Saussurian linguistics,
offers a highly conceptualized account of the sig-
nifying codes and conventions involved in var~
ious cultural activities. In Eco's terms, it places
the requirements and complexities of "disci-
pline" before the varieties of "field" to be
explored, and thus induces a maximum concern
with matters of theory and principle. This desire
to elaborate new theoretical models is evident
enough in the texts of a literary critic like Roland
Barthes, an anthropologist like Claude Levi-
Strauss or a cultural historian like Michel Fou-
cault. They all start out from the basic discovery
of semiotics, that language and social existence
have certain structures in common, enabling the
analyst to describe them in terms of signifying
system and structure. An early text like Barthes's
Elements of Semiologllays down a classic program
for the "reading" of cultural codes and conven-
tions by means of a model based on Saussurian
linguistics. But it soon became evident that
French semiology was wresding with its own
presuppositions and developing a different order
of discourse, one which would break entirely with
the "commonsense" assumptions of previous
thought. This involved a highly politicized rhet-
oric, mixed with an abstract terminology bris-
ding with technical neologisms.
British reactions to French semiology provide
a useful comparative index. Writing in 1970,
Roger Poole expressed the broadly representa-
tive view that semiotics had been kidnapped, or
deftected from its proper concerns, by a group
of obscurantist ideologues bent on distorting its
genuine insights. 6 He argued for a firm distinc-
tion between semiotic method as a true (ideolog-
ically neutral) discipline of thought, and the
new semiology as a willfully misapplied and para-
sitic variant, threatening to discredit the whole
5Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers
and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967).
6Roger Poole, "Struetures and Materials," 20th Century Stud-
ies, 3 (May 1970), 6-30.
 GREAT BRIT AIN
enterprise. Poole's reactions were very much in
line with the general pattern of response among
British observers of the French intellectual scene.
Semiotics and structuralism have certainly left
their mark, as the following pages will testify.
But the ground has been won against consider-
able odds, with resistance coming mainly from
the deep-grained mistrust of abstract terminol-
ogy and system-building theory.
It is for these reasons that "British semiotics"
has defined itself largely through aseries of tac-
tical responses to seemingly alien habits of
thought. In general the British contribution has
been at its strongest in those disciplines where
theory could be kept within the limits of a firm
and widely-accepted intellectual framework.
Typically, the British response to new develop-
ments of theory has been one of massed oppo-
sition to begin with, followed by aperiod of
guarded interest and finally a compromise
acceptance with various qualifications. This can
be seen most clearly in the field of literary study,
where shifts of theoretical view have a powerful
effect in transforming the tradition al pattern of
thought. Academic interests are deeply vested in
the idea of tradition as a stable repository of
values, offering both a canonized corpus of texts
to be studied and a codified discipline of methods
to embrace them. Semiotics evidently challenges
any such assumption, questioning the bases of
literary judgment by showing how meaning and
values are always bound up with the self-
understanding of a dominant culture. Structur-
alism was therefore fiercely resisted by those who
saw in it a dangerous threat to the autonomy of
"English" as a university discipline.
Such at least was the position in the late 1960s
when structuralist ideas were little understood
in Britain and regarded as the property of a
small, disruptive clique. Since then the situation
has changed to the extent that many university
courses provide a regular option in modern crit-
icial theory. What has happened is not so much
a radical change of heart as a gradual recogni-
tion that structuralist ideas could be absorbed
and adapted to fairly conventional ends. This
process is exemplified by a book like David
Lodge's Working With Structuralism (1981 ).7 Lodge
7David Lodge, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews
on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
231
is frank enough about his aim to domesticate
structuralist ideas and apply them to the pur-
pos es of a "practical criticism" not so far removed
from familiar techniques of the past three dec-
ades and more. He agrees with Roger Poole in
rejecting the claims of those French radical the-
orists (associated with the Tel Quel group) who
seek to undermine or explode all conventional
forms of signifying practice. "Working with
structuralism" comes to sound like making a vir-
tue of necessity. In his criticism-as indeed in
his fiction-Lodge attempts to strike a balance
between the "old-fashioned" pleasures of nar-
rative verisimilitude and those new ways of
thinking which call such pleasures into question.
The very title of his book has an air of grim
necessity about it, a feeling that "structuralism"
is there to be reckoned with, a tough but ines-
capable challenge in the path of the would-be
practical cri tic.
Lodge is unconcerned to disguise or disavow
what he calls his "incorrigibly empirical English
mentality." Some of his essays are openly stra-
tegie in reclaiming ground for traditional con-
ventions of narrative and criticism alike. Others
are more ambiguous, or bear the signs of a cer-
tain defensive embarrassment, as when Lodge
writes that "structuralism of the classical, for-
malist kind is, as it were, only accidentally mys-
tifying and in timida ting.,,8 Beca use this is
precisely Lodge's "kind" of structuralism, his
statement of its virtues is oddly self-compromised!
This is not to deny that Lodge's methods can be
used to good effect when consistently applied,
as indeed they are in his previous book The Modes
of Modern Writing (see discussion below). What
is more striking and symptomatic is the way in
which reviewers and commentators on the "aca-
dernie scene" have taken hirn up as a represen-
tative figure. Depending on individual prejudice,
Lodge is cast either as a welcome debunker of
these otherwise dangerous ideas, or-more in
sorrow than in anger-as a once commonsens-
ical critic who has strangely succumbed to their
spell. Or again-the majority reaction-
"structuralism" is accepted on Lodge's terms as
simply a revived and geared-up version of "old"
New Criticism. The threat is warded off by
whatever means. The reception of Lodge's book
is thus a striking example of British empiricism
8Lodge, p. ix.
232 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

facing a s trong theoretical challenge and in 1923 by I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden. 11

finding-as usual-a compromise modus vivendi. The book was conceived mainly as a therapeutic
I have so far been describing British semiotic exercise in clearing away the manifold errors and
activity through a kind of Rezeptionsgeschichte, an "metaphysical" delusions surrounding the topics
account of how foreign (mainly French) ideas of language and thought. At the same time it set
have been handled and adapted for use. Given out to review the major historical contributions
the nature and limits of that activity, this is I to philosophy of language, treated by Ogden and
think the most sensible approach. It can hardly Richards as a more or less steady progress from
be claimed that there exists an independent and abstract mystification to nominalist clarity. The
well-defined school of thought answering to the book was very much a product of its time and
tide "British Semiotics." What we have is a far milieu, written in Cambridge during the period
more complicated picture of trends and devel- which saw the rise of logical positivism and the
opments, so me ofwhich expressly own their alle- drive to place all kinds of knowledge-the
giance to semiotic theory whereas others display "human sciences" included-on a positivist foot-
a tacit or unacknowledged kinship. There is, ing. The Meaning oJ Meaning tried to do for lin-
moreover, the awkward fact that those who have guistics wh at Bertrand Russell and others were
derived their main stimulus from semiotic theory carrying through in the current revolution of
have tended to take it over wholesale from non- philosophie thought.
British sourees. This is not to deny the vigor and Ogden and Richards took the view that
resourcefulness of groups like that associated with semiotics could only become a self-respecting sci-
the journal Sereen, whose work on the semiotics ence if its program was formulated in behaviorist
of film and television has exercised a good deal terms, as a branch of applied psychology. Hence
their account of the "sign-situation," based on
ofinftuence. 9 It is, however, fair to say that their
thinking derives almost entirely from the theories a highly simplified model of stimulus-response
of Lacan, Althusser, Barthes and the French and designed to exclude any vague appeal to
poststructuralist Left. The commitment to a abstract or mentalist criteria. Their chosen tide
semiotic mode of thought most often entails a is to some extent ironie, because the book makes
self-conscious distancing from the language, con- every effort to purge semiotics of the fruitless
ventions, and protocols of British tradition. At questing after essences of "meaning" involved
the same time there is much useful work within in traditional inquiries. Meanings are here to be
that tradition which has not explicidy aligned defined and located as part of a behavioral rep-
itself with semiotic thinking but which offers- ertoire, produced in response to a given situation
if approached from the right angle-some ahd obeying a clear-cut economy of reference
revealing grounds of comparison. This is simply and context. The famous "triangular" diagram
to recognize, as Eco puts it, that "we must keep of thought, symbol and referent is brought in mainly
in mind the semiotic field as it appears today, as an illustrative pointer to the ground-clearing
in all its many and varied forms and in all its discipline which Ogden and Richards intend.
disorder. ,,10 Thought (or reference) is at the apex of the tri-
angle, symbol and referent at the two base angles.
Between referent and thought there exists a
2. General Background: determinate relation (unbroken line) which gives
Beginnings of Modern Interest the speaker her hold on communicable meaning.
The recipient for his part gathers such meaning
through the likewise determinate relation between
A. Semiotics and "The Meaning of symbol and thought. The communicative circuit
Meaning" thus depends on an unimpeded transfer along
both imagined sides of the triangle, whereas the
Of all British projects in the semiotic sphere,
base (from symbol to referent) is seen as an indi-
by far the most ambitious and sweeping in its reet or arbitrary link, represented in the diagram
claims was The Meaning of Meaning, written joindy
by a dotted line.
')Sereen is the journa1of the Society for Edueation in Film
and Television (Great Britain). "c. K.Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning 01 Meaning
IIIEeo, Theory 01 Semiotics, p. 7. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923).
 GREAT BRIT AIN
This model is worth pondering for what it
implies about the scope and peculiarities of the
Ogden-Richards program. Up to a point they
are clearly in agreement with Saussure's insist-
ence on the arbitrary relation between signifier
and signified. Indeed it is a main part of their
argument that much confusion has been caused
by the habit of treating meaning as somehow
inherent, or naturally present, in the signs which
conventionally serve to convey it. To this extent
The i\1eaning oI Meaning advances a properly
semiotic model of language, as opposed to a var-
iant of tradition al semantics. However, Ogden
and Richards qualify this position by insisting
that signs are determined in context by a reflex
psychology of stimulus and response. They con-
stantly revert to a behaviorist model which posits
the basic and invariable link between referent
(object signified) and the act of achieved com-
munication. So far as language departs from this
norm, it becomes a matter of "emotive" usage
or more or less hazy connotation. In his Principles
oI Literary Criticism, Richards went on to develop
this loaded distinction between the referential
language of science (veridical statement) and the
emotive language of poetry.12 His intention was
to "save" poetie meaning by staking out an area
of charged and intensive significance where pos-
itivist criteria of truth and logic need not apply.
The result, however, was a form of special plead-
ing which preserved the poet's language only at
the cost of his intellectual dignity.
Such were the problems engendered by Rich-
ards' empiricist stress on the "sign-situation" as
a means of supposedly objective analysis. In The
Meaning of Meaning he and Ogden showed sm all
patience with philosophers of language who
attempted to press their ideas beyond this point
of broadly confirmable evidence. Such was their
quarrel with Saus sure, whose mode of semiotics
they largely reject (although, to be fair, Ogden
and Richards were quick to perceive the impli-
cations of his thought). They object to Saus-
sure's cardinal distinction between langue and
parole, and his insistence that only the former-
language in its "synchronic" or systematic
aspect-is capable of scientific study. They
regard the very notion of la langue as a product
of pure semantic abstraction, a concept brought
into being merely by the word which names it.
"I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Rou-
tledge & Kegan Paul, 1925).
233
From their positivist-behavioral standpoint
Saussure has sacrificed the reality oflanguage-
its functional dependence on context-to a wholly
chimerical concept of method. Saussurean
semiology is "cut off from any contact with sci-
en tifie methods of verifica tion." 13
This demand for empirical "verification" sig-
nals the enormous difference of outlook between
two riyal notions of scientific discipline. The dif-
ferenee is crucial when it comes to understanding
how British semiotics has developed within-
and to so me extent against-the mainstream of
semiotic thought.
B. From Function to Structure: Tbe
Semiotic Turn
Semiotics as a science of communicative sys-
tems takes rise from the perception that me an-
ings are structured in accordance wi th certain
mediating rules. Hence the fact that "semiotics"
and "structuralism" are usually taken as more
or less synonymous terms of description. This
dominant concern with structure has mostly
superseded the older, functionalist perspective
which governed the human sciences (linguistics
included) until quite recently. Functional expla-
nations assume, like Ogden and Richards, that
meaning is produced in response to a specific
local stimulus (or social need), and that disci-
plined inquiry is a matter of relating cause to
effect. Structuralism on the contrary posits a net-
work of articulated mcanings, such that no single
or isolated function can yield up its own self-
evident explanation. In linguistics this shift of
explanatory paradigm-mainly through Saus-
sure's powerful influence-is familiar enough and
need not detain us here. But its effect in other
disciplines has been just as marked, and dem-
onstrates both the range of semiotic thinking and
the limits placed upon it by empiricist habits of
thought.
British anthropology is one tradition which
has registered the impact of structuralism while
preserving some measure of resistance. I make
it something of a test case here because the meth-
odological issues involved are particularly clear-
cut and illuminating. Levi-Strauss points the way
in his short study Totemism, where he offers a
powerful structuralist critique of the various-
I:lOgden and Richards, p. 6.
234 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
mainly British-schools of early modern anthro-
pology. What these have in common, he argues,
is a broadly functionalist stress on the causes
and societal roots of certain toternie phenomena,
rather than the logic of interrelation which gov-
erns their global working. His essay brilliantly
isolates the points at which such functional
explanations either break down or lead to fresh
insights incompatible with their own method-
ology. Certain findings can be explained, as he
says, "neither by utilitarian considerations such
as those adduced by Malinowski, nor by the
intuition of perceptible resemblances proposed
by Firth and by Fortes." The only adequate level
of explanation is one which acknowledges, and
sets out to define, "a series of logical connections
uniting mental relations."I4 From this point the
way was clearly open to Levi-Strauss's vastly
ambitious accounts of the structure and mor-
phology of human culture.
Of interest here is the fact that Levi-Strauss
arrives at this commanding position by working
through the insights and problems of a largely
British background of research. His thinking
starts out precisely from the gaps in "utilitarian"
approaches like that of Malinowski, or the "intu-
ition of perceptible resemblances" assumed by
all empirieist accounts. Malinowski as it hap-
pens contributed a "Supplement" to The Meaning
qf Meaning, extending the Ogden-Richards argu-
ment to the ethnographie problems of "primitive
language" and how to understand it. All lin-
guistic processes, Malinowski states, "derive their
power only from real processes taking place in
man's relation to(his surroundings.,,15 This func-
tionalist outlook is completely in line with the
book's central argument and method. However,
Levi-Strauss is far from simply dismissing the
tradition which provides hirn with so many hints
toward his own revelations. Speaking of
Radcliffe-Brown as the critical high-point of this
tradition, Levi-Strauss sees the evidence ine-
luctably pointing "beyond a simple ethno-
graphie generalization-to the laws of language,
and even of thought."I6 British anthropology is
shown to have reached the point where a "logic
of oppositions and correlations"-a structuralist
14Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 152.
I50gden and Richards (Supplement by Bronislaw Mali-
nowski), p. 336.
16Levi-Strauss, p. 163.
method-was clearly in sight. What prevented
Radcliffe-Brown from achieving this break-
through, according to Levi-Strauss, was his lin-
gering adherence to a functionalist psychology.
Associationism sketched out the "elementary
logic" of thought but failed to recognize that this
logic governed and preexisted all possible associative
links. Radcliffe-Brown stopped short of that
fecund revers al which would open up "primi-
tive" cultures to a fuH understanding of their
logical complexity. Though impressively
advanced for its time, his thinking retained the
limiting stamp of a stimulus-response psychology.
More recently British anthropologists have
responded to Levi-Strauss's theories, but not
without a certain ambivalent reserve. Edmund
Leach is perhaps the best known, having written
an appreciative but critical monograph on the
master, I7 and various books and essays drawing
on structuralist thought. His allegiance and
reservations are succinctly expressed in the col-
lection Genesis as Myth, where he extends Levi-
Straussian techniques to the analysis of biblical
(mainly Old Testament) narratives. Leach very
strikingly applies the structuralist method of
treating myths as an exercise in problem-solving
logic, unconsciously adapted to the needs of social
legitimation. The approach clearly derives from
Levi-Strauss but all the same finds room for some
points of difference in method and principle.
Leach remarks on the extreme disparity between
Levi-Strauss's complicated logic of interpreta-
tion and the relatively simple nature of the myths
he chooses to expound. Moreover this appears
to contradict a central argument of structural
anthropology: that "primitive thought" is in fact
just as logical and complex as the sciences of
modern understanding. According to Levi-
Strauss the interpreter and the myth-maker work
within the same basic repertoire, the same men-
tal stock of structures and variations. It is there-
fore curious, as Leach points out, that he restriets
his analyses largely to the products of re mo te
toternie cultures, "characterized by the absence
of any setting within an historical chronology,
real or imaginary."IB
Leach attempts to transcend these limitations
by applying structuralist techniques to biblical
17Edmund Leach, Livi-Strauss (London: Fontana, 1970).
'BEdmund Leach, Genesis as Myth (London: Jonathan Cape,
1969), p. 17.
 GREAT BRITAIN 235
narrative. The range, complexity and narrative the philosophie background of empiricism. There
sequence of this material-as weil as the exist- is, however, a very marked difference in their
ence of a long interpretative tradition-demand norms of theoretical consistency and rigor. Levi-
something other than a purely Levi-Straussian Strauss, in his structuralist critique of associa-
"synchronie" approach. If myth in the abstract tionism, speils out the difference clearly enough.
is divorced from chronology, this cannot be, the Up to this point I have tried to present a gen-
case with biblical stories, which depend for their eral picture of the background and conditioning
significance on the belief that events occurred in assumptions of British semiotics. I shall now go
a certain predestined and privileged order. Hence on to describe in more detail some particular
the problem, as Leach sees it: "How does this disciplines and fields of interest where semiotic
essential diachrony of the traditional hermeneu- thinking has played an appreciable role. Of
tic relate to the synchrony of a structural course my account is very far from exhaustive,
analysis?"19 but it does attempt to trace the main lines of
Leach is effectively appealing to the context interest and point up the links between them.
of lived or experiential meaning, the shared The extended bibliography with which this
human his tory which Levi-Strauss on principle chapter doses should be used at every stage as
excludes. Although he embraces a semiotic model a guide to further reading.
of myth as signifying structure, Leach holds fast
to some elements of a more traditional approach,
including the functionalist stress on his tory and 3. Disciplines and Trends: A
"setting." Narrative order and historical context Guide To Current Interests
are in this sense co-implicates of diachronie
method. What Leach explicitly rejects in Levi-
Strauss's thinking is the idea that "sequence is
A. Linguistics and Semiotics
simply a persistent rearrangement of elements The problem of demarcation-what shall
which are present from the start." This mixture count as a specifically "semiotic" method-is
of admiration and dissent on Leach's part is more pressing in the case of linguistics than in
typical of much in the British reaction to struc- any other discipline. In one sense the linguist,
turalist theory. It finally comes down to that whatever her approach, is always concerned with
deep-Iying split between the rationalist and the forms and resources of communicative utter-
empirieist habits of mind. ance, and thus with a branch (one among many)
Historically the two traditions are oddly inter- of semiotic practice. Such was Saussure's under-
twined because some of the most important standing when he predicted that linguistics would
structuralist ideas first found expression in the eventually become apart of that much wider
British empirieist camp. It was Hume, for exam- enterprise devoted to the full range of signifying
pie, who proposed that all the operations of codes and conventions. In another sense, it may
thought could be explained in terms of "resem- be argued (as by Roland Barthes) that linguistics
blance" and "contiguity," these being the axes provides the master science and privileged model
of mental association. Translated out of the of semiotic thought. 21 In practice this amounts
empirieist idiom, this same distinction was of to the difference between a view of language as
course set up by Roman J akobson as a model social semiotic-a broadly contextual or func-
for the semiotic study of language. 20 Hume's tionalist view-and one which seeks to account
mechanistic philosophy of mind was reinter- for language in more purely formal or abstract
preted to yield the language coordinates of met- terms. Lately there has occurred a marked shift
aphor and metonymy, offering a powerful abstract of interest from the latter to the former view,
hold on the detours of meaning. It is therefore and it is this main trend which I shall here
not the case, historically speaking, that struc- attempt to summarize.
turalism represents an outlook wholly alien to Perhaps the most important single inftuence
I"Leach, p. 18.
has been the work of M. A. K. Halliday, a lin-
2°Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and guist of exceptional range and versatility whose
Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cam-
bridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1960), pp, 350-77. 21Barthes, Elements, p. 10.
236 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
position is elearly stated in the tide of his most
recent book: Language as Social Semiotic. 22 Halli-
day's commitment to the semiotic enterprise is
forthright and unambiguous. "The social
semiotic," he writes, "is the system of meanings
that defines or constitutes the culture; and the
linguistic system is one mode of realization of
these meanings."23 Halliday arrives at this
socialized perspective through a elose and
methodical concern with textual cohesion, or the
properties of discourse (i.e., units of language
longer than the isolated sentence) which form
an intelligible sequence. This oudook dis tin-
guishes Halliday's approach from any variety of
semantics based on a purely structural or imma-
nent analysis. As he puts it, language depends
on a "meaning potential" which can only be real-
ised in and through the context of utterance.
This' in turn requires a "positive act of semiotic
reconstruction" whereby the linguist responds to
that energizing context. 24
Halliday's arguments have an obvious affinity
with the cultural-relativist case p.ut forward by
Benjamin Lee Whorf. In this respect he seems
squarely opposed to a Chomskian (or "mental-
ist") philosophy of language, and interested
rather in the socializing process through which
the individual enters the realm of communica-
tive function. Halliday's work is chiefty impor-
tant for the bridge it provides between this
broadly semiotic concern and the program of
constructing a workably organized (or "sys-
temic") account oflanguage patterning. "Form"
in his view is always and inevitably an aspect of
socialized meaning. This puts Halliday at a dis-
tance from what he calls "the early modern
'structuralist' period of linguistics," when lan-
guage was seen theoretically as a construct or
edifice of abstracdy related terms. While making
full use of the Saussurian paradigm for his basic
means of description, Halliday contests the
structuralist tendency to substitute notions of
system (prematurely conceived) for those of con-
text and function. He regards all items of struc-
tural description (from "morpheme" to
"sentence") as abstract entities, justified only in
22M. A. K. Halliday, Language as Social Semiotic (London:
Edward Arnold, 1978).
2~M. A. K. Halliday, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in
the Development rif Language (London: Edward Arnold, 1975),
p.139.
24Halliday, p. 140.
so far as their place can be assigned within a
larger sociodiscursive pattern. Textual cohesion
is "above considerations of structure," and
depends in turn on the "context of situation"
relating language to societal norms. It is by means
of such "exophoric" links of discourse that lan-
guage both reftects and reinforces cul tural
cons train ts.
I have dealt at some length with Halliday's
ideas because they serve as a convenient focus
for the widespread shift, within British linguis-
tics, from a formal to a contextualized or "inter-
level" treatment of meaning. This shift has taken
various forms and directions, of which a few
representative examples will have to suffice.
Roger Fowler, in aseries of books and artieles,
has argued the case for a sociolinguistics giving
fuH weight to the context of utterance and the
role of trans action al or interpersonal functions. 25
Fowler makes a virtue of eelecticism, drawing
on the speech-act theories of Austin and Searle,
the findings of social ethnography (Hymes) and
a wide range of other contributory disciplines.
His most re cent work has focused on the question
of language and ideology, the ways in which
linguistic structures encode the representation of
social power. His approach combines empirical
evidence (from newspaper reports, interviews,
etc.) with a theory of discourse analysis based
on structuralist and post-Saussurian thinking. 26
There is a similar concern with codes and elass
divisions in the work of Basil Bernstein, whose
theories have had.great inftuence in the fields of
education and child psychology.27 Bernstein con-
centrates on the relation between social or family
backgroundand the kinds of linguistic structure
which the child typically acquires in coping with
experience. His most controversial elaim is that
there exist two "codes" or orders of communi-
cative competence, elosely related to social envi-
ronment and powerfully affecting the child's
intellectual growth. The "restricted" code con-
sists of a relatively limited syntax and an empha-
sis on forms of verbal response which involve
very litde in the way of reasoned explanation.
"For a broad-based introduction see Roger Fowler, Under-
standing Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
26The results of this work can be usefully gauged from Gunther
Kress and Robert Hodge, Language as /deology (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979).
2'Basil Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control, Vol. I (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971).
 GREAT BRITAIN
It serves to inculcate patterns of behavior and
respect for an order of authority (social and fam-
ilial) imposed on the child from outside and
above. Such codes have an almost ritual func-
tion, their simplicity geared to the requirements
of unquestioning obedience and strong hierar-
chicalorder. The "elaborated" code, on the other
hand, represents the typically middle-class ethos
wherein the child has a right to reasoned expla-
nations of why he should act in this way or that.
His or her perceptions are thus attuned, from an
early age, to processes of thought encouraging
the use of analytic reason and tending to
devalue--or at least to question-the rituals of
obedience. Bernstein sees the codes as operating
at every stage of social development, from child-
hood on through the structured opportunities of
adult (working or professional) life. Degrees of
linguistic self-awareness or "reftexivity" are allied,
he argues, to the problem-solving power which
counts as a measure of intellectual merit.
The theory extends from contrasts of type
within a single society to broad-based anthro-
pological comparisons between "primitive" and
"developed" cultures. If ritual is a form of
restricted code with strong regulatory functions,
then more advanced societies display the kind
of analytic questing and "enlightened" scepti-
cism which Bernstein attributes to elaborated
speech styles. Indeed, Bernstein's model has been
taken over by the anthropologist Mary Douglas,
who applies it (in her book Natural Symbols) to
the analysis of ritual survivals in modern society
and the way in which codes enter conftict over
issues of value and rational progress. 28 Her title
is meant as something of a paradox, because
"symbols" are widely assumed (by the structur-
alists at least) to be socially determined within
a network of arbitrary meanings, rather than pos-
sessing any fixed or "natural" significance. Mary
Douglas attempts to straddle these two positions.
She argues that a genuine comparatist outlook-
one which accepts the multi pli city of cultures-
should also recognize recurring systems of sym-
bolic opposition and acknowledge their "natu-
ral" status. This is to raise large questions about
the scope and proper application of semiotic
method. In linguistics especially, the debate runs
high between those who would seek out innate
28Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (London: Barrie & Rockliff,
1970).
237
deep structures for all known varieties of lan-
guage, and those who hold to the Whorfian view
that the structures are as various as the lan-
guages involved.
Bernstein (like Halliday) rejects the Chom-
skian position, and with it the stress on innate,
or ontogenetic, laws of language development.
Such thinking on his view leads to a divorce
between "the rule system of language" and "the
social rules which determine contextual use.,,29
Semiotic theory is largely opposed to any Chom-
skian approach, because its interest lies not so
much in discovering formal uni versals as in pre-
serving a sense of the open multiplicity of sig-
nifying codes and conventions. George Steiner's
After Babel speaks most eloquently for this view
of language as a manifold phenomenon, beyond
all reach of reductive or monistic explanation. 3o
SteiQer's main concern is with the problems
encountered when translating, not only between
different tongues but also between the various
styles and registers contained within a single lan-
guage. He sees the act of translation as a focus
and test-case for theories of language, since (as
he argues) all human thought and understand-
ing rests on a mediating transfer between private
and public idioms. The translator becomes a
privileged guide to the complexities of language,
existing as she does in a "space of recognition"
where linguistic press ures and differences are felt
most keenly. Steiner presses his case against
Chomsky on precisely this ground of the creative
open-endedness and infinite variety of language.
Its character is not to be discovered, he argues,
by delving beneath its surface multiplicity in
quest of some "deep" (and purely hypothetical)
structure. Chomsky's universals may have
explanatory power from a logical standpoint, but
they miss the sense of creative possibility which
comes through perceiving the sheer diversity of
language types. Translation at various levels is
the very condition of language, and multilingual
competence becomes-in effect-the richest
source of genuine linguistic understanding.
Steiner speaks for a good many British lin-
guists who have absorbed something of Chom-
sky's approach but resisted its ultima te
29Basil Bernstein, "Language and Socialization," in Linguis-
ties at Large, ed. Noel Minnis (London: Paladin, 1973),
pp. 227-42.
30George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects rif Language and Trans-
lation (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1975).
238 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

implications. Changes of British. intellectual B. Semiotics and Literary Criticism

fashion have never been as sweepmg and dra-
No more than for the field of semiotics in gen-
matic as they very often are in American thought.
eral can Britain elaim any distinctive school or
Semantics survived as a respectable discipline in
theory of semiotic method as applied to li~erary
Britain during the period when Bloomfield's
texts. Semiotics has been viewed (and cautlOusly
antimentalist inftuence placed it virtually out of
welcomed) as a means of codifying various
bounds for American linguists. Neither was there
assumptions already weIl established in critical
anything like the massive swing back to ration-
thought. A book like Jonathan CuIler's Str~c~ur­
alist assumptions which has followed Chomsky's
alist Poetics confirmed this attitude by exphCltly
example in America during the past two dec-
diselaiming any radical intention an? ~rgu~n.g
ades. A semanticist like Stephen Ullmann can
for a largely regulative concept of ~emlOtlc .cntl-
treat his subject as a broad-based inquiry
cism. On this account, structurahst techmques
acknowledging the ideas of generative theory but
of description offer a stronger met?odica~ grasp
looking beyond them to a unified science of
on perceptions of organized meanmg WhlCh the
meaning and context. Semantics according to
critic might weIl have arrived at without. them.
Ullmann is a point of interseetion for interests
They seek to bring out the structure of hterary
as various as philosophy, psychology, anthro-
"competence" by which the critic bot~ orders
pology, information theory, and st~listicS.31 !his
her experience of reading and checks It (more
wide-ranging treatment of semantlcs put~ It on
or less consciously) agiünst the normal con-
a level with the semiotic enterprise, and mdeed
straints of literary sense.
comes elose to collapsing the distinction between
This "regulative" emphasis has come to the
them. Ullmann's reservations with regard to
fore in re cent British thinking on style and
generative semantics-the problems .he P?ints. to semiotics. David Lodge, in The Modes 01 Modem
in the Katz-Fodor model of analysls-hkewlse
Writing, proposes a broad-based typology of lit-
reftect his broadly semiotic interest in the social
erary styles deriving from Roman Jakobson~~
and contextuallife of signs.
polarized theory of metaphor and metonymy.
This pragmatic approach to questions of
Lodge conducts an impressive survey of mod~rn
method suggests (as I argued in Section I) t~e
and "postmodern" styles, showing a suc~esslOn
continuing inftuence of British empiricist phl-
of period norms which reftect the predommance
losophy. Colin Cherry, in his work on language
of one or the other rhetorical figure. His book
and symbolic communication, offers a good
offers no very startling revelations, but goes some
example of theory adjusting itself. to the ne~ds
way toward making explicit what previ0.us critics
and expression of organized sOClal behavl~r.
had vaguely divined. This approach, hke. Cull-
Cherry deelares hirnself a convinced pragmatIst
er's, embodies the assumption that theory IS best
in the school of William J am es and Charles
employed as a coordinating fr~mework for per-
Sanders Peirce. Like them (and unlike Chom-
ceptions which would otherwlse be ad hoc and
sky) he views die operationsof "logical': thought
intuitive, but still within reach of a "common-
as determined by social roles and reqmrements,
sense" reading. Such has indeed been the gov-
rather than existing apriori in a timeless Carte-
erning principle of most British wor.k ~n literary
sian realm. Cherry's book On Human Communi-
style and its (broadly defined) semlOtlc proper-
cation has been widely inftuential in its forging
ties_ Geoffrey Leech,34 Graham Hough,35 Roger
of links between the his tory of ideas, the science
Fowler36 and others have worked at providing a
of symbolism, and the language of commu~ica­
negotiable bridge between the. terms of desc~ip­
tion theory.32 As a school of thought, Amencan
tive linguistics and the techmques of practIcal
pragmatism received scant attention from Brit-
criticism.
ish philosophers. As a general outlook, however,
its roots lie elose to British habits of thought, 33David Lodge, The Modes qf Modern Writing (London: Edward
not least in the line of linguistic thinking which Arnold, 1977).
I have here (very sketchily) attempted to trace. "G. N. Leeeh, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London:
Longman, 1969).
31Stephen Ullmann, "Semanties," in Linguistics at Large, ed. 35Graham Rough, Style and Stylistics (London: Routledge &
Noel Minnis, pp. 77-87. Kegan Paul, 1969).
32Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (New York: MIT 36Roger Fowler, ed., Essays on Style and Language (London:
Press, 1957). Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
 GREAT BRITAIN
A more radically ambitious semiotics of the
text is advanced by those in the "poststructur-
alist" camp, drawing on the theories of Roland
Barthes,Jacques Lacan, and other Parisian mas-
ters. 37 Theorizing here goes far beyond the orderly
and mainly subaltern role which it plays for more
traditional critics. It aims at transforming the
very process of reading through a radical reflec-
tion on the literary sign and its capacity for
multiple (and often contradictory) modes of sig-
nification. Texts are seen as the products of a
complex interweaving of codes and conventions
which opera te in the space between language,
ideology, and literary form. Jacques Derrida's
critique of Western metaphysics (or "logocen-
tric" discourse ) is joined to a Lacanian view of
subjectivity as constituted in and through the
unconscious agency of language. A Marxist
component is provided by the theories of Louis
Althusser, whose rigorously textual rereading of
Marx lays stress on aspects of structure and dis-
cursive formation.
This radical semiotics has gained its largest
following among those (like Stephen Heath 38 and
Colin McCabe 39 ) who divide their attention
between literature and film. Its most convincing
applications have been, not surprisingly, to texts
of a modernist or markedly experimental char-
acter. J ames J oyce and the French nouveau roman
virtually anticipate such critical tactics in their
use of polyvalent language and highly self-
conscious structural devices. Otherwise this work
has so far been devoted to questions of a mainly
theoretical interest concerning the nature of rep-
resen ta tion and the workings of tex tu al ideology.
The position is most ably summarized by Ros-
alind Coward and John Ellis in their book Lan-
guage and Materialism. 40
Perhaps the most challenging task at present
is that of forging some workable link between
stylistics, or the detailed analysis of language,
and large-scale aspects of literary form. Several
critics have recently addressed this problem from
a broadly semiotic standpoint. Bernard Ber-
'''For abrief but forcefully argued account of these theories,
see Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen,
1980),
3"Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman (London: Elek, 1972),
39Colin McCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution oJ the Word
(London: Macmillan, 1978).
lORosalind Coward andJohn Ellis, Language and Materialism:
Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).
239
gonzl, m Reading the Thirties, attempts to work
outward from elose observations of style to mat-
ters of period atmosphere and social-thematic
concern.'!! He isolates qualities of language and
significant detail which tend to recur with more
than average frequency in the poetry and fiction
of the 1930s. Bergonzi writes with an awareness
of structuralist and semiotic thinking, though he
applies such ideas in rather piecemeal fashion.
Earlier "presemiotic" approaches often led to
similar conelusions without benefit of structur-
alist theory. lan Watt's elassic paper on "The
First Paragraph of The Ambassadors" explores the
connection between James's stylistic peculiari-
ties and the habits of mind (or encoded cultural
perception) which produced them. 12 Again, there
is an area of blurred definition where old-style
"practical criticism" passes over into tex tu al
semiotics. One could argue that a critic like Wil-
liam Empson, with his brilliant techniques of
verbal explication, presents a semiotics of poetry
less systematic-but no less rewarding-than
current approaches elaiming that title. 43 Cer-
tainly the same can be said of Empson's Cam-
bridge mentor I. A. Richards, whose concern with
literary language and its modes of meaning
placed hirn among the forebears of modern
. • 44
semlOtlCs.
Where the discipline has broken new ground
is in its greater drive toward elarity of method
and generalized explanatory power. The best
examples of the kind show theory constantly
refining itself in practice, rather than setting up
wholesale as an abstract methodology. This dan-
ger has not been entirely avoided by those who
seek to place stylistics on a "scientific" footing
through the use of transformational-generative
schemes. (Again, Henry James is a favorite test
case by reason of his almost obsession al use of
complicated self-embedding sentence structures.)
On the other hand there have been some striking
examples of theory perfectly in balance with
interpretative insight. One such achievement is
41 Bernard Bergonzi, Reading the Thirties (London: Macmillan,
1978).
4'lan Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An
Explication," in Henry James: Modern Judgements, ed. Tony
Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1969), pp. 283-303.
43William Empson, Seven Types oJ Ambiguity (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1930).
HEspecially relevant are the writings of Richards's middle
period, including The Philosophy oJ Rhetoric (New York &
London: Oxford University Press, 1936).
240 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
M. A. K. Halliday's paper on "Linguistic Func-
tion and Literary Style," applying the principles
of systemic grammar to William Golding's novel
The Inheritors. 45 This fiction is narrated from the
viewpoint of a group of Neanderthal folk, fear-
fuHy witnessing the arrival of a new, more
advancedpeople in their midst. Halliday shows
how the narrative style reftects the very limited
conceptual grasp of Lok, the N eanderthal
observer. This emerges mainly through the pre-
dominance of intransitive verbs and structures
expressing the passivity-or sense of bewildered
inaction- feIt by the threatened community.
Elsewhere, "the intransitive clauses have poten-
tially transitive verbs in them, but instead of a
direct object there is a prepositional phrase."
Halliday's functional-systemic theory is allowed
full play, but serves to sharpen and focus intu-
itive judgments rather than burden them with
abstract justification.
This would seem to confirm George Steiner's
conclusions in his essay "Whorf, Chomsky and
the Student of Literature. ,,46 The business of
critical theory, Steiner believes, is not to drive
deep into realms of abstraction, but to recognize
the variety of styles and textual strategies. Critics
should strive to maintain "an honestly argued
distance and epistemological tact." Steiner's
particular quarry here is the Chomskian
assumption that logical "depth" and universality
are the only proper aims of linguistic science.
He argues that critics are better equipped with
a Whorfian perspective admitting and rejoicing
in the sheer multiplicity of languages. This is
not to say, of course, that an interest in gener-
ative stylistics (or "deep" explanations) neces-
sarily precludes the kind of tact and sympathy
which Steiner holds dear. Several recent critics
(among themJ. P. Thornet 7 have shown what
can be done in the way of extending and inven-
tively applying Chomsky's principles. Semiotic
method at its best keeps open the channels of
communication between sensitive response and
"M. A. K. Halliday, "Linguistic Function and Literary Style:
An Inquiry into the Language 01' William Golding's The
Inheritors," in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. Seymour Chat-
man (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1971),
pp. 330-65.
16George Stein er, "Whorf, Chomsky and the Student of Lit-
erature," in "On Difficulty" and other Essays (New York &
London: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 137-63.
"See for instance his "Stylistics and Generative Grammars,"
Journal 01 Linguistics, I (1965), 49-59.
a properly articulate concern with matters of
theory.
C. Semiotics, Mass Media, and
Cultural Studies
U ntil recently the study of "popular culture"
in Britain was carried on for the most part by
literary critics who regarded the subject as a
documentary sideline to their main field of inter-
est. F. R. Leavis and his collaborators took up
a tradition of broadly sociological enquiry, look-
ing back to Matthew Arnold for the high-toned
critique of a (supposedly) degenerate modern
mass culture. 48 This attitude was fairly summed
up in the title of Leavis's 1930 pamphlet Mass
Civilization and Minority Culture. 49 Among Leavis's
followers, however, there developed a marked
shift of outlook and tone which led to the reval-
uation of "culture" as a class-based and deeply
historical idea. Chief among these "left Leavis-
ites" (as they came to be known) was Raymond
Williams, a critic of exceptional range and inftu-
ence whose work has long been a center of debate
in British cultural studies.
Williams set out to analyze the ways in which
"culture"-as a nexus of meanings and
attitudes-had grown up over the past two cen-
turies in rooted opposition to prevailing social
and economic norms. 50 From the early Roman-
ties, through Coleridge, Carlyle and Matthew
Arnold (who used it as a rallying cry against
"Philistine" society), the term had passed down
to the Leavisite defenders of a privileged cultural
elite. Williams saw his task as that of rescuing
"culture"-the word and the concept-from a
powerful custodian tradition bent upon obscur-
ing its genuine popular roots. His work at this
stage was historical in bearing, but involved a
kind of strategie semiotics intended to reactivate
the sense of social struggle carried by such
charged and ambiguous words.
This side of his en terprise emerged more s trik-
ingly in Williams's later work. The Country and
the City explored the reciprocal images of rural
4HLeavis's cultural politics and the influence of his thinking
are brilliantly analyzed in Francis Mulhern, The Moment oJ
"Scrutiny" (London: New Left Books, 1979).
49F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cam-
bridge: Gordon Fraser, 1930).
50Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1957).
 GREAT BRITAIN
and urban life, as reflected in pastoralliterature
and other forms of ultimately dass-based expres-
sion. 51 The result was a curious blend of his tor-
ical analysis, social observation, and reflective
brooding on the complex conditions which made
up the "English ideology" in its various guises.
Again, Williams conducts his survey through a
kind of social semiotic, revealing the processes
of representation-the imaginary meanings and
ideals-bound up with dass distinctions. Key-
words is Williams's most explicit attempt to lay
the semiotic groundwork of a socialized his tory
of language. 52 The book is a collection of
dictionary-style entries, a treatment of words
which, as Williams argues, encapsulate the com-
plex relation between language and ideology.
Most of his examples (like "culture" itself) are
seen to enact a struggle for ground within areas
of meaning largely commanded by a dominant
ideology. "Ideology" is indeed one such key-
word, capable of a wide range of implicative
uses, some of them politically quietist, others
conveying a sense of active critical involvement.
Williams's work is a prime ex am pIe ofthe way
in which sociocultural criticism has increasingly
tended to draw upon forms of semiotic study.
His ideas have in fact been developed (and often
criticized) by others who adopt a more thorough-
going line of semiotic critique. Perhaps most pro-
ductive in this field is the group of theorists and
researchers based at the Centre for Contempo-
rary Cultural Studies (University of Birming-
harn). The center has published an intermittent
series of working papers, studies on various
aspects of mass communication, media, and cul-
tural form. Their work shows a balance of broad-
based empirical research and theories adopted
in the main from French semiology and conti-
nental marxism. 53 A similar corporate approach
to these problems can be found in the work on
television news presentation carried out by the
Glasgow University Media Group.54 Here the
main stress falls on techniques of reporting and
51 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1973).
52Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976).
53For a useful exposition of their work on the more theoretical
side, see Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, On !deology (London:
Hutchinson, 1978). This originally appeared as No. 10 in
the Working Papers.
54The results of this research have been published in two
collective volumes so far, Bad News and More Bad News
(Glasgow University Media Group, 1977 and 1980).
241
visual editing whereby an apparently "fair" or
balanced political coverage becomes, in fact,
shrewdly slanted in one direction. Examples are
taken mostly from disputes between such polar-
ized interests as management and work force or
government and union spokesmen. Analysis of
the program concerned shows a keen awareness
of semiotic factors-devices of visual contrast
and powerful, if subliminal suggestion-which
would hardly figure in a more "empirical"
approach.
Newspaper coverage has likewise been sub-
jected to various more or less methodical treat-
ments of its social-semiotic role. Colin Seymour-
Ure has strikingly analyzed the process of con-
sensual feedback whereby political bias in the
press both reflects and-at times-actually cre-
ates the conditions of government policy.55 His
approach is mainly documentary, but sharpened
by an underlying sense of the power and com-
plexity of modern semiotic media. Others have
extended their enquiry into more theoretical
regions of discourse, ideology, and news report-
ing style. 56 Semiotics is seen as a liberating dis-
cipline for the space it opens up within and
around the text as a site of political engagement.
Advertising has also drawn the attention of those
who wish to develop semiotics into an actively
questioning critique of values and institutions.
Here it is a matter of relating image to code, or
explaining how techniques of seemingly "natu-
ral" presentation in fact work to boost and rein-
force the stereotypes of culture. (This
demystifying use of semiotics of course derives
mainly from the pioneering work of Roland
Barthes.) Judith Williamson's book Decoding
Advertisements effectively dedares this approach
in its title. 57
The work I have been describing is by no
me ans confined to specialized studies of a high-
powered academic nature. Much of it has been
produced by lecturers involved with courses in
mass-communication and media studies at the
new British polytechnic colleges. Their openness
55Colin Seymour-Ure, The Political Impact rif Mass Media (Lon-
don: Constable & Sage Publications, 1974).
56See for instance Stuart Hall, "Culture, the Media and the
'Ideological Effect,' "in Mass Communication and Society, ed.
James Curran (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), pp. 315-
48.
57Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements (London: Mar-
ion Boyars, 1978).
242 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
to interdisciplinary methods, along with adesire
to bridge the gap between "arts" and "sciences,"
makes the polytechnics a fertile ground for such
developments. Technology and cultural form (as
it happens, the subtitle of a book by Raymond
Williams)58 represents a meeting place of ideas
where semiotic theory has a central role to play.
Publishers have not been slow to recognize this
trend. One fairly typical series (Methuen's New
Aeeents) ranges over topics from literary style to
television and the varieties of "subculture," all
within the general compass of semiotic theory.59
It is here, in the field of present-day cultural
analysis, that semiotics has made perhaps its
greatest educational impact. The main effect has
been to open up the "culture and society" debate
to a much wider sense of active participation. If
the theme was first broached by a small and self-
conscious cultural elite, it is now within the grasp
of a large student readership. Semiotics has acted
as a spur to this change by offering astandpoint
of "democratized" theory resistant to the claims
of a privileged cultural tradition.
D. Semiotics, Film, and Photography
The journals Sereen and Sereen Edueation have
attracted some of the most radical and articulate
proponents of semiotic theory.60 As usual, this
commitment goes along with a left-wing political
stance and a will to demolish what are seen as
the "naturalized" or hegemonie structures of
bourgeois perception. Realism is regarded as the
chief legitimating mode of an ideology depend-
ent on disguising its own very specific cultural
effects. Roland Barthes's criticism (especially his
book S/Z) provides a model for the dismantling
of realist assumptions and for reading the cin-
ematic image as a tissue of ideological codes and
conventions. 61 Brecht is enlisted for his teaching
58Raymond Williams, Television: Teehnology and Cultural Form
(London: Fontana, 1974).
59Titles in the Methuen series, published in London, include
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semioties (1977); Roger
Fowler, Linguistics and the Novel (1977); Dick Hebdige, Sub-
eulture (1979), and John Hartley & John Fiske, Reading
Television (1978).
6°The Sereen approach to film theory is ably set forth by
Stephen Heath, "Film and System, Terms of Analysis," in
Sereen, 66, No. 1 (1975),7-77, and No. 2 (1975),91-113.
61Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London:Jon-
athan Cape, 1976).
of the "alienation effect," a technique which dis-
penses with theatrical illusion in the interest of
making an audience see (and think through for
themselves) the lessons of enacted history.62
Lacanian psychoanalysis steps in with a theory
of subjectivity as structured and thrown into
conflict by primordial des ire brought up against
the limits of "symbolic" mediation. 53 These lim-
its are seen as socially repressive but capable of
producing new, revolutionary modes of percep-
tion if pressed to the point of explicit
contradiction.
There is, it must be said, an uncomfortable
gap between this mandarin theoretical activity
and the film-going public whose consciousness
it seeks to transform. The predicament is famil-
iar enough, and aptly figured in the Sereen critics'
frequent reference to Walter Benjamin, whose
Marxist convictions were so curiously yoked to
an esoteric strain of contemplative mysticism.
Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction" has a special sig-
nificance for the theorists of Screen, as it has for
many current attempts to define the status of
"popular" art forms. 54 Benjamin sees a decisive
break in cultural tradition when the work of art
becomes reprodueible, the mere single instance of
a multiple series, none of which possesses "orig-
inal" value. Photograhy and cinema are the
obvious examples. For Benjamin, this loss of tra-
ditional "aura" is not to be regretted in nostalgie,
elitist fashion but welcomed as a portent of
cultural-political change. For the Sereen critics
likewise, film is to be freed from the mystique of
origins (or homage to modish directors), and
restored to the domain of ideological contest.
Hence their quarrel with the auteur theory which
holds that films communicate the vision, or cre-
ative individuality, of a sovereign producer. The
writers in Screen consistently denounce what they
regard as a collusion of fallacies: the idea of
"expressive realism," or film as a source of sub-
jectively authenticated truth to reality.65
6'Stephen Heath, "Lessons from Brecht," in Sereen, 15, No. 2
(1974), 103-128.
63Stephen Heath, "Notes on Suture," in Sereen, 18, No.4
(1977-78),48-76.
64Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan-
ical Reproduction," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn
(London: Collins/Fontana, 1973), pp. 219-253.
65Colin McCabe, "Theory and Film: Principles of Realism
and Pleasure," in Sereen, 17, No. 3 (1976), 7-27.
 GREAT BRITAIN 243

This debate is carried on at a rarified level of strove rather to formulate a language of rigor-
abstraction. More accessible to many is the work ously logical construction.
of John Berger, who combines art criticism with This concept of philosophy was largely over-
an interest in photography, film, and other forms thrown by the inftuence of Wittgenstein (in his
of present-day culture. 66 His emphasis on "ways later period) and the shift toward "ordinary lan-
of seeing," or socially determined perceptual guage" as the starting point of philosophic
norms, shows an obvious kinship with the Screen thought. 68 Wittgenstein's stress on the role of
line of argument, though managing without the convention-the "language games" or codes of
same weight of abstract terminology. Berger is tacit understanding--'signaled a widespread
the more representative figure, writing (like Ray- retreat from the idea that language could or
mond Williams) out of a strongly felt need to should be reduced to logical order. It opened the
find links between tradition and the dislocating way to a pluralist outlook which acknowledged
shocks of cultural change. His usc of semiotics, the variety of language uses wi thou t, on the other
like his treatment of abstraction in art, is part hand, lapsing into total relativism. In Wittgen-
of the search for communicable meanings which stein's view there exist "criteria," sanctioned by
survive despite these periodic shifts of awareness. usage or tradition, which in practice determine
the limits of communicable meaning. Ordinary-
language philosophy thus shares with semiotics
E. Semiotics and Philosophy: Tbe the view that language is a social activity, bound
"Linguistic Turn" up with the cultural needs and conventions which
British philosophy, since 1900, has been much brought it into being. 69 In the hands of an adept
concerned with problems of language, often like J. L. Austin, philosophy becomes a kind of
adopting a semiotic stand point though rarcly finely-tuned semiotic probing, designed to elicit
appealing to the discipline by name. The work the shades and distinctions of sense which make
of Ogden and Richards (which I discussed at up a word's special character. 70 Austin's main
some length in my Introduction) represented a concern was with the "grammar" (or contextual
full-scale nominalist assault on "metaphysical" implications) of words like know which seem to
accounts of meaning. Language was a province offer dues to some fine point of epistemological
of stimulus-response psychology, an object of debate. Others applied the same technique to
behavioral science, and not to be lost in the giddy matters of linguistic habit and scruple in various
realms of semantic abstraction. This brought disciplines, induding theology and the social sci-
them squarely into line with C. S. Peirce and the ences. It was widely assumed, after Wittgen-
American pragmatist tradition of semiotic think- stein, that philosophy should "leave things as
ing. It also fitted in with the logical-positivist they are," in the sense of rcspecting ordinary
outlook of philosophers like Bertrand Russell who usage and commonsense wisdom, rather than
were likewise and concurrently engaged with the erecting conceptual prisons of abstraction.
ousting of idealist metaphysics. Much of Rus- This conventionalist attitude was developed
sell's work on language and logic (for instance, by Austin (and his American discipleJohn Searle)
his 1924 essay "On Denoting")67 bears an obvious into a philosophy of "speech-acts" based on the
relation to semiotic theory. On the other hand various performative uses of language. Again this
it points away from the pragmatist tradition by represents a break with the logical-positivist
stressing the logical structure of language and the stand point, which regards allianguage as aspir-
search for a purely formal system of notation. ing to the form of the analytic statement or truth-
Where Peirce and his American followers (nota- ful proposition. Besides such "constative" uses,
bly Charles W. Morris) treated logic as a sub-
division of the global semiotic process, Russell 68Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophicallnvesligalions, German text
with English translation by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford:
6"John Berger, Ways rif Seeing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Basil Blackwell, 1967).
1972). 69For hints of an early semiotic connection, see Ludwig Witt-
67Bertrand RusselI, "On Denoting," Mind, 14 (1905), 479- genstein, Letters 10 C. K. Ogden, ed. and intro. by G. H. von
493. Reprinted in Readings in Philosophical Analysis, ed. Wright (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
H. Feigl and W. Sellars (New York: Appleton-Century 70J. L. Austin, "The Meaning of a Word," in his Philosophical
Crafts, 1949). Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 23--43.
244 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
language performs a variety of functions such as
promising, commanding, requesting, and enter-
ing into different kinds of contractual relation-
ship. Austin's concept of "illocutionary force"
(in Haw Ta Da Things With Wards) has exercised
a powerful inftuence, on linguists and literary
critics as weil as philosophers. 71 It leads, in one
direction, to a form of social semiotic where lan-
guage is treated as a register of complex verbal
interactions. One such line of development has
been taken up by Herbert P. Grice, whose theory
of conversational "implicature" (or the rules and
"maxims" of effective dialogue) has a strongly
semiotic cast. 72
Objections to ordinary-language philosophy
fasten on its conventionalist thesis, which some
regard as inherently conservative and others as
a mere evasion of real conceptual problems. 73
Recent philosophy has shown a marked reaction,
areturn to analytic and logical concerns, pro-
pelled in part by the "rediscovery" of Frege's
seminal work. 74 The questions now raised are
still semiotic in bearing. They center on the rela-
tion between natural and formallanguages, and
the prospect of creating a logical notation which
would fully disambiguate the vagaries of mean-
ing and reference. This marks a return, on more
so~h~sticated ground, to Russell's pre-Wittgen-
stelllian sense of priorities. One might compare
the two very different lines of approach to
semiotic method. The one (mainly French) takes
theory as its starting-point and justification,
whereas the other (predominantly British and
American) looks more to the empirical fields of
a~p~ication and rests content with a practical
mlllimum of theory. The idea of constructing a
metalanguage remains a tempting prospect for
French semiology, as it does for logicians and
philosophers of language in the analytic line. It
is in the nature of modern philosophy that its
course and changes of interest can be charted
very largely in semiotic terms.
71J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words (New York &
,London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
"H. P. Grice, "Utterer's Meaning, Sentence-Meaning and
Word-Meaning," Foundations 01 Language, 4 (1968), 225-
242. See also Max Black, "Meaning and Intention: An
Examination of Grice's Views," New Literary History, 4 (1973)
~~~
"For one such dissenting view, powerfully argued, see
C. W. K. Mundle, A Critique 01 Linguistic Philosophy (Lon-
74 don: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Most notably In the work of Michael Dummett Frege:
Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973).'
F. Semiotics and Music
Ethnomusicology is firmly established as an
academic discipline in Britain. It combines with
an interest in music as the "language of emotion"
a loosely semiotic approach going back to the
19th century Darwinian philosopher Herbert
Spencer. 75 M ore recent Iy t h e concept of musical
"language" has received fresh thought and the-
oretical refinement from the field of semiotic
research. John Blacking, a musician and social
anthropologist, draws the two approaches
together in his book Haw Musical 1s Man?
"Because music is humanly organized sound,"
he writes, "there ought to be a relationship
between patterns of human (social) organization
and the patterns of sound produced as a result
of human interaction.,,76 His examples range
across a wide chronological and cultural span,
from African tribaI music to Mahler, Stravinsky
and Benjamin Britten. The gist of Blacking's
argument is that music plays a cognitive role in
structuring social experience, a role that varies
from culture to culture but still gives a hold to
general understanding. Feelings about music may
be culture-specific and indeed often private; but
analysis yields more positive results when it looks
to the structures which mediate social and musical
experience. Music is neither objectively "there"
nor reducible to mere subjective impressions.
"The sound may be the object, but man is the
subject;" and the task of a musical semiotic is
to draw out the "activating principle" which
governs their relation.
Blacking's is a kind of theoretical blueprint
for what remains in practice an empirical inves-
tigative method. Recent ideas have moved toward
a higher level of abstraction, mainly under the
infiuence of Jacques Nattiez's studies in musical
semiotics. His work has stimulated various reac-
tions, from downright hostility (Roger Scru-
ton) 77 to reasoned and productive discussion. Of
75Darwin, in The Descent of Man (1871), cites Spencer's essay
"The Origin and Function of Music." For the semiotic
implications of this early work, see Thomas A. Sebeok,
"Coding in the Evolution of Signalling Behavior," in Per-
spectives in Zoosemiotics (Mouton: The Hague, 1972),
pp. 7-33.
, 76John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1973), p. 26.
77Scruton has adopted a polemically hostile line toward var-
ious branches of semiotic theory. For a general account of
his views on aesthetics, see Scruton, Art and Imagination
(London: Methuen, 1974).
 GREAT BRITAIN 245
particular interest in this context is Peirce's def-theoretical perspective. In other fields of interest
inition of the "iconic" sign-function, and the there has been a gradual shift which might prop-
extent to which it covers the theory and practice erly be termed "semiotic," though without the
of musical notation. David Osmond-Smith, same sense of theoretical commitment or use of
among others, has some interesting proposals for explicitly semiotic models.
a Peircian approach to the topiC. 78 A conference This seems to be the case with studies of com-
organized by tbe British Society of Aesthetics municative behavior in animals, as surveyed by
(September, 1980) gave promise of some stim- Thomas A. Sebeok in his volume Perspectives in
ulating work-in-progress, though this has yet to Zoosemiotics. 80 Sebeok takes account of various
reach the stage of publication. The society's British contributions, among them the work of
journal is at present the main British forum for MacDonald CritchleySl (on relations between
discussion of musical language and its relation animal and human language) and E. A.
to other branches of cultural analysis. Armstrong82 on semiotic aspects of birdsong. This
The most useful British work of reference for tradition can of course be traced back to Darwin
sources and ideas is the collective volume Whose and the heated currents of Victorian debate on
Music/ 9 This sets out ambitiously to provide a the question of animal intelligence. Many Brit-
"sociology of musical languages" questioning ish scientists of high repute-J. B. S. Haldane
such value-laden distinctions as that between for one83-have shown a keen interest in com-
"serious" and "popular" art. The authors put municative patterns of animal behavior. This
the case for a sociosemiotic approach to musical interest, however, has been largely restricted to
his tory, relating the rise of technocratic reason a functional-evolutionist outlook, treating of the
(in its social manifestations) to the development isolated sign and its "meaning" rather than the
of an ever more complex and disciplined lan- code of which it must form apart. Sebeok draws
guage of music. There is an obvious debt to Max a pertinent distinction between "zoosemantics"
Weber's sociology, as weil as to Marshall of this limited kind, and the "zoosemiotics" which
McLuhan and his writings on the link between he thinks more adequate to the task. The former
print and social stratification. The book's orig- "does not exist as a scientific discipline but merely
inality lies in its bringing together of a wide and a heterogeneous collection of ad hoc proposals."s4
fascinating range of approaches. The authors Zoosemiotics, on the other hand, looks beyond
suggest (without fully demonstrating) how mod- such piecemeal and pragmatic observations to
ern techniques of musical analysis" like those offer an account of the codes (or "zoosyntactic"
developed by Schenker and Reti, can be joined properties) which organize animallanguage. This
to a larger sociological perspective. Two chap- is not to deny the value of zoosemantics since,
ters especially Oohn Shepherd on "The Musical as Sebeok points out, the behavioral field is so
Coding of Ideologies" and Trevor Wishart on huge and complex that it requires such prelim-
"Musical Speaking, Musical Writing") offer so me inary groundwork before one can apply more
valuable leads for discussion. sophisticated terms of analysis. However, the
"semantic" model is handicapped from the out-
set by its failure to recognize the systematic
G. Zoosemiotics: The Question of changes of meaning brought about by varieties
Method . of semiotic context. Such ambiguous signs, or
U p to now I have been discussing fields of appli- "shifters"-Sebeok gives various examples-call
cation where "British semiotics" can fairly claim
so me distinctive outlook or line of approach. My
coverage is far from comprehensive but concen- ROThomas A. Sebeok, Perspectives in Zoosemiotics (Mouton: The
Hague, 1972).
trates on those areas of research where semiotic 81MacDonaid Critchley, "The Evolution of Man's Capacity
thinking has wrought a very definite change of for Language," in Evolution Afler Darwin 2, ed. Sol Tax
(Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1960), pp. 289-308.
78David Osmond-Smith, "The Iconic Process in Mnsical 8'E. A. Armstrong, A Study if Birdsong (London: Oxford Uni-
Communication," and "Formal Iconism in Music," in VS, versity Press, 1963).
3 and 4 (1972/3). 83J. B. S. Haldane, "Animal Communication and the Origin
79John Shepherd, Phi I Virden, Graham Vulliamy and Trevor of Human Language," Scientific Progress, 43 (1955), 385-
Wishart, WhoJe Music? A Sociology qf Musical Languages (Lon- 401.
don: Latimer, 1978). 84Sebeok, p. 80.
246 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
for a grasp of the signifying code if their import
is to be understood.
This difference of approach can be put down
partly to the surviving influence of empiricist
thought in British philosophies of mind and lan-
guage. It might also be argued that Chomsky's
theory of language, by stressing its innate and
uniquely human attributes, has encouraged a
kind of counterreaction among American stu-
dents of animal behavior. Zoosemiotics clearly
presents a case for regarding language not as a
distinctly "human" possession but as shared to
some extent by other communicative species. The
debate might almost be seen as a modern, more
specialized rerun of 19th century Christian-Dar-
winian controversies. It gives American work in
this field a cutting edge and drive toward sys-
tematic theory which are largely absent in Brit-
ish research.
H. Semiotics and the Visual Arts
British theory of art over the past twenty years
has been much concerned with graphic conven-
tions and the role of visual codes in determining
aesthetic response. This work has been deeply
semiotic in character, reflecting on the nature of
representation and the changing historical modes
of "realistic" portrayal. The writings of Ernst
Gombrich and his colleagues at the Warburg
Institute (many of them German refugees from
the prewar period) have exercised a great influ-
ence here. Gombrich illustrates, to striking effect,
the way in which visual codes or "schemata"
condition our response to various aspects of style
and pictorial "realism.,,85 He treats art history
as a study of the periodic shifts of awareness
defining the norms of aesthetic perception. Art
is a twofold activity of "making" and "match-
ing," the artist (or innovative genius) one who
can shape new conventions and match them to
his or her view of the world. Thus Da Vinci,
Michelangelo, and Raphael figure in the his tory
of Renaissance naturalism as fashioners of a dis-
tinctly evolving technique and style.
Gombrich is often cited with approval by lit-
erary critics and theorists working outside the
domain of visual aesthetics. 86 The reasons for
8SE. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1968).
86By George Steiner, for example, who draws from Gombrich
the lesson that "even the most violent, spontaneous of pic-
torial notations-Goya's sketches of the insurrection in
this appeal are not far to seek, since Gombrich
proposes a method much akin to various branches
of semiotic thought. There is, for example, a
striking parallel between his idea of "schema
plus correction" and the theory of literary style
as defined by specific deviations from a back-
ground norm. In terms of philosophic outlook,
there is a marked affinity between Gombrich's
views and those of Karl Popper, the philosoph er
and historian of science who likewise regards the
growth of knowledge as a testing of new conjec-
tures against a background of normative
assumptions. 87 For Popper this amounts to a full-
scale attack on dogmatic or absolute conceptions
of truth. His arguments against Marxist dialec-
tic (in The Open Society and its Enemies) join with
his attitude to scientific progress as an open and
always conjectural search for method. 88 This lib-
eral ideology makes hirn, like Gombrich, a nat-
ural ally of those committed to a pluralist and
basically pragmatic philosophy of art.
It also--understandably-sets hirn at odds
with critics who seek a more "revolutionary" way
of explaining artistic change. Thus David Novitz
points out that there is no clear distinction, in
Gombrich's terms, between "refining a style and
radically altering it.,,89 There is much the same
problem here as with literary theories based on
the concept of style as "significant deviation."
For one thing, such theories presuppose a norm
by which deviant structures can be judged and
interpreted-a norm which may exist only in the
analyst's vague conjecture. For another, they beg
the whole question of just what constitutes the
cultural "schema", or how far its workings depend
upon previous developments of style. For want
of a more adequate cognitive model, Gombrich's
theory (and others of the kind) run the danger
of collapsing into cultural relativism, or some-
thing very like it. This is to make the point, once
again, that the British tradition has tended to
Madrid-are stylized by, filtered through, previous works
of art." See Steiner, "On DijJiculty" and Other Essays (New
York & London: Oxford, 1978), p. 191.
8'Kar! Popper, Conjectures and Rifutations: The Growth of Sci-
entific Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
88Kar! Popper, The Open Society and fts Enemies (London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
89David Novitz, "Conventions and the Growth of Pictorial
Style," The BritishJoumal of Aesthetics, 16, No. 4 (1976), 324-
337. The reader might like to consult Paul Richter's essay
in the same issue: "On Professor Gombrich's Model of
Schema and Correction," pp. 338-346.
 GREAT BRITAIN
absorb semiotics on i ts own special terms,
eschewing systematic theory and relying on a
kind of liberal-pluralist consensus in matters of
method and judgment.
There haue been scattered proposals for a more
"scien tific," or methodicaBy self-conscious,
semiotics of art. Anthony Hili, writing in 1970,
invoked Peirce's views on the unity of aim
between science, aesthetics, and logic. 90 Hili goes
so far as to envisage the emergence of a "struc-
turalist art," possessed of its validating theory
and created according to self-discovered laws of
form and meaning. Since a good deal of modern
poetry and fiction follows in the wake of critical
theory, this idea may not be so very far fetched.
For the most part, however, British art critics
have ventured very timidly into the higher reaches
of semiotic theory. Roger Scruton, a ceaseless
denouncer of aB things "structuralist," expresses
what is probably their chief reservation when he
asks what is meant by the "Ianguage" of (for
instance) architecture?9! Is the claim scientific
or merely a suggestive analogy? His reply is to
dismiss as "pseudo-thought" aB structuralist
concepts of articulated code, and to put in their
place a generalized "sense of the appropriate"
based on notions of taste, harmony, and (taking
a lead from Susanne Langer) "virtual form."
Scruton still wants to speak of an architectural
"Ianguage," but is obviously using the word in
a sense very remote from that of the semioticians.
More rewarding is the work of Charles J encks
on the meaning and "syntax" of postmodern
architecture. 92 Jencks's approach is grounded in
a firm and consistent use of linguistic ideas, not
merely by way of loose analogy but argued with
care and precision. He sees postmodernism as a
set of stylistic conventions which grew up after
the modernist period, much as mannerism fol-
lowed the High Renaissance. This development
took the general form of a "partial inversion and
modification" of preceding codes. His survey
combines an exhilarating sweep of examples with
a sharpness of argument closely geared to
semiotic theory. J encks's use of linguistic ter-
minology-semantics, metaphor, syntax, and
90 Anthony Hili, "A Structuralist Art?," Twentieth Gentury Stud-
ies, 3 (May 1970), 102-109.
91 Roger Scruton, "Architectural Taste," The BritishJournal of
Aesthetics, 15, No. 4 (1975), 294-328.
92Charles J encks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture
(London: Academy Editions, 1977).
247
various dasses of sign-shows a darity and dis-
cipline amply refuting the doubts of a critic like
Scruton. His attitude is openly polemical, attack-
ing the modernists for their brand of inverted
elitism ("fetishizing the means of production"),
and praising postmodernism for its open plu-
rality of codes and conventions. But his argu-
ments rest on a firm rationale which removes
them from the level of mere subjective "taste"
or fashionable vagaries. There is a striking con-
vergence, also, between Jencks's description of
postmodern styles in architecture and the use of
that term by literary critics (for example, David
Lodge) who likewise draw upon semiotic meth-
OdS. 93 Postmodernist fiction in particular, through
its play with codes and conventions, tends to
undermine the high claims for metaphor and
symbol invested in modernist writing. Jencks is
making the same basic point with a wealth of
practical examples. A convivial style in archi-
tecture is one which adapts to the cultural signs
created by "a social group, an economic dass
and real, historical people." The modernist ethos,
on the contrary, led architects to "unlearn" this
civilizing craft and apply aB their efforts to
designing for "universal man, or M ythic Modern
Man.,,94 The argument for a social semiotics of
art could hardly be expressed with more urgency
and force.
Semiotics has also left its mark in the field of
iconography, the study of pictorial images and
their relation to cultural codes. Inspired very
largely by the pioneering work of Panofsky, this
tradition has aga in been carried on in Britain by
emigri members of the Warburg Institute. There
is something of a paradox here, as Peirce pointed
out in his remarks on iconic signs in general. If
meaning somehow inheres in the image as an
object of pure contemplation, how can aspace
be opened up for decoding its graphic or textual
conventions? (Saussure had to adopt a similar
distinction between arbitrary "signs"-the object
of systematic study-and natural or motivated
"symbols.") Iconography thus offers a peculiar
challenge to semiotic theory. Its images seem to
demand (as Hubert Damisch remarks) "not so
much a reading as an interpretation," a process
which effectively short-circuits the semiotic
93David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing (London: Edward
Arnold, 1977).
91Jencks, p. 24.
248 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
method. 95 Damisch sees this problem in radical
terms, as a paradox to challcnge the "logocen-
tric" basis of Western thought about language
and representation. He writes (albeit in the
abstract) of an approach to iconography which
would break down the age-old distinction
between "that aspect of thc image which belongs
to the order of perception" and "that which has
properly semiotic dimensions."
The work of Stephen Bann gives some indi-
cation of how such ideas might be put into prac-
tice. Bann brings together a knowledge of semiotic
theory (especially the ideas of Roland Barthes)
with an interest in visual codes and iconic devices.
He has produced a fascinating commentary on
lan Hamilton Finlay's Heroie Emblems, a collec-
tion of cryptic ideographs with tradition al mot-
toes from various sources. 96 Bann brings out the
remarkable complexity of thc tacit knowledge
involved in "reading"-or perceptively
transcoding-such an interplay of image and
language. Wh at is in question here is a rhetoric
of the symbol, a means of understanding the
relation between dis course and the purely "intu-
itive" image. Bann draws some of his examples
from Gombrich, and thus points the way toward
a fruitful liaison between art-historical method
and the speculative reaches of semiotic theory.97
4. Conc1usion: The
Institutional Framework
(Research and Publication)
In the foregoing sections I have tried to pro-
vide a compressed but fairly representative
account of semiotic thought in Britain over the
past few decades. If some developments have
been emphasized at the expense of others, it is
because they seemed either more distinctive in
their line of approach or more possessed of a
coherent rationale. As a whole, however, the pic-
ture is that of a wide diversity of disciplines
%Hubert Damisch, "Semiotics and Iconography," The Times
Literary Supplement (October 12, 1973), pp. 1221-1222.
96lan Hamilton Finlay, Heroie Emblems, Introduction and
Commentary by Stephen Bann (Calais & Vermont: Z Press,
1977).
9'For some comments on the semiotic aspect of this work,
see Christopher Norris, "Heroic Emblems," in Poetry Nation
Review, 11 (1979), pp. 59-60.
achieving only rare and occasional glimpses of
unified method. Some of these convergences I
have pointed to, whether as cases of explicit
interdisciplinary exchange or as parallel
approach es to a broadly common aim. .
The lack of any larger programmatic shape
sterns from the absence of a strong institutional
framework. So far as semiotics exists in Britain
as a conscious and developing activity, it remains
cIosely tied to the various separate disciplines
where its methods first took hold. There is noth-
ing to compare with the American project of
large-scale research and synthesis carried on at
Indiana University. This is not to deny that there
are in Britain coordinated efforts on a smalIer,
more specialized scale. I have mentioned, among
others, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at Birmingham and the group of theo-
rists associated with the journals Screen and Screen
Education. To these one could add some active
university departments, often with a publishing
outlet or connection to strengthen their sense of
purpose. Cambridge has become a main center
of the more advanced theoretical activity, with
two of its avatars (Colin McCabe and Stephen
Heath) editing aseries on "Language, Discourse
and Society" for the publisher Macmillan. In
linguistics, the University of Edinburgh (Scot-
land) has long been associated with the kind of
systemic-semiotic approach which I discussed in
reference to the work of M. A. K. Halliday.98
More recently, a group at Cardiff (University
of Wales) have established an active seminar
base, while one of their number, Tcrence Hawkes,
has edited the influential Methuen New Accents
senes.
Such local concentrations of resource and ini-
tiative are certainly having their effect in pro-
ducing a more widespread awareness of semiotie
method. Yet they tend to be isolated encIaves,
even within university departments where rele-
vant seminars and options exist. This is very
much the case in departments of English, where
the quarrel runs deep between traditionalists
("practical criticism" plus a regulated dose of
literary his tory) and those whom they regard as
newfangled theorists and enemies of cuIture.
Linguistics passed through the same kind of
98See also the writings ofJ. R. Firth, especially his Studies in
Linguistic AnatJsis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957).
 GREAT BRITAIN
struggle at an earlier period, when established
disciplines like philology and (old style) sem an-
tics began to yield ground to new theoretical
approaches. The outcome varied from school to
school, giving rise to what is still a shifting and
uneasy truce.
The prospect at present is therefore complex
and hard to describe. Semiotics and structural-
ism have undoubtedly created a major shift of
ground in the human sciences. Interpretative
disciplines have all been affected to the extent
that no one can respectably engage in such debate
without at least acknowledging the semiotic turn.
It is the manner of that acknowledgement which
registers the various shades of dissent. At one
extreme are the outright opponents such as Roger
Scruton, whose views I have mentioned already.
More ambiguously placed are those who take an
interest in semiotic theory but manage to domes-
ticate its findings and play down the differences
between it and their own more traditional terms
of inquiry. Philip Thody's book Roland Barthes:
A Conservative Estimatl9 is perfectly explicit about
its intentions. Thody sees Barthes as a brilliant
but rather wayward and dandified critic who is
best approached with a large measure of British
commonsense reserve.
Others are yet more equivocal in their atti-
tude. Denis Donoghue's The Sovereign Ghost sets
out courageously to mediate between
structuralism-including its more radical
"deconstructive" forms-and the humanist desire
to preserve some place for creative and imagi-
native values. 100 Donoghue sees the structuralist
enterprise as bent upon dissolving the human
subject into the codes and constitutive orders of
language, thus preventing all appeal to artistic
creativity. By a subtle process of argumentation
he manages to reconcile these opposite view-
points, or at least to suspend the issue between
them.
The need for such efforts of adjustment is part
of the British intellectual response to semiotic
theory and its various implications. This is evi-
dent not only in the work of individuals but also
in the larger institutional context of academic
checks and resistances. I have offered some
99Philip Thody, Roland Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (Lon-
don: Macmillan, 1977).
luoDenis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost (London: Faber, 1978).
249
account of the philosophic background and tra-
ditions of thought which seem to make up this
defensive formation. It would, however, be mis-
leading to end on such a negative note. "British
semiotics" may not be the kind of unified general
program envisaged by the founding fathers Peirce
and Saussure. Yet its achievements are real
enough, as will be seen from the following (very
selective) checklist of publications.
5. Bibliography
For space-saving reasons, I have not repeated
footnote references in this section. Texts referred
to in the body of this chapter are not, therefore,
mentioned as "recommended reading," although
they are often, of course, of primary interest.
Readers are advised to consult both the footnotes
and this section for a guide to any given topic
of inquiry.
Ayer, A. J. Language, Truth and Logic. London: Gollancz, 1936.
Bann, Stephen. The CIDthing of Clio: A Study of the Representation
oJ History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Bann, Stephen, and S. Bowlt, eds. Russian Formalism. Edin-
burgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973.
Bassnett-McGuire, Susan. Translation Studies. London:
Methuen, 1980.
Beattie, J. "Aspects of Nyoro Symbolism" Africa, 38 (1968),
413-442.
Beja, Maurice. Film and Literature: An Introduction. London:
Longman, 1979.
Bennett, Tony. Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen,
1979.
Berger, Peter. The Sodal Reality oJ Religion. London: Faber &
Faber, 1969.
Berger, Peter and T. Luckmann. The Sodal Construction oJ
Reality. London: Allen Lane, 1969.
Bernstein, Basil. "A Sociolinguistic Approach to Socialisa-
tion." In his Glass, Codesand Control, Vol. 2. London: Rout-
ledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
Best, David. Expression in Movement and the Arts: A Philosophical
Enquiry (London: Lepus Books, 1974).
Blumler, Jay and D. McQuail. Television in Politics. London:
Faber & Faber, 1968.
Brewster, Ben. "From Schlovsky to Brecht." Sereen, 15, No. 2
(1974),38-57.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. A Grammar oJ Metaphor. London:
Secker & Warburg, 1958.
Chaney, D. Processes oJ Mass Communication. London: Mac-
millan, 1972.
Clarke, Linda. "Explorations into the Nature of Environ-
mental Codes." Journal oJ Architectural Research, 3, No. 1
(1974),34-38.
Cohen, L. Jonathan. The Diversity of Meaning. London:
Methuen, 1962.
250 CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
Cooke, Deryck. The Language rif Musie. London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1959.
Cresswell, M. J. Logies and Languages. London: Methuen,
1973.
Critch1ey, MacDonald. Silent Language. London: Butter-
worth, 1975.
Crystal, David and Derek Davy. Investigating English Style.
London: Longman, 1969.
Culler, Jonathan. Saussure. London: Fontana, 1976.
- - - . The Pursuit OfSigns: Semioties, Literature, Deeonstruction.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981.
Dimond, StuartJohn. The Social Behaviour of Animals. London:
Batsford, 1970.
Douglas, Mary ed., Rules and Meanings. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973.
Durgnat, R. "Rock, Rhythm and Dance." The BritishJournal
of Aesthetics, 2 (1971),28-47.
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1983.
Easthope, Antony, Poetry As Diseourse. London: Methuen,
1983.
Eaton, Trevor, The Semantics rif Literature. The Hague: Mou-
ton, 1966.
Ebling, John and Kenneth C. Highman. Chemieal Commu-
nieation. London: Edward Arnold, 1969.
Elam, Keir. The Semioties rif Theatre and Drama. London:
Methuen, 1980.
Empson, William. The Structure rif Complex Words. London:
Chatto & Windus, 1951.
Farrago, Peter Joseph. Seienee and the Media. London: Oxford
University Press, 1976.
Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. London:
Oxford University Press, 1954.
Firth, J. R. The Tongues of Men. London: Oxford University
Press, 1937.
- - - . "Modes of Meaning," in Essays and Studies.The Eng-
1ish Association: 1951, pp. 118-49.
Firth, J. R. The Tongues of Men. (London: Oxford U niversity
Press, 1937).
Flew, Anthony, ed. Logic and Language. (Ist and 2nd ser.).
Oxford: Blackwell, 1951 and 1953.
Forrest-Thompson, Veronica. Poetie Artifiee: A Theory of
Twentieth-Century Poetry. Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 1978.
Fowler, Roger. "Linguistic Theory and the Study of Liter-
ature. " In Essays in Style and Language. Ed. R. Fowler. Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, pp. 1-28.
Glucksmann, Miriam. Structuralist Anarysis in Contemporary Soeial
Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
Gombrich, Ernst Hans. Meditations on a Hobby-Horse. London:
Phaidon, 1963.
- - - . Norm and Form: Studies in the Art rif the Renaissance.
London: Phaidon, 1966.
Gombrich, E. H. and R. L. Gregory, eds. Illusion in Nature
and Art. London: Duckworth, 1973.
Graham, Keith. J. L. Austin: A Critique rif Ordinary-Language
Philosophy. Hassocks: Harvester, 1976.
Hasenmueller, Christine. "Panofsky, Iconography and
Semiotics." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36 (Spring
1978), 289-301.
Halloran, J. D. The Efficts rif Mass Communication. Leicester:
Leicester U niversity Press, 1965.
Halloran, J. D. et al. Demonstrations and Communieation. Har-
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Hartley,John. Understanding News. London: Methuen, 1982.
Heath, Stephen. Vertige du deplacement: Lecture de Barthes. Paris:
Fayard, 1974.
- - - . "Narrative Space." Sereen, 15, No. 3 (1976),68-112.
Hinde, Robert Aubrey, ed. Non-Verbal Communieation. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Howes, Frank Stewart. Musie and Its Meanings. University of
London: Athlone Press, 1958.
Humphrey, C. "Some Ideas of Saussure Applied to Buryat
Magical Drawings." In Soeial Anthropology and Language.
Ed. E. Ardener. London: Tavistock, 1971.
Kempson, Ruth Margaret. Presupposition and the Delimitation
rif Semanties. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Kepes, G., ed. Sign, Image and Symbol. London: Studio Vista,
1966.
Kermode, Frank. "The U se 'of Codes" (on Roland Barthes).
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Kermode, Frank, Essays On Fiction (London: Routledge &
Kegan Pau1, 1983.)
Kriegbaum, Hillier. Seience and the Mass Media. London: Uni-
versity of London Press, 1968.
Lane, Michael, ed. Structuralism: AReader. London:Jonathan
Cape, 1970.
Leach, Edmund R. Culture and Communication: The Logic by
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 GREAT BRITAIN
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Bibliography of books and articles published since 1955.
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Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York &
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Wittkower, Rudolf. Al/egory and the Migration of Symbols. Lon-
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 CHAPTER 11
Semiotics in Greece
K. Boklund-Lagopoulou and A.-Ph. Lagopoulos
I. Historical Introduction
The introduction of semiotics in Greece is a rel-
atively recent phenomenon. To understand the
reception and development of semiotics in
Greece, it is helpful to present briefty the nature
of intellectual life in modern Greece (that is,
since the liberation from the Ottoman empire),
and especially the intellectual dimate after the
fall of the dicta tors hip in 1974.
Within the socioeconomic structure of the
eighteenth-century Ottoman empire, the Greek
urban dass es maintained very active commer-
cial relations with Europe. 1 These dasses were
internationally minded, looking to Italy, Ger-
many, England and France for their intellectual
orientation, and simultaneously, e:::pecially in
Constantinople, cultivating an intense admira-
tion for dassical antiquity and the orthodox tra-
dition. 2 After the establishment of Greece as an
independent state in 1827, the commercial dass,
living largely beyond the borders of the national
'Konstantinos Tsoukalas, Exartisi kai Anaparagogi (Athens:
Themelio, 1977), pp. 31-50; and Nicolas Svoronos, Histoire
de la Grece modeme (Paris: PUF, 1964), pp. 25-30.
2Svoronos, pp. 30-34.
K. Boklund-Lagopoulou • English Department, Univer-
sity of Thessaloniki, Greece 540.06. A.·Ph. Lagopou-
los • Department of Architecture, Urban and Regional
Planning, University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
54006.
253
state, continued to have a determining inftuence
on fundamental aspects of economic, social, and
politicallife in Greece: 3 their role as commercial
middlemen" between industrial Europe and much
of the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Mid-
dIe East reinforced the very strong foreign inftu-
ence in Greek politics, and contributed signifi-
cantly to the very slow pace of industrialization
in Greece (practically nonexistent before 1900,
and still insignificant in 1920), while encourag-
ing the growth of an astonishingly large tertiary
sector. 4 The effects of the economic dependence
of the country were compounded by the strong
inftuence of the foreign powers with in te rests in
the Balkans and the Mediterranean, whose
maneuvers dominated Greek political life. The
primary vehide of foreign political inftuence was
the royal court and the institution of the mon-
archy; hence the intensifying struggle through-
out the nineteenth century between the court
and the parliamentary politicians. 5 The strong
foreign inftuence was reftected in a partly
dependent cultural life. On the other hand the
3Tsoukalas, pp. 336-371.
4A._Ph. Lagopoulos, "Schesi tou Koinonikou Schimatismou
kai tou Diktyou OikismoQ stin Ellada, 1821-1974," in Diere-
vnisi tou Diktyou Astikon Oikismon stin Ellada, ed. A.-Ph. Lago-
poulos (Thessaloniki: Technical Chamber of Greece and
Chair B' of Urban Planning, University 91" Thessaloniki,
1978), pp. 308-13; and Tsoukalas, pp. 181-197.
5Svoronos, pp. 48-84.
254 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
immediate consequence of the creation of the
Greek state was a tendency for intellectual life
to attach itself exdusively to dassical antiquity,6
a tendency which remained strong throughout
the nineteenth century and which domina ted the
educational system. 7 Sciences were taught only
theoretically and formed only a small part of the
curriculum; dassical philosophy and literature
were studied in place of contemporary thought. 8
With the beginnings of industrialization (very
slowly from around 1907, more rapidly since
1920)9 aseries of social changes begins: the for-
mation of a working dass, the final absorption
of the Greek commercial dass within the national
boundaries, the rise of a new bourgeoisie rep-
resented by the Liberal party of Venizelos, the
main opponent of the royal court. World War
11 and the resistance against the German occu-
pation led to the appearance of a strong and
militant communist movement, bloodily sup-
pressed first with British, then American assis-
tance during the Civil War, 1946-1949. 10
American inftuence dominated both in economic
and in political life in the period between 1950
and 1974. Politicallife can be seen as a contin-
uous series of attempts by the right wing to keep
in check-with the help of semiofficial terrorist
measures-the increasing press ures for the over-
throw of the dominance of the privileged dass,
for greater democracy, and for a popular voice
in the determination of national concerns; II the
final step in this process was the military coup
of 1967.
The social changes in Greece since World War
11 had thus only very partially found their
expression in the political and institution al life
of the country. These social changes did not stop
during the 1967-1974 dictatorship: their most
characteristic symptom in the context of our sub-
ject is in the desire for more, and more special-
ized, high er education. 12 In the sixties and
6Svoronos, p. 62.
7Tsoukalas, pp. 552-567.
8Tsoukalas, pp. 555-56, 565.
9Svoronos, pp. 71-72, 103-105; Tsoukalas, pp. 181-197; and
Lagopoulos, "Schesi," p. 312.
IOSvoronos, pp. 113-120.
"Svoronos, p. 121; andJean Meynaud, "L'Abolition de la
democratie en Grece," La Pensee, No. 137 (1968), pp. 51-
70.
12Education traditionally has very high social status in Greece,
being viewed as a sure means of social advancement; on
the historical socioeconomic reasons for this phenomenon,
see Tsoukalas, pp. 124-159,397-448.
seventies the nu mb er of students 10 the Greek
university system increased significantly; many
Greeks study abroad, and especially since 1970
many have been going abroad (to Italy, France,
Germany, England, to some extent the United
States) for postgraduate study.
Because no free political life was permitted
during the dictatorship, the extent of the social
change was not openly evident, and it was in
many ways artificially restrained. As a result,
when the junta fell and democratic institutions
were restored, the country experienced a tre-
mendous upsurge of political activity, accom-
panied by a pronounced radicalization. 13 All
aspects of social and cultural life are examined
from a political point of view by an increasing
number of people, and a strong Marxist theo-
retical orientation be comes evident, especially
among intellectuals. The general movement to
the left is also evident in the significant number
of new leftist political parties, both communist
and noncommunist. 14 Knowledge is still imported
into Greece, but it is today more organically
introduced into the intellectuallife of the coun-
try. The number of scholars with personal sci-
entific experience abroad has increased
significantly, and the number of scholars with
postgraduate diplomas is in the process of trans-
forming university education; there is a marked
tendency toward the creation of a teaching and
research tradition oriented toward science rather
than toward dassical antiquity.
It is in this context that the introduction of
semiotics into Greece should be seen. The gen-
eral backwardness of intellectual life until quite
recently had as its consequence the almost com-
plete lack of a local tradition to which semiotics
could be related; semiotics appeared as the result
of foreign intellectual inftuence. It encountered
a general public not trained in science but steeped
in dassical philology, and an intellectual public
with strong political involvements and fre-
quently strong Marxist theoretical orientation.
But semiotics has been adopted in certain envi-
ronments as part of the attempt to modernize
intellectuallife, and within the framework of the
"See Angelos Elefandis and Makis Kavouriaris, "PASOK:
Laikismos i Sosialismos?" 0 Politis, No. 13 (1977), pp. 18-
19.
14Cr. Elefandis and Kavouriaris: cr. also Nikos Alivizatos,
"0 Ekdimokratismos Simera," Synchrona Themata, 2, No. 8
(1980), pp. 71-80.
 GREECE 255
efforts toward a local research tradition it has international crisis in the theory of architecture
been the vehicle of a limited but in part original and the search for new theoretical approaches
scientific production. to the field from around 1965 on. Definite semiotic
work appears independently in both Athens
(School of Architecture, National Technical
11. The Appearance of University) and Thessaloniki (Department of
Semiotics in Greece-The Architecture, School of Engineering, University
of Thessaloniki) from 1972. The first structur-
Institutional Framework 1S alist-oriented presemiotic studies in Greece
appear in 1970 with the studies by A.-Ph. Lago-
The first appearance of semiotics in Greece
poulos, who works in the field of settlement-
did not take place within the institutional frame-
space theory and is not motivated by the archi-
work of linguistics or literature, as one might
tectural problematic. 16
have expected; the reasons can be found in the
Since the mid-1970s, most of the scholars
situation of linguistics and literary studies in
working in the field of the semiotics of space are
Greece, which we will discuss briefly below.
in closer personal contact within the framework
Instead, semiotics appeared almost simultane-
of the Department of Architecture at the Uni-
ously-the first publications date from 1972-in
versity of Thessaloniki. This group has a clear
two fields: in the schools of architecture at the
Marxist theoretical orientation. There are as yet
university of Athens and Thessaloniki, and in
no courses in the semiotics of space as such, but
the field of film theory and criticism, which the
members of the group have directed student work
journal Synchronos Kinimatografos had as its focus.
in the field and encouraged further research. A
Within a few years, scholars using semiotic
large part of the group is involved in the team-
methodology also appeared in the social sci-
teaching of the course in the sociology of space
ences, literature, linguistics, and to so me extent
(formal coordinator Lagopoulos, Professor of
in the other arts. It is characteristic of semiotics
Urban Planning), which has been taught
in Greece that in certain fields (semiotics of space,
annually since 1975 and part of which is con-
semiotics of the cinerna, more recently in liter-
cerned with semiotics.
ature and linguistics), groups have been formed
In the field of film theory and criticism, the
by scholars who share a similar background or
primary vehicle for semiotic work has been the
orientation and who have some personal contact,
journal Synchronos Kinimatografos (edited by V.
whereas in the other fields scholars have worked
Rafailidis, and later by Michalis Dimopoulos),
individually in relative isolation from each other.
around which from 1972 on gathered a group of
Also characteristic of semiotics in Greece has
young and enthusiastic writers (the dominant
been the fact that it has its sources both inside
figure until 1977 was N. Lyngouris). Two other
and outside the university system. A special case
journals, Film (since 1974) and Othoni (since
in practically all respects is semiotics in music.
1979), also publish semiotic material. All three
The appearance of semiotics in the schools of
journals have from their inception published
architecture should be seen in relation to the
translations of foreign work on film theory, among
15The following sections are based on the personal knowledge
them several significant articles on the cinerna.
of the writers concerning Greek semiotic production and Synchronos Kinimatografos un til 1977 presen ted
the his tory of semiotics in Greece. This knowledge was to material with a pronounced psychoanalytic
an important extent supplemented with the help of six tendency (inspired by Lacan and Kristeva) and
interviews and a formal questionnaire to wh ich seven-
a radical leftist but not systematically Marxist
teen scholars responded. Interviews were held with:
G. Babiniotis, S. Dimitriou, E. Efstathiadis, G. Papai- orientation; this is true also of Othoni and to a
oannou, V. Rafailidis, and M. Setatos. Responses to the lesser extent also of Film-but much less sO of
questionnaire were sent by: D. Agrafiotis, T. Andonopoulos,
Th. Didaskalou, S. Dimitriou, G. Dizikirikis, K. Dorfmüller-
Karpusa, M. Evangelinou-Santoriniou, D. Fatouros, 16 A.-Ph. Lagopoulos, "L'Influence des conceptions cos-
K. Georgousopoulos, Gr. Gizelis, E. Kapsomenos, miques sur I'urbanisme africain traditionnel," Diss. Ecole
G. Kechagioglou, P. Martinidis, Th. Rentzis, M. Setatos, Pratique des Hautes Etudes, 1970; and I Epirrol ton Kos-
N. Skouteri-Didaskalou, and eh. Xanthoudakis. We wish mikon Antilipseon epi tis Paradosiakis Mesogeiakis kai Indoevro-
to thank all of the above for their assistance, which con- palkis Poleodomias, Diss. National Technical University, 1970
tributed significantly to the completion of our work. (Athens: privately printed, 1970).
256 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
the books published on semiotics and film the-
ory. The group of writers on film semiotics also
includes filmmakers.
Film studies are not part of any university
curriculum in Creece, and the semiotic work
produced in this field is of a nonacademic char-
acter. The book-length works by the writers on
film theory often have the form of general intro-
ductory works on both semiotics and cinema,
aimed at a nonspecialized public.
Linguistics and literature, on the other hand,
are very much tradition al academic domains, a
fact which presented its own problems for the
introduction of semiotics here. As mentioned in
the introduction, Creece has traditionally
emphasized studies in classical philology, and
the position and orientation of both literary and
linguistic studies within the university curricu-
lum reflects this tradition. Linguistics has until
recently been conceived largely as the hand-
maiden of classical philology, and has been ori-
ented primarily toward historicallinguistics and
ancient and modern dialectology. The Creek lin-
guists, in addition, were very much occupied with
the long and heated debate on the so-called "lan-
guage question": the marked differences, his-
torically explicable but for political reasons ins ti-
tutionally perpetuated, between (roughly) the
spoken and the written, or the common and the
learned forms of the modern Creek language, a
question only finally resolved with the gradual
development of a unified language and the quite
recent adoption of the common form throughout
the school system. l7
The introduction of structural linguistics dates
from the la te sixties and early seventies, and the
appearance of semiotics in linguistics and new
linguistic fields (stylistics, text linguistics, psy-
cholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguis-
tics, structural semantics) is later still. Today,
the schools of philosophy in Athens, Thessalon-
iki and Ioannina have active chairs oflinguistics,
of which the two in Athens and Thessaloniki are
structurally rather than historically oriented. At
Athens University, references to semiotics are
17 On linguistics in Greece, see Georgios Babiniotis, Theoritiki
Glossologia (Athens: n.p., 1980), pp. 5-8; and "Synoptiko
Diagramma tis Simerinis Katastaseos ton Glossologikon
Spoudon stin Ellada," paper presented at the Linguistic
Symposium of the North Helladic Area, Institute for Bal-
kan Studies, Kastoria, April 1978.
included in the linguistics courses (Prof. Ceor-
gios Babiniotis), semantics are part of the cur-
riculum, a course in linguistic stylistics has
recently been added, and a second chair in lin-
guistics will be established. In Thessaloniki, a
course entitled "Semiology and Semantics" is
taught regularly (Prof. Michalis Setatos), and
there is also a course in pragmatics and socio-
linguistics. At the University of Thessaloniki a
chair of English Language and Linguistics has
also been active since 1975, teaching theoretical
and applied linguistics to students in the English
department. Attempts are being made to include
linguistics in all the foreign language programs
at Athens and Thessaloniki (a Creek Association
of Applied Linguistics was founded in 1980).
Finally, some psycholinguistics are taught within
the psychology department at Thessaloniki.
Apart from a lexicological newsletter , there
are no Creek linguistic journals; some journals
of philology and Creek literature also publish
linguistic material.
The study of literature has also traditionally
been dominated by historical and philological
approaches. The new theories and methodolo-
gies which appeared in the Creek universities in
the mid-seventies were from several different
sources: statistical techniques, various schools of
stylistics, narrative analysis, French structuralist
lecture, and Anglo-American N ew Criticism,
among others. Both in teaching and in research,
scholars often draw on several of these methods
simultaneously. We will mention below the most
specifically semiotic approaches. Of university
programs, the course on stylistics in the Chair
of Linguistics at Athens has already been men-
tioned; the French department at Thessaloniki
introduces stylistics and French structuralist
approaches in some literature courses (Prof. Zoe
Samara). But by far the most systematic te ach-
ing of semiotic methodology in literature are the
courses in modern Creek literature by Prof. E.
Kapsomenos at the University of Crete and
Ioannina, where both narrative analysis and lin-
guistic stylistics are taught in application. As
concerns research on the other hand, something
like a focus for semiotic and linguistic approaches
to literature exists in the School of Philosophy
of the U niversity of Thessaloniki, where
researchers have some closer personal contact.
Writing in the field has come from both inside
and outside the universities. Thejournal Kodikas
 GREECE
was founded in 1975 (editor, Charis Kambouri-
dis) as a semiotic periodical, 18 and has published
work in various areas of semiotics, including lin-
guistics, literary analysis, and stylistics. Semiotic
material, including translations, has also been
published in literary journals, notably in Speira,
but also in Filologos and, to a much lesser extent,
in others. These journals also carry occasional
linguistic material.
In the social sciences, there is a general lack
of academic institutions and an essential lack of
social science in the modern sense. Structural
anthropology was introduced into folklore stud-
ies in the late sixties, and various forms of nar-
rative analysis in the study of folk song a few
years later. A few scholars, working individually,
have produced work of a semiotic nature since
1970. Today, various aspects of structural
anthropology and narrative analysis form part
of the folklore courses at the University of
Thessaloniki.
Semiotics, especially as inspired by the writing
of Lacan and Foucault, has been used, together
with other sources, as an approach to the study
of ideology and institutions; this approach forms
part of the courses in the sociology of institutions
at Pandios School of Political Science in Athens
(Dr. Giorgos Veltsos). A course in the analysis
of political discourse is taught at the University
of Athens (Prof. Metaxas, political science). No
group of semioticians working in the social sci-
ences has formed to date.
The application of semiotics in other areas is
best discussed in the analytical section below;
no institutional framework for semiotics in these
areas has been established.
In October 1977 the Hellenie Semiotic Society was
founded in Thessaloniki to encourage semiotic
studies in Greece. The society organized a suc-
cessful two-day colloquium with international
participation in June 1979, and sponsored the
publishing of the papers presented in a volume
entitled Semiotics and Society.19 It publishes a twice-
yearly newsletter, I (Sigma), which it plans to
expand into a journal.
No publisher in Greece has shown specific
interest in semiotics, but a number of transla-
18Since 1979, the journal Kodikas/ Code ceased to be published
in Greece. The last Greek issue was published in 1978, the
first German issue, in 1980.
19Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, ed., Simeiotiki kai KoiflOnia
(Athens: Odysseas, 1980).
257
tions as well as Greek works have been published
during the last ten years. They are predomi-
nantly general introductory, nontechnical texts.
111. Greek Work in Semiotics
Semiotic work in Greece is not easily acces-
sible from outside the country. Quite apart from
the fact that much of it is written in Greek, the
conditions of publication are frequently such
(small editions, journals with limited circulation,
university editions not commercially available)
that it remains unknown outside a limited circle;
only very few semioticians working in Greece
have published their research in international
journals. We therefore thought it useful to pro-
vide a fairly exhaustive analytical presentation
of Greek work in semiotics; we also include pre-
semiotic work when we feIt it to be appropriate. 20
The discussion groups the work by fields of
application, presenting the fields generally in
order of the importance of the semiotic work
produced in each field (quality, scope, original-
ity, and quantity ofwork, number ofresearchers
involved).
Our analysis will cover systematically work
published up to 1980. Since then, there have
been so me shifts in emphasis (growing impor-
tance of literary semiotics, some work in theater
and mass media, a falling off of interest in the
semiotics of film), but in our judgment no struc-
tural change in the nature of Greek semiotic
production as a whole. We apologize to more
recent semioticians, whose work thus could not
be included in this presentation.
A. Semiotics of Space
The semiotics of space is the most important
field of semiotics in Greece. A dominant position
in the semiotics of space is held by the work of
A.-Ph. Lagopoulos, who also has done signifi-
cant work on the nonsemiotic aspects of urban
and regional planning theory and practice. His
work in serniotics can be divided into two periods,
20We have attempted to include in the analytical discussion
all semioticians with at least a certain amount of work in
the field; more peripheral authors are covered in the bib-
liographical references. The work of Greek semioticians
living abroad is included only if the author carries on so me
substantial form of semiotic activity within Greece.
258 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
each with two phases. The first period (1966-
1970) is characterized bya presemiotic approach,
prestructuralist in its first phase and structuralist
in its second. The analysis is focused alm ost
exclusively on systems of signification, not being
specifically concerned with their social frame-
work, and is based on a corpus of archaeological
and anthropological material. The second period
(1972-present) is characterized by the use of a
semiotic approach. In the first phase emphasis
is given to the so ci al framework of systems of
signification and to the need to advance from a
formal, static structuralism to a genetic struc-
turalism, and in the second phase primary
emphasis is placed on sociosemiotics, and the
analysis of the social framework and its articu-
lation with semiotic systems is accomplished from
a structuralist-Marxist perspective. Archaeolog-
ical and anthropological material still forms the
basis for the analysis, but it is augmented with
contemporary material.
The work of Lagopoulos is organized around
three main axes: analysis of organized or orga-
nized-and-constructed settlement and regional
space as a signifying system, formulation of a
theoretical framework for sociosemiotic analysis,
and analysis of the relationships between social
formations-(global) social structures-and
semiotic structures. We will examine below his
positions in relation to each of these research
orientations, which are also those which he fore-
sees for his future work.
Lagopoulos studies the manner of application
of semiotics (co~cerning which he basically fol-
lows Barthes's Elements de semiologie) to the anal-
ysis of settlement space, and introduces the
concept of "semiological urbanism. ,>21 He dis-
tinguishes between the process of the semiotic
production and the process of conception of set-
tlement space; the connotative levels of the two
processes are identical in precapitalist societies,
but not in industrial societies. 22 He arrives at a
series of conclusions concerning the semiotic
structures of precapitalist settlements, and finds
that several of their characteristics are shared
'I"Semiological Urhanism: An Analysis of the Traditional
Western Sudanese Settlement," in Shelter, Sign and Symbol,
ed. P. Oliver (London: Barrie andJenkins, 1975), pp. 206-
218; and Domiki Poleodomia (Athens: Technical Chamher
of Greece, 1973).
"Domiki Poleodomia; "Semiological Urhanism"; "L'Image
mentale de l'agglomeration," Communications, No. 27 (1977),
pp. 55-78; and "Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou Chorou," in
Simeiotiki kai Koinonia, pp. 111-130.
by the mental image of the city in industrial
societies. The denotative signifiers of the semiotic
structures of precapitalist and industrial settle-
ments can be classified (generally) into three
paradigmatic categories: "points," "lines," and
"surfaces."23 On the basis of the extensive group
of ancient and "primitive" societies which he
studies, Lagopoulos shows that the organization
of space in the precapitalist settlement, even that
of its buildings and of regional space, is governed
by semiotic models which are within each society
the same for all spatial scales. He draws up a
typology of the geometry of the form of expres-
sion of these models and shows that in its most
general formulation it consists of two funda-
mental categories of forms: the "centric" ca te-
gory and the "orthogonal" category.24
In the analysis of precapitalist settlements,
Lagopoulos focuses on the connotative level of
the form of the content; he considers that the
codes of this level determine the denotative codes,
and he shows that the same codes determine the
form of the expression. The dominant code is
the cosmological, with the result that space con-
stitutes an image of the world (Lagopoulos began
searching for this code und er the inftuence of the
work of Eliade). The me ans of formulating the
relationship (of analogy and identity) between
settlement and world is orientation: toward a
central point in the case of the "centric" cate-
gory, toward the points of the horizon for the
"orthogonal" category. Based on the analysis of
the cosmological code, Lagopoulos considers that
the semiotic models of the settlement are go v-
erned by syntactic laws of a logico-algebraic
nature, the vehicle for which are connotative
relationships in the form of the triadic structure
+ /0/ - or the binary one + / - (the inftuence
of the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss is
evident here). In both precapitalist and indus-
trial societies, the semiotic models of the settle-
ment have the characteristics which Piaget
ascribes to a structure: unity, transformation,
and autoregulation. 25
23 Domiki Poleodomia; "Semiological U rhanism"; "L'Image
mentale"; and "Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou Chorou."
24J Epirrol; "L'Influence des conceptions"; "Analyse semio-
tique de I'agglomeration europeenne precapitaliste," Semi-
oliea, 23 (1978), pp. 99-164; and "Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou
Chorou."
25 1 Epirroi'; "L'influence des conceptions"; "Anaryse J"Cmiotique;
"Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou Chorou"; and "Semeiological
Analysis of the Traditional African Settlement," Ekistics,
33, No. 195 (1972), pp. 142-148.
 GREECE
The work of Lagopoulos centering around the
axis of socio-semiotie theory is not quantitatively
very developed, but is of particular interest as
an attempt to articulate semiotics in general, and
semiotics of space in particular, with historical
materialism. Semiotic systems are seen as social
creations produced and reproduced by the func-
tioning of the social form, which is governed by
the mode of production. Each society engages
in a material process of production (praxis) and
in a signifying proeess which is fundamentally
determined by the former. The social formation
consists of two general levels, the fundamental
level of the (social) base (identical to the mode
of production in its narrow sense) and that of
the superstructure; the whole, in dialectieal
interaction with the biotic and abiotic environ-
ment, forms a new structure, ecosystemic in
nature. The aetual space of the settlement is
fundamentally a functional, exosemiotic system,
which is simultaneously also the vehide for a
semiotic system. Both spaee and ideology are
produeed by the social formation and belong to
the superstrueture. The semiotic systems and
speeifically the semiotic system of settlement
space incorporate ideology, which, as substance
of the content, constitutes the mediator between
social formation and semiotic system; the form
of the content is codified ideology. Lagopoulos
eondudes that only sociosemiotics, and partic-
ularly a sociosemiotics with Marxist orientation,
can render semiotics legitimate, and, instead of
limiting itself to the description of semiotic phe-
nomena, advance to an interpretation of them.
On the basis of this theory he criticizes the typol-
ogy of cultures attempted within the framework
of the Moscow-Tartu school, pointing out that
the notion of a general cultural text neutralizes,
in the case of dass soeieties, the dass origins of
and differences between particular texts. 26
We now come to the third axis of Lagopoulos'
work, that which concerns the relationship
between social formations and semiotic strue-
tures. Concerning precapitalist societies, Lago-
poulos eonsiders that the "centric" category of
models of settlement space appears to have pre-
ceded agricultural societies, while the appear-
an ce of the "orthogonal" eategory seems to be
26"Analyse semiotique"; "Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou Chorou";
and Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou and A. Ph. Lagopoulos,
"Koinonikes Domes kai Simeiotika Systimata," in Bok-
lund-Lagopoulou, ed., Simeiotiki kai Koinonia, pp. 23-37.
259
linked to the kinds of astronomical preoceupa-
tions provoked by agriculture. 27 He observes that
there is a correlation between modes of produc-
tion and the complexes of connotative codes of
settlement space; that the dominant connotative
codes derive from the dominant level of the soeial
formation; and that the strong identification of
the settlement with the world appears in the
framework of modes of production where reli-
gion is part of the dominant structure; that this
identification begins to give way to analogy with
the appearance of the political level as main
dominant, and that even analogy disappears with
the appearance of the dominance of the eco-
nomic level. He remarks that the eorrelation of
the geometrie forms of the model of settlement
space with modes of production shows no pro-
gressive line of development, with the exception
of the industrial mode (modes?) of production,
and that certain ideologieal, semiotic, and geo-
metrie complexes pass from one mode of pro-
duction to another. He also remarks that in the
semiotic models of settlement spaee the geo-
metrie forms corresponding to the form of the
expression and their transformations are deter-
mined by the connotative codes and generally
by the social formation in their relation to the
ecosystemic environment, but in spite of this fact
the level has a relative autonomy.28 Concerning
industrial societies, he considers that the deno-
tative signs of the mental image of the settlement
and their relationships derive in general (also)
from the funetional, spatial, and social organ i-
zation of the settlement, and its topography; both
these signs and the connotative signifieds can be
correlated with social dasses and groups.29
The work of Petros Martinidis is very impor-
tant for Greek semiotics of space. Though his
problematic is focused on space, it covers a wide
semiotic and exosemiotie range; the exosemiotic
work of Martinidis adopts the perspective of his-
torical materialism. U nfortunately his published
work is written almost exdusively in Greek, and
most of it is in the form of university editions of
limited cireulation which are not available
commercially.
27"L'Influence des conceptions"; "Analyse semiotique"; and
"Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou Chorou."
2S"Analyse semiotique"; and "Koinonio-Simeiotiki tou
Chorou."
2'lDomiki Poleodomia; and "L'Image mentale."
260 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
In his first published work, he presents the
domain of semiotics and its basic concepts, and
then continues with a careful introduction to
architectural semiology which follows faithfully
the views of Eco in La struttura assente. 30
The approach of Martinidis is based, on the
one hand, on the position that in architecture
(in which he, like Eco, also indudes urbanism,
which creates some confusion) there exists a
process of production with asender (the archi-
tect), and a process of conception with a receiver
(the user), and that the two processes are dosely
linked; on the other hand, that the laws of this
model of communication are determined by the
set of economic, social, political, and ideological
factors related to the architectural work. This
basic approach, which he shares with Lagopou-
los, explains both the objects with which he is
concerned and the type of semiotic analysis which
he applies to them. His objects, when they are
not exosemiotic, concern sociosemiotic theory,
the conceptions of space on the part of the users,
and the views on space held by the specialists
and promoted by the mass media. His own anal-
ysis is founded on a sociosemiotic approach, with
which he articulates his formal analyses to which
secondary importance is given.
On the subject of sociosemiotics, Martinidis
believes it is dangerous to isolate semiotics from
sociology. Semiotics analyzes the signifyingfunc-
tioning of society, apart of the social superstruc-
ture, hence it is a social science. Because formal
linguistics neglects this fact, it is metaphysical
in character. The purpose of semiotic analysis
in architecture must be political: because the
discourse on space has its source in the dominant
dass, semiotic analysis must be used to uncover
its ideology and as a means of political struggle
against it on the level of the superstructure. From
this perspective Martinidis criticizes the views
of Kristeva: 31 in attempting to supplement
Marxism, Kristeva eliminates it completely; she
arrives at that harmonization of social relations,
which is the ideal of every liberal bourgeois while
his dass is in power; and in proposing a revo-
lution within the superstructure, she abolishes
the revolution. Martinidis, like Lagopoulos,
30Petros Martinidis, Simeiotiki-Architektoniki (Thessaloniki:
Laboratory of Architectural Design, University of Thes-
saloniki, 1972).
31"Une Lecture de Polylogue deJ. Kristeva," KodikaslCode, 1
(1980), pp. 275-280.
advances further into sociosemiotics than the
work of Eco. In his sociosemiotic and semiotic
analysis of space, Martinidis considers space,
the image of space, and the theories about it as
social products. Space is of a dual nature: it
answers practicalneeds and is a system of sig-
nification. The building and the city are texts,
speaking a social discourse. The semiotic pro-
duction and consumption of the architectural
work correspond to the icriture and the reading
of a text, whose subjects are "actors" analyzable
as "actants" (the influence of Greimas is evident
here).32
Martinidis analyzes the relationship of the
users to architectural space on the basis of their
responses during nondirective interviews. In a
first formulation of his condusions psychoan-
alytical terminology predominates,3 whereas
later it is dearly related to semiotics. 34 He iden-
tifies three discursive practices: egocentric, con-
formist, and distancing, and correlates them with
their social origin and with social groups.
The views of the specialists are analyzed on
the basis of a specific c-orpus of works, which are
in varying proportions metalinguistic in nature.
Because this constraint renders a developed
semiotic analysis difficult, Martinidis limits him-
self to the analysis of ideology. He believes that
the reality of the conversion of raw materials
into products by means of human labor is mythi-
fied by bourgeois thought, and he constructs a
model of this mythification which he confirms
by means of examples drawn from the theory of
architecture and planning. 35 He identifies three
discursive practices by the specialists: anthro-
pocentric, axiocratic, and pseudoscientific. 36
The views promoted by the mass media are
analyzed on the basis of three kinds of inter-
national corpuses, not precisely defined. 37 The
first is chosen from literature and is characterized,
32 Simeiologia tis Architektonikis Empeirias, 2 vols. (Thessaloniki:
Laboratory of Architectural Design, University of Thes-
saloniki, 1974 and 1980); and I Paragogi kai i Katanalosi tou
Architektonikou Ergou, Diss. University of Thessaloniki, 1975;
(Thessaloniki: privately printed, 1975).
"Simeiotiki tis Architektonikis Empeirias, Val. l.
34 Simeiologia ton Antilipseon kai ton Theorion gia tin Architektoniki
(Volos: Technical Chamber of Greece, Volos Research
Center, 1979).
351 Paragogi kai i Katanalosi.
36Simeiologia tis Architektonikis Empeirias, Val. 2; and Simeiologia
ton Antilipseon.
37 Simeiologia tis Architektonikis.
 GREECE
according to Martinidis, by a "Iogocentric" dis-
cursive practice. In this context he analyzes the
works of de Villiers (agent SAS, the French
equivalent of James Bond),38 using the logical
square as interpreted by Greimas. He identifies
the (ideological) deep structure of the works,
which consists of three logical squares (one of
actants, one of spaces, and one of values) which
are isomorphically related, shows that the stages
of the narrative, each of which corresponds to
specific themes out of a total of ten themes, are
determined by the local square of actants, and
concludes that the works are vehicles of a "his-
tory degree-zero." The second corpus is chosen
from magazines with advice and advertising con-
cerning space, and is characterized by a "per-
suasive" discursive practice. Finally, the third
corpus is chosen from comics, and is character-
ized by conservatism and a "monosemic" dis-
cursive practice. Martinidis finds that the deep
structure of comics (actants, spaces, and values,
isomorphically related) follows the logical square;
the deep structure inftuences even the stylistic
and chromatic characteristics of the iconic sig-
nifier (for further discussion see section C.3,
below).39
Martinidis concludes that each of the three
discursive practices in each of the three levels
(users, specialists, mass media) can be grouped
with two practices on the other two levels, a fact
due to a "mother-structure," which reappears
on each level in accordance with its particular
presuppositions, and which is the vehicle for a
world view. The three world views are the results
of different conceptions of the relationships
between subject and object, and are either prod-
ucts of the dominant ideology or remnants of
the past not inconvenient to it. The three
"mother-structures" are integrated into a logical
square. Semiotic analysis of space stops here,
with this static description. On the other hand
(and here Martinidis adopts his political per-
spective) a dialectical approach to this logical
square should attempt to abolish it, because
dialectics is not limited to the description of real-
ity, but aims at action upon it. 40 The analysis of
the process of this abolition, as weil as the further
3SCr. also "SAS i 43 Agorefseis Fasistikis Politikis Geogra-
lias," Kodikas, No. 3 (1977), pp. 128-58.
39"Chorikes Parastaseis kai Choroi Anaforas sta 'Comics',"
in Simeiotiki kai Koinonia, pp. 261-73.
40 Simeiologia ton Antilipseon.
261
development of the research we have discussed,
appear to be the orientation of Martinidis' future
work.
Considerably more limited than the work of
Lagopoulos and Martinidis in semiotics is the
work of Pandelis Lazaridis, who limits hirns elf
to general approaches. Lazaridis agrees with Eco
that the object of semiotics is cultural phenom-
ena seen through the lens of communication.
This view, according to the writer, brings
semiotics into the social and political fields.
Whereas architectural semiotics refer to the social
superstructure, architectural practice plays the
role of producer of surplus value in economic
and social reality.
Lazaridis discusses the use of semiotics in
architecture, but is sceptical of the possibilities
of an architectural semiotics since he feels that
it is the result of a metaphorical use of Saussurian
linguistics. He believes that the specificity of
architecture-which can be found in the concept
of iconicity of Peirce and Morris-is lost in this
fashion.
Lazaridis believes that a political approach to
space is more useful than a scientific one, and
in relation to this view he conceives of semiotics
mainly as a critical and pedagogical tool: In order
to enable the public to acquire the cultural codes
which are possessed by the dominant social
groups-and thus be able to participate in the
shaping of space-the public must be educated. 4 !
Certain other work, by architects, also falls
within the scope of semiotics. The work of Theo-
doros Didaskalou is domina ted by the search for
a theoretical perspective for the analysis of the
signification and the structure of space. It
includes a questionable critique of semiotics and
of the general use of the concepts "signifier" and
"signified" in the semiotic analysis of space: he
feels this is a mechanical transfer from linguis-
tics, and that it leads to a partial and superficial
analysis based on language and on the con-
sciousness of the social subject rather than on
his unconscious. He considers that the relations
determining linguistic meaning are different in
41Pandelis Lazaridis "Architektoniki Simeiologia: Mia Opsi
Architektonikis Epikoinonias," Architektonika Themata
(Architecture in Greece), 6 (1972), 110-115; "I Epiko-
inonia me tin Architektoniki," Kodikas, No. 2 (1976), pp. 77-
101; and "I Architektoniki ton Architektonon," Kodikas,
No.3 (1977), pp. 175-184.
262 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS

principle from those determining meaning in sys- (relationship to users) analysis. In this analysis
tems such as space, where they are relations other semiotic systems, such as that of the post-
between categories belonging to different levels card (see Section C.3), can be helpful. 44
of society. Space primarily organizes informa- U sing mainly Barthes, Eco, and Lagopoulos,
tion and secondarily communicates it. Accord- Michalis Vitsentzatos on the one hand semant-
ing to Didaskalou, a profounder formal analysis ically analyzes the discourses of the architect and
of the meaning of space can be achieved, based the developer o[ a housing area, while on the
on the work of Levi-Strauss, through the artic- other hand he analyzes, through the dis course
ulation (the vehicle [or homology) o[ the level of the users, the meaning of the architectural
of spatial organization with other social semiotic forms; he concludes with the study of the diver-
systems, a view which appears to exclude the gen ce between these two types o[ discourse. 45
analysis o[ actualized social signification. This Finally K.-V. Spyridonidis, with the same the-
"specifically spatial" signification is invested in oretical basis, analyzes with the help o[ ques-
space, which can be analyzed topologically and tionnaires the relation al characteristics of the
is governed by a relatively autonomous logic; signifiers which allow the inhabitants of a city
this logic can be [ormulated by a model of the to recognize the [unction of a building by its
production of spatial structures and transfor- morphological organization, together with cer-
mations (here the writer follows the views o[ tain significations of urban space, and applies
Greimas, and Hillier and Leaman). Signification his conclusions in the design o[ a housing area. 46
is the result of history and society, hence should
be explained through the use of historical mate- In addition to the writers who have worked
rialism. The structural analysis to which Didas- more or less within the semiotic field, others have
kalou refers evidently must be seen as referring approached the subject of the meaning of space
to this [ramework, rather than to the analysis of through a perspective peripheral to semiotics.
significa tion. 42 To the extent that this perspective is related to
Joseph Stefanou attempts an introduction to semiotics, we feit it useful to make brief mention
the semiotics o[ space linked to a more general of certain works which belong within it. These
introduction to semiotics, but fails thus to avoid include the work of D. A. Fatouros, which cen-
a fairly confused stringing together of opinions; ters around the theme of the organization of
the central place in his presentation is held by constructed space, architectural and urban,
the semiotics of Bense. 43 His main purpose is the which he considers as a "perceptual" system,
formulation of proposals for the conservation of part of which is the visual system. 47 This system
historical cities. He believes such proposals must is of socioeconomic and psychological origin
be based on the character o[ the cities and there- (whence the term "socio-perceptual" system-a
fore tries to define and to analyze it. The char- matter he does not discuss further) and has con-
acter is the set of significations of the image for sequences for individual sociocultural behavior
the inhabitants of or visitors to a city; and the and development (whence the importance of the
vehicles for these significations are unitary ele- high degree o[ complexity of space with respect
ments o[ constructed space, unitary temporal to the possibilities of the user, which places the
elements, and unitary elements of behavior. user in a problem-solving situation, in contrast
Thus, the city is a semiotic "super-system" wh ich
refers to the total of these unitary elements. 44"Vers une methodologie de protection du patrimoine archi-
According to Stefanou, after the identification o[ tectural et urbain," Diss., University of Paris VIII, 1980.
these uni tary elements and their semiotic 45Michalis Vitsentzatos, "Meaning in Architecture: A Gase
Study," M.A. thesis, University ofNew Mexico, 1974; and
description, the analysis must be supplemented
"Simeiologiki Methodologia kai Analysi tou Architekto-
with a syntactic, a semantic, and a pragmatic nikou Noimatos," in Methodologia kai Poleodomia-Chorotaxia
(Thessaloniki: Center of Urban Studies, University of
42Theodoros Didaskalou "Space as a System of Social Sig- Thessaloniki, 1975), pp. 261-271.
nification" (M.Sc. thesis, University College London, 1976); 46K._V. Spyridonidis, "Efarmoges ton Archon tis Simeiotikis
and "To 'Idiaitera Choriko' Noima tou Chorou," in Simei- ston Poleodomiko Schediasmo," in K. Boklund-Lagopoulou,
otiki kai Koinonia, pp. 87-94. ed., Simeiotiki kai Koinonia, pp. 131-156.
13Joseph Stefanou, Eisagogi stin Simeiologia (Athens: Chair A' 47See, for example his "Apo to Keno sto Choro," in Simeiotiki
of Urban Planning and Center of Urban Research, 1979). kai Koinonia, pp. 95-109.
 GREECE
to the low level of complexity to which corre-
sponds the aesthetic category of the "institu-
tional").48 One of his central concerns is the
attempt to construct a metalanguage for the
"perceptual" system. The work of Fatouros is
inftuenced primarily by Anglo-American psy-
chology and shows few points of contact with
semiotics. After a first reference to the semiotics
of Morris in 1963, he attempted a semiotic for-
mulation of his views on the metalanguage of
the "perceptual" system, which shows a confu-
sion between the conception of the architect dur-
ing production, the conception of the user,
metalanguage, and the substance of the
• 49
expressIOn.
The perspective of Anglo-American psychol-
ogy is also adopted by Aristeidis Mazis, who tries
to relate environmental, cognitive, and social
psychology, and oversimplifies the relation of the
first to semiotics. His main object is the process
of conception and evaluation of constructed
space, within a framework which he considers
as the inter action between man and environ-
ment, on the part of individuals (analyzed by
means of personal construct theory) and social
groups (analyzed by me ans of semiotic differ-
ential theory), and the differences which appear
between individuals and between groups. He feels
the three fundamental semantic axes (identified
by means of semantic differential theory), eval-
uation, potency, and activity, correspond to the
basic emotional dimensions of the individual and
appear to be universa1. 50 The analyses of both
Fatouros and Mazis belong within the frame-
work of a primarily professional, basically ar chi-
tectural, problematic.
B. Semiotics and the Verbal Arts
We have included under this heading several
different approaches to text analysis, structur-
alist forms of literary analysis, narrative analy-
48Fatouros, "Apo to Keno sto Choro"; "L'Environnement
bliti: Champ d'apprentissage des structures psychologiques
et intellectuelles," Le Carn! Bleu, I (1974), 1-6; and "Notes
sur une esthetique institutionnaire," in Vers une esthitique
sans entraves, (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1975), pp. 451-455.
49"Paratiriseis ston Architektoniko Choro," Chronika Aisthi-
tikis, 2 (1963), 78-90; and "Apo to Keno sto Choro."
50 Aristeidis Mazis, "The Covent Garden Planning Partici-
pation Case Study," M.Sc. thesis, University of Surrey,
1975: and I Axiologisi tou Architektonikou Ergou, Diss. Thes-
saloniki, 1979 (Thessaloniki: University of Thessaloniki,
1979).
263
sis,stylistics, and text linguistics. Thus defined,
the field of semiotics and the verbal arts in Creece
is second in importance only to the semiotics of
space.
The most important figure in Creek literary
semiotics is Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, who has
applied several methods of formal text analysis
to Creek literature. The methodology of text
analysis is one of his main concerns. His work
shows a gradual passage from a predominantly
formal analysis to a concern to integrate the
results of formal study with the ideological mes-
sage of the text.
After the use of thematic interpretations of
poetry,51 Kapsomenos employed linguistic and
statistical methods for a careful analysis of the
style of the Creek poet Seferis,52 attempting a
synthesis of three schools of stylistics (style as
deviation from a norm, style as internal consist-
ency, style as a set of compositional regularities).
He defines three levels of analysis (frequency of
occurrence of various parts of speech, syntactic
analysis, and rhetorical figures). On the first of
these, he arrives at quantitative distinctions
between such generic categories as popular ver-
sus personal, demotic versus learned, traditional
versus modern Creek poetry, and defines the
poetry of Seferis in its relation to these cate-
gories. On the syntactic level, analysis of sen-
tence structure reveals that Seferis's language is
in the tradition of the spoken language. Rhetor-
ically, the preferred structures of Seferis' poetry
coincide with fundamental structures of popular
poetry; in particular, structures of opposition and
contradiction are the bearers of a set of formal
and semantic oppositions which form the back-
drop of the tragic vision peculiar to the poetic
universe of Seferis. He thus arrives at the artic-
ulation of stylistic analysis with the semantic
universe of the text. From there, Kapsomenos a
few years later proceeds to supplement his sty-
listics with structural narrative and paradig-
matic analysis, using the methods of Propp, Levi-
Strauss, and Creimas. 53 Through this analysis
51 Eratosthenis Kapsomenos, I Schesi Anthropou-Fysis sto Solomo,
2nd rev. ed. (Chania: privately printed, 1979; Ist ed. 1972).
52 I Syntaktiki Domi tis Poiitikis Glossas tou Sljeri: J'iOlogiki Meleti,
Diss. Thessaloniki, 1974 (Thessaloniki: University ofThes-
saloniki, 1975).
""Seferi 'Mythistorima, "3': Domiki Analysi," KodikaslCode,
I (1978),50-77; To Elliniko Dimotiko Tragoudi, Lecture notes
1977-78 (Rethymno: University of Crete, 1978); and D.
264 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
he arrives at the principal messages of the texts
he studies (selected poetry by Seferis and Solo-
mos, Creek folk songs), and relates them to the
ideology of the texts, as weil as to the social and
historical circumstances of their composition. In
1979, he attempts an original synthesis of sty-
listics with narrative analysis and semantic the-
matic analysis into agiobai method of text
analysis which would be capable of integrating
surface and deep structures, and which he applies
to the modern Cretan folk song. 54 The analysis
has three stages, each stage starting with surface
structure and arriving at a deeper structure:
• themes and motives....,. actants and their
functions
• (syntagmatic level:) stylistics (syntactic sur-
face structures) ....,. narrative functions
(paradigmatic level:) narrative pattern ....,.
ideological content.
Applying this method especially to the anal-
ysis of folk songs about the Cretan resistance
during the Cerman occupation in World War
11, Kapsomenos arrives at specific characteris-
tics of these songs on each level of analysis.
Among its actants, the Cretan songs of the
Resistance show consistent use of a collective
subject, a highly unusual phenomenon in folk
song and one which demonstrates an important
turn away from an individual towards a collec-
tive myth. Analysis of the narrative functions
permits hirn to situate the different song patterns
on an axis of past-present-future within an
inclusive model, which reveals the global Cretan
myth of the Resistance. Finally, paradigmatic
analysis indicates the two principal semantic
oppositions of the songs, life versus death and
freedom versus slavery. These pairs are related
in such a way that life:death :: freedom:slavery,
which permits the singer to operate a mythical
transformation where death in the name of lib-
erty becomes life, and where material defeat
becomes moral victory. The modern Cretan
Resistance songs hold this ideological pattern in
common with the tradition al Kleftic (outlaw)
songs, a fact which makes it the most charac-
teristic structure of heroic Creek folk song, and
possibly of the local cultural system.
Solomou: '0 Peirasmos' ton Elifiheron Poliorkimenon, lecture notes
(Rethymno: University of Crete, 1979).
"To Synchrono Kritiko Istoriko Tragoudi (Athens: Themelio, 1979).
Recently,55 Kapsomenos has elaborated on his
analysis of the semantic (ideological) opposi-
tions of the folk song, including traditional songs
in addition to the modern ones, and added a
second set of equivalences-individual:society::
nature:culture. The triumph of nature and the
individual in the folk song represents the ideo-
logical universe of a peripheral society, living in
an organic relations hip with nature and in oppo-
sition to the central state. The individual hero,
reacting to a threat by resistance, or seeking res-
titution for an injustice, is defensive rather than
aggressive, the representative of the values of
nature against organized society. Kapsomenos
proposes a typology of societies on the basis of
their ideological stance in relation to the nature-
culture opposition; he also points out that the
semantic oppositions of the folk song become
part of the ideology of the Creek struggle for
independence, as an ideology which was poten-
tially, and actually became, revolutionary.
The contribution of Kapsomenos to the study
of post-Byzantine Creek literature, both popular
and written, is considerable. His work shows a
growing concern for the ideological message of
a text or a literary genre, for its integration into
the ideological climate of its historical environ-
ment, and for its function within the latter. His
efforts to integrate stylistic and semantic, for-
malist and ideological analysis also form part of
this shift in emphasis in his work. In his study
of the Cretan folk song, he has also included a
careful analysis of the contemporary conditions
of the production of new folk songs, and how
these conditions affect the genre.
Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou has been working
in Creece since 1976. Her studies are concerned
with Western European medievalliterature, pri-
marily the courtly roman ce. In her work, as in
that of Kapsomenos, a concern with the meth-
odology of text analysis is apparent, as is a preoc-
cupation with the relationship of texts to social
ideology-in her recent work from an explicitly
Marxist point of view.
Boklund began with a presemiotic structur-
alist thematic interpretation, inspired by French
structuralist literary analysis, of selected French,
Cerman, and English courtly Arthurian verse
5""Vasikes Opseis tou Laikou Politismikou Modelou opos
Emfanizetai sto Dimotiko Tragoudi," Anti, No. 134 (Sept.
4, 1979), pp. 33~34; and "I Antithesi Fysi vs. Koultoura
sto Elliniko Dimotiko Tragoudi," in Simeiotiki kai Koinonia,
pp. 227~232.
 GREECE 265
romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centu- meaning to a much more restricted realized
ries. 56 She defines the narrative pattern of the meaning, operating at all levels of textual orga-
original model; emphasizes its source in the value nization through mechanisms of text coherence
system of the courtly aristocracy; examines a with their source in the most global ("deep")
series of morphological transformations of the levels of organization and ultimately in extra-
pattern, their effect in altering the meaning of textual ideological structures.
the text, and their formulation and integration The concern of Boklund with the role of lit-
according to the constraints of the value system. erary texts within a social value system has
This structuralist thematic reading gradually developed into an explicitly Marxist approach
becomes more formally semiotic; paradigmatic to the social function of literature (and other
and syntagmatic structures are separately ana- semiotic systems), accompanied by specific his-
lyzed, and a first attempt at formulating a unified torical, socioeconomic analysis, and based on the
approach to text analysis is made. The complex concepts of Lucien Goldmann (see, for example,
of values in the courtly romance is seen as orga- Marxisme et sciences humaines). 59 The specific rela-
nized around the basic opposition courtly versus tionships between social structure and text struc-
noncourtly, which in the world of the romance ture, and more specifically the manner in which
is equated to order versus chaos. These oppo- the social function of a text-as a way for a
sitions are articulated with a spatial code (courtly specific social group to conceive of itself, its world,
space versus space of avanture 'adventure') in such and its possibilities for action-is related to the
a way that a diagram of the spatial organization (potential and actual) collective consciousness
comprised in the text gives a valid model of its on the one hand, and these to the intern al orga-
world view. The narrative takes the form of a nization of the narrative on the other, are also
threatening intrusion of chaos into courtly space, the focal points for the orientation of her future
a quest by a hero (representative of the court) work. From analysis of the courtly romance, her
into the space of chaos, and aresolution which studies have expanded to include other medieval
reaffirms the boundaries of the court and rees- texts, chiefty the Middle English Lift rif Saint
tablishes order. Transformations take the form Alexius. As in the case of Kapsomenos, Boklund's
of the introduction of a second, riyal center and work basically consists of monographic studies
source of order; the romance cannot tolerate this of specific texts and genres.
dualism, and the narrative resolves the problem In the context of the history of literary theory
by imposing one center on the order, but the and criticism, Jina Politi has discussed structur-
choice of which center will be dominant corre- alism in its application to literature, identifying
sponds to the ideological criteria of the romance various structuralist approaches, and relating
audience. 57 them to the problematic of twentieth-century
In her most recent work, Boklund makes use theories of literature. Her own analysis of the
of Greimasian formal narrative analysis, ana- eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel is based
lyzes the internal structure of paradigmatic codes, on Goldmann's Marxist genetic structuralism,
and derives the thematic organization and the but incorporates elements of both Anglo-
ideological message of the text from specific American and French structuralist theories. She
articulations between syntagmatic and paradig- combines formalist and historical approaches,
matic structures. 58 She is concerned with the relating text structure to social structure. 60
nature of connotative meaning in the internal We have already (Section A) discussed the
structure of a text, and attempts to define this work by Petros Martinidis in the analysis of,
as the result of a process of reduction of potential especially, the ideological aspects of narrative.
In the study of oralliterature, anthropologists
56Karin Boklund-Coffer, "Myth, Code, Order: Transfor-
and folklorists also use semiotic methods of text
mations in the Narrative Structure of Courtly Romance, "
Diss. University of Colorado, 1975.
57Karin Boklund, "On the Spatial and Cultural Character-
istics ofCourtly Romance," Semiotica, 20 (1977),1-37; and 59Karin Boklund, "Socio-semiotique du roman courtois,"
"Notes sur I'analyse des textes litteraires," Kodikas, No. 3 Semiotica, 21 (1977),227-256; Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou
(1977), pp. 159-170. and A.-Ph. Lagopoulos, "Koinonikes Domes."
5HKarin Boklund-Lagopoulou, "Domes Syneirmikis Simasias 6°Jina Politi, "Entechnos Logos, i oi Metamorfoseis tou Pro-
kai Analysi Logotechnikon Keimenon," in Simeiotiki kai tea," Deukalion, 25/26 (1979), 3-43; and The Novel and fts
Koinonia, pp. 207-223. Presuppositions (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1976).
266 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
analysis. Gregory Gizelis has written an intro-
ductory presentation of various approaches to
narrative analysis, in which he includes struc-
turalist approaches in anthropology (Dundes,
Hymes) and literature, and American New Crit-
icism. He discusses both syntactic and semantic
(paradigmatic) analyses (mainly those of Propp,
Levi-Strauss, Bremond, and Greimas), but
stresses in particular the need for pragmatic
analysis of the cultural context. In the analysis
of a Greek folk song which he gives as an exam-
pIe, as weIl as in another study of folk song, he
emphasizes Levi-Strauss's concept of a mediat-
ing third term which balances the two elements
of a binary opposition. 61
Nora Skouteri-Didaskalou, in her lecture notes
on verbal art in traditional societies, gives a care-
ful account of structural anthropological
approaches to oral narrative, including detailed
presentations of the methods of Pro pp and Levi-
Strauss and a discussion of some of the problems
they present. She concludes with a discussion of
Marxist approaches to literature, closing with
some brief indications of how a semiotic analysis
could be integrated into a Marxist dialectical
perspective, and referring to Goldmann. 62 Prop-
pian analysis has been used in the interpretation
of Byzantine texts by Giorgos Kechagioglou. 63
Käthi Dorfmüller-Karpusa works at the Uni-
versity of Bielefeld, but has also published work
in Greece. She works within the text-structure
world-structure theory of Petöfy, of which she
has given a clear introductory presentation. This
is a linguistic text grammar applicable to all kinds
ofverbal texts, attempting to construct an unam-
biguous metalanguage for the description of text
structures. Her own applications of it are divided
between literary and nonliterary texts, and show
a high level of formalization. 64 Among them is
61Gregory Gizelis "Oi Synchronoi Methodoi Analyseos tis
Entechnis Afigimatikis Epikoinonias," Speira, I, No. I
(1976), pp. 408-429; and " 'ltan mia Skyla Pethera,' "
Ipeirotiki Estia, No. 249/250 (1973), pp. 67-79.
62Nora Skouteri-Didaskalou, Methodologia Anafysis ton Koinoni-
kon Phainomenon. Anthropologiki-Koinoniologiki Theorisi tis Technis
tou Logou, lecture notes (Thessaloniki: University of Thes-
saloniki, 1979).
63Giorgos Kechagiogliou, Kritiki Ekdosi tis Istorias Ptocholeon-
dos, Diss. Thessaloniki, 1978 (Thessaloniki: University of
Thessaloniki, 1978), pp. 84-103.
64Käthi DorfmülIer-Karpusa, "Mia Glossologiki Theoria
Keimenon: TeSWeST," Filologos, No. 14 (1978), pp. 381-
391; "Komponenten des Textverstehens und ihre Rekon-
an analysis of the relationships of verb tenses in
a Kavafis poem, which indicates the fruitfulness
of the theory as an approach to literature, though
it stops short of applying the conclusions to a
critical interpretation of the poem. 65
In the area of stylistics, in addition, there exist
several monographic studies on modern Greek
poetry (Giorgos Kechagioglou, Maria Evange-
linou-Santoriniou-see Bibliography).
Giorgos Dizikirikis is concerned with literary
criticism from a non-academic viewpoint. From
a perspective mainly of traditional aesthetics and
humanism, he takes issue with Barthes's view of
literary criticism-and with modern literature in
general-, considering it as, potentially, an abdi-
cation of responsibility on the part of the writer
or critic. 66 (For a further discussion of the views
of Dizikirikis, see below, Section E.2.)
C. Semiotics and the Arts
1. Semiotics and Film
The most serious attempt to present a semiotic
methodology of film analysis in Greece has been
that of Takis Andonopoulos. 67 Andonopoulos,
who has studied with Metz, places Metz's method
of film analysis in the context of the problematic
of Paris filmmakers and theoreticians of the late
1960s. He presents Metz's early analytical
method and, simultaneously, criticisms of it. In
particular, Andonopoulos disagrees with Metz's
insistence on the necessarily narrative character
of film; he also takes issue with the limitation of
the analysis to only those codes specific to cin-
ematic discourse, because he feels that both the
relationship of the film image to the real world
(its representational character) and many ide-
ological elements of film are thus excluded from
the analysis. Andonopoulos admits that Metz
hirns elf has modified and altered his early views
struktion in der Textanalyse," in Bedeutung, Sprechakte und
Texte, eds. W. Vanderweghe and M. van der Velde (Tü-
bingen: Max Niemeyer, 1979),2, pp. 339-349.
65"Aspekte der temporalen Relationen in Texten," in Per-
spektiue:Textintern, eds. E. Weigand and G. Tschauder
(Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1980), 1, pp. 225-237.
66Giorgos Dizikirikis, I Synchroni Skepsi, i Apati tis Logotechnias
kai 0 Vathmos Miden tis Grafis (Athens: Grammi, 1973), pp. 15-
90.
6'Takis Andonopoulos, Kinimatografos, Epistimi, ldeologia
(Athens: Antilogos, 1972).
 GREECE
considerably, but still feels that the Metzian
approach ties cinema too closely to the repre-
sentation of reality. He believes that a possible
opening for a nonrepresentational, nonformalist
(and hence nonideological) theory of film could
be found in Derrida's concept of ecriture.
Sotiris Dimitriou follows Andonopoulos in his
presentation and critique of Metz's approach to
film, but disagrees on the subject of a Derrida-
inspired approach to the medium. 68 As early as
1973 he takes issue with the notion of the de-
structuring of cinematic discourse and the rup-
ture of signifier and signified, finding it formalist
and elitist; the destructuring of film cannot
change society, as it claims, it can only destroy
communication between artist and audience.
Since 1975, his critique of "philological semiot-
ics," as he calls the approach of Barthes and
Kristeva, is explicitly Marxist. He criticizes· the
arbitrary isolation of the code from the condi-
tions of communication; such an approach to
cinema is not revolutionary, only anticommer-
cia1. 69 In an article on the role of music and
silence in cinema, Dimitriou discusses the
semiotic function of the uses of certain film tech-
niques, relating them to linguistic and ritual ele-
ments serving the same or analogous functions. 70
Dimitriou also frequently refers to the cinema in
his general discussions of semiotics and struc-
turalism (see below, Section E.2). Likewise, the
work of Giorgos Dizikirikis, largely general in
nature, includes discussions of semiotics and the
cinema (see below, Section E.2).71
Diamandis Levendakos, following Peirce's and
Morris's triadic definition of the sign, dis tin-
guishes three dimensions of film: film as such
(cinematic language), which is however an iconic
language to which the linguistic model cannot
automatically be applied; film in relation to real-
ity, as a cognitive-aesthetic mastering of reality
to which criteria of artistic truth apply; and film
in relation to the spectator, where the primary
6BSotiris Dimitriou, Mythos, Kinimatografos, Simeiologia (Ath-
ens: Alma, 1973); and article with the same tide in Film,
I, No. 1 (1974), pp. 30-69.
69"Domismos, Filologiki Simeiologia kai Dialektikos Yli-
smos," Film, 2, No. 7 (1975),433-476; and Lexiko Oron, I:
Simeiologikis kai Domikis Ana(ysis tis Technis (Athens: Kastani-
otis, 1978).
7°"Siopi kai Pafseis," Film, No. 18 (1979), pp. 73-100.
71[ Synchroni Skepsi, pp. 252-60; and "Simeiologia, Techni,
Kinimatografos," Film, 2, No. 5 (1975), pp. 49-81.
267
problem is that of intelligibility versus original-
ity, codification versus the continuous under-
mining of codes. Following Lacan, art is seen as
a continuous revolution of the signifiers. Leven-
dakos also takes a Marxist view of film, arguing
that the aesthetic and ideological nucleus of a
film are determined not only by the filmmaker
but mainly by the economic and cultural factors;
this nucleus is internalized by the public. He
calls for a free cinema in which the people will
control their own means of expression. 72
Dimitris Panagiotatos has applied to cinema
Todorov's categories of the fantastic in litera-
ture. He discusses extensively the characteristics
of the classical (thematic axis: rational vs irra-
tional) and the conventional (natural vs preter-
natural) fantastic in film, the codified elements
used by the genre, and proposes the extension
of the categories to include science fiction (sci-
ence vs humanism). He also provides an inter-
pretation of these thematic axes in terms of the
ideological functions of the genre within the
framework of the contradictions of modern
capitalism. 73
The main representative of the (French jour-
nal) Cahiers du Cinema approach to film criticism
in Greece is Nikos Lyngouris, who between 1972
and 1977 wrote prolifically for the journal Syn-
chronos Kinimatografos. His primary references are
to Kristeva, Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, and Der-
rida, and his writings center around the concept
of ecriture as the process of valorization of the
signifier as opposed to the signified. Analyzing
Bunuel's Tristana, he observes that the represen-
tational code in film creates an apparently trans-
parent meaning that obscures the fact of
signification; Bunuel's work in this film is a proc-
ess of ecriture which effects a rupture between
signifier and signified, permitting the film to
destroy its own myths. The characters of the film
are seen in terms of the relations hip between
signifier and signified, instinct and rationalism.
Ecriture is obedient to the material nature of the
signifier, thus revealing the forbidden body, the
repressed; this eroticism makes of film a hiero-
glyphic script of signifiers whose signifieds are
suspended, and frees it from the psychosis of
72Diamandis Levendakos, Synchroni Theoria Kinimatografou
(Athens: Rappa, 1972).
73Dimitris Panagiotatos, 0 Fantastikos Kinimatografos (Athens:
Deka, 1979), Introduction.
268 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
bourgeois discourse. From this point of view
Lyngouris criticizes films which produce a neu-
rotic, oedipal identification of the spectator with
the hero. He proposes an interpretation of the
work of Hitchcock as being on the limits of clas-
sical cinema: the work contains two texts, the
traces of a repressed chain of signifiers and a
fetish text of narrative which covers it and in
which the public invests ideologically.
Analyzing a Greek political film, he also makes
use of the logical square in a discussion of the
articulation between the two main systems of
the film. A certain Marxist radicalism in this
article and elsewhere in Lyngouris is, however,
incorporated into and assimilated to the psy-
choanalytical view of semiotics: revolutionary
praxis is situated exclusively on the level of
discourse. 74
Michalis Koukios has also written extensively
for Synchrorws Kinimatografos. He is concerned with
a historical-materialist theory of cinema-and
in this sense he interprets and employs the
semiotics of Kristeva and Lacan- while taking
a critical position on formalist semiotics. 75 Within
this perspective he has written, for example, on
the problematic relationship of Western cinema
to Japanese culture, and the work of Japanese
filmmakers; on the ideological nature of the real-
istic psychological story in Hollywood historical
films, which impose on the spectator a single,
"lived," fragmentary experience as a represen-
tative interpretation of an historical whole; and
on the need for a nonnarrative, nonrepresenta-
tional filmic approach to history.76 Koukios also
uses structural analysis of content when he finds
it appropriate. 77 Other writers in Synchronos
Kinimatografos likewise show inftuence of Kris-
teva, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault: most pro-
74Nikos Lyngouris, "Simeioseis pano stin Tristana," Synchronos
Kinimatografos, No. 21 (1972), pp. 2-15; "I Thesi tou Vas-
ilia i 0 Hitchcock kai to Ptoma tou Pouthena," Synchronos
Kinimatografos, No. 23 (1972), pp. 21-33; "I Thesi tou Vas-
ilia ... (11)," Synchronos Kinimatografos, No. 24-26 (1972),
pp. 52-59; and "Meres tou 36 (11)," Synchronos Kinimatografos,
No. 24-26 (1972), pp. 16-37.
75Michalis Koukios, book review of Dimitriou, Mythos, in
Synchronos Kinimatografos NS 2-3 (1974), pp. 148-152; and
book review of Andonopoulos, KinimatogrtifOs, in Synchronos
Kinimatografos NS 5 (1975), pp. 72-75.
76"1 Provlimatiki Matia" and "Kinimatografos/lstoria," both
in Synchronos KinimatogrtifOs NS 15-16 (1977);pp. 26-35 and
122-132.
77"1 Dilitiriasmeni Metafora," Synchronos Kinimatografos, NS
129 (1978),85-87.
nouncedly psychoanalytical is Nikos Savvatis;
Christos Vakalopoulos refers to Lacan and
Barthes in his film criticism; and finally, we might
mention Dimosthenis Agrafiotis. 78 The journal
Othoni also publishes articles and film criticism
in this school of thought (for example by Giorgos
Tziotzios, who refers primarily to Barthes and
to the concepts associated with the self-referential
text, and Minas Grigorakos, who tends to follow
Lacan).79
Finally, Thanasis Rentzis (editor of Film) has
proposed adefinition of the avant-garde cinema
(in opposition to conventional and to innovative
cinema) as code-making: not simply reorganiz-
ing conventional codes, but challenging the rela-
tion of form to referent and hence to some extent
altering the perception of the spectator. To
Rentzis, the avant-garde filmmaker, like the
modern artist, is independent of society, having
no specific social goal; an unusual opinion in
Greek semiotics. 80
The inftuence of semiotics is also apparent in
some film criticism in the daily press
(A. Dermentzoglou in Thessaloniki, Rafailidis in
Vima.)
2_ Semiotics 'and the TheaterS1
Very litde work has been done in Greece in
this field. K. Georgousopoulos uses some semiot-
ics in his theater criticism in the daily press (Vima)
and elsewhere. 82
3. Pictorial Semiotics
Greek work in this field is very limited. The
primary theoretical study is an article by A.-Ph.
Lagopoulos and Andreas Ioannidis. 83 Following
7BSee Bibliography.
79See Bibliography.
BOThanasis Rentzis, Oi Protoporeies ston Kinimatografo (Athens:
Kastaniotis, 1978).
B'The following sections on semiotics and the theater, the
image, and music have not been arranged in order of
importance, but are grouped together with the section on
semiotics and film in order to provide a more unified picture
of semiotics and the arts.
B2We might also mention the article by Grigoris Sifakis on
the traditional shadow puppet theater, "I Paradosiaki Dra-
matourgia tou Karagiozi (Proti Prosengisi)," 0 Politis, No. 5
(1976), pp. 25-39, which employs some semiotic method-
ology, mainly from Propp.
B3 A.-Ph. Lagopoulos and A. loannidis, "Semiotique pictur-
ale: Analyse d'une mosa'ique byzantine," Semiotica, 21 (1977),
75-109.
 GREECE
the views of Lagopoulos on settlement space, the
article distinguishes between the process of pro-
duction and the process of conception of the
pictorial work.
The theoretical views formulated in the arti-
cle, concerning both pictorial semiotics and its
articulation with historical materialism, consti-
tute the framework for the monographie analysis
of a mosaic, itself an element in the larger pic-
torial system of a church. The article concen-
trates on two levels of analysis of the mosaic, of
different degrees of generality, and analyzes the
signs of each level as to denotative and conno-
tative signification, the denotative signifier and
its spatial and chromatic characteristics; the
global meaning of the mosaic is then decoded.
Through abrief sociological analysis, the authors
attempt to prove that the ideological orientation
of the mosiac is due to exosemiotic factors. The
article points out the unity of the syntactic struc-
ture and the connotative organization of theele-
ments of the pictorial system-in particular those
of the mosaic-with the corresponding structure
and organization of the architectural system of
the church, as weIl as the arrangement of the
semiotic organization of the first system in rela-
tion to that of the second. It also shows the
projection of the cosmological code on the syn-
tactic and semantic organization of the mosaic,
and formulates the hypothesis that the mor-
phological and semantic organization of Byzan-
tine art is due to the cosmological code.
We have already mentioned Martinidis' anal-
ysis of comics (Section A). The writer is of the
opinion that the comic consists of three levels.
The first level, that of the pictorial signifier, he
considers as the surface level; the second as the
level of the pictorial narrative; and the third, the
ideologieal, as the deep level. The deep structure
is given by the logical square formed by "forces
of good," "forces of evil," "agents of good,"
"agents of evil." Passage from the second to the
first level involves a formal articulation, whereas
the passage from the third to the second involves
a logico-semantic articulation between the deep
structure and the various investments made in
it. Martinidis emphasizes the importance of space
in the characterization of the heroes and refers
to i ts (exosemiotic) social function. 84
84 Simeiologia tis Architektonikis Empeirias, Vol. 2; Simeiologia ton
Antilipseon; and "Chorikes Parastaseis. "
269
For Stefanou, the semantic and aesthetic
valorization of alandscape is based on the nature
of its conception and its practical appropriation,
which are limited by social factors. This valor-
ization can be studied through the postcard. Ste-
fanou refers to the framework of production-
consumption and the functions of the postcard,
and carries out two monographie analyses influ-
enced by Moles and Barthes. In the first he ana-
lyzes, not without confusions, signifiers and
signifieds of denotation and connotation. In the
second he analyzes the change in meaning and
its focusing on the character of the site during
the passage from a hypothetical to the actualized
image, and identifies empirically the focus of the
latter. 85
Agrafiotis believes that semiotic analysis is part
of a metalanguage on art. He comments on a
series of historical images from a point of view
which appears to be influenced by Foucault and
Lyotard, and which could be characterized as
partly traditional and marginally semiotic. He
observes that the historical maps which he pre-
sents are in a loose analogical relations hip to
geography, consist of symbols and signs, and
have aesthetic value, whereas modern maps are
strictly analogie al and their signs are mono-
semie; these characteristics are due to a certain
cultural formation. 86
Dizikirikis includes a critical discussion of
semiotics in the pictorial arts in his general writ-
ings on aesthetics (see Seetion E.2, below).
4. Semiotics and Music
There is no Greek semiotic work in the domain
of musicology.87 However, several Greek com-
posers have worked in a manner that can be
considered prestructuralist and presemiotic, that
is, they have been concerned with the same object
as semiotics, without substantial use of semiotic
85"Dimensions psycho-sociales du paysage urbain," Diss.
University of Strasbourg I, 1978; and "Les Filtres de la
lecture: Application a la carte postale," Messages, 10 (1978),
49-67.
86 Topos kai Eikona (Athens: Olkos, 1978), 1, pp. xi-xvi, 170-
80, 266-275.
B'With the exception of an article by Charis Xanthoudakis,
"Kinimatograf kai Mousiki: I Periptosi tou Mauricio
Kagel," Film, No. 18 (1979), pp. 110-119, which refers to
the filming of the "instrumental theatre" of Kagel and
analyses the semantic, syntactic, and other semiotic rela-
tions between the music and the film image.
270 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS

concepts and in a manner related to structur- relations hip of the rest with these is one of con-
alism. This presemiotic work appears in two trolled ambiguity (polysemy), that is, it leaves
forms: as compositional technique and as musi- considerable freedom for improvisation during
cal notation (semiography). The first case is that the performance within a determined frame. 89
of integrated systems of composition whose The aleatory compositions of Anestis Log-
musical parameters follow a set of rules, and othetis are based on combinations of varying
compositional techniques related to these. By patterns. Since about 1959 he has developed an
international standards, Creek composers have integrated compositional system (after aperiod
created an unusually large number of these sys- of serial works) in which he considers that his
tems. The musical notation is related either to "polymorphie" notation, as a me ans of compo-
the systems or to the techniques. 88 sition and composer-musician communication,
Concerning compositional technique, J ani plays the central role. His fundamental position
Christou, who has created aseries of integrated is that composition is essentially limited by the
systems of composition, began by enriching serial notational system, since the latter orients it in
technique (based on twelve-tone series which fol- certain directions. His "polymorphie" notation
low specific rules) with "simple" and "complex" is linked to the theoretical aim of controlled
"patterns," which represent combinations of ambiguity in relation to the composition and
twelve-tone series, and are classified and num- performance. The score consists of a single sheet
bered; the system has its own syntax (period of paper, and is generally composed of three
1959-64). After the formulation of this system, categories of graphie signs of an analogical
his musical theory shows aseries of develop- nature, presenting increasing degrees of poly-
ments. First, he replaced serial technique with semy. The graphie syntax (isolation or grouping
the pattern technique. Second, the patterns of signifiers) is in an analogous relation to the
gradually take on for hirn more important meta- musical syntax, and the signifiers are read in all
physical meaning (the beginnings of this are directions. The score, which for Logothetis also
found in the last part of this period) , that is, they has a pictorial aesthetic quality, has agraphie
are incorporated into a progressively more dis- unity which corresponds to the unity of the mus-
tinct process of semiosis. This process finally ical composition, and to the acoustic ftow and
takes the form of a passage from a mystical- structure; as a limit case, it may include only the
psychoanalytical foundation to psychological latter and be composed of only one signifier. 90
constructs and from these to his patterns. Third, Certain other Creek composers have arrived
the central emphasis of the syntax shifts from at a partial systematization of compositional
the technical level to the mystical- technique, whereas several others use systema-
psychoanalytical level. tization in a looser fashion. Apergis belongs in
The musical notation of Christou passed the second category, and adopts a musical view-
through various phases, of which we can detect point and a compositional technique analogous
three between 1965 and 1970. In his "synthetic to the orientation of Christou: recent "theatri-
notation" (first phase), the score consists of the cal" musical works of his are based on a file of
number of the pattern and a simple graphie rep- about 2000 cards which correspond to "musical-
resentation which recalls it. The relationship of expressive- thea trical-psychological situations."
some of these representations with the corre- In the same category are Andoniou and Ioan-
sponding patterns is biunivocal, whereas the nidis, who also base their works on patterns and
use their own notational systems. gl Re'cently a
notation al approach has been formulated by
SBBased on G. G. Papaioannou, "Nea Systimata Synthesis
stin Elliniki Mousiki Protoporeia," Graji, No. 2 (1978), B9G. Papaioannou, "0 Giannis Christou ki i Metafysiki tis
pp. 52-62. We will not discuss below composers whose Mousikis," Chroniko '70 (Athens: Ora, 1970), pp. 112-19;
metalanguage of composition can be considered either tra- and "Nea Systimata," pp. 56-58; see also Janis Christou,
ditional (and for that reason known), or incompatible with Enantidromia, edition W. Hansen (London: J. and
a semiotic perspective. Thus, we will not discuss for exam- W. Chester, n.d.).
pie Skalkottas (1904-1949), who arrived at a system similar 90 Anestis Logothetis, Zeichen als Aggregatzustand der Musik
to serial composition, or Xenakis, whose approximately (Wien: Jungend und Volk, 1974); Logothetis, Papaioan-
fifteen integrated compositional systems are based on a nou, in Anestis Logothetis (Athens: Ora, 1975); and
kind of isomorphism between the musical compositions and Papaioannou, "Nea Systimata," pp. 59-60.
mathematica1 systems. 91Papaioannou, "Nea Systimata," pp. 60, 61.
 GREECE 271
Kornilios, in which the musical notation is devel- of traditional Greek society. Verbal and non-
oped in relationship to a spatial notation (and verbal aspects of culture are organized into
a choreographic notation, in the case of musical wholes, functioning as codified messages follow-
theatre). ing conventional rules. The world is organized
into aseries of cultural categories. She gives
examples of traditional Greek cultural categories
D. Semiotics and the Social Sciences for the organization of space, time, ritual behav-
ior, and aspects of costume. 95
A significant part of the work of Lagopoulos,
In a detailed sociosemiotic analysis of sexual
concerning the semiotics of settlement space in
distinctions and spatial patterns in marriage rit-
precapitalist societies, forms part of the Greek
ual in two Greek villages, she argues that the
contribution to semiotics in anthropology; for
marriage ritual, as a model which emphasizes
discussion, see Section A.
the complementarity of the attributes of sexual
Gregory Gizelis has written on semiotic aspects
classification, functions as an ideological mech-
of anthropology, sociology, and folklore studies.
anism mediating the contradictions between the
His writings center around the concept of the
economic infrastructure and the ideological
cultural system as a system of communication.
superstructure. A contradiction in the actual
Recently he has formulated more systematically
productive role of women (necessary but
his view of culture as a semiotic system or a
dependent producers) is structurally inherent in
system of texts, and has discussed the concept
the infrastructure, but, to ass ure the reproduc-
of text as applied to cultural phenomena by var-
tion of the productive unit (creation of new fam-
ious semioticians. 92 The cultural system is based
ilies by marriage), this contradiction is surpassed
on the world view of a folk community or, in
on the ideological level by the symbolic pres-
modern society, of a social group. At one point,
entation of the roles of male and female as simply
he sees the world view as being composed of
symmetrical. Semiotic system and social rela-
hierarchically structured categories, normally
tions are not simply structural transformations
binary, among which categories the human
one of the other, but integral parts of a unified
mind establishes various relations identifiable
system of social production. 96 Skouteri-
as rhetorical tropes (metaphor-metonymy-
Didaskalou draws mainly on structuralist and
synecdoche).93
Marxist anthropology, notably Mary Douglas.
Individual texts must be seen in the context
Though most of the work of Giorgos Veltsos
of culture to be interpretable. Gizelis also takes
is general in character, it includes discussions of
a functional view of folklore, seeing folklore ele-
social institutions (specifically the institution of
ments as a means of group self-identification.
freedom of the press) and ideology from a partly
Function can affect both form and message of a
semiotic point of view (he derives his approach
folklore text, which change as its function
94 from Foucault and Lacan). His purpose is the
changes. Gizelis draws on various aspects of
demythification of institutions through the use
Greek folklore (ritual, social roles, costume) for
of semiotics, primarily through discussions of
examples in presenting his view of culture.
institutional discourse. 97 Veltsos' general views
Among his main sources are Goffman, Levi-
on the relations hip of language, society and ide-
Strauss, and Alan Dundes; he also frequently
ology (his central concern) are discussed below
refers to Aristotle.
in Section E.2.
Nora Skouteri-Didaskalou adopts a sociose-
An interesting study by Agrafiotis on how
miotic approach in analyzing semiotic systems
modern technology is conceived by different
social groups is sociological in method but inftu-
92 To Politismiko Systima: 0 Simeiotikos kai Epikoinoniakos Charak-
tiras tou (Athens: Grigoropoulos, 1980); cf. also I Ritoriki
enced by a semioticist bibliography (Lyotard,
tou Endymatos (Athens: privately printed, 1974), and I Ethno-
grafia tis Ygeias (Athens: Grigoropoulos, 1977). 95 Simeioseis Ellinikis Laografias kai Laikis Technis, lecture notes
93 I Koinoniki Leitourgia tou Schimatos tis Metaforas (Athens: pri- (Thessaloniki: Tourist Guide School, National Tourist
vately printed, 1973). Organization of Greece, 1979); and Methodologia.
94"Ta Anastenaria kai ta Ermineftika tous Provlimata," in 96"Gia tin Ideologiki Anaparagogi ton kata Fyla Koinonikon
Praktika tou TU Symposiou Laografias tou Voreioelladikou Chorou, Diakriseon," in Simeiotiki kai Koinonia, pp. 159-196.
14-16 Oct. 1976 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 9'See especially Giorgos Veltsos, Simeiologia ton Politikon Thes-
1979), pp. 3-15. mon (Athens: Papazisis, 1974).
272 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and others).
Agrafiotis uses questionnaires and statistical
methods to determine the various ways in which
the subject of technology is connected to the
conceptual scheme of postindustrial society; he
finds that technology tends to be conceived by
social groups in sociocultural rather than
technico-economic terms. 98
E. Theoretical and General Writings
on Semiotics
1. Theory of Semiotics: Linguistics
and Semiotics
As has been indicated in the preceding sec-
tions, several Greek semioticians have made con-
tributions to the theory of semiotics; since these
contributions are organically linked to their
research in a specific field, they were discussed
in the section concerned with that field. In this
section we will present the remaining theoretical
work on semiotics and (very briefty) work in
linguistics with a semiotic interest.
Michalis Setatos in his lecture notes on
semiotics presents definitions of the domain, its
his tory and main theoreticians, classifications of
sign systems, basic concepts and terms, and var-
ious fields (paralinguistics, kinesics, proxemics,
graphemics, signaling systems, artificial lan-
guages, zoosemiotics). U nfortunately the pres-
entation is extremely summary (the book being
intended to accompany lectures). This work
includes the only presentation of Peircian
semiotics in Greek. 99
The dictionary of terms by Sotiris Dimitriou,
of which two volumes haVe appeared to date, is
an important contribution to semiotics in Greece.
Volume I covers semiotic and structural anal-
ysis primarily of art (and especially of the cin-
ema), whereas Volume 2 (which is more
technical) refers to communications theory and
semiotics. The discussions of basic semiotic con-
cepts are extensive---:-if not always systematic or
unified-and critical; for all entries, the French,
English, and German terms are given. IOD
98"Le Mode d'etre de la technologie et sa perception sociale
au sein des societes post-industrielles," Greek Review qfSocial
Research, No. 35 ~1979) pp. 33--66.
99Michalis Setatos, Eisagogi sti Simeiologia kai Simasiologia, lec-
ture notes (Thessaloniki: University ofThessaloniki, 1977).
lOoLexiko Oron, Vol. I, and Vol. 2, Epikoinonias kai Simeiotikis
Anarysis, (Athens: Kastaniotis, 1980).
Setatos has also analyzed the system of deter-
mination of location and spatial relations in the
Pontic dialect of Greek, using methods of struc-
tural semantics. He formulates the rules deter-
mining the semantic distinctions on which
determination of location depends in Pontic,
together with certain transformational rules of
its generative grammar. 101 Georgios Babiniotis,
in addition to a text book on theoreticallinguis-
tics,102 has written on the nature of the linguistic
sign, discussing many of the basic concepts of
semiotics from a linguistic point of view. 103 (On
Dorfmüller-Karpusa, see Section B above, near
the end.)
2. General Writings on Semiotics
Some general discussions of semiotics have
appeared in Greece. Characteristically, these
works are addressed to a wider public, and are
often simultaneously an introductory presenta-
tion, a discussion, and a critique. They are pri-
marily concerned with the better-known French
structuralist texts of the sixties and seventies:
those of Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Kristeva. The
authors of these general writings use examples
from various fields, but do not usually base their
opinions on specific research results of their own,
nor do they use formal analytical methods.
Dimitriou sees semiotics as related to com-
munications theory. He criticizes the use of
semiotics in aesthetics and social anthropology
from an epistemological viewpoint, and argues
for a conception of semiotics as a so ci al science.
He is specifically interested in the semiotics of
film, where he at an early date takes issue with
French structuralism as introduced into Greek
film criticism (see Section C.I, above). He crit-
icizes "philological semiology," as he calls this
school, as formalist, idealist, and mysticist: it
perpetuates an elitist conception of art, a bour-
geois aesthetics in disguise. Since 1975, his crit-
icism of "philological semiology" is explicitly
Marxist: he believes that we do not change soci-
ety by destructuring its codes. 104 Recently, he
opposes to "philological semiology" a scientific
101"1 Architektoniki tou Chorou stin Pontiaki Dialekto," in
Timitikos TomosS. G. Kapsomenou (Thessaloniki: n.p., 1975),
pp. 375-40l.
102Giorgos Babiniotis, Theoritiki Glossologia (Athens: n.p., 1980).
103"1 Monadikotis tis Lexeos: Symvoli stin Theoria tou Glos-
sikou Simeiou," Speira, No. 5 (1976), pp. 11-29.
104"Domismos. "
 GREECE
semiology, which is conceived as a social
science. 105
According to Dimitriou the linguistic model
cannot be transferred to other semiotic phenom-
ena. On the other hand, he has always stressed
the need to see semiotic texts in relation to their
social function. Whereas in linguistics the code
can be analyzed in relative isolation, in other
semiotic systems the code must not be isolated
from the "conditions of communication," which
are social in nature. Signs develop within a social
system, and change as their social function
changes. The work of art is the vehide of an
ideological model, and this model and the role
it plays in a dass society can be analysed by a
socially aware scientific semiotics. Semiotic sys-
tems are not autonomous of reality, but are an
abstraction of human experience and conception
of reality.106
A quite different view of semiotics is taken by
Veltsos. The central concern of Veltsos in all his
writings is the relationship between language and
society.107 When language is treated as a social
institution (langue), this relationship tends to be
seen by Veltsos as a set of (variously defined)
isomorphie levels (forms of "exchange"). Wh at
is capitalism on the economic level is logocen-
trism on the ideologieal, paternalism or mon-
archy on the political, and phallocracy on the
level of desire. Langue is an institution for the
repression of the libido; codes are the "chains"
of desire. However, language in the form of parole
or dis course is also energy, a process of produc-
tion or generation of meaning by the libido, which
speaks in "non-hierarchical" images and sym-
bols. Veltsos insists on the material nature of
parole, on what he calls its "non-material reality."
Reality is in language, internal to it; hence, dis-
course shapes reality. To change society, he
therefore feels that a certain type of discourse is
necessary: a theoretical unified discourse on, pre-
cisely, the relations hip between language and
society, a discourse of images rather than of logic.
For this reason, he writes only general theoret-
ical studies, never doing applied research. 108 The
"unified dis course" of Veltsos is an attempt at
reconciling quite heterogeneous sourees: pri-
marily Lacan, Freud, Althusser, Marx, and Fou-
cault, but also at times Lyotard, Chomsky,
105 Lexiko, Vois. 1 and 2.
106See Bibliography.
107See Bibliography.
108 Koinonia kai Glossa, 2nd ed. (Athens: Papazisis, 1976), p. 10.
273
Saussure, Husserl, von Humboldt, Derrida,
Aristotle, the pre-Socratics, and oriental mysti-
cism. He relates these sources in a somewhat
metaphorical manner, advancing highly per-
sonal and frequently startling interpretations.
Dizikirikis makes frequent, primarily critical,
references to semiotics in his writings on litera-
ture, cinema, and art in general. His viewpoint
(see Section B above) is mainly that of tradi-
tional aesthetics and humanism (Della Volpe,
Garroni). He criticizes "structuralist linguistics"
for its neopositivist, idealist tendencies, stressing
the need to see language as a social phenomenon.
He sees "French structuralist" writing (Barthes,
Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Lacan) as idealist, dog-
matic, and irrationalist; structuralism, being
unable to account for his tory, borrows from psy-
choanalysis the concept of the unconscious to
explain structure. Dizikirikis believes that mod-
ern aesthetics ignores the "need" for communi-
cation between the writer or artist and society;
he insists upon the cognitive, rational component
of art. He also pleads for an evaluative approach
to art, for a science of art with its roots in art
his tory and criticism, and not in the formalist
transfer of a linguistic model. 109
In dosing, we note that a presentation of the
position of semiotics within Lacan's theory of
psychoanalysis is induded in the introduction to
the work of Lacan by Marios Markidis. 110
IV. Conclusions
Judging by the preceding discussion, in the
last 10-12 years Greece has experienced a mod-
est semiotic cosmogony. Semiotic theory, con-
cepts, methods, and techniques, from isolated
and scattered instances have proliferated in dif-
ferent fields and, in several cases, in groups of
scholars. The work that has been produced in
semiotics is uneven in quality and quantity, both
among scholars working in the same field and
between fields. In general we observe that there
is a growing interest in semiotics among the gen-
eral public, a fair amount of introductory and
general writing on semiotics, and a small but
growing body of systematic research.
109/Synchroni Skepsi; Gia ti Glossa kai tin Epistimi tis Logotechnias
(Athens: Nea Synora, n.d. [1977]) and "Simeiologia,
Techni, Kinimatografos," Film 2, No. 5 (1975),49-81.
110/ Psychanalysi tou Dichasmenou Ypokeimenou (Athens: Eras-
mos, 1980).
274 K. BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU AND A.-PH. LAGOPOULOS
Characteristic of Greek semiotic work is the
rather sharp distinction between academic and
nonacademic writing. This distinction also
appears as a distinction between fields: in certain
fields, semiotics has taken root and developed
within academic institutions (semiotics of space,
verbal arts, social sciences; theory of semiotics),
whereas in others, semiotics is almost exclusively
a nonacademic phenomenon (cinema, general
writings). Work in the field ofpictorial semiotics
appears as an extension of semiotics from other,
mainly academic fields into the analysis of
Images.
In respect to contents, Greek semiotic pro-
duction can be grouped into three main cate-
gories: research, introductory presentations (with,
frequently, criticism of semiotics), and reviews.
Research is done in an academic context; intro-
ductory presentations are found in both aca-
demic and nonacademic writings; and semiotics
in reviews is primarily a phenomenon of film
criticism, hence nonacademic.
The primary influence on Greek semiotics has
undoubtedly been French, though there is a not
negligible Anglo-American and Italian influence
in the academic fields. If we consider individual
writers referred to as basic sources by Greek
semioticians, we find that Lacan is used as a
basic source more frequently than any other
writer, but primarily in the nonacademic field
of semiotics and film; Barthes is also referred to
very frequently, in both academic and nonaca-
demic writing but primarily in the former. The
influence of Foucault appears in various fields,
but that of Levi-Strauss, Greimas, and Eco
almost exclusively in academic writing.
If we examine the primary influences in each
field that we have discussed above (excepting
theater and music, which are not significant in
this context), we find that the semiotics of space
shpw dominant influence by Eco and Barthes
(Eliments de semiologie), and secondarily by Levi-
Strauss and Greimas. In the verbal arts, Gold-
mann is dominant, followed by Levi-Strauss,
Greimas, Propp, and French and Anglo-
American structuralist writings in general. In
cinema, by far the main influence is that of Lacan,
f9110wed quite secondarily by Barthes (not the
Elements), Derrida, Kristeva, and Foucault; Metz
is not a primary influence.
Among the fields with less semiotic work, in
pictorial semiotics the influence of Barthes's Ele-
ments is evident. For the social sciences there is
a division between Levi-Strauss and structural
anthropology (both Anglo-American and French)
on the one hand, and Lacan and Foucault on
the other. In theoretical writings no tendency is
discernible aside from a general influence by
structuralist linguistics, and general writings are
divided between the influence of Lacan and Fou-
cault on the one hand, and criticism of this tend-
ency on the other.
However, the most striking characteristic of
semiotics in Greece is the influence of Marxism,
which appears in all fields, academic and non-
academic. Of the semioticians whose work we
have discussed above, nearly a third show a sig-
nificant, explicitly Marxist influence in their
writings. Marxism is related to semiotics in var-
ious ways. In general and introductory writings
it often appears as a perspective for criticism of
semiotics. In the nonacademic field of semiotics
and film, the Marxist influence is gene rally
absorbed by and subordinated to the psychoan-
alytical tendency which dominates this field. In
the academic fields, on the other hand, semiotics
is usually seen as subordinate to Marxist theory,
and significant work has been done on the artic-
ulation between the Marxist theory of society
and a semiotic theory of signifying systems
(Lagopoulos, Martinidis, Boklund, Skouteri-
Didaskalou, Dimitriou, Kapsomenos ).
The above group with an explicitly Marxist
orientation is part of an even larger group (nearly
half of the semioticians discussed) which shows
a fundamental concern with the relationship
between semiotic systems and the society within
which they function, and with the use of semiot-
ics in the analysis of ideology. This general socio-
semiotic tendency is also evident in all fields,
academic and nonacademic, and in all types of
writing from research to introduction and reviews.
Taken together, the sociosemiotic orientation and,
within it, the explicitly Marxist perspective, must
be considered as dominant characteristics of
Greek semiotics. As a social phenomenon and
as a theoretical orientation, it should clearly be
seen as the result of the specific historical con-
junction in which Greece finds itself today, and
which was discussed briefly in the introduction.
Greek semiotic production has been, and is,
uneven in quality. Few formal studies exist as
of today, but their number is growing. Little
original work of international standard has been
done, but here also the number of original stud-
ies is likely to grow. Finally, the sociosemiotic,
 GREECE
and more speeifieally the Marxist orientation of
many Greek semiotieians has produeed the most
original and interesting Greek semiotie work to
date and is, in our judgment, likely to eonstitute
the framework for the most signifieant Greek
eontribution to semioties in the future.
v. Bibliography
Four kinds of works are included in the Bib-
liography: (a) semiotie and strueturalist prese-
miotie works in whieh we have attempted to
provide a eomplete bibliography of Greek
semiotie produetion; (b) peripherally semiotie
works, that is, partially semiotie, or linguistie,
or prestrueturalist presemiotie (marked with 0);
(e) works using a different methodology eom-
patible with semioties, and having the same or
a similar objeet with it (marked with D);
(d) works unrelated to semioties used as general
bibliography (marked with 6).
Agrafiotis, Dimosthenis. "Metafores kai Isomorfismoi: Gia
Merikes Prosfates Tainies tou Neou Germanikou Kini-
matografou." Synchronos Kinimatografos, NS 13-14 (1977),
19-29.
- - - . Topos kai Eikona: Charaktika Xenon Periigiton gia tin
Ellada. Athens: Olkos, 1978, I, pp. xi-xvi, 170-180,266-
275.
0 - - . "Le Mode d'etre de la technologie et sa perception
sociale au sein des societes post-industrielles." Greek
Review rifSocial Research, No. 35 (1979), pp. 33-66.
liAlivizatos, Nikos, "0 Ekdimokratismos Simera: Syn-
chrones Diastaseis enos Paliou Aitimatos." Synchrona
Themata, 2 No. 8 (1980), 71-80.
Andonopoulos, Takis. Kinimatografos, Epistimi, Ideologia.
Athens: Antilogos, 1972.
OAnestis Logothetis, album with a brief text by G. Papaioan-
nou. Athens: Ora, 1975.
OBabiniotis, Georgios, "I Monadikotis tis Lexeos: Symvoli
stin Theoria tou Glossikou Simeiou." Speira, No. 5 (1976),
pp. 11-29.
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- - - . "Gia to Simainon." In Simeiotiki kai Koinonia. Ed.
K. Boklund-Lagopoulou. Athens: Odysseas, 1980,
pp. 81-84.
Vitsentzatos, Michalis. "Meaning in Architecture: A Case
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1974.
- - - . "Simeiologiki Methodologia kai Analysi tou
Architektonikou' Noimatos: Efarmogi eis to Oikistiko
Syngrotima La Luz." In Methodologia kai Poleodomia-
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DVrychea-Haidopoulou, Annie. "La Publicite immobiliere:
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DXagoraris, P. "Kyvernitiki kai Techni." Nat. Techn. Univ.
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Xanthoudakis, Charis. "Kinimatografos kai Mousiki: I
Periptosi tou Mauricio Kagel." Film, No. 18. (1979),
pp. 1l0-119.
 CHAPTER 12
Semiotics in Hungary
Vilmos Voigt
I.
In considering the development of semiotic stud-
ies in Hungary, we have to deal first of all with
some facts in the history of Hungarian social
sciences. In Hungary, that is, in the Austro-
Hungarian Monarchy unti11918, a profound dif-
ferentiation and rapid development of the var-
ious sciences began in the late 19th century and,
from a historical point of view, this occurred
under the influence of positivism. However, in
consequence of a delayed social development,
the sciences remained under the predominant
influence of liberalism, and thus were full of
romanticism and even nationalism. As a matter
of fact, the situation generally changed in the
period between 1890 and the World War I, when
the goals and methods of the Hungarian social
sciences became the very heart of the society's
interest. New trends in linguistics, philosophy,
and anthropology appeared, and new branches
of science developed, for example, psychology
and sociology. The second "reform period" of
Hungarian society and sciences collapsed
together with the old monarchy in October 1918.
Then a bourgeois revolution took place, rapidly
followed, in March, 1919, by a short Proletarian
Dictatorship State lasting less than twenty weeks.
This radically new period was too short to create
Vilmos Voigt • Folklore Tanszek. Eötvös Lorand
Tudomanyegyetem, Budapest, Hungary H-1364 pf. 107.
279
actual results in education, science and academic
life, yet it was long enough for various scientific
programs and projects to emerge. Practical and
applied sciences were predominant among the
supported fields of research, and the education
of the entire people was considered the main
future task. Scientific research took on an impor-
tant symbolic role, incorporating the "new,"
nontraditional, nonreligious way of life.
As a drastic reaction to this vision of a new
society, there began in August, 1919, a twenty-
five year period of restricted possibilities.
Although the few months of the brutal white
terror were followed by a conservative consoli-
dation which called itself liberal, first the world
economic crisis in the thirties, then the world
war and the fascist persecution of the J ews and
liberals caused serious damages to scientific
activity. The state sponsored "official" researches
of this epoch were mostly retrograde from begin-
ning to end. On the one hand political irreden-
tism gave rebirth to Hungarian nationalism, and
in the social sciences isolationist tendencies arose.
On the other hand, romantic and idealistic tend-
encies reappeared, and critical reviews became
more and more a rarity. New trends, even the
idealistic ones, as for example, Geistesgeschichte in
his tory and literature, seemed to be oppositional,
non-institutionalized, or privately supported.
However the clandestine Marxist social sciences
were hostile towards all the established schools
in the "bourgeois" researches.
280 VILMOS VOIGT
Following World War 11 and lasting a few
years, the next period may be seen as a transi-
tional one. Old and new tendencies clashed but
at this time coexisted. By the early fifties, how-
ever, there came a full turn-around in all the
sciences: a socialist model be ca me absolutely
mandatory. Here we should mention that we
may distinguish several shorter periods within
the epoch in question. The five years between
1945 and 1950 may be regarded as a time of
polemics among the most divergent political,
social, and scientific trends, during which the
new and increasing power was the socialist
Marxist school. Its main representatives were
the scholars, emerging either from the commu-
nist underground, or returning from political
emigration. Usually these were scholars of good
reputation, who sometimes also had to give up
their personal views in order to represent a
homogeneity in all the sciences in Hungary. The
next five or six years cannot simply be charac-
terized as having been under the limitless dom-
inan ce of Stalinist science, but it is true that the
impact of Soviet on Hungarian science definitely
increased. Despite the fact that the whole pro-
gram of academic research was one-sided, the
same period gave birth to a new golden age of
traditional Hungarian science (his tory, history
of language and literature flourished during this
period, fulfilling 19th-century tasks of Hungar-
ian philology). The second half of the fifties again
experienced ideological confusion, a collapse, and
then a new consolidation. Then the need for
modern ideas, information, and projects greatly
increased, and at the same time the ideological
principles of social sciences in Hungary changed,
becoming more flexible, more practical, and more
modern.
The last twenty years constitute a new period,
however. U nd er the socialist mode of production
(both material and cultural), school systems,
academic institutions, and research facilities have
been improved. The isolation of Hungarian sci-
ence, which had persisted during the previous
half century, has given way to a better, world-
wide dissemination of information. Hungarian
scholars and their work are again becoming weIl
known abroad. New trends appear in every field
of research, sometimes even ahead of time. In
some other cases, however, the rush for mod-
ernization proves not to have been weIl founded,
for there were tendencies to get involved in some-
thing new at any price, and to reject everything
that was not present yesterday. In recent years
both the hurry and the rejection have slowed
down. The exceptionally fast increase of book
publication in the social sciences, and the ever
faster growing flood of translations, documen-
tation, international and interdisciplinary meet-
ings, has created completely new conditions for
the social sciences in Hungary.
The century-old request for handbooks was
filled during this period (finally a multivolume
his tory of Hungarian literature has appeared;
similar handbooks of Hungarian history, eth-
nography, etc. are in progress; dictionaries of
literature and ethnography have been made, etc.),
with the central academic and university research
projects having been directed toward these "tra-
ditional" tasks. Modern tendencies or methods
have also appeared, however, and fierce polem-
ics between modernists and traditionalists are to
be seen in every domain of Hungarian social
sciences. National isolationist tendencies have
appeared only infrequently, and the fear of phi-
losophy in other social sciences is lessening. In
various sciences the Hungarian approach has
been to combine "Eastern" and "Western"
methods, in some cases with significant results.
11.
So me ideological factors should also be men-
tioned separately. Up to the first decades of the
20th century, primary and secondary education,
as well as the training of scholars, had a pro-
gressive basis, and Hungarian science has there-
fore produced a number of outstanding scholars.
A great many of these during or after the two
revolutions in 1918-1919, had to move either to
horne emigration, or simp1y abroad, in order to
earn more. University numerus clausus and then
persecu tion of the J ews forced many ou ts tanding
or up-and-coming scho1ars to 1eave Hungary.
There was also a certain amount of emigration
during and after World War 11, especially in 1956
and later. Because of this, Hungarian science
came to be scattered over five continents. In an
oppositive movement, communist scholars came
back from emigration after 1945, when, with a
few exceptions, they were high1y rewarded and
appreciated. During the last ten years, Hungar-
ian scholars li~ing abroad have frequently visited
 HUNGARY 281
their homeland, and thus they have more or less semiotic studies. elose to semiotics stand the
directly brought first-hand information about the Hungarian linguists abroad. Some of them, like
newest results in the social sciences. Usually they Paul Garvin, Robert Austerlitz and others were
are rewarded and highly esteemed in Hungarian in fact only born in a Hungarian milieu, but
scientific communities, and without their efforts transmit modern ideas to Hungary. We can
modern Hungarian social sciences would be con- acclaim the late John Lotz and also Thomas A.
siderably poorer. Sebeok as Hungarian linguists: their works have
It would be impossible to describe the his tory been published in Hungary too, and both played
of structural and semiotic research in Hungary an outstanding role in connecting Hungarian
without mentioning the emigrant Hungarian scholars with modern international trends. Still,
scholars. Still, their life work falls outside of the their work falls outside of the boundaries of
context of the proper Hungarian social sciences. Hungarian social science itself.
Therefore, we can present here only a very short
characterization of three generations of these
scholars.
Those who left Hungary before the end of the 111.
twen ti es have, in general, followed positivistic
trends, or turned toward a more social, socio-
When we speak of the his tory of modern
logical approach. The great representatives have
research in Hungary we must not forget the artis-
become world famous because of their new ideas,
tic and literary avant-garde. Despite some ante-
which, on the other hand, had not very much to
cedents, it was with the activism of 1915 that
do with structuralism or semiotics. The sociol-
radically new art appeared in Hungary. The
ogist Karl Mannheim, the art historian Arnold
leader of the movement, like that of many later
Hauser, the physicist Denis Gabor, the econo-
ones, was the poet and painter Lajos Kassak, a
mist Karl Polanyi, the psychoanalytical anthro-
theoretician of the avant-garde who did not him-
pologist Geza R6heim, or even the Marxist
self elaborate a structural theory of art. The
philosopher György Lukacs could hardly be
modern artists who took an active and very per-
mentioned among the forerunners of the above-
sonal part in the two revolutions of 1918-1919,
mentioned modern trends. It is characteristic of
were criticized by political parties both during
each of them, that they were traditional-minded
and after that period, and most emigrated: some
scholars who based their ideas upon earlier cen-
to Germany, France, and then to the United
turies and did not deal with structuralist prob-
States, others to Moscow. Among the first group,
lems. If occasionally they did refer to those
we mention Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, Victor
problems, they were usually very critical, and
Vasarely, Nicholas Schöffer, George Kepes and
almost rejected them. Although nowadays the
others, who all have made important theoretical
inftuence of their works is increasing among
statements about the possibilities of modern art.
Hungarian social scientists, their doubts about
In the domain of Hungarian music, BeIa Bart6k
structuralism, cybernetics, or semiotics are either
lived and died in the Uni ted States, and among
simply overlooked, or politely forgotten. Their
the representatives of modern music we should
works are still good arguments for scholars who
mention György Ligeti as weil. Again, their
even today refuse to use modern methods in the
important statements fell outside of the inner
social sciences in Hungary.
circle of the Hungarian humanities.
In the next period of Hungarian emigration
There were some art theoreticians (e.g., Ivan
(i.e., from the thirties until now) the picture
Hevesy, Pal Ligeti, and especially Ferenc Lehel l ),
changes radically. Among H ungarian scholars
abroad appear the names of the founders of new
trends in sciences, such as John von Neumann, 1 Ivan Hevesy, A m~viszet ag6nidja is reinkarndciOja (Budapest:
Eugen Wiegner, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and Manifesztum, 1922), Pal Ligeti, Uj Pantheon flli. A kulturdk
others, pioneers in cybernetics, systems theory, ilete a m~uiszet tükriben (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1926) enlarged
edition Der Weg aus dem Chaos (Münich, 1931), Ferenc Lehel,
and such. Their works from the sixties are Fortschreitende Entwicklung (Munieh, 1928) almost the same
extremely popular in Hungary, to some extent Halad6 m~viszet. Ujrendszer~ stilusmorfol6gia vaz/ata (Budapest,
providing a background to structural and 1929), Idem, Morphologie camparie des arts (Paris, 1930).
282 VILMOS VOIGT
who in a way approached a morphological anal-
ysis. The first internationally weIl known theo-
retician of the silent film was Bela Balazs,2 then
in exile in Germany, later in the Soviet Union.
Another former member of the avant-garde
movement, Janos Macza, living in the Soviet
Union, became a devoted enemy of modern
trends. 3 The great Hungarian philosoph er and
aesthetician, György Lukacs, also can be men-
tioned among those who did not favor modern
trends in art and literature. 4
IV.
If we want to understand the later rapid devel-
opment of modern trends in Hungarian sciences,
we ought to look at the facts mentioned above.
Until the sixties, there was in Hungary no dom-
inant avant-garde art or literary movement which
created its own theoretical framework (as the
Russian avant-garde created Russian formal-
ism) . Nor was there a coherent school of a mod-
ern character in philosophy and aesthetics (as
in Poland). Therefore we cannot boast of a trend
such as Polish logical semanties, phenomenology
in literary studies, Czech structuralism, and such.
If important discoveries were suddenly made
(e.g., Professor Laszl6 Kozma, of the Technical
University in Budapest, made experiments on
two electronic computers which were later
destroyed in order to prevent their falling into
the hands of the Nazis) ,5 it happened as a result
2Bela Balazs, Der sichtbare Mensch, oder die Kultur des Films
(Vienna and Leipzig: Deutsch-Österreichischer Verlag, 1924)
and Der Geist des Films (Halle, 1930); the two works were
published in Hungarian in one volume: A tathato ember. A
jilm szelleme (Budapest: Bibliotheca, 1958) and his Russian
book on the art of the film was published twice in Hun-
garian: Filmkultura. A film ml1veszeifilozrffoija (Budapest: Szikra,
1948) and Ajilm (Budapest: Gondolat, 1961).
'Janos Macza, Esztetika es jorradalom (Budapest: Gondolat,
1970), Legendtik es tenyek (Budapest: Corvina, 1972). Besides
his collection of papers in Hungarian there are various Rus-
sian publications of his writings.
'For the first English monograph on Lukacs's work see: George
Lichtheim, Luktics (London: Fontana-Collins, 1970), with
further references and bibliography.
sIn the abundant evaluative literature concerning hirn there
is no hint as to his direct interest in semiotics. However, in
his earlier works myth and symbol, in his later works epis-
temology and semanties, play an important role. His polem-
ies against Ernst Cassirer might be interpreted also along
this line.
of curiosity, and not as part of continuous
projects.
This chapter in the development of Hungar-
ian science even now remains unwritten. When
so ci al and historical circumstances in the sixties
made possible a new start in Hungarian sciences,
in general it was a completely new beginning,
following international standards. Only later did
the participants in the new trends become aware
of their national antecedents. 6 What has hap-
pened in structural and semiotic studies in Hun-
gary since then has been reviewed in several
summaries. 7 Following these articles, we first
present the necessary organizational coordi-
nates, then look into the different fields of study.
v.
Since the end of the sixties there have been
conferences in Hungary devoted to modern trends
in various fields of research. J ust for information,
we will present here a list of the most important
ones:
September 23-26, 1968 in Budapest: "Models
of Social Mind," organized by the Hungarian
Ethnographie Society, with papers on ethno-
semiotics, semantic analysis, modeling. The
material has been published. 8
November 14-15, 1968 in Budapest: "Form-
Creating Elements in Poetry," organized by the
Poetic Committee at the Institute of Literature,
with papers on structural analysis in literature
and language. The papers and the discussion
have been published. 9
6See for example, Vilmos Voigt, "A strukturalizmus Ma-
gyarorszagon," Az Ojvideki Bölcseszettudomtinyi Kar Magyar
Tanszikinek Kiadvtinya-Tanulmtinyok 7, ed. Imre Bori (Ujvi-
dek: az Ujvideki Egyetem Bölcseszettudomanyi Kavanak
Magyar Nyelvi es Crodalmi Tanszeke, 1974), pp. 117-142;
and Vilmos Voigt, "Semiotik in Osteuropa. 11: DDR,
Rumänien, Ungarn," ZeitschriftforSemiotik I, No. 4 (1979),
407-416.
'See the latest summary with bibliographical notes by Mag-
dolna Orosz, "A magyar szemiotikai kutatasok bibliogra-
fiaja," in Kultura es szemiotika, ed. Imre Grafik and Vilmos
Voigt (Budapest: Akademiai, 1981), pp. 445-470.
8Vilmos Voigt, eds, Modelltiltis a jolklorisztiktiban (Budapest:
Akademiai, 1969) and Vilmos Voigt, ed. "A tarsadalmi
tudat formainak modelljei," ValOstig, 12, No. 4 (April 1969),
34-55.
9Elemer Hankiss, ed., Formateremt3 elvek a költ3i alkottisban
(Budapest: Akademiai, 1971).
 HUNGARY
July 1-3, 1969 in Budapest: "Language and
Communication," organized by the Institute of
Linguistics and by the Mass Communication
Center, with papers on various communication
systems. The material has been pub1ished. 1O
January 15-16, 1970 in Budapest: "Under-
standing Art," organized by the Interdiscip1i-
nary Committee of Art Theory. The material
has been pub1ished. I1
April 9-11, 1970 in Szeged: "Short-Story
Analysis." The material has been published. 12
May 20-21,1970 in Vacrat6t (near Budapest)
"Sign Systems and Society," organized by the
Interdisciplinary Committee of Art Theory. The
first entirely semiotic conference in Hungary, with
a few foreign participants. The material remains
unpublished.
September 4-7, 1971 in Debrecen: "Interna-
tional Conference on Computationa1 Linguis-
tics." The material has been published. 13
June 8-9, 1972 in Budapest: "New Methods
in Literary Studies," a joint Soviet-Hungarian
conference at the Institute of Literature. Parts
of the material were later pub1ished. 14
August 22-25, 1972 in Szeged: "Second Inter-
national Congress of Hungarian Linguistics,"
organized by the Hungarian Linguistic Society,
devoted to semantics and stylistics, in both fields
with semiotic overtones. The material has been
published. 15
February 10, 1973 in Budapest: "Style in the
Twentieth Century." The material remains
un pu blished.
June 11-15, 1973 in Sopron: "General Sys-
tems Theory," organized by the J ohn Neumann
Society of Cybernetics. The material remains
unpublished. 16
IOTamas Szeesk8 and György Szepe, eds., Nyelv es kommuni-
kacirf, Vois. I-lI (Budapest: MRT Tömegkommunikaci6s
Kutat6központja, 1969).
\I Istvan Szerdahelyi, ed. Mllves<:et es ködrthet3seg (Budapest:
Akademiai, 1972).
12Elemer Hankiss, ed., A novellaelemds uj mrfds<:erei (Budapest:
Akademiai, 1971).
13Ferene Papp and György Szepe, eds., Papers in Computational
Linguisties (Budapest: Akademiai, 1976).
"See Footnote 16.
15Samu Imre, Istvan Szathmari, Laszl6 Szß.ts, eds.,Jelentestan
es stilis<:tika (Budapest: Akademiai, 1974).
16J. J. Barabas, J. M. Meletyinszkij, Lajos Nyfr8, Mikl6s
Szabolcsi, eds., S<:emiotika es mllves<:et (Budapest: Akademiai,
1979), ajoint publieation of two symposia. There also exists
a Russian language edition.
283
May 26-29, 1974 in Tihany: "Culture and
Semiotics" a precongress international confer-
ence, attached to the First International Semiotic
Congress in Milan Uune 2-6,1974). Parts ofthe
papers were published later. 17 The conference
was connected with the meeting of the Inter-
national Committee on Slavic Stylistics and
Poetics, the material of which has also been
published. 18
April 28-30, 1975 in Visegrad: "Belief Sys-
tems and Every-Day Life," organized by Mass
Communication Center and Research Group of
Ethnography. Important parts of the material
have been published. 19
September 12-13, 1975 in Budapest: "Pare-
miological Semiotics," a workshop at the Fourth
International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies.
The material has been published. 20
August 18-19, 1976 in Budapest: "Semiotics
of Genre and of Work of Art in Literature," a
postcongress conference at the Eighth Interna-
tional Congress ofComparative Literature. (The
Congress also had a section on literary semantics
and semiotics.) Congress material has been
published. 21
November 26, 1976 in Budapest: "Semiotic
Problems in Social Communication and Theory
of Culture." The material has been pub1ished. 22
December 22,1977: "In memoriam Ferdinand
de Saussure," organized by the Semiotic Com-
mittee and by the Hungarian Linguistic Society.
There is no special publication of the meeting.
September 14-16, 1978 in Szeged: "Theoret-
ical Problems of Narrative Studies," organized
by the Semiotic Committee and by the Depart-
ment of Comparative Literature at the J6zsef
17A partial publieation: Imre Grafik and Vilmos Voigt, eds.,
Kultura es s<:emiotika (Budapest: Akademiai, 1981).
18Mihaly Peter, ed., The Strueture and Semanties rif the Literary
Text (Budapest: Akademiai, 1977).
19Tibor Frank and Mihaly Hoppal, eds., Hiedelemrends<:er es
tdrsadalmi tudat, Vois. I-lI (Budapest: Tömegkommunika-
ci6s Kutat6központ, 1980).
2°Vilmos Voigt, ed., "Parömiologie-Sitzung des IV. Inter-
nationalen Finno-Ugristen Kongresses," Acta Ethnographiea
Aeademiae Seientiarum Hungarieae, 26 (1977), fase. 1-2, 163-
184.
21 See Proceedings rif the 8th Congress of the International Comparative
LiteratureAssociation, Budapest, 12-17 August 1976, ed. Bela
Köpeezi, György M. Vajda (Budapest and Stuttgart: Aka-
demiai Kiad6 and Kunst and Wissen, passim).
22Peter J6zsa, ed., Jel es jelenees a tdrsadalmi kommunikaeirfban
(Budapest: MTA Szemiotikai Munkabizottsag-
Nepmß.velesi Intezet Kutatasi Osztaly, 1977).
284 VILMOS VOICT
Attila University in Szeged. The material has
been published. 23
June 26-27, 1979 in Budapest: meeting of the
board the project "Encyclopedia of Semiotics of
Culture." Some of the papers are referred to in
the next conference proceedings.
June 28-July I, 1979 in Budapest: "Semiotic
Terminology and its Historical Development,"
an international precongress conference, con-
nected with the Second International Semiotic
Congress in Vienna Ouly 3-6, 1979). Parts of
the papers were published. 21
September 10-13, 1980 in Szeged: "Possible
World Analysis in Narratives," an international
conference. The material is to be published. 25
September 28-0ctober 2, 1981 in Pecs: "Cul-
ture-Logic-Culture," First Polish-Hungarian
Semiotic Workshop. 26
Second American-Hungarian Workshop on
Semiotics. The first meeting was held June 26-
27,1979 in Budapest (see above), and the Amer-
ican organizers promised to arrange a second
one.
As can be seen, after a rapid increase of inter-
disciplinary meeting up to the mid-seventies, the
pace has slowed down, because recently there
have been other conferences in linguistics, phi-
losophy, folklore, and anthropology where
semiotic points of views are expressed.
Hungarian scholars take part regularly in
international gatherings of semioticians (in Italy
in Urbino, in France in Paris, at the meetings
of the German and Austrian Semiotic Associa-
tions, at Polish Semiotic conferences and even
in the United States and Canada at various
21Zoltan Kany6, ed., Az irodalmi e!besdlis elmileti Mrdisei
(Szeged: J6zsef Attila Tudomanyegyetem, 1980) Studia Poe-
tiea, I.
2+Vilmos Voigt, ed., Abstracts and Papers. Semiotic Terminology,
28 June-1 July 1979, Budapest (Budapest: MTA Szemiotikai
Munkabizottsag-Nepmßvelesi Intezet Kutatasi Osztaly,
1979) and Vilmos Voigt, ed., Proceedings-EI3adasok. Semiotic
Terminology, 28 June-1 July 1979 Budapest. (Budapest: MT A
Szemiotikai Munkabizottsag-Nepmßvelesi Intezet Kuta-
tasi Osztily, 1979).
"Kiroly Csuri, ed., Literary Semantics and Possible Worlds, Stu-
dia Poetica, 2 (Szeged: J6zsef Attila Tudominyegyetem,
1980); Zoltin Kany6, ed., Studies in the Semantics of Narrative-
Beiträge zur Semantik der Erzählung, Studia Poetica, 3 (Szeged:
J6zsef Attila Tudominyegyetem, 1980); and Zoltin Kany6,
ed., Simple Forms-Einfache Formen, Studia Poetiea, 4 (Szeged:
J6zsef Attila Tudominyegyetem, 1982). Further issues are
in preparation.
2GPublication in preparation.
semiotic events); it is not necessary to mention
all of these.
Hungary has been represented at the Board
of the International Association for Semiotic
Studies (lASS) since its formation, in its pub-
lications, and at its conferences. Also, in other
semioticjournals from Canada to Greece or Ger-
many you may find Hungarian contributions.
As to research organization, after some years
of preparatory work since 1973, there exists a
Working Committee of Semiotics at the Hun-
garian Academy of Sciences. I t is not a research
group and has no financial support, but never-
theless coordinates semiotic studies in Hungary.
(I ts predecessor was the Interdisciplinary Com-
mittee of Art Theory, 1970-1972, which orga-
nized the first explicitly semiotic conference in
Hungary, in Vacrat6t in 1970). It published a
mimeographed newsletter, Szemiotikai Trijikoz-
tato, four tim es a year. Since 1972 there has been
aseries of offprints (Szemiotikai Tanulmrinyok-
Semiotic Studies) which had reached number 76
by 1981. 27
The mimeographed publication series Jel-
tudomrinyi Dokumentumoe s ran for only a few issues
owing to the sudden death of its founder, Peter
J6zsa, who also published five booklets on film
semiotics (A magyar film Jormanyelve es köz/e-
menye).29 In the book series, "Muszeion könyvtrir"
two collective volumes appeared. 30 Special issues
of journals, books and translations were pub-
lished by several publishers.
Since 1978 there has been a special division
for semiotics at the Hungarian Linguistics Soci-
ety (Magyar Nyelvtudomrinyi Trirsasrig) with regular
lectures on semiotics. At various Hungarian uni-
versities since 1970 there have been some oblig-
atory but mostly elective lectures on various
topics in semiotics. 31
27Edited by Mihily Hoppi!. In one of the latest issues, Vil-
mos Voigt, Ujabb vizsgalatok a kultura nyelui Jormai köreb31
(Budapest: Akademiai, 1982), there is a eomplete list of
the earlier issues.
2"See the works mentioned in Footnotes 22 and 24.
29Peter J6zsa, A magyar filmJormanye!ve es ködemenye 1965-1975,
Vols. 1~5 (Budapest: Nepmßvelesi Intezet Kutatisi Osz-
tily-MT A Szemiotikai Munkabizottsig-Tömegkom-
munikici6s Kutat6központ, 1977~1978); the last three
volumes (6, 7,8,) were edited by Özseb Horinyi (Budapest:
Nepmßvelesi Intezet, 1980).
3IJSee Vilmos Voigt, György Szepe, Istvan Szerdahelyi, eds.,
Je! es käzössig (Budapest: Akademiai 1975) and the volume
mentioned in Footnote 17.
3i No summary of the leetures has been published.
 HUNGARY
Despite the achievements of Hungarian
semiotics, and its recognition in academic life, it
lacks solid scholarly support, and plays only a
sm all part in academic plans. The Institute of
Literature, the Research Group of Ethnography
at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Phil-
osophical F acili ties of the Lorand Eötvös Uni-
versity in Budapest, the AttilaJ6zsef University
in Szeged, and the Lajos Kossuth University in
Debrecen created possibilities for semiotic
research in various fields. The Institute of Pop-
ular Culture housed the Working Committee and
some of its publications. Nevertheless, semiotic
research has been carried out in Hungary until
now with personal enthusiasm and devotion, and
the necessary support has been mostly of a ver-
bal and not of a financial character. On the other
hand, Hungary became and remains the country
in Eastern Europe where semiotics can establish
itself on a firm basis. Semiotics is not only tol-
erated, but literally supported by the academy
and by research institutes and universities.
VI.
It should be mentioned that Hungarian semi-
oticians abroad add a considerable contribution
to Hungarian semiotics. In Rumania, linguists
and literary scholars have dealt with problems
of style, folklore, and cultural semiotics. 32 Their
works also represent a bridge between Ruma-
nian and Hungarian studies. 33 In Siovakia, Tibor
Zsilka is a full-fledged member of the Nitra school
32Their most important books: Zoltan Szab6, ed., Kis magyar
stilisztika (Bueharest: Irodalmi Könyvkiad6, 1968); Kis
magyar st{lustöretenel (Bueharest: Kriterion, 1970); Erzsebet P.
Dombi, Öt irdk ezer muzsikaja (Bueharest: Kriterion, 1974);
Maria]. Nagy, A szo milveszete (Bueharest: Tudomanyos es
Eneiklopediai Könyvkiad6, 1975); Janos Pentek, Zoltan
Szab6, Pal Teiszler, A nyelv vilaga (Kolozsvar: Daeia, 1972);
Zoltan Szab6, Tanulmanyok a magyar impresszionista st{lusrol
(Bueharest: Kriterion, 1976); Jakab Mate and Paul
Sehveiger, Nyelveszet es matematika (Kolozsvar-Napoea: Daeia,
1977); Zoltan Szab6, A mai stilisztika nyelvelmileti alapjai
(Kolozsvar-Napoea: Daeia, 1977); Peter Egyed, A szenvedes
kritikaja (Temesvar: Facla, 1980); Gusztav Lang and Zol-
tan Szab6, eds., Irodalomtudomanyi es stilisztikai tanulmanyok
1981 (Bueharest: Kriterion, 1981); Zoltan Szab6, ed., A
szövegvizsgalat zij ziljai (Bueharest: Kriterion, 1982).
3'See, for example, György Mandies, Harmadjatek, (Temes-
var: Facla, 1977).
285
of literary semiotics,34 and his works are avail-
able both in Siovak and Hungarian. Imre Denes,
of the same school, studies literary language. 35
In Yugoslavia, the very first publication of Hun-
garian semiotics appeared recentll 6 as a result
of visiting lectures by the author at the Hun-
garian Institute at the Novi Sad/Ujvidek
Uni versi ty.
Among the Hungarian philologists abroad we
should mention the name of the linguist Ivan
F6nagy, who from the beginning was one of the
Hungarian members at the lASS Board. He lives
in Paris, but his recent publications appear in
Hungary, too. His main field is structural poetics
and stylistics, or phonetic symbols in poetic lan-
guage. 37 Janos S. Petßfi left Hungary in 1969 and
thus his works first became famous abroad. 38
Still, he was one of the initiators of modern lin-
guistics and poetical text analysis in Hungary,
and tookan active part in developing early
semiotics in Hungary.39 Other, mostly younger,
Hungarian scholars abroad are not mentioned
here because their interest in semiotics did not
originate in Hungary.
VII.
To come to the descriptive part of this paper,
one should ask, which is the most important
domain of Hungarian semiotics today? Tradi-
tionally linguistics, logic, and philosophy lay
claim to predominance, but, in practice, literary
studies and analyses of mass culture playa deci-
sive role. Hungarian semiotic researches first
Tibor Zsilka, A stilus hirirteke (Bratislava: Madaeh, 1973)
:l4
and his Stilisztika es statisztika (Budapest: Akademiai, 1974).
An interesting attempt toward metaphor theory: Zsigmond
Zalabai, Tiln3dis a tropusokon (Bratislava: Madaeh, 1981).
"'His essays have not yet been eolleeted in aseparate volume.
3fiVilmos Voigt, eds, Szemiotikai Tanulmanyok (Novi Sad: A
Magyar Nyelv, Irodalom es Hungarol6giai Kutatasok Inte-
zete, 1979-1980), Nos. 12-13, pp. 7-135.
37His books published in Hungary: Ivan F6nagy, A
költ3i nyelv hangtanabol (Budapest: Akademiai, 1959) and
Füst Milan: Öregseg. Dallamfljtes (Budapest: Akademiai, 1974)
his poetie entries in the Hungarian Eneylopedia of World
Literature (Vilagirodalmi Lexikon) are monographie in
charaeter.
38His only book published in Hungary: Janos S. Petllfi, Mo-
dem nyelveszet. Tajikoztato összefoglalris (Budapest: TIT, 1967).
39See, for example, his paper published in the work men-
tioned in [n. 8, and his unpublished paper intended for the
work mentioned in fn. 10.
286 VILMOS VOIGT
offered solutions in folklore semiotics, or eth-
nosemiotics. 40 But in fact there is no hierarchy
between domains in semiotics in Hungary, and
we can therefore list the results in any convenient
order.
VIII.
At first glance philosophy, logic, and in gen-
eral theoretical semiotics have not brought sur-
prising results in Hungary. But as we start to
examine this statement, unforeseen findings arise.
In the very first encyclopedia in Hungary, Magyar
Enciklopidia (1654) compiled by the Transylvan-
ian professor, J anos Apaczai Csere, who received
his university degree in the Netherlands, there
is a short description of semantics and signs. In
a book published in 1841, the philosopher Andras
Vandrak produced a short definition of semiot-
iCS,41 and included it in his philosophical ter-
minology. In his manuscript dated about same
time, the mathematical genius who was one of
the founders of non-Euclidean geometry, Janos
Bolyai, devoted several chapters to the "science
of marks" as we could trans la te his term jegy-
tudomany (this was equated by hirn with "Semi-
otika").42 We do not know too much about the
intellectual background of early Hungarian phil-
osophical semiotics, but most probably it was
anchored in Dutch and German philosophy. At
the end of the 19th century, there appeared in
education theory a trend called "sign-teaching,"
which might have been connected with Herbart-
ian philosophy and psychology.43 Because the
historiographers of Hungarian semiotics did not
pay much attention to these forerunners, their
1{)See the special issue of the journal Ethnographia, 87, No. 3
(1976) with introduction and a summarizing article by the
author.
41Janos Apaczai Csere, Magyar Enciklopidia (Budapest:
Szepirodalmi, 1959). Andras Meszaros, Vand"ik Andrdsfilo-
zofiai rendszere (Bratislava: Madach, 1980), with a short
summary of the whole Eperjes school of philosophy in the
19th century.
42 Attilla Gajdos, "Bolyai J anos es a jeltan," in Proceedings-
El3addsok. Semiotic Terminology, 28 June-1 July 1979 Budapest,
ed. Vilmos Voigt (Budapest: MTA Szemiotikai Munka-
bizottsag-Nepmßvelesi Intezet Kutatasi Osztaly, 1979),
pp. 180-187. There is a large literature on Janos Bolyai
not cited here.
43See, for example, A. Lederer, Ajelkipds mintfUggelik minden
nevelistanhoz (Budapest: Lampe! R6bert, 1891).
works remained completely unknown, or their
semiotic affiliations were simply ignored, until
just a few years ago.
Phenomenology, logical semantics, and for-
mallogic in general did not appear in Hungary
until recently. Since the sixties, Imre Ruzsa has
published aseries of books devoted to symbolic
logic,44 and there are others in Hungarian logic
who deal with similar problems. Anna Madarasz-
Zsigmond focuses on pragmatics,45 whereas other
logicians consider so-called dialectical logic the
best substitution for semiotics. Linguists and tex-
tual philologists also use logical and semantic
models, mostly within the framework of the
Montague grammar, along the lines of Hintikka,
studying the "possible-world semantics" in lit-
erary works of art. 46
Another interesting approach to theoretical
semiotics may be seen in some social studies,
usually labeled "social semiotics" or "semiotics
of culture" in Hungary. According to these, signs
do not exist separately, but rather always form
sign systems, and the sign systems form a net-
work within a given society, which can be under-
stood by analysis of the sociocommunicative
patterns. Works belonging to this approach47 have
come to grips with the Marxist interpretation of
society, and also with the works of György
Lukacs. He 48 and his students wrote interesting
works on the ontology of society, or on aesthet-
ical foundations, with statements relevant to
social semiotics-however, they did so with-
out an explicit semiotic terminology or
methodology.49
Hungarian social philosophers such as Ferenc
T8kei, Attila Agh, and others tried to built up a
sociohistorical classification of human societies,
"See some of his works: Imre Ruzsa, Szimbolikus logika, Vols. 1-
III (Budapest: Tankönyvkiad6, 1974, 1973, 1973); A logika
elemei (Budapest: Tankönyvkiad6, 1976); Aszimbolikus logika
elemei (Budapest: Tankönyvkiad6 1979).
45 Anna Madaraszne Zsigmond, A logikai szemantika kirdisei,
A filoz6fia idßszedß küdesei, No. 9 (Budapest: Mßve!ßdes-
ügyi Miniszterium, 1972).
46See the volumes from the series Studia Poetica in fns. 23
and 25.
"See Vilmos Voigt, "A kultura szemiotikaja," MTA 1. Osz-
tdlydnak Közleminyei, 30 (1978), pp. 281-295, and the papers
in the collective work quoted in fn. 17.
4BIt will be the task of a special study to oudine the "semiot-
ics" of Lukacs.
49Hungarian aestheticians usually accept the ontological
framework of Lukiics, whereas the German and Soviet
scholars stress their dis agreement.
 HUNGARY
and took part in so me of the structuralist dis-
cussions. 50 Their works, however, do not rep-
resent a clear-cut semiotic trend; and despite
attempts by Hungarian aestheticians (e.g., Ivan
Vitanyi) ,51 they cannot be presented as the by-
products of Hungarian semiotics.
Structural and semiotic ideas are prevalent in
the studies of the philosoph er J anos Kelemen,
one of the first in Hungary to write on semiotics.
He gave a short report on structuralism52 from
a philosopher's point of view, then devoted books
to problems of language and meaning,53 espe-
cially the language philosophy of the French
enlightenment. 54 A young mathematician and
philosopher, Csaba Andor, tried to use mathe-
matical-semiotic models in describing human
communication and, connected to that, human
culture. 55
It is probably superfluous to mention that phi-
losophers in Hungary deal regularly with the
ideas ofWittgenstein, the Vienna and the British
analytical schools. As for the philosophers' own
contributions, we cannot see much semiotics in
them. 56
IX.
In psychology there is again no direct semiotic
trend in H ungary. There are followers of the
psychoanalytic school of Piaget, Henri Wallon,
and others who use their more or less sign-and-
symbol terminology, but we cannot suppose that
5DThe most important summary: Ferenc Tßkei, A tdrsadalmi
formtik marxista elme~etinek nehtiny Urdese (Budapest: Kos-
suth, 1977); Atti1a Agh, Tudomtinyos-technikai forradalom es
mllvel3des (Budapest: Magvetß, 1977), and A termel3 ember
viltiga (Budapest: Kossuth, 1979).
51Ivan Vitanyi, A zenei sdpseg (Budapest: Zenemßki.1.d6,
1971). . munikäci6s Kutat6központ, 1979); Csaba P1eh, A pszicho-
"Janos Kelemen, Mi a strukturalizmus? (Budapest: Kossuth,
1969).
"Janos Ke1emen, A tudat es a megismeres (Budapest: Kossuth,
1978).
54J anos Kelemen, A nyelvfilozOfia Urdesei (Budapest: Kossuth-
Akademiai, 1977).
55Csaba Andor, Jel-kultura-kommunikticio (Budapest: Gon-
do1at, 1980).
56See the works of Ferenc Altrichter, Marta Feher, Zador
Tordai, Mihii1y Vajda and others. Just as sampIe works:
Miha1y Vajda, ZtirOjelbe teU tudomtiny (Budapest: Akademiai,
1968) and A mitosz es a rticio hattirtin (Budapest: Gondo1at,
1969).'
287
these studies are of a semiotic character. Sem an-
tic differences have been analyzed according to
Osgood's model, and in psycholinguistics we find
the impact of semiotics. 57
x.
The situation is similar in aesthetics. Let us
summarize the preliminary results of the Hun-
garian researchers as well. as some formalized
studies. The most important ones are the studies
by the musicologist Ern8 Lendvai on the struc-
ture of works by Bela Bart6k and Zoltan
Kodaly.58 In the books ofJ6zsefUjfalussy, more-
over, we find the seeds of structuralism toO. 59 In
a handbook as well as in some short papers,
attempts have been made to describe the social
his tory of the arts in terms of communication
theory and sign-system usage. 60
But all the results are of interdisciplinary
character, and cannot be defined as strictly
semiotic in nature.
XI.
In the field of zoosemiotics, Hungarians at
horne have not achieved definite results. A musi-
cologist, Peter Sz8ke, has written books on bird-
song;61 and a noted biologist has devoted his
attention to human ethology.62 Curiously enough,
in Hungary their works are not considered to be
semiotic.
"See among others Csaba P1eh, ed., Pszicholingvisztika es kom-
munikticiokutattis (Budapest: Tömegkommunikiici6s Kl\ta-
t6központ, 1977); Csaba P1eh and Tamas Terestyeni, eds.,
Besddaktus, kommunikticio, interakcio (Budapest: Tömegkom-
lingvisztika horizontja (Budapest: Akademiai, 1980), etc.
5sErnß Lendvai, BartOk dramaturgitija (Budapest: Zene-
mßkiad6, 1964); and BartOk es Kodtily harmoniaviltiga (Buda-
pest: Zenemßkiad6, 1975).
59J6zsef Ujfa1ussy, A vaLOstig zenei kipe (Budapest:
Zenemßkiad6, 1962).
6DIvan Vitanyi, ed. A mllveszelek (Budapest: Minerva, 1973).
61 Peter Szßke, A zene eredete es htirom viltiga (Budapest:
Magvetß, 1982).
62Vi1mos Csanyi, Magatarttisgenetika (Budapest: Akademiai,
1977); Vi1mos Csanyi, ed. KisetolOgia (Budapest: Gondo1at,
1980); Vi1mos Csanyi, ed. EtolOgiai szemintiriumok (Buda-
pest: Akademiai, 1982).
288 VILMOS VOIGT
XII.
Linguistics, to use a well known expression,
has often been considered a "pilot science" in
semiotics. In Hungary the situation is much the
same: in logic and philosophy, semiotic tend-
~ncies have until recently remained of secondary
Importance. Hungarian linguists, on the other
ha,:d,. have tried to follow the contemporary lin-
gUlStlC schools, and their results have
accumulated.
Despite some attempts, a good history ofHun-
garian linguistics does not exist. Still, we know
that the Humboldtian approach, and later the
Wundtian psycholinguistics, did not disappear
without exerting some inftuence upon linguistics
in Hungary. The works of Saussure became weH
known (though less used) by the great historical
linguist, Zoltan Gombocz (1877-1935), who in
fact was an adherent of the neogrammarian
school, but in his semantics accepted the basic
opposition between langue andparole. 63 His tran-
sitional model between "old" and "new" lin-
guistics seemed for a long time to be adequate
and even later, debates in Hungary concerning
modern linguistics used his name as a tag.
Among the Prague-school participants we
should mention (besides so me linguists living in
Czechoslovakia, who received fresh ideas from
the Prague-school doctrines)64 the phonologist
and language theoretician, Gyula Laziczius
(1896-1957). His life is full of contradictions:
both accepted and rejected by his linguist col-
leagues, he was finally in 1940 promoted to Pro-
fessor of General Linguistics at the Budapest
University. In 1945 he was elected member of
the Hunga~ian.AcademyofSciences, but, during
the reorgamzatlOn of research institutions in 1949
he was dismissed from the academy. Lazicziu~
died in scholarly isolation, and regained his farne
only posthumously. His theoretical writings form
aseries from 1940, starting with a phonetics
handbook,65 in which he explicitly followed
6'On Gombocz's work, especially on his semantics Jelentis-
tan, (Pecs: 1926), see Gyula Nemeth, Gombocz Zoltln (Buda-
pest: Akademiai, 1972), with further bibliographical
references.
64Vladimfr Skalicka, Laszl6 A. Arany and others dealt with
Hungarian topics. Unfortunately no summary was made
of this trend.
65Gyula Laziczius, Fonetika (Budapest: Tankönyvkiad6, 1963)
first edition in 1944.
Saussure and identified general linguistics with
"independent" linguistics. The basic ideas of
phonology were expressed here with some hints
toward structural semantics. Laziczius also
broached the idea of the general theory of signs,
but did not elaborate this topic sufficiently.66
Dying without elose foHowers, he achieved a
greater reputation abroad than in Hungary. His
phonetics book was published in German,67 and
as early as 1966 Thomas Sebeok published in
English his selected papers. 68 Since then he has
come to be considered a elassic of modern Hun-
garian linguistics, but his proper semiotic merits
have not yet been appreciated. 69
The Scandinavian (Copenhagen and Stock-
holm) school of linguistics has inftuenced only
the work of Janos Lotz, who became a leading
figure in Swedish and then in American linguis-
tics. At the end of his life he visited Hungary
several times, giving lectures at Budapest Uni-
versity. His papers were published in Hlmgary,
where they have had a significant inftuence on
new poetic and linguistic researches. 70 ~otz used
the t~rm "signs that make man" for language,
but dld not elaborate a distinct theory of semiotic
linguistics. 71
American (and French) structuralism, as well
as the most modern trends in Soviet linguistics,
appeared in Hungary at the end of the fifties.
In Hungary the new wave has been called
"structuralist," but it also has elements of
semiotic theories. In 1959-60, during the so-
called Saussure debate,72 the neo-Saussurian
tendencies received their first formulations. The
first essay on mathematical linguistics was
66In his phonology (Bevezetis afonolOgitiba, Budapest, 1932),
Laziczius gives only some hints.
67Gyula Laziczius, Lehrbuch der Phonetik (Berlin: Akademie
1961). '
6"Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Selected Writings 01 Gyula Laziczius
(The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1966).
69See, for example,Janos Harmatta, "Gyula Laziczius," Acta
Linguistica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 7, No. 2-4 (1958),
211-216, and a discussion originated by Ferenc Kovacs
in thejournal Nyelvtudomtinyi Közleminyek, 72 (1970) and 73
(1971).
70See his collected papers in Hungarian, with comments and
bibliography: Janos Lotz, Szonettkoszoni a nyelvr3~ ed. György
Szepe (Budapest: Gondolat, 1976).
7lJohn Lotz, "Symbols Make Man," in Frontiers qf Knowledge
in the Study qf Man, ed. L. White (New York: Harper and
Row, 1956), pp. 207-231.
"See papers in Nyelvtudomtinyi Közleminyek, 61 (1959) and 62
' (1960), by various participants.
 HUNGARY
published in 1960. 73 In the next year a special
meeting was devoted to the problems of general
linguistics. 74 In 1959, at Budapest U niversity, a
Department of General Linguistics was reinau-
gurated. In 1962, a section for general and struc-
turallinguistics was established at the Institute
of Linguistics. From 1963, on, two series of pub-
lications have appeared: Altalrinos Nyelvis;;:;eti Tan-
ulmrinyok (a yearbook of generallinguistics) and
Computational Linguistics (in English), w hich,
although it later slowed down and ceased to exist,
still gave an impetus to modern linguistics in
Hungary. György Szepe, in 1961, and Ferenc
Papp, in 1965, published articles in which they
used semiotic terminology to solve linguistic
problems/5 and from the works of Ferenc Papp
(both in Hungarian and in English)76 one got an
insight into the early phase of the development
of Soviet mathematical and structural linguis-
tics. Ferenc Kiefer 77 was the first advocate of
structural semantics in Hungary, whereas in
mathematicallinguistics the studies by Jänos S.
Pet8fi 78 should be mentioned separately. General
semantic rules were investigated by Sändor
Käroly/9 and Jänos Zsilka has elaborated a
highly original system of dialectical semantics. 80
A younger generation of linguists tried to deal
with various problems of signification. But as is
73Ferene Papp, "A matematikai m6dszerek alkalmazasar61
nyelvtudomanyunkban," A Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia
Nyelv- es Irodalomtudomanyi Osztdlyanak Köz/emenyei, 17, No. 1-
4 (1960), 289-306.
""Vita a nyelvtudomany elvi kerdeseir81," A Magyar Tudo-
manyos Akademia Nyelv- es Irodalomtudomanyi Osztalyanak
Közlemenyei, 18, No. 1-4, (1961), 1-174.
75Ferene Papp, "Szemi6tikai jegyzetek," Altatanos Nyelveszeti
Tanulmanyok,2 (1965),157-176.
76Ferene Papp, Matematikai nyelveszet es gepi flrditas a Szov-
vetuni6ban (Budapest: Orszagos Mßszaki Könyvtar es
Dokumentaei6s Központ, 1964) and Mathematical Linguistics
in the Soviet Union (London, The Hague, Paris: Mouton,
1966).
77For his early works see Ferene Kiefer, Mathematical Lin-
guistics in Eastern Europe (New York: 1968).
78See his summary eited in fn. 38.
79Sandor Karoly, Altatanos es magyar jelentestan (Budapest:
Akademiai, 1970).
80See some of his first books: J anos Zsilka, A magyar mondat-
flmuik rendszere es az esetrendszer (Budapest: Akademiai, 1966),
trans. The System qf Hungarian Sentence Patterns (Bloomington
& The Hague: Indiana University Press-Mouton, 1967);
and Nyelvi rendszer es valOsag (Budapest: Akademiai, 1971),
trans. Sentence Pattern and Reality (The Hague: Mouton, 1973);
A nyelvi mozgasformak dialektikdja (Budapest: Akademiai,
1973), Dialectics qf the Motion Forms qf Language, trans. A. Javor
(The Hague: Mouton, 1981).
289
evident from 1976 meeting papers, there is no
distinct semiotic school in Hungarian linguistics.
If the linguists use a semiotic framework, they
usually work in psychology, philosophy, or cul-
ture theory. On the other hand, linguists made
available in Hungary translations of the elassic
works of semiotics. When the long-awaited
handbook of modern Hungarian theoreticallin-
guistics appears, it will give a full picture of this
development. 81
XIII.
Poetics, stylistics and theory of literature
belong very elose to one another. Since the la te
sixties, a considerable change has occurred in
this domain in Hungary. In 1969 the Institute
of History of Literature changed its name to
Institute of Literature, emphasizing the shift
towards theoretical research. They formed spe-
cial study groups for poetics, and started to dis-
cuss regularly the problems of literary semantics.
Hungary held a key position in comparative lit-
erary studies, and important international gath-
erings were organized in Budapest. From 1965
on, the renewed journal Helikon became the cen-
tral organ for literary semiotics, both in trans-
lations and {in original research. We mentioned
above the conferences organized on literary top-
ics. In the analysis üf poetic texts the exemplary
essays like Mik16s Szabolcsi82 paved the way for
structural studies. As regards the theory of lit-
erature, Elemer Hankiss took psychological and
so ci al approaches towards understanding the
poetic message. 83 Research history is very well
represented in Hungarian literary studies. Many
artieles are devoted to Russian formalism, or
phenomenology in literature. French structur-
alism is usually reftected in a rather journalistic
81Unfortunately there is no an nu al bibliography or report on
eurrent Hungarian linguisties. For a short summary in
English see Istvan Szathmari, "An Outline of the History
of Hungarian Linguistics," in The Hungarian Language, eds.,
Lorand Benk8 and Samu Imre (Budapest: Akademiai,
1972), pp. 349-379.
82Mikl6s Szabolcsi, A verselemzis kirdeseihez (Budapest: Aka-
demiai, 1968).
83Elemer Hankiss, A nepdalt6l az ahszurd dramaig (Budapest:
Magvet8, 1969), Az irodalJYli kiftjezisformak lelektana (Buda-
pest: Akademiai, 1970), ErtekszociolOgiai k(serlet (Budapest:
Nepmßvelesi Propaganda Iroda, 1976), Ertek es tdrsadalom
(Budapest: Magvet8, 1977). His later axiologieal and soci-
ological works lack semiotic methodology.
290 VILMOS VOIGT

way. Endre Bojtar wrote a very elucidating review XIV.

of modern literary scholarship in Eastern
Europe,84 in which he committed himself to the In music, dance, and visual art research, sig-
receptional-aesthetic school. In Szeged a special nification is being studied from a sociological
school arose: Zoltan Kany6, Karoly Csuri, Arpad and aesthetic point of view, only for a strictly
Bernath and others have published papers, in semantic analysis. We have already tried to
German,85 using modal semantics for describing characterize some of the works belonging to this
literary narratives. Stylistics and rhetoric are also trend. 89 Özseb Horanyi did pioneering work in
being treated in modern ways. Both in Budapest visual semiotics, using reception theory as a
and Szeged the analysis of literary works of art framework for his film and photo analysis. 9o
also approached hermeneutics. Again, we need Gabor Szilgyi, Andras Szekfti and others have
a more detailed description of this trend. 86 It is done picture analysis. The cultural background
interesting that the new, structural models found preoccupies the art historian Pal Mik16s,9! who
their way into literary education. The more than mostly deals with Oriental art, and with modern
ten-volume encydopedia of world literature, literature, from a communication-theory angle.
Vildgirodalmi Lexikon (since 1970), gives a very The life work of the suddenly deceased Peter
detailed picture of modern semantics, poetic and J6zsa is manifold. He studied the postwar Hun-
semiotic trends in literature. Linguistics, logic, garian films in terms of social references, and
philosophy, folklore research, and culture his- established a progressive social semiotics using
tory are in fact dosely connected with literary French philosophical models. 92 Ivan Vitanyi's
studies, as the four-volume Szeged yearbook, Stu- book deals with structure and signification in the
dia Poetica, makes quite dear. arts. 93
To sum up: semiotic literary theory has no
forerunners in Hungary. Its present represen-
tatives refer to German, French and Russian xv.
schools. One interesting fact is that linguistics,
poetics, folk literature, and culture analysis (and Hungarian ethnosemiotics is generally con-
lately logic, too) are combined very intensively.87 sidered one of the most important fields of
A long series of foreign handbooks have been semiotic research both in Hungary and abroad.
translated into Hungarian, and literary semiot- The term itself was coined in 1971 by two Hun-
ics flourishes. Sometimes it is combined with garians (and at the same time by French and
value theory, sometimes it is modernized as a Russian semioticians), independently of one
method of historical research. Y oung members another. 94 Mihaly Hoppal, in his studies, prefers
of the Institute of Literature (Mihaly Szegedy- code-oriented descriptions, where folk culture
Maszak, Andras Veres, Ivan Horvath and others) appears. 95 Vilmos Voigt's interest is focused on
form a "new-poetics" group, using semi-semiotic
methods. 88 B9See Footnotes 58-60.
90Özseb Horanyi, Jel, jelentes, informdci6 (Budapest:
Magvetll, 1975); his book on visual semiotics is in
"Endre Bojtar, A szldv strukturalizmus az irodalomtudomdnyban
preparation.
(Budapest: Akademiai, 1978). 91 Pal Mik16s, Olvasas es ertelem (Budapest: Szepirodalmi, 1971),
85 A.rpad Bernath, Karoly Csuri, Zoltan Kany6, Texttheorie
and Vizudlis kultura (Budapest: Magvetll, 1976).
und Interpretation (Kronberg/Ts: Scrip tor Verlag, 1975). With 92Besides his series mentioned in Footnote 29, see also: Peter
reference to the earlier works of the Szeged school see Zol- J6zsa, Esztetikai alkotrlsok trlrsadalmi hatasa (Budapest:
tan Kany6, Sprichwörter. Analyse einer einfochen Form. Ein Bei- N epmilvelesi Propaganda Iroda, 1976), K6d-kultura-kom-
trag zur generativen Poetik, Approaches to Semiotics, (Budapest munikdci6 (Budapest: Nepmilvelesi Propaganda Iroda, 1976),
& The Hague: Akademiai-Mouton, 1981). Adalilok az ideo16gia es a jelentes elmeletehez (Budapest:
BGO ne of the first summaries is Lajos Nyirll, ed. Irodalom- Nepmilvelesi Propaganda Iroda, 1979), Levi-Strauss, struk-
tudomdny (Budapest: Akademiai, 1970). turalizmus, szemiotika (Budapest: Akademiai, 1980).
8'See 01ga Murvai, ed. lrodalomszemiotikai tanulmdnyok 93See the book mentioned in fn. 60.
(Bucharest: Kriterion, 1979). 94Yilmos Yoigt, "Etnoszemiotikai jegyzetek," Ethnographia,
88See Mihaly Szegedy-Maszak, Vildgkip es stilus (Budapest: 82, No. 4 (1971), 577-584, and Mihaly Hoppal, "Jegyzetek
Magvetll, 1980); Andras Yeres, M~, ertek, mMrtik (Budapest: az etnografiai szemiotikähoz," Nepi Kultura-Nepi Tdrsa-
Magvetll, 1981); I van Horvath, Balassi költeszete törteneti poe- dalom, 5-6, (1971),25-43.
tikai megközelitesben (Budapest: Akademiai, 1982). The essays 95Mihaly Hoppal, Egy falu kommunikaci6s rendszere (Budapest:
by Lasz16 Szörenyi have not yet appeared in one separate Tömegkommunikaci6s Kutat6központ, 1970); his papers
volume. on ethnosemiotics are to appear in a collectlve volume.
 HUNGARY
the structure of texts,96 and he combines genre
theory and communication theory with folklore
and culture semiotics. He wrote an introduction
to semiotics in Hungary.97 Imre Grafik has
devoted his semiotic studies to property signs 98
and in general to sign-character reading, using
mathematical methods. There are various papers,
mostly by former university students. At the
Folklore Department of Budapest University, a
collective field work was carried out on the May
Day parade,99 the results of which gained inter-
national acceptance.
In Transylvania, the linguist Janos Pentek, in
his elaborate description, gave a full semantic
analysis of folk-art signs. 100 Folklorists such as
Gabriclla Vö8 and others also use semiotic meth-
odology.101 Belief systems and narrative forms
in general are treated in Hungary by semiotic
devices. Zoltan Kany6 wrote his dissertation on
proverbs, 102 and paremiological semiotics is well
known in Hungary in general. 103 Hungarian eth-
nosemiotics and folklore semiotics have influ-
enced culture semiotics in Hungary.
XVI.
There are other fields in which Hungarian
semioticians havc done some work, but, because
of the space limits of this summary, we shall not
96See Vilmos Voigt, A Seeond Approach to Ethnosemioties (Buda-
pest, 1982, manuscript), with bibliographica1 notes.
97Vilmos Voigt, Beuezetis a szemiotikaba (Budapest: Gondo1at,
1977)"and a somewhat en1arged and updated Slovak edi-
tion, Uvod do semiotiky, (Bratislava: Tatran, 1981).
9"His ethnosemiotic essays collected into a single volume are
now in preparation. For his method see Imre Grafik, "Prop-
erty Sign Examination through Entropy Analysis," Semi-
otiea, 14, No. 3 (1975), 197-221, and "The Motion Pattern
of the Court yard and the House," Acta Ethnographiea Aea-
demiae Seientiarum Hungarieae 25, No. 1-2 (1976), 51-74.
99See the fieldwork notes 1973 majus 1, ed. Vilmos Voigt
(Budapest: Tömegkommunikici6s Kutat6központ, 1974),
in MOdszertan, 5, No. 13, pp. 1-170. A short summary, with
references to earlier pu blished parts: Adatok mdjus elseje sze-
miotikajahoz (Budapest: Akademiai, 1981), offprint.
100Janos Pentek, A kalotaszegi nepi himzes es szokinese (Bucha-
rest: Kriterion, 1979).
101To so me extent see Gabriella Völl, Trifas nepi elbeszelisek
(Bucharest: Kriterion, 1981), pp. 5-180, Introduction.
I02S ee fn. 85.
103Since 1980, Proverbium Paratum, a special paremiological
journal, has been edited in Budapest by Agnes Szemer-
kenyi and Vilmos Voigt.
291
discuss them here. On the semiotics of architec-
ture, Gabor Hajn6czy has published an impor-
tant paper. 104 I t is a pity that on very many topics
(e.g., medical semiotics, semiotics of religion,
semiotics of law, etc.) there is no good summary
or study in Hungarian. Thanks to one person's
passionate work, the semiotics of sport was first
studied in Hungary. Zoltan Kövecses, in his suc-
cessive papers, has presented a typology of sports
activities and behavior. 105
XVII.
"Semiotics of culture" and "social semiotics"
are synonyms in current use in Hungary. It is
commonplace that signs are used as apart of
their systems and according to the societies of
their observers/users. This is the so ci al character
of signs according to Hungarian semiotics. Cul-
ture, on the other hand, has many functions,
among which we stress especially the expressive,
the reflexive and the autotelic (self-purposive)
ones, all of which are perfused with signs. Because
culture is apart of society, cultural semiotics
forms a domain of social semiotics. 106 Semioti-
cians in Hungary have studied various aspects
of culture and society, and several volumes of
such studies have appeared. 107 In a more general
framework, Hungarian scholars follow the dis-
tinction, made by thc school, between "primary"
and "secondary" modeling systems, but in a more
elaborate way than do the Soviet scholars. They
refer to the fact that the distinction occurs not
only in language versus literature (myth, etc.),
but also on the logical behavioral level. 108 This
was the reason Hungarian semioticians started
to collect pertinent material for describing signs
I04Gabor Hajn6czy, "Epiteszetszemiotikai vizsgal6dasok" and
"Szemle. V alogatis epiteszetszemiotikai tanulmanyok-
b61," Epites- es Epiteszettudomany 9, No. 2-3 (1978), 251-
264; 265-323.
I05He is collecting his papers in aseparate volume.
10iiSee Peter .J6zsa, ed., Semiotie Studies of Hungarian Researehers.
A Collection of Reprints (Budapest: Working Committee in
Semiotics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences-Insti-
tute of Culture, 1979); Peter J6zsa, ed., Studies in Cultural
Semioties (Budapest: Working Committee in Semiotics of
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences-Institute of Cul-
ture, 1979).
107See further, A tdrsadalomjelei. Szemiotikai tanulmanyok (Buda-
pest: Nepmi.\velesi Propaganda Iroda, 1977).
lOBSee my introduction to semiotics, cited in fn. 97.
292 VILMOS VOIGT
in their social complexity. They made a field-
work study of May Day demonstrations and
described their results in some publications. 109
As mentioned above, Peter J6zsa's work was
directed in a somewhat different direction. In
his empirical research 110 he wrote on the cultural
fixation of mass communication forms (films,
novels, radio, etc.), using more sociological, and
psychological and semiotic methods. On the other
hand in his book of a theoretical character l11 he
tries 'to combine Levi-Straussian and Greima-
sian notions with Marxist sociology of art.
For culture semiotics proper, I have suggested
that we should make a working distinction
between semiotics of culture in a broad sense (in
which we deal with problems belonging to nat-
ural language, general communication, text
theory, visual systems, systems of objects,
architecture, etc.), and semiotics of culture in a
narrow sense. Within the framework of the lat-
ter, we should deal with phenomena like cultural
communication, sign (and symbol) usage, myth,
human interaction, language as a sign system,
philosophy of language (and of other cognitive
systems), world view, etc. A program has been
made for such research, reviewing the previous
results. ll2 It is by now the major project of Hun-
garian semioticians to make an internationally
oriented handbook of social/cultural semiotics.
Preliminary plans were discussed in 1979 at var-
ious meetings, and by now the realization of the
project is necessary.113
Both in a narrow and a broad sense, cultural
semiotics in Hungary is based on comparative
(sometimes crosscultural) material, using his-
torical data. That is why it is accepted as an
'09See Footnote 99.
"oBesides his works mentioned earlier, see: Feter J6zsa,
Research Problems in Semiotics and Sacialogy oJ Fine Arts, Movie
and Literature (Budapest: Institute ofCulture, 1974), Essais
sur la cammunicatian des valeurs esthitiques (Budapest: Institute
of Culture, 1976), Etudes en saciologie de {'art (Budapest:
Institute of Culture, 1978).
"'See his 1980 book mentioned in fn 92.
' 12 The program is not available in printed form.
' 13 For more details see my summaries, as quoted in fn. 6,
above.
important contribution to the theory of culture
in general. 114
XVIII.
By way of a short summary of this otherwise
short summary, we could conclude that semiot-
ics in Hungary has become firmly established
during the last dozen years. It has the necessary
organization and does not lack institutional sup-
port. However, both in research and in e.duc~­
tion it has an extraordinary status WhlCh lS
insufficient to allow all the serious work which
the Hungarian semioticians have al ready
launched to be continued.
Hungarian semioticians do not comprise a sin-
gle school. Differences remain between linguistic
and logical, literary and folklore, sociological and
psychological studies, even in terms of their
semiotic applications. On the other hand, the
interdisciplinary character of Hungarian semiot-
ics is very effective and prominent. The most
widely accepted branches of Hungarian semiot-
ics abroad are the literary studies made by the
Szeged school and folklore semiotics (and eth-
nosemiotics), enlarged and extended as cultural
semiotics. The sociological and symbolic logical
works by Hungarian semioticians deserve more
international attention. Followers of the Mos-
cow-Tartu, German and the Peircian semiotic
trends are well known in Hungary. On the other
hand, Levi-Strauss, Greimas, Hjelmslev and
Morris are mentioned only sporadically. The
relationship between Cassirer, or the long phil-
osophical tradition of German idealism, and
semiotics needs more elaboration. Marxist epis-
temology, and especially the impact of György
Lukacs's school on semiotics in Hungary, also
will be a task for a separate paper, which has to
be written soon.
114This paper was completed in 1981, the notes were extended
to the end of 1982, but the publications of the last years
were not fully consulted. For current events in Hungarian
semiotics see the newsletter of the Semiotic Working Com-
mittee at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, S::;emiotikai
Ttijika::;tato, since 1973, mostly in four numbers per year.
 CHAPTER 13
Semiotics in Italy
Gianfranco Bettetini and Francesco Casetti
I. Introduction
The primary task of a historian of Italian semidt-
ics is to illuminate a few nodal points which stern
from some often contradictory indications. One
fact, for instance, may conceal several others,
and one suggestion may be masked by li mi ta-
tions and contradictory facts. This new dis ci-
pline, in fact, achieved apreeminent position in
a very short time-during the late sixties-after
a long and silent period o( groundlaying. The
reorganization that took place in several kind red
areas of scholarly research set the stage for the
sudden success of semiotics in Italy. Its emer-
g~~ce on the Italian scene was fostered by tra-
dItlOnal and modern influences from France and
the United States and by quite original Italian
contributions. Besides this, semiotics has pro-
vided different research areas with a common
ground for confrontation. It has not always been
possible to promote an actual encounter, for to
This chapter has been jointly planned and discussed by the
authors. Casetti wrote the Introduction, Part II on the Ori-
gin and Development of Semiotics in Italy, and the section
on Film and Visual Communication in Part III (Semiotic
Fields and Practices), and Part IV on Institutional Frame-
work. Bettetini wrote all the other sections in Part III.
Gianfranco Bettetini and Francesco Casetti • Istituto
Scienze della Comunicazione e Spettacolo, Universita Cat-
tolica, Largo Gemelli, 20123, Milan, Italy.
293
stress the points of contact or similarity has
sometimes hidden some basic differences and a
dialogue between different fields has oft~n con-
cealed a struggle in which each field tries to over-
whelm the other. Lastly, in the rather short
"official" history of semiotics several stages can
be perceived: in a few years a quick replacement
of "passwords" took place, showing, on the one
hand, the permanence of the same basic interest
and, on the other, bringing to the scene some
often contradictory scientific projects.
Therefore, there seem to be four difficulties
facing us when trying to reconstruct the trajec-
tory of our discipline: the presence of a vast but
silent background; the complexity of the influ-
ences, especially at the emergence of semiotics·
the relative autonomy of the different areas; ami
the rapidity and heterogeneity of developments.
In other words, the history of semiotics is not a
linear one. Its features and components are min-
gled together, and a very large field is covered.
This means, however, that semiotics in Italy
has been and is very lively (an intricate history
is always a sign of delicate structuring). Two
bibliographies of the many books, essays, and
studies on semiotics have so far been published,
the first in the journal VS, in 1974,1 and the
second in Strumen ti critici (in ten issues, from 1973
to 1978; being nearly exhaustive up to 1978, and
'Nos. 8/9 (1974).
294 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
with critical abstracts for almost aB the texts).
There are also some specialized series, reviews,
and research centers that focus on semiotics.
Several translations have been made both of for-
eign works into Italian and of Italian works into
French, English, Spanish, and other languages;
(see books by Bettetini, Eco, Corti, Segre, Rossi-
Landi, Garroni, Pagnini, and Casetti, mentioned
in the text below). In some areas, such as literary
theory and criticism, and mass communications,
Italian contributions are aB over the world con-
sidered to be in the vanguard. Besides this, the
Associazione Italiana di Studi Semiotici (AISS)
has many members and organizes meetings on
specific topics every year. The AISS is also affil-
iated with several regional centers which are often
specialized in particular research areas. Semiot-
ics is taught in many universities, often under
the label of some more traditional subject. Last,
but not least, the First and the Third Congress
of the lASS (International Association for
Semiotic Studies) were held in Italy (Milan, June
2-6, 1974; Palermo, June 25-29, 1984).
This brief sketch, to be developed in the fol-
lowing pages of this chapter, is intended to hint
at the complex his tory of our discipline as weB
as at its important role in the Italian cultural
landscape. Such a complexity has been noted by
scholars who have tried to outline the develop-
ment of semiotics in Italy. Segre made an exten-
sive survey, focusing primarily on linguistics and
literary criticism. 2 Eco wrote a very condensed
summary.3 Augusto Ponzio published a large
reader, the introduction to which, however, deals
with topical issues rather than general problems
in the history of the discipline. 4 Gian Paolo
Caprettini and Dario Corno have reconstructed
the relationships between semiotics and literary
analysis by reprinting the most important essays
on this topic. 5 Omar Calabrese and Francesco
Casetti have dealt extensively with the Italian
situation in Guida alla semiotica6 and Semiotica. 7
Several scholars have, moreover, focused on the
state of the art before proposing their own
hypotheses. In many contributions there is also
2"Du structuralisme a la semiologie en Italie," in Le champ
simiologique, ed. Andre Helbo (Brussels: Complexe), 1979.
'''L'ondata dei segni," in Dieci anni in Italia, Autori Vari,
(Milan: Studio Marconi, 1976).
'La semiotica in Italia (Bari: Dedalo, 1976).
5 LeUeratura e semiolqgia in Italia (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier,
1979). '
6(Firenze: Sansoni, 1975).
'(Milano: Accademia, 1977).
a critical statement about what has been written
on a specific subject, or a proposal to interpret
the main features of a domain of research. Many
lectures, concerned with topical issues, appear
as a rethinking of the past.
From the perspective of this background, we
will try to retrace the paths of semiotics in Italy.
In order to avoid the aforementioned difficulties,
without however neglecting the variety of the
panorama, this survey has been divided into two
main sections. The first will illustrate the emer-
gence of the new discipline on the Italian scene
and will note the topics that have been of pri-
mary interest in Italy. The second section will
examine the fields of research separately, with
brief critical statements and suggestions con-
cerning the problems still to be debated. The
two sections are complementary, both from the
chronological point of view-the first dwelling
on the earlier years of semiotics in Italy, the
second on later years, and from the point of view
of content-the first dealing with more general
issues, the second with specific problems.
11. The Origin and
Development of Semiotics in
ltaly
A. The Cultural Environment
When it appeared on the Italian scene, semiot-
ics encountered a so~ewhat peculiar cultural sit-
uation. As a matter of fact, the early sixties were
characterized by a great fluctuation of opinions.
In spite of traditional aesthetic categories, a ren-
ovation of the procedures of literary analysis
became apparent: there was a kind of experi-
mentation in both poetry and criticism, one wit-
nessed the beginning of a closer look at the
phenomena of mass culture, and sciences such
as anthropology, linguistics, and sociology came
to the forefront. There was, in brief, the restrain-
ing force of tradition on the one hand, and on
the other a greater and greater acceptance of
new solutions. In particular, while several areas
of research progressively focused on themes and
issues that would be covered by semiotics, some
obstacles to this development still persisted.
One of the first elements unfavorable to
semiotics was Croceanism, which was slowly
fading but still alive. Croce defined poetry, and
art in general, as "lyrical intuition" or "pure
 ITALY
intuition," thus reducing the work of art (liter-
ary, pictorial, musical, etc.) to an individual cre-
ation and, at the same time, dismissing the
pattern of composition, the significance of tech-
nique, the conventions of genre, and so forth. In
other words, Croce's aesthetics stresses the
uniqueness of each experience while neglecting
the presence of regularities, structures, and codes.
Focusing on the individuality of each realization,
it did not consider the underlying generality.
Croce's philosophy was extremely successful in
Italy, and even after World War 11 it was an
unavoidable term of comparison. Although by
the early sixties many scholars had taken a crit-
ical attitude toward Croce's work, his prestige
had not faded. Now it is elear why semiotics
encountered such resistance in Italy. In fact, the
piece-by-piece dissection of a text, conceived of
as a signifying object, and the attempt to project
its functioning onto the more general functioning
of language, address the very things that had
been dismissed by Croce: on the one hand, the
inner structuring of the work, consisting of a
system of relationships, and the dependence upon
a logic and a technique of composition; on the
other, the social character of the work, its ref-
erence to a context of collective possibilities
within which individual choices are made, and
at the same time, its goal of linking communi-
ca ti on partners together.
The second obstaele to this new discipline was
historicism. This is a eluster of different expe-
riences and trends (especially but not exelusively
Marxian), bound together by a common thread.
To reconstruct the outline of a work of art meant,
first of all, to connect it to its time, to single out
the cultural and social determinants that pro-
duced it. That, however, did not prevent histo-
ricists from devoting their attention to the text,
in which some "external" elements (such as bor-
rowings, determining circumstances, chronolog-
ical setting, the fact of belonging to a tradition,
etc.) were considered more distinctive than some
"internai" ones (such as the structure and form
of a work of art).
This hierarchy is reversed by semiotics. The
specificity of a text is due to its whole architec-
tu re rather than to its historical context. Some
methodological choices are, therefore, proposed.
First, to consider the actual presences rather than
the data referred to; second, to point out the
relationships between elements instead of their
genesis; third, to reconstruct the inner balance
295
between elements in the work of art rather than
its social effects. This makes it elear why his-
toricism viewed semiotics as an antagonist. The
new discipline aimed at replacing the interplay
of causes with the logic of relationships, the ftow
of events with a still picture.
While Croceanism and historicism were two
obstaeles to the success of semiotics in Italy,
there were also some potential allies. The first
was the criticism of variants, the most inftuential
representative of which is Gianfranco Contini.
He starts from the manuscript corrections made
by some authors (Petrarch, Ariosto, Leopardi)
in order to prove that the subsequent versions
of a composition are not random but refer to a
system, both the system of the text examined
and the system of the whole work of the author.
Contini, unlike the followers of Croce's philos-
ophy, dweIls, therefore, on linguistic and stylistic
procedures rather than on the "inspiration" of
the poet and focuses on the structures of the text
instead of on its aesthetic "essence."
The second crucial element in favor of semiot-
ics was stylistics. Although the translation of
Spitzer's works had been promoted by the Cro-
cean environment, owing to some similarities in
theoretical foundations, the penetrating analyses
and interpretive subtlety proper to stylistics are
far removed from Croce's approach, which uses
synthetic judgments and refers to the texts mainly
in order to illustrate some aesthetic categories.
The importance of this discipline appears in an
even elearer way when considering that, in the
fifteen years of its success on the Italian scene
(1945-1960), it promoted seminal exchanges
between literary critics and linguists. As a matter
of fact, the two most prestigious representatives
of this trend, Benvenuto Terracini and Giacomo
Devoto, have pursued both a elose "reading" of
the texts and a vast analysis of linguistic phe-
nomena in general. Stylistics is, therefore, elose
to the semiotic scope not only for the attention
paid to the inner structuring of the work, but
also because they both pair interpretative pro-
cedures with theoretical models.
The third element to stress is the ever-growing
interest in the history of languages in the post-
war period. This discipline is highly regarded by
all schools and scholars concerned with the rela-
tionships between the language of a work of art
and the language of its time in order to better
evaluate a text or to reconstruct with more pre-
cision the language of a certain period. This is
296 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI

another common ground shared by literary critics of construction of the work of art, an increasing
and linguists, but in this case the latter are more artificiality in composition, and the achievement
directly committed to refining their instruments of a metalinguistic consciousness. Therefore, even
of analysis and to defining their areas of research the renovation of artistic language, because of
(see, for example, Bruno Migliorini). In this way the goals it pursued and the expectations it cre-
a debate was begun about problems elose to ated, prepared the way for the emergence of
semiotics, especially structuralist semiotics, such semiotics.
as the dialectic btitween individual and collec-
tive, idiosyncratic and normal, personal. and
institutional perspectives. Criticism of vanants, B. Paths of Semiotics
stylistics, and his tory of language are three trends
Besides the often unconscious opposing forces
that, though stemming in some way from Cr~­
alluded to above, semiotics in Italy has been
ceanism and historicism, have overcome thelr
affected from the outset, by other elements-
limitations.
namely,' the growirr.g p,restige of st~~cturali~m,
Besides these conditions in which linguists,
the discovery of Pelrce sand Morrls s legaCl.es,
critics, and literary theoreticians were operating,
and the inftuence of information theory-whlch
the emergence of semiotics was prepared by t~e
have eventually become an integral part of its
debate on mass communications that started In
history.
Italy during the fifties and sixties and ~nvolved
The structuralist approach appeared on the
aestheticians, sociologists, and psychologlsts. T?e
scene of Italian linguistics in the fifties, thanks
great inftuence of the cinema upon eve.r~day hfe
above all to Luigi Heilmann, whose book, La
and customs, the rapid spread of televIsIOn, and
parlata di Moena, 8 gives a very pre:ise pic.ture of
the success of consumer literature introduced
the previous studies on the subJect (wIth the
new topics for discussion which can~lOt ?e. easily
author's personal elaboration, too) and dem-
mastered but the importance of whlch IS Imme-
onstrates the efficacy of structuralist tools in field
diately apparent. In other words, phen?men~
work. This double characteristic is typical of the
such as stereotypes (in spite of the emphasls untIl
entire work of Heilmann, who later committed
now placed on original inventions), standard-
hirns elf both to theoretical reftection (by pin-
ization processes (stressing redundancy and ~ep­
pointing the connections between substantialist
etition), or the interchange of contexts (leadIng,
and immanentist views of language, between
for instance to a discovery of poetic figures used
diachrony and synchrony, etc.) and empirical
in commercials) show, on the one hand, the inad-
analysis (mostly of dialects). Heilmarr.n also
equacy of the usual categories and, on the other,
founded a school, the chief representatIves of
the need for a global approach in order to e~u­
which are Luigi Rosiello, Paolo Valesio, and
cidate the different rationality of mass medIa.
Enrico Arcaini. Rosiello 9 contrasts the Saussu-
Moreover, early inquiries in this area already
rean opposition of langue and parole with the triad
demonstrate the use of so me very refined com-
of system, rule, an d use, 10 emp I ·
0Ylng th e.se
municational techniques far removed from the
notions in an investigation of Italian. ValeslO,
crudeness imputed by some polemicists. I~ is
starting from the relationships between linguistic
necessary, therefore, to adjust the analytlcal
analysis and literary criticism, focuses on the
potentialities to the complexity of the facts exam-
crucial role of style. Arcaini 11 lays the founda-
ined. In this perspective, the intervention of
tions for teaching linguistics in a purely struc-
semiotics would prove very useful. This new di.s-
turalist perspective.
cipline, the emergence of which was prepared In
Other contributions, however, joined forces
the early sixties by works of Gillo Dorftes and
with Heilmann's and those of his school. First
U mberto Eco, would not only provide go?d
of all there were several translations which in
descriptive tools but would also find here a pnv-
the ~id-sixties introduced foreign authors such
ileged ground for practice.. .
as Bally, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, Martinet, Propp,
To complete this sketch we mlght mentlOn the
widespread experimentalism which .affected t?e
"(Bologna: U niversita, Facolta cli L.ettere, 1955). .
arts (poetry, painting, music, etc.) In the fiftles 9Strutlura, uso efonzioni della lingua (Fnenze: Vallecchl, 1966).
and sixties. It is not a negligible element, espe- IOStrutlure dell'allilterazione (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1967).
cially since it proposed a dissection of the rules 11 Principi di linguistica applicata (Bologna: Zanichelli), 1967.
 ITALY
and, above all, two masters of structuralism-
Levi-Strauss and Saussure-the latter carefully
edited by Tullio De Mauro. In his important
inquiry based on a questionnaire submitted to
scholars of different disciplines, Cesare Segre 12
made elear the significance of the new categories
proposed for the practice of literary criticism and
pinpointed the problems to be dealt with, aH
while aiming at a thorough absorption of the
structuralist approach. This inquiry not only
provided a elear picture of the then current sit-
uation, but also strongly stimulated debate. As
a result of this and other contributions, struc-
turalism became an actual "cultural fashion" in
the late sixties. Its analytical character, the large
applicability to different areas of research, as
well as its esprit de geometrie and its efficacy in
solving old unsolved problems, were highly
praised. Its success became the best foundation
for the emergence of semiotics.
Another crucial point was the revival of inter-
est in some American authors, in particular Peirce
and Morris, although their respective influences
have been felt in Italy in different ways. The
import an ce of Peirce grew steadily in the sev-
enties, until he is by now very popular, while
Morris was frequently referred to in the sixties.
Morris had been trans la ted immediately after
World War II and carefully studied by Ferruccio
Rossi-Landi. 13 Morris's presence at the very birth
of Italian semiotics can be seen in Giovanni Klaus
Koenig's Analisi del linguaggio architettonico,14 in
which Morrisian categories are applied to city
planning and architecture, as weH as in Gian-
franco Bettetini's Cinema: lingua e scrittura,15 in
which the nature of the language of cinema is
defined in a Morrisian perspective. Reminis-
cences of the American scholar also surface in
the work of Gillo Dorfles, among others.
A kind of dichotomy therefore appears: while
structuralism was absorbed mainly in the liter-
ary field, behaviorism seems to have rather influ-
enced studies in visual and mass communications.
In fact, the notion of system is most likely to suit
texts endowed with great internal cohesion, while
the typology of signs and responses mostly fits
some composite and so to speak open phenom-
ena, even if there has often been areversal of
l2(Milano: Il Saggiatore), 1965.
"See Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Charles Morris (Roma: Bocca,
1953).
I4(Firenze: LEF, 1964).
15(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
297
this situation. After the pioneer study by Nynfa
Bosco, La filosofia pragmatica di Ch. S. Peirce,16 the
American philosoph er has been methodically
studied and absorbed only after elose readings
by Umberto Eco and Carlo Sini, among others.
The third important element for the under-
standing of the emergence of semiotics in Italy
is the influence of information theory. It appears
in several studies in the seventies, both in
attempts at framing statistical analyses and in
newly proposed categories for the understanding
of communicational phenomena. In fact, con-
cepts like information, redundancy, and noise,
have immediately met with great success in par-
ticular areas as well as in generaiones. The most
seminal encounter of information theory and
semiotics is in Eco's La struttura assente. 17 In this
work, the communicational pattern and concept
of code, derived from Shannon and Weaver's
studies, are assumed as guidelines for the new
discipline. In spite of the great influence of infor-
mation theory on subsequent research, its the-
oretical consistency and analytical efficacy were
contes ted in the late seventies. In conelusion,
structuralism, Morris's revival, and information
theory (see section on Theories and Methodol-
ogies) do not merely characterize the cultural
landscape, they are rather elements directly
contributing to the emergence of semiotics. We
are thus moving from adescription of the back-
ground to a reconstruction of the his tory of our
discipline.
C. The Emergence of Semiotics in
ltaly
The official birthdate of semiotics in Italy may
be placed somewhere between 1964 and 1966.
In this biennium, in fact, several preparatory
experiences began to take shape, and the quests
for new solutions began to come together. Roland
Barthes's Elements de semiologie, which in Europe-
and therefore in Italy-was received as a kind
of "manifesto" for the foundation, or new foun-
dation, of our discipline, was both a starting
point and a verification of arrival. It was pub-
lished in France in 1964, in the journal Com-
munications, and in 1966 was translated into
Italian by Einaudi, in the series "Il nuovo poli-
tecnico." Among the most crucial events, the
16(Torino: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1959).
17(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
298 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI

remarkable efforts of some periodicals, both in di Ulisse,,19 applies Propp's approach for the first
accepting more and more semiotically oriented time in Italy. Eco investigates narrative tech-
contributions and in directly promoting the niques and procedures in "Le strutture narrative
debate, should be pointed out. In 1963, for in Fleming,"20 singling out different levels of
instance, Nuova corrente published an essay by codification and hinting at some devices used to
Piero Raffa, "Per una fondazione delI'estetica catch the attention of the reader. Tullio De Mau-
semantica," together with the comments of other ro's Introduzione alla semantica, 21 a reference point
scholars, and the interest in semiotics continued for many semioticians, examines the most impor-
in the writings of Raffa, Rossi-Landi, and later tant theories about meaning. Rossi deals with
Maurizio Grande. Among the other journals are: some general problems in "Semiologia del
Marcatre, intent on aglobai renewal of the cul- simbolo,,22 and, one year later, in "Protocolli
tural landscape, which published an essay by sperimentali per la critica,"23 he reviews the
Guy Bonsiepe, "Retorica visivo-verbale," that emerging analytical procedures, illustrating them
had some influence on the Italian debate; in with a study of D' Annunzio's poem, "La pioggia
Paragone, Aldo Rossi reported on the first studies nel pineto." Ezio Raimondi, in Tecniche delta cri-
and congresses abroad; Rassegna di sociologia, in tica letteraria,24 and Marcello Pagnini, in Struttura
which Paolo Fabbri and Pier Paolo Giglioli aimed letteraria e metodo critico,zs provide a elose scrutiny
at a similar updating of information available; of the main trends, also summarizing and ver-
and later Sigma, to which Gillo Dorfles, Ugo Cas- ifying the methodological proposals elose to their
tagnotto, Luigi Rosiello and Gianfranco Bette- personal viewpoints.
tini contributed. Lastly, Lingua e stile and Strumenti It was especially in 1968 that a great many
critici expressed the tendencies of two workshops, contributions explicitly devoted to semiotics
at the universities of Bologna and Pavia, which appeared on the Italian scene. Eco's La struttura
proved to be very sensitive to a semiotic approach. assente, 26 a very successful book, reviews the con-
Conferences are another set of events marking cepts elaborated in the semiotic domain and
the birth of our discipline. In 1965, at a meeting applies them to such fields as advertising and
on "Televisione e pubblico" (Television and architecture, both proelaiming the potentialities
Audience) held in Perugia, a few scholars (Eco, of the new science and providing a radical cri-
Fabbri, Giglioli, and Tinnacci-MannelIi, among tique of the "philosophy" underlying a large por-
others) proposed some research projects in an tion of structuralism. Emilio Garroni's Semiotica
openly semiotic perspective. In 1966, the first of ed estetica 27 had a fundamental influence upon the
aseries of meetings on cinema was held in Pesaro, semiotic debate because of its critical revision of
and for a few years these meetings served as an such notions as linguistic heterogeneity, unity,
outstanding platform both for proposing and pertinence, as weIl as by its reevaluation of
hypotheses and for reporting on work in prog- the legacy of Hjelmslev. Garroni verifies his the-
ress. In 1968, the Olivetti foundation organized oretical system with reference to cinerna, the same
an important symposium in Milan, on "Lin- area examined by Gianfranco Bettetini who, in
guaggi nella societa e nella tecnica" (Languages Cinema: lingua e scrittura,28 puts forward some
in Society and Technology), which was attended methodological hypotheses for studying audio-
by prominent scholars of linguistics, logic, pro- visual language, and analyzes such phenomena
gramming languages, and so forth. as acting, lighting, montage, and so on. Gillo
Studies and essays are the third element Dorfles' Artificio e natura,29 another book on mass
reflecting the emergence and strengthening of
our science. D' Arco Silvio AvalIe's "Gli orecchini" 191n Studi danteschi, 43 (1966).
various authors, II caso Bond (Milano: Bompiani, 1965).
di Montale l8 is one of the first essays in which the 2°ln
21(Bari: Laterza, 1965).
analysis of a single poem is viewed in the per- 22In Paragone, No. 200 (1966).
spective of a language belonging to a whole cul- 23ln Paragone, No. 206 and 210 (1967).
ture, and the structures of the text are, therefore, 24(Torino: Einaudi, 1967).
connected to other, more general, semiotic sys- 25(Messina and Firenze: D'Anna, 1967).
26(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
tems. One year later, AvalIe's "L'ultimo viaggio 27 (Bari: Laterza, 1968).
28(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
18(Milano: 11 Saggiatore, 1965). 29(Torino: Einaudi, 1968).
 ITALY
communications, deals with cinematographic
explorations, advertising, television, the "comi-
cal," modern musical notation, and city plan-
ning. The book is concluded by a discussion about
"structuralist aesthetics." In 1969, two influen-
tial texts of criticism and literary theory were
published. Metodi e jantasmi 30 by Maria Corti
proposes, throught a reading of ancient and
modern Italian authors, a sophisticated critical
experiment, and revives some neglected moments
in the his tory of our literature. Cesare Segre's I
segni e la critica, 3 I on the other hand, provides a
detailed state-of-the-art review in which some
preferred trends are emphasized and, secondly,
collects some specific investigations upon
Machado, Garcia Marquez, Gombrowicz, and
others.
In the Italian landscape, therefore, semiotics
is a lively presence, permitting a renewal of ana-
lytic procedures in such a traditional field as
literature, and promoting the foundation of
research methods in new fields (for instance, mass
communications). Its growth, however, was also
stimulated by a will to dismantle appearances
and get at the co re ofreal things, or, ifyou prefer,
adesire to see behind each presence the complex
strategy of which every element is a part. In
conclusion, our discipline is expanding also
because it apparently secures an effective demys-
tification. Besides the aforementioned events-
journals, meetings, books-such basic elements
as a liking for research and laying bare ideolog-
ical scaffoldings should be emphasized. They
played a fundamental role in the emergence of
semiotics in the late sixties, and in its further
activity in the seventies.
D. Steps of Semiotics in Italy
In the seventies, semiotics, already well es tab-
lished on the Italian cultural scene, took one
further step. I ts features were common both to
a whole set of issues and researches (the demands
and experiences that caused its emergence having
already been melted down in the same crucible),
and to the permanent confrontation in the Ital-
ian cultural debate (the new science having been
contrasted by some disciplines far removed in
their perspectives, as well as in their approach es ).
3°(Milano: Feltrinelli, 1969).
3l(Torino: Einaudi, 1969).
299
In this decade, however, semiotics, in spite of
such an undeniable unity of scope, lost its con-
centration of interests and placed its tasks and
status at issue. Some often conflicting separa-
tions of fields ensued (e.g., the polemics of the
semanalytic trends against structuralist
approaches), and criticisms and self-criticisms
emerged, sometimes provoking a rough confron-
tation (e.g., the fiery disputes between semiotics
and Marxism, or between semiotics and
psychoanalysis) .
This double measure-unity and diversity,
recognition and problematic attitude-should be
taken into account in order to chart the seventies.
As a matter of fact, the different stages pro-
ceeded in alternation: either there was a large
consensus about the basic problems and proce-
dures of analysis, or new and eccentric issues
were introduced. Better yet, a stable scientific
paradigm alternated with some explicit attempts
at substitutions. We shall try now to outline,
albeit in a sketchy way, the main steps of this
decade, each one centered around a specific topic.
The division into periods will not be absolute,
because some themes, after a long preparation,
outlived their high points and in certain years
several topics were debated at the same time. In
spite of these overlappings, however, a rather
accurate picture of the itinerary of our discipline
can be drawn.
The first step takes place between the sixties
and the seventies. It was a moment ofvast explo-
rations, of intense and multifarious activity, but
it was also characterized by a <;;lear convergence
of purposes and approaches. The target aimed
at can be represented by the key words structure
and sign. The former term mostly refers to a
procedure of analysis. The object investigated is
dissected into its components through a double
operation and is recomposed by singling out the
pattern of its elements. Thus, an understanding
of the way in which the terms constitute a total-
ity and the totality gives each element its place,
function, and value is achieved. Of course, such
a methodological procedure was most system-
atically applied in the sphere of structuralism.
Structuralism, as a matter of fact, lent to early
semiotics its instruments of investigaton, but not
its philosophical foundations, which have been
sometimes severely criticized, as in Eco's Lastrut-
tura assente. A discipline cannot be thoroughly
reduced to its method, and so another key word,
300 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
sign, intervenes, to indicate the object to be ana-
lyzed. As a matter of fact, early semiotics can
be defined as the "science of signs" both because
it focused on this entity from a theoretical view-
point (its nature, status, and typology) and
because it used this standard unit to measure
differen t concrete phenomena (everything is
analyzed either as a sign or in a sign perspective).
It would take too long to consider all such con-
tributions. We shall only mention Eco's book,
Segno~ 32 which may be read as an interesting
account of this first step.
Semiotics would soon question both its method
and its object, as was already foreshadowed dur-
ing the second stage, in the early seventies, which
faced the issue of ideology. Several topics were
debated, all of them tending to one single point-
namely, what does the scientific project of the
new discipline involve, in epistemological terms,
or produce, in terms of social utility? The answers
of some scholars were purely negative. Semiot-
ics, borrowing its method from structuralism, is
doomed to be abstract and ahistorical. The same
result is obtained when reference is made to
transformational-generative theory, so heavily
charged with innatist assumptions. Other schol-
ars gave more positive answers. Semiotics might
permit an effective reconstruction of the his tory
of a culture, provided it is able to capture, in
the language and texts, the point of mediation
between the economic base of society and its
superstructural levels. This thesis is developed
by Segre in a few essays, later collected in Semi-
otica, storia e cultura,33 and it pervades some inves-
tigations published in the journal Uomo e cultura
by the Circolo Semiologico Siciliano. Lastly,
according to some scholars the new science should
devote itself to sign production, rather than to
the sign per se, in order to prove useful and effec-
tive (see, e.g., Ferruccio Rossi-Landi's Il lin-
guaggio come lavoro e come mercato,34 Semiotica e
ideologia,35 and the journal Ideologie, which he
edits). The notion of production, however, albeit
in a thoroughly different perspective, has been
emphasized by Bettetini36 and ECO. 37
In the mid-seventies, semiotics condensed
around a third theme, which may be represented
32(Milano: ISEDI, 1973).
"(Padova: Liviana, 1977).
34(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
35(Milano: Bompiani, 1971).
36Produzione dei senso e messa in scena (Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
"Trattato di semiotica generale (Mi1ano: Bompiani, 1975).
by the pair of terms communication and signifir;ation.
Beyond questioning whether to consider the two
terms antagonistic or not (in France they have
been considered opposites, while in Italy they
have been mostly regarded as complementary),
their use stresses aspects that differ both from a
theoretical and a practical point of view. For
instance, a persistent reference to communica-
tion focuses attention on the factors allowing the
exchange of information, on the social subjects
involved, on the value of intentionality, and so
on. A close scrutiny of these elements has been
provided, in the literary field, by Corti. 38 The
insistence on signification, on the other hand,
underlines the semantic, rather than pragmatic
dimension, the expressive potentialities rather
than the concrete realizations, the play of inter-
pretation instead of the linguistic exercise. This
trend was foreshadowed in Eco's Le forme del
contenuto. 39
The fourth step of semiotics in Italy (none of
these divisions into periods is, however, abso-
lute) directly involved the notion of sign, which
was tentatively replaced by other units of anal-
ysis. There is a trend aimed at decomposing the
sign into its minimal constituents (features,
semes, etc.), which are eventually placed in a
rather loose combinatorial system. At the same
time, a different notion of sign function was pro-
posed, one which underlined the merely rela-
tional character of any formation. Besides Eco's
contributions, we should mention D' Arco Silvio
Avalle's L'ontologia del segno in Saussure.#J A rather
similar attitude was shared by scholars empha-
sizing the signifier instead of the signified. They
too operated on minimal constituents (gra-
phemes, phonemes) and on temporary and
changeable combinations (the play of ana-
grams). Among them is Stefano Agosti. 41 An
opposite trend, centered instead on elements
"Iarger" than the sign, can be easily detected in
the investigations of narrativity, in which more
complex and so to speak second-Ievel units are
taken into account. The characters and actions
appear as clusters of manifold and scattered ele-
ments and, at the same time, as formations inde-
pendent of the language in which they are shaped.
This double character of the narrative unit
3BPrincipi delta comunicazione letteraria (Milano: Bompiani, 1976).
39(Milano: Bompiani, 1972).
4O(Torino: Giappichelli, 1973).
41 Il testo poetico (Milano: Rizzoli, 1972).
 ITALY 301

-namely, its composite as weIl as translinguistic salient outlines of the overall journey of this
nature-is stressed by Segre in Le strutture e il discipline.
tempo.42 The aforementioned trend, however, is
apparent in all the studies focusing on discourse,
although a further change of direction can be
noticed. 111. Semiotic Fields and
The latest step of semiotics in I taly was char- Practices
acterized, in fact, by an ever growing interest in
discourse. Such an interest was already present A. Theories and Methodologies
in the investigations of literary genres and rhet-
oric, but it received its ultima te consecration- Structuralism and information theory are the
and also its most solid framing-from the success two theoretical nuelei from which I talian semiot-
met with, in Italy too, by theories of the text. And ics stems, even if no I talian scholar can be defined
it is the text, rather than the sign, that is now either as a structuralist, in philosophical terms,
recognized as the "natural" unit oflanguage and or as merely depending upon informational
therefore as the main object of semiotics. The tenets.
text, rather than the sign, is the subject matter Structuralism has nearly always superseded
of many studies as weIl as the verification point previous cultural movements, especially those
for many problems. Some contributions on this which are historicist in nature, and it has been
topic can be mentioned: a fine anthology, edited mainly considered as a way of arranging the
by Maria-Elizabeth Conte,43 La linguistica tes- different traditions of formal criticism. In other
tuale, which proved quite stimulating; the works words, structuralism has been privileged and used
by Bice Mortara GaraveIli;44 and the extension either as an interpretative approach or descrip-
of the concept of text to fields other than spoken tive procedure rather than a philosophical system.
languages promoted by Paolo Fabbri,45 Bette- On the other hand, some useful models have
tini,16 and Casetti. 47 Let us not forget, also, the been derived from information theory in order
by now numerous studies of speech acts (espe- to describe signification within communicational
cially the works by Marina Sbisa), the analysis situations, but they have been elaborated and
of utterances, conceived of as both production applied to theoretical contexts other than the
and interpretation of sentences (e.g., in Segre's original ones. Information theory is also used as
book, Semiotica filologica 48), a growing interest in a methodological tactic for reductive applications.
pragmatics (see, for examgle, Marcello Pagnini's The foundation of semiotic theories in Italy,
Pragmatica delta letteratura, 9 Casetti, Mauro Wolf, therefore, and the ensuing methodological
and Lucia Lumbelli in Ricerche sulta comunica- assumptions made, stem from a compromise
<:ione,50 and, last but not least, Eco's Lector in between a previous attention to multifarious sig-
fabula. 51 A shared interest in discourse has pro- nifying materials and the two abovementioned
moted a sometimes seminal exchange between foreign models. Forerunners of this phenomenon
semiotics and kindred sciences such as logic and can mostly be found in formalliterary criticism,
psychoanalysis. in the criticism of variants, in stylistics, in formal
This is the latest step of semiotics in Italy. studies of language, in the rethinking of the lan-
This brief survey has only presented the most guage of cinema in a structuralist perspective,
in presemiotic considerations about architec-
ture, in the first iconological approaches to the
42(Torino: Einaudi, 1974). production of visual arts, in the early critiques
4"La linguistica testuale (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1977). of content analysis in mass communications, and
"Ilfilo de! discorso (Torino: Giappichelli, 1979). in the writings of phenomenological philosophers.
45"Le comunicazioni di massa in Italia: sguardo semiotico e
malocchio della sociologia," VS, 5 (1973). From these broad and partly confused inter-
1fiTempo dei semo (Milano: Bompiani, 1979). ests, a quick transition was made to empirical
47"11 testo dei film," Comunicazione sociali (1979). analysis by means of the approaches and models
413 (Torino: Einaudi, 1979).
of foreign-especially French-studies or, better
49 (Palermo: Sellerio, 1980).

50"Indagine su alcune regole di gene re televisivo," Richerche

yet, to the elaboration of original theoretical sys-
sulla cnmunicazione, 2 (1980) and 3 (1981). tems which were elose to the cultural context
51 (Milano: Bompiani, 1979). that favored, and almost conjured them up.
302 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
Only a few Italian scholars have explicitly and
globally dealt with a theoretical grounding of
the different methodologies of applied analyses,
that is, with the issue of a general semiotic the-
ory. After the initial valuable attempts by Piero
Raffa, who offered a personal model of literary
criticism in some artieles in Nuova Corrente (see
the debate on "semantic aesthetics" started in
1963), and in his book Avanguardismo e realismo 52
Emilio Garroni is the first outstanding person-
ality. Having already approached a semiotic per-
spective in La crisi semantica delle arti,53 Garroni,
in Semiotica ed estetica,54 starting from the chaotic
complexity of the filmic text, asserts the incom-
pleteness and inadequacy of linguistic models
when applied to signifying materials other than
(or only partly) linguistic. Garroni's thesis,
enhanced later in Progetto di semiotica,55 had a vast
international echo, not only among semioticians
of the cinema (his work is amply quoted in Metz's
Langage et cinema) , bu t also in the broader field
of semiotic theory. As a matter of fact, Garroni
faced issues that transcend the filmic text, thus
founding in a personal way a philosophical per-
spective-almost always neglected in Italy and
elsewhere--for the topics generally treated by
the language sciences.
Eco's theoretical production, too, took root in
a philosophically-oriented research. His starting
point is information theory, with many cyber-
netic implications. On this basis, Eco superim-
poses a crossbreed of French and American
linguistic models, both linking semiotics to cul-
tural anthropology and considering culture itself
as a form of communication. In La struttura
assente,56 Eco breaks away from the extremisms
of French structuralism (too biased by ontolog-
ism) and makes his way toward a theory of sig-
nification that will be further elaborated in Segno,57
thus resorting to Peirce's neopragmaticism and
Morris' behaviorism and aiming at the unifica-
tion of the structuralist dimension and Anglo-
Saxon philosophy of language, without however
neglecting the European logicians. In Trattato di
semiotica generale,58 Eco rearranges all his previous
work, eventually coming to face that everlasting
52(Milano: Bompiani, 1967).
53(Roma: Officina, 1964).
54(Bari: Laterza, 1968).
55(Bari: Laterza, 1972).
56(Mi1ano: Bompiani, 1968).
57 (Milano: ISEDI, 1973).
58(Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
opposition--or confused formulation of it-which
had often negatively influenced semiotic research
in Italy: namely, the opposition between co m-
munication and signification, conceived as very
elose to the Aristotelian pair "act/potency." In
Eco's words, in fact, "any system of communi-
cation among human beings presupposes a sys-
tem of signification as its necessary condition."
In this same book, Eco deals with the issue of
sign production, keeping his distance from the
French trend (e.g., in Kristeva's work) and pro-
posing an openly empirical position. Signs are
elassified according to their modes of production
instead of their material forms.
Problems of the production of "sense"-
instead of "signs"-have been tackled also by
Bettetini,59 who, although dealing in a semiotic
perspective with enunciation in cinema and
theater, proposes a general theoretical view and
studies the ways in which the toil of producing
a text affects its semiotic structure, its sign orga-
nization. Every text is therefore basically
(although not exhaustively) considered as the
trace of its own production.
Production, and especially linguistic produc-
tion, is the focus of the studies carried out by
Rossi-Landi, who grounds semiotics in Marxian
economic categories. He dweIls on the homology
between linguistic production and material pro-
duction, with reference to the three fundamental
moments of production, exchange, and con-
sumption, and points out, in the dialectic of lan-
guage and speakers, the danger of linguistic
alienation, not unlike the one deriving from eco-
nomic exploitation. Illinguaggio come lavoro e come
mercato60 was followed by Semiotica e ideologia,61 in
which these issues are further developed and a
joint study of sign systems and ideologies is pro-
posed in a Marxian perspective. Marx, in fact,
founded his theory of ideology on some basic
principles of a science of signs which is not
detached from social practice. In Rossi-Landi's
work, therefore, sign production is analyzed
within the larger framework of social reproduc-
tion, and semiotics becomes an essential element
of any theory of society.
While Rossi-Landi's semiotic reflections start
from his studies of Charles Morris (whom he
introduced into the Italian culturallandscape),
59 Produzione dei senso e messa in scena (Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
6°(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
61(Milano: Bompiani, 1972).
 ITALY
De Mauro, an expert on Ferdinand de Saussure,
is the author of a text belonging de jure to the
field of general theories: Senso e significato,62 which
develops De Mauro's earlier semantic consid-
erations and defines the notion of noema within
a formal patterning at the level of content.
Another interesting philosophical contribution is
Giogio Derossi's Semiologia della conoscenza,63 in
which the issue of meaning is subordinated to
the issue of sign function. Derossi points out the
inadequate identification of meaning with sys-
tematic structures (Saussure, structuralism,
transformational-generative grammar, etc.) and
with operational structures (neopositivism,
operationalism, behaviorism, etc.), and empha-
sizes meaning formation, consisting of a codi-
fying act that is basically indexical in nature. A
rigorous semiology of knowledge is thus assumed
as prolegomenon to any theory of knowledge, in
other words, as a test for cognition. The afore-
mentioned authors were looking for the foun-
dations· of a semiotic theory in pre-existent
philosophical systems. Derossi's aim, in con-
trast, is to constitute an autonomous philosoph-
ical system with a founding perspective that
precedes the very issues of gnoseology.
As regards theoretical interlacings between
semiotics and other disciplines, Italians have not
been very productive. Andrea Bonomi, U go Volli,
and EC0 64 have taken a few steps in the field of
logic. Some timid explorations in the area of
psychoanalysis are due to the research of Stefano
Agosti and to the interdisciplinary approach of
Franco Fornari. In the wake of Lacan, Agosti65
analyses some systems of signifiers considered
to belong to a form of thinking very rich in semic
(non-communicative) values. Fornari,66 on the
other hand, deepens the relations between
semiotics and psychoanalysis, connecting the two
disciplines according to mutual complementar-
ities and functional equivalences.
The methodologies applied in Italy were
derived partly from foreign models, media ted by
critical new elaborations, and partly from the
original systems outlined above. Investigations
have aimed at empirical descriptions of phenom-
ena that can be analyzed with semiotic proce-
dures (literature, cinema, television, advertising,
6'(Bari: Laterza, 1971).
6'(Roma: Armando, 1976).
64(Milano: Bompiani, 1979).
65][ testo poelieo (Milano: Rizzoli, 1973).
66Simbolo e eodiee (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1976).
303
theater, music, road signs, architecture, ges-
tures, etc.) or at singling out textual structures
studied within the framework of an author's, or
a school's, production. Great attention has also
been paid, especially in the seventies, to the
modalities in which different texts and discourse
typologies are inscribed in ideological systems.
The prevailing model in early methodological
choices was undoubtedly structuralist linguis-
tics, which has also invaded the fields of literary,
cinematographic, architectural, and theatrical
analyses. Such a model was supported in Italy
by the prestige of scholars and schools that had
used it in a rigorous and exemplary way: Heil-
mann and his school in Bologna, attended by,
among others, Luigi Rosiello, Paolo Valesio, and
Enrico Arcaini; De Mauro, who was a pupil of
Antonino Pagliaro; and Giulio Lepschy, author
of a historical synthesis of structuralism, La lin-
guistica strutturale. 67 Oddly enough, these meth-
odologies scarcely affected the specifically
linguistic area, while they established them-
selves, at least for a few years, in other fields
which are either loosely connected or uncon-
nected with linguistics. Many Italian linguists
continued their work according to tradition al
patterns, while structuralists such as Rosiello and
Valesio closely studied poetic language, con-
ceived as a sort of linguistic production. The
different attitude of these two scholars may be
interpreted as a lack of faith in the structuralist
approach insofar as its linguistic applications are
concerned, and, at the same time, the at least
tentative acknowledgement of its efficacy in other
areas of semiotics.
As a matter of fact, in the mid-sixties struc-
turalism found its most fertile ground in the field
of literary criticism. See, for instance, the anal-
yses by Rosiello,68 Pagnini,69 Silvio d' Arco
Avalle,70 and Cesare Segre. 71 Between 1966 and
1967, two nearly contemporary journals, Lingua
e stile and Strumenti critici, confirmed the preem-
inence of structuralist criticism all over Italy.
The structuralist approach was, at any rate,
always applied with discretion and with repeated
67(Torino: Einaudi, 1966).
68"La sinestesia nell'opera poetica di Montale," in Rendieonli,
7 (1963).
69 La poesia di W. Collins (Bari: Laterza, 1964).
70 "Gli oreeehini" di Montale (Milano: 11 Saggiatore, 1965).
71"Due appunti su Antonio Machado," in Sludi di lingua e
letteratura spagnola (Torino: Giappichelli, 1965); now in I
segni e la eritiea (Torino: Einaudi, 1970).
304 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
references to different traditions of criticism, and
above aIl, with steady adherence to the texts
being analyzed.
In a similar way, early protagonists of for-
malist literary criticism include, among others:
AvaIle, with his analysis of the Canto XXXVI
of Dante's Infirno;72 Corti, with her research on
constant, or analogous functions in Beppe Fen-
oglio's work 73 and Eco, with his investigation of
narrative functions in Fleming's novels. 74
Italian semiotics applied to cinema and mass
communications (advertising, television, pho-
tography, consumer literature) had its structur-
alist period too, in an attempt to transfer linguistic
models into its own areas of concern. In this
perspective we find Pier Paolo Pasolini's talk at
the 1966 meeting at Pesaro 75 and part of the first
"semiotic" work of Bettetini, 76 as weIl as the early
works and analyses of a group of pupils of Bet-
tetini, a few young scholars who largely contrib-
uted to the development of the new science in
the sphere of performing arts and mass com-
munications. They include, among others: Cas-
etti, Alberto Farassino, and Aldo Grasso.
Bettetini's book shows some perplexities about
the legitimacy of applying a linguistic approach
to a field in which language, either spoken or
written, is but one signifying component of the
text (the same perplexities were raised in 1968
by Garroni, in the above mentioned Semiotica ed
estetica) .
The semiotics of cinema little by little escaped
the stranglehold of linguistic structuralism by
assuming the legacy of Peirce (e.g., Bettetini's
L 'indice dei realismo 77 ) , by tracing the codifications
of texts back to the production of sense and their
ideological matrices (e.g., Produzione dei senso e
messa in scena, cited above), by focusing on textual
analyses, and by debating the issues of enunci-
ation and the pragmatics of communication (see
Bettetini's Tempo dei senso 78 and Casetti's "11 testo
dei film" 79).
From a methodological point of view, semiot-
ics applied to theater and mass communications
n"L'ultimo viaggio di Ulisse," in Studi Danteschi, 43 (1966).
73Metodi efantasmi (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1969).
""Le strutture narrative in Fleming," in Il caso Bond (Milano:
Bompiani, 1965).
75"La lingua scritta dell'azione," Nuovi Argomenti, 21 (1966).
76Cinema: lingua e scrittura (Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
77(Milano: Bompiani, 1972).
78(Milano: Bompiani, 1979).
7gIn Comunicazioni sociali, 3 (1979).
went a similar route. For the latter, Fabbri's
(unfortunately too short) "written" work has
always proved bright and illuminating. 8o
Literary criticism has also gradually given up
the methods of linguistic structuralism, while
devoting itself to the analysis of "discourse,"
"text," and communicational (and therefore
pragmatic) aspects of the work of art. In the
1977 entry "Discorso" by Segre, in the Enciclo-
pedia Einaudi, the analysis of this notion, pre-
sented as a set of specific "procedures," tends to
emphasize key words, theme words (in which a
preeminence of "concepts and systems of con-
cepts" is apparent), stylistic vectors (represent-
ing, on the analogy of the lexical level, "the
parallelograms of forces among the guiding ideas
of the message"), and the autonomy of the
signifier.
In 1976, Corti published Principi della comuni-
cazione letteraria,81 in which he proposes a notion
of literature conceived as an informative and
communicative system and formulates a method
of analysis emphasizing the text. The text is con-
sidered a "hypersign" or polysemic message, an
individual and unique entity as weIl as a product
of institutions and literary genres.
In Eco's Lector in jabula,82 the pragmatic
dimension of the communicative exchange in lit-
erature is analyzed in terms of the relationships
between the freedom of the reader and the con-
straints of the textual machinery. In this ana-
Iytical approach attention is paid to devices of
cooperation within the text and to a theory of
possible worlds, built up according to models of
a semiotics ofnarrativity. Eco's discourse brings
a great many of the centrifugal forces that affected
the choices of several Italian scholars in the sev-
enties back to the semiotic fold. Semiotics, as a
charming lady, has perhaps exhibited too loose
behavior in Italy, at the risk of compromising
herself After her methodological deviations, she
is returning to her foundations and to a self-
critical rethinking.
In spite of a recently growing interest in the
8°"Le comunicazioni di massa in Italia: sguardo semiotico e
malocchio della sociologia," VS, 5 (1973) and "I processi
pubblicitari: analisi semiotica" Sipra 6 (1973).
Bl(Milano: Bompiani, 1976).
82(Milano: Bompiani, 1979).
 ITALY
history of Italian semiotics, the present produc-
tion is still rather slender. Historical research
has generally taken two different paths: either
to present a former author or school in which
the foundations of semiotics, or some prese-
miotic interests, can be singled out, or to sketch
a tentative picture of the past and the present.
In the former perspective, a revival of the phi-
losophy of Peirce is promoted by Nynfa Bosco, in
Lafilosofia pragmatica di Ch. S. Peircl 3 and Niccolü
Salanitro, in Peirce ei problemi dell'interpreta;:;ione. 84
The former book devoted an entire chapter to a
semiotic analysis of the American philosopher,
when I taly had not yet been touched by semiot-
ics (with the exception of Rossi-Landi's Charles
Morris) .85 The latter book, on the other hand,
refers entirely to Peirce's semiotic studies, viewed
from within the framework of his philosophical
system. More recently, however, the interest in
Peirce has been growing. See, for instance, issue
no. 15 of VS (Sept.-Dec. 1976), with papers by
Massimo Bonfantini and Roberto Grazia, Carlo
Sini, Giampaolo Caprettini, and Eco; Semiotica e
filosofia,86 by Sini; and Bonfantini's introduction
to a collection of Peirce's writings on semiotics. 87
Other investigations, in spite of their basically
linguistic perspective, reveal some semiotic
interests and curiosity, e.g., Rosiello's Linguistica
illuministica,88 Lia Formigari's Linguistica e empir-
ismo nel '600 inglesl9 and Linguistica e antropologia
nel secondo Settecento,90 and Raffaele Simone's
Introduction to the Grammatica e logica di Port-
Royal,91 as weH as his "Semiologie Augusti-
nienne.,,92
As for studies of the logical aspects of lan-
guage, a topic ranging over the entire Italian
semiotic scene, we should mention Mario Dal
Pra's "Studi sul problema logico dellinguaggio
nella filosofia medievale"93 and Paolo Rossi's
Clavis universalis. Logica combinatoria da Lullo a
Leibni;:;. 94 The Rivista critica di storia della filosofia
B3(Torino: Edizioni di Filosofia, 1959).
B4(Roma: Silva, 1969).
85(Milano: Bocca, 1953).
"6(Bologna: 11 Mulino, 1978).
B7Semiotica (Torino: Einaudi, 1980).
8"(Bologna: 11 Mulino, 1968).
89(Bari: Laterza, 1970).
9°(Messina: La Libra, 1972).
91(Roma: Ubaldini, 1969).
92In Semiotica, 6/2 (1972).
93In Rivista critica di storia deltafilosofia, 1954.
9'(Napoli, 1960).
305
also published, in 1956, an essay by Giulio Preti,
"Sulla dottrina del semeion nella logica stoica. ,,95
A very penetrating research on the semiotic
"presences" and "intuitions" in William of Ock-
ham's work is Alessandro Ghisalberti's Guglielmo
di Ockham. 96
The interests of historians of semiotics are
concentrated on trends, schools, authors such as
the Stoics, Augustine, medieval philosophy, Wil-
liam of Ockham, the grammaire generale, the
Enlightenment, the logic of language (studied
on a long diachronie arc), the "case" of Peirce,
and so on. '
In the historical perspective of an organic view
of the semiotic phenomenon, De Mauro's Intro-
du;:;ione alla semantica 97 and Lepschy's La linguistica
strutturale98 should be mentioned. More pertinent
to adefinition of "history of semiotics" are three
works: by ECO,99 Omar Calabrese and Egidio
Mucci,IOO and Casetti. lol They are three didactic
reports of investigations, probing into the history
of Western thought and culture in quest of the
roots of this new science.
Although for the time being a comprehensive
and rigorous body of historical research is lack-
ing in Italy, there are clues that an organic pro-
duction may be achieved in a short time. As a
matter of fact, the meeting of the Associazione
Italiana di Studi Semiotici held in Palermo in
December 1980 was devoted to the history of
semiotics, which will also be the main topic of
the next meetings. The papers delivered and the
closing speech by Segre may all be considered
as serious contributions to an imminent histor-
ical systematization.
B. Architecture
Although the application of semiotic sciences
to architecture and city planning had, in Italy,
a bright and internationally known beginning,
this failed to ensure its adequate development.
The initial enthusiasm and lucidity of the
95 Rivista critica di storia delta filosofia, 1956.
96(Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1972).
97(Bari: Laterza, 1965).
98Quoted above.
99Segno (Milano: ISEDI, 1973).
IOO"Per una storia delle idee semiotiche," the last chapter of
Guida alla semiotica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1975).
IOI"La presemiotica," Semiotica (Milano: Accademia, 1977).
306 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
researchers later subsided in internal antago-
nisms and sophisticated debates which did not
seriously improve the discipline. Looking at uni-
versity departments of architecture, one must
admit that their programs generally follow paths
far removed from the principles and methodol-
ogies of semiotics. In 1953, however, Italo Gam-
berini expressed the need for a codification and
logical organization of the elements of architec-
ture. '02 In the same year, Tomas Maldonado,
who was then attracted by the German school
of DIrn, wrote an essay, "Comunicazione e semi-
otica," published in 1964 as an appendix to the
first I talian book on architectural semiotics,
Analisi del linguaggio architettonico,'03 by Giovanni
Klaus Koenig, in which Morris's models and
terms are applied to the semiotic study of ar chi-
tecture and city planning. The "denotatum" of
the architectural sign is, according to Koenig,
the development of activities in the different con-
figurations of humans (the most typical of which
is, of course, the family), that use or inhabit the
architectural structures. Thus the city commu-
nicates by means of a language, in which the
use-objects indicate (in a Morrisian sense) the
functions of spaces.
Koenig's hypo thesis stimulated the didactic
and speculative activity of Ecü, who in 1967 cir-
culated as mimeographed notes for students of
architecture in Florence, "Appunti per una
semiologia delle comunicazioni visive," out of
which La struttura assente was derived. In disa-
greement with Koenig's approach, Eco identi-
fied the architectural sign with a signifier "the
signified of which is the function enacted." He
also distinguished a denotative from a conno-
tative reading of architectonic construction.
Architectonic artifacts, endowed with the same
static function, connote different ways of affirm-
ing its value in different periods and cultural
situations. Besides this, Eco gave a positive
answer to the question of communicability in
architecture, considered as a mass medium. This
opinion is shared by Renato De Fusco, in Archi-
tettura come mass-medium. ,o1
Gillo Dorftes I05 shows some confusion about
102Per un'analisi degli elementi dell'architettura (Firenze: Ed.
Universitarie, 1953).
103(Firenze: LEF, 1964).
I04(Bari: Dedal0, 1967).
105"Valori iconologici e semiotici in architettura," op. eit., 16
(1969).
Eco's proposal to distinguish between the den-
otative and connotative functions in architec-
tural sign production. However, it is through the
works of this scholar, which are characterized
by inexhaustible curiosity, that the Italian audi-
ence met for the first time with parasemiotic and
even specifically semiotic terms and issues, espe-
cially in the fields of visual arts and architecture.
Dorftes' latest book '06 is also largely devoted to
contemporary architecture, considered in its
craving for filling any void and eliminating any
space that is not immediately functional. (Such
a "negation" of any seemingly useless space is
viewed by the author as a "devilish" element of
architecture as weIl as of other forms of expres-
sion and communication.)
Koenig, however, revised his initial position,
comparing it with Eco's and attempting an inte-
gration of his Morrisian model with the sugges-
tions provided by information theory. Architettura
e comunicazione '07 aims at defining the complex
communicative process of architecture, and
identifies the message with both the primary
(denoted) ~md secondary (connoted) functions
of the object.
In the meantime, a workshop had also been
developed in Naples (specifically around De
Fusco) which focuscd on problems concerning
the value of space in the semiosis of the whole
architectonic work. In Segni storia e progetto
dell 'architettura, 108 De Fusco broadened the spatial
dimension of contemporary architecture and
introduced the temporal one. Maria Luisa Scal-
vini, belonging to the same group, tried to go
beyond traditional models of structuralist lin-
guistics in L 'architettura come semiotica connota-
tiva,109 thus resorting to models proper to
semiological literary criticism and even to the
analysis of narrative.
Martin Krampen, who works in a direction
far removed from linguistics (oddly enough, on
the basis of a reference to Saussure), though
living in Germany, had many contacts with Italy,
where he held for a number of years the chair
of Mass Communications at the Dipartimento
Arti Musica Spettacolo of the Dniversity of
Bologna. Krampen has also delivered a lecture
106L'intervaLlo perduto (Torino: Einaudi, 1980).
107 (Firenze: LEF, 1970).
108(Bari: Laterza, 1973).
I09(Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
 ITALY 307
on his antilinguistic thesis, aimed at resurrecting cultural anthropology) was soon accused, in Italy
Prieto's theories, at the First Congressof the and elsewhere, of being imperialistic. Such a per-
International Association for Semiotic Studies in spective seemed to divest semiotic practice of
1974. 110 Close to Hjelmslev, on the other hand, any relevance whatsoever. Semiotic methods
is Garroni's thought in "11 linguaggio seemed applicable to the whole sphere of human
dell'architettura."lll Other Italian scholars either activity, and at the same time, any semiotic prac-
teaching or practicing architecture, such as Bruno tice seemed to be part of a general and holistic
Zevi, Eugenio Battisti, and Manfredo Tafuri, semiotics of culture. On the other hand, in a
have paid attention to semiotics. more selective manner (restricted to the anthro-
Semiotics applied to architecture is no longer pological meaning of "culture"), I talian scholars
as lively as it was earlier. Although semiotic who have worked in this area may be divided
studies in this field have been inftuenced by early into two categories: the so-called ethnosemiolo-
Italian contributions (and references are still gists, and the researchers interested in issues of
made to them), the scientific and cultural source semiotics of objects.
seems to have dried up, perhaps because the field As for ethnosemiology, first of all, the group
is interlaced with social and political issues that working at the University of Palermo and inside
seem to be more important. Nevertheless, a seri- the Circolo Semiologico Siciliano should be men-
ous semiotic work might provide much more cor- tioned. Antonino Buttitta has mainly studied
rect (and less ideologically biased) solutions than folklore from a semiQtic viewpoint, with the aim
the ones that are at present proposed and debated of providing clues for an ideological interpre-
"in the various political and academic centers. tation. 114 Antonio Pasqualino has made an anal-
ysis of narrative structures ll5 and an investigation
of the notion of "code" in the tradition of Sicilian
C. Culture
puppets. 116 Lastly, Silvana Miceli has focused
The first formal statement of the connections on myth and its cultural significance. ll7
between semiotics and culture is found in Eco's In Alberto M. Cirese's Folklore e antropologia, I 18
La struttura assente, 112 in which the communicative semiotic issues of folklore are dealt with accord-
nature of culture is affirmed with reference to a ing to logical models. In the same perspective,
hypothesis formulated by American cultural Cirese had already published I proverbi: struttura
anthropology. Any culture, therefore, may be delle dejinizioni."9 In Segre's Semiotica, storia, cul-
studied as a communication system and, vice versa, tura,120 the relationship between literature and
any communicative phenomenon may be ana- society is emphasized.
lyzed as apart of a given cultural context. All With regard to semiotic studies of the prob-
cultural events may thus be studied as systems lems of the object, the most remarkable Italian
of signs. This hypo thesis was later systematically authors are Corrado Maltese and the Argentine-
taken up by Eco in Trattato di semiotica,113 in which born Tomas Maldonado, who, after having
a deepening of the communication-signification worked for a long time in Germany, now teaches,
dichotomy implies an attempt at founding a sci- works, and publishes in Italy. Rossi-Landi's
entific theory of cultural anthropology in a important contributions have been sufficiently
semiotic perspective. analyzed in the section of this chapter on the-
Eco's proposal had repercussions on an inter- oretical models.
disciplinary scale. Semiotics appeared as the
possible meeting point of other disciplines-
namely, as an integrative approach rather than ll4See Ideologia e folklore (Palermo: Flaccovio, 1971).
an autonomous science. Such an approach, how- 115"Per un'analisi morfologica della letteratura cavalleresca:
i reali di Francia," Uomo e cultura, 3 (1970).
ever, owing to its broad availability to all cul- 116"L'opera dei pupi," In/omo al codice, proceedings of the
tural fields (and also for being likely to replace meeting of the AISS, Florence, 1976.
"'See Struttura e senso dei mito (Palermo: Circolo Semiologico
1lOThe proceedings have been published by Mouton, as Siciliano, 1973).
A Semiotic Landscape. 118(Palermo: Palumbo, 1973).
111 In Progetto di semiotica, cited above. 119Working papers and pre-publications (Urbino: Centro
112(Milano: Bompiani, 1968). Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, 1972).
113 1975. 12°(Padova: Liviana, 1977).
308 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
Maltese l2l faces the issue of the signs generally
considered "similar" to their referents, namely
iconic signs, thus proposing a research based on
the various modalities of productions.
Maldonado l22 singles out two main trends of the
international debate on the problem of objects:
the negation of the use value, defended by Baud-
rillard in a Marxian framework, and the con-
nection between messages and the object, as
theorized by Abraham Moles. Maldonado rejects
both perspectives (the idealistic risk of the first
and the technocratic dimension of the second),
thus dialectically mediating the direction of his'
own research.
At present, Eco's proposal to transform
semiotics into "the scientific form of cultural
anthropology" has produced some results in the
areas of research already involved in semiotic
practices, while it has had only a faint resonance
in traditional academic environments. As in the
case of architecture, cinema, theater, and lin-
guistics, institutes of cultural anthropology have
been scarcely inftuenced by the semiotic wave,
and they still retain their former methods. The
meaning of their practices, cut off from new
approaches, tends slowly to disappear. Their
rejection of the communicational hypo thesis
concerning their subject matter may, however,
expose them to the risk of incommunicability.
D. Film
Even at a cursory glance, the outstanding role
of semiotics of film in Italy is apparent. This is
evidenced by the many contributions on the sub-
ject, by the deep interest and lively polemics they
arouse, and by the results of studies that have
often affected some foreign environments too.
Such a success probably originated from the fact
that semiotics of the cinema has taken the place
of the now fading theories of film. Starting from
this precious legacy, the different contributions
have res ta ted the terms of the issues, renewed
the methods of analysis, and suggested new
directions of research. In other words, the new-
born dis ci pli ne has become an attraction for all
the people looking for an answer to such ques-
tions as "What is a film?" and "How can it be
121Semiologia dei messaggio oggettuale (Milano: Mursia, 1970).
'22Avanguardia e ra;donalita (Torino: Einaudi, 1974).
decoded?" Two more reasons for its success,
however, should be added. First of all, the
semiotics of the cinema has never forgotten that
it is only apart of general semiotics. Thus, film
has sometimes been used as a mere test for
hypotheses formulated in other areas (see, for
instance, the quest for a "double articulation").
On the other hand, elements emerging from
studies of the cinema have reverberated upon
the general framework (for example, the twofold
nature of film, being both an industrial and a
symbolic product, has proposed anew, at a more
comprehensive level, the hypothesis of a elose
connection between material production and the
production of sense). Second, the very liveliness
and variety which the debate sometimes presents
can be elearly seen.
At any rate, the itinerary of the semiotics of
the cinema in Italy may be divided into three
stages. The first regards the emergence of the
new discipline, with the verification of basic
hypotheses and the testing of methods of inves-
tigation. At this stage, the main topic was the
one proposed by Metz in his early work. The
cinema is a langage without a langue, and yet it
is a fertile field for serniotics. Although no organic
and complete system of codes can be singled out,
there are nevertheless so me elements that may
be formalized. Such a thesis is questioned by
several Italian authors. Pier Paolo Pasolini, for
instance, in aseries of contributions later col-
lected in Empirismo eretico,123 notices that both
objects and actions constitute a signifying chain
that is fixed by the film exactly as speech is fixed
by writing. From this point of view, the cinema
may be considered as the "written language of
reality" and reality may be viewed as "cinema
in nature." The system of laws ruling the film
is the same as the one at work in life. Pasolini's
proposal may be read also as a personal state-
ment of poetics (he was both a writer and film-
maker). Other scholars, however, have dealt with
the issue in a more formal way. Bettetini l24 reex-
amines Metz's hypo thesis in light of different
categories. With his reference to the Morrisian
semiotic model (instead of to the Saussurian lin-
guistic one), Bettetini emphasizes the syntactic
dimension rather than looking for an improbable
'23(Milano: Garzanti, 1972).
124Cinema: lingua e scrittura (Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
 ITALY
lexical dimension. This, as weIl as his focusing
on communication rather than signification, per-
mits a greater flexibility in dealing with such
phenomena as the shot, acting, and montage.
Eco, too, in a section of La struttura assente, crit-
icizes the pretence of finding the film an ana-
logue of verbal language, and provides a long
list of filmic (or, more generally, visual) elements
that may be codified. Lastly, Garroni l25 ques-
tions Metz's two key words, saying that it is
absurd to oppose langue and langage as if they
were two different organizing forms of signifying
sets, the former "stronger" and more open to
semiotic analysis, the latter "weaker" and more
resistant to analysis. As a matter of fact langue,
as a formalizable system, is a researcher's con-
struction from concrete elements, namely, ele-
ments belonging to the langage. The film does
not, therefore, have any particular status to claim,
and it may be analyzed by semiotics in the same
way as any other communicating and signifying
system.
Once the field had been cleared of preliminary
issues, the second step aimed at providing a con-
sistent and comprehensive picture of the domain
of the cinerna. The many contributions ranged
from investigations of some film components,
studied in the entire span of their development
(see, for instance, the fine analysis of scenog-
raphy by Cappabianca, Mancini, and Silva 126)
to close scrutinies of a film or sequences of a
film (e.g., Calzavara and Celli, Il lavoro delto
spettatore I27 ). Among the models proposed, two
main trends may be singled out: one adopting
Hjelmslevian categories in order to grasp the
forms of film beyond the audio-visual matter,
the other going back to Peircean schemes with
the purpose of describing the different types of
signs at work in a film. The former position is
represented mostly by Maurizio Grande in two
publications l28 in which the Hjelmslevian con-
cepts of "process" and "system" are discussed
and contrasted with such notions as film sequence
and cinernatographie language. The latter posi-
tion, on the other hand, is defended by Bette-
tini, 129 who, pairing theoretical reflection with
125Estetica e semiotica (Bari: Laterza, 1968).
126La costruzione de!labirinto (Milano: Mazzotta, 1972).
127 (Roma: Armando, 1975).
128Filmcritica, 242-43 (1974).
129 L -zndice dei realismo (Milano: Bompiani, 1972).
309
concrete investigations of films, applies the Peir-
ce an classification of signs (indices, icons, and
symbols) to the his tory of cinema and verifies
its usefulness when dealing with the phenome-
non of realism. Although Bettetini and Grande
are at opposite poles of the debate, other con-
tributors should be mentioned. Gian Piero Bru-
netta focuses on the relationships between word
and image in a stylistic perspective l30 and exam-
ines cinernatographie narrative. 131 Alberto Far-
assino and Francesco Casetti analyze the different
codes of the cinema in three made-for-TV films. 132
In all the works of this period, however, there
is a tendency to verify general assumptions in
individual sampIes, so that the concrete object
becomes the focus of a wide debate between dif-
ferent perspectives. 133 The only risk is to confuse
the semiotic activity with the critical one, the
latter involving evaluation besides analysis (such
an equivocation may be noticed in several arti-
cles in Filmcritica).
The third stage of semiotics in I taly is marked
by a rejection of any taxonomie and descriptive
approach, and by the quest for an explanatory
model. In other words, a structuralist perspec-
tive is replaced by a largely transformational-
generative one. Such a turning point was pre-
pared by a widespread interest in the production
of film, debated in the early seventies. Farassino,
for instance,134 demonstrates the complexity of
film as a technico-industrial product and puts
forward so me proposals for a methodological
renovation of semiotics. Casetti 135 maintains that
only the examination of cinernatographie praxis
will cast some light on the films of modernity,
namely, those by Straub, Godard, and Garrel.
Lastly, Bettetini l36 systematically investigates the
relationships between themaking of a film as a
matel'ial object and the making of a film as a
symbolic object. In particular, Bettetini pro-
pos es three decisive stages of control: the moment
of planning (when the author's expressive pur-
pose emerges), the moment of comparison with
130Forma e parola ne! cinema (Padova: Liviana, 1970).
131Nascita de! racconto cinematografico (Padova: Patron, 1974).
132fl telefilm sperimentale (Roma: mimeograph, 1972).
I33See Giorgio Tinazzi's inquiry on "Strutturalismo e critica
del film," in Bianco e nero, 3-4 (1972).
134In "11 cinema iconico e la semiotica della produzione fil-
mica," Carte segrete, 18 (1972).
13s"Nuova semiotica, nuovo cinema," fkon, 88-9 (1974).
I36Produzione de! senso e messa in scena (Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
310 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO,CASETTI
other filmic works (when the singularity of a text
turns into a play of countless references), and
the moment of reading (when the audience inter-
venes with its owninterpretation).
Such an interest in the dynamics of film found
a new and more comprehensive arrangement
when enriched by the hypotheses of text gram-
mars. Casetti 137 proposed a elear distinction, in
the case of cinema too, between grammaticality,
adequacy, and semantic consistency, and hence
focuses on such crucial phenomena as the pro-
cedures producing consistency, the relationships
between topic and comment, and the existence
of a pragmatic framework. Bettetini 138 analyzes
aspects of time in film. In particular, time is
studied as an enunciational rather than a seman-
tic component (in other words as duration, a
factor of continuity and discontinuity), as a pro-
ducer of entailments and implications, as an ele-
ment that may be subjected to modal analysis,
and so on. In this book too Bettetini combines
theoretical hypotheses with concrete investiga-
tions of some film sequences.
In this brief survey other important contri-
butions, have been left out, and the suggestion
of dividing the itinerary of Italian film semiotics
into three stages should not imply a succession
of mutually impermeable periods. The structur-
alist framework, far instance, is still alive and
prornotes some excellent contributions, some of
which are critical toward their own premises,
theshortcomings of which are now apparent. 139
The main trends of film semiotics, however, are
the on es tentatively reconstructed here, and cur-
rent debate tends to verifY the traditional semiotic
framework and take hold of the tools provided
by textual researches.
E. Literature
The development of relations between semiot-
, ics and literature has already been referred to in
the section devoted to the different approaches
used in Italy. As a matter of fact, the work done
in the literary field provides a good model of
137"Il testo del film," Comunicazioni sociali, 3 (1979).
I38Tempo dei senso (Milano: Bompiani, 1979).
I39See, for example, Grande, "I codici connotativi neHe anal-
isi del film," VS, 17 (1977); or Farassino, "Il trucco e 10
spettacolo," in Hollywood 1969-1979.1magini,piacere, dominio,
ed. Bruno Torri (Venezia: Marsilio, 1980).
methodological efforts in nearly all branches of
semiotic practice, in particular, because of the
great seriousness that characterized a whole tra-
dition of studies preceding the new (semiotic)
approaches. An innovation, in fact, is often the
result of the burden of earlier institutions.
In Italian literary criticism, a breakthrough
to a semiotic formulation was provided by struc-
tural linguistics and formal criticism. To these
two main trends should be added stylistic crit-
icism, which in Italy, where it was founded on
translations of Spitzer's and Auerbach's works,
lost some of its idealistic connotations and turned
into a concrete study of and formal interpreta-
tion of texts. Outstanding representatives of
Italian stylistic criticism are Benvenuto Terra-
cini and Giacomo Devoto, two linguists involved
in dialectological and Indo-Europeim studies,
respectively. Emphasizing the innovative and
creative moments oflinguistic activity, they both
eventually turned to the literary field. Devoto,
for instance, hypothesized an "individual lan-
guage" (a concept elose to the notion of idiolect)
mediating between langue and language use. l4D
With reference to the penetrating and struc-
turally anticipatory work of Gianfranco Conti ni
during the forties and fifties, we may say that in
Italy the field of literary criticism was ready to
be fertilized by a new theoretical approach which
was semiotic in nature. After several examples
of structural criticism,141 in 1965 the general cat-
alog of the publishing house "Il Saggiatore"
ineluded a survey, edited by Segre, which con-
tained contributions by Corti, Rosiello, Segre,
and others, and which may be considered the
first Italian text devoted to the semiotics of lit-
erature. 142 This investigation, accomplished by
means of a questionnaire, gives ex am pies of all
the topics of the debate to come: the resort to
structuralism, conceived either as an ontological
reference or as a method of research; the differ-
ence between linguistic and exelusively semantic
analyses of texts; and the relationships between
the individual artistic activity and the system to
which it belongs.
l4{)See G. Devoto, Studi di stilistica (Firenze, 1950).
l4IAldo Rossi, 1963 and 1964; Luigi Rosiello, 1963 and 1965;
MarceHo Pagnini, 1964; Silvio d' Arco Avalle, 1965; Cesare
Segre, 1965.
l42Cesare Segre, ed., StruUuralismo e critica (Milano: Il Sag-
giatore, 1965).
 ITALY
In the meantime, the Italian bibliography of
literary semiotics was growing, including Eco's
narratological approach in the aforementioned
"Le strutture narrative in Fleming," Ezio Rai-
mondi's Tecniche delta critica letteraria,143 and Guido
Guglielmi's La letteratura come sistema e come
junzione.144
In 1966, Italian publishers resolutely entered
a semiotic stage of development. The works of
Propp, Barthes, Sklovskij, and Erlich were trans-
lated, and in 1967 De Mauro edited Saussure's
Gours de linguistique generale.
The intense activity of these years in the field
of literary criticism has been summarized in a
volume edited by Corti and Segre,145 with con-
tributions by Cesare Cases (sociological criti-
cisrn), Raimondi (symbolic criticism), Michel
David (psychoanalytic criticism), Dante Isella
(stylistic criticism), Gian Luigi Beccaria (criti-
cism and history of Italian), Pagnini (formalistic
criticism), Segre (structuralist criticism), Eco
(semiological criticism), and many others
The basic problem of a criticism hinging on
semiotic assumptions appeared with increasing
clarity to be an oscillation between two different
attitudes: either a preference for research on the
langue, the deviations from which may be con-
ceived as an emphasis upon the code (in this
case semiotic criticism becomes apart of lin-
guistics), or a preference for studying the literary
system of an author or a school, in which case
semiotic criticism acquires de jure an autonomy
of its own when applied to literary languages-
i.e., to systems of deviations institutionalized in
practice. Any single work should, therefore, be
contras ted with the "general context of the lan-
guage of a given author" (Avalle) or, resorting
to a concept borrowed from linguistics, one may
say that the task of structural (not structuralist)
criticism is to single out "the aesthetic idiolect
proper to any single work" (Eco).
In the meantime, "semiotic" criticism devel-
oped according to structuralist models in Pag-
nini's analyses of Shakespeare's 20th sonnet and
John Donne's poems,146 and in another book of
his, in which linguistic and formal interests in
the "new criticism" are combined with more tra-
ditional approaches, concentrating on the
143(Torino: Einaudi, 1967).
144(Torino: Einaudi, 1967).
145 1 metodi aUuali delta critiea in Italia (Torino: ERI, 1970).
146(Torino: Einaudi, 1970).
311
semantic aspects of texts, on their allegorical
construction, and on literary his tory itself. 147
Avalle points out the balladlike structure of
an epigram by Montale, "A Liuba che parte,"
thus suggesting a connection (which was beyond
Montale's intentions) with the poet's interest in
the world of opera. 148 The production, however,
is very large and intricate and cannot be sum-
marized here. Among the scholars working in
this direction, in spite of differences and disa-
greements, one should at least mention Aldo
Rossi, Letizia Grassi, Ezio Raimondi, Oreste
Macri, and Alessandro Serpieri.
According to the foregoing remarks (cf. the
section above on "Paths of Semiotics"), formal-
istic criticism, stimulated by the work of Erlich,
Todorov, Propp, Barthes, Greimas, and Bre-
mond, produced textual analyses by Avalle
(Dante), Corti (Fenoglio), and Eco (Fleming).
In the seventies, when the semiotic debate would
shed light on the basic issues of discourse and
literary communication, this abiding attention
to single texts became the fulcrum of studies by
Italian scholars.
In addition to the works mentioned in the se;c-
tion above on"Theories and Methodologies," the
following outstanding contributions should be
no ted here: Avalle l49 compares Propp's models
with the phonological models of the Prague
school, and, above all, points out some recurrent
"motifs" such as "macro-signs," used in different
ways by those authors. Corti l50 treats the "rus-
tic" and "bucolic" literary genres before turning
her attention to Principi delta comunicazione letter-
aria. 151 Other names to be mentioned are Rossi,
Aldo Ruffinetti, Gian Paolo Caprettini, Pagnini,
and Serpieri. Serpieri brings semiotic analysis
back to the problems of meaning, and discovers
in metaphor a generative link between deep
structure and conceptual system. 152
In the seventies, the Italian scholar most deeply
involved in literary criticism was undoubtedly
147 Cf. Struttura letteraria e metodo eritieo (Messina/Firenze:
D'Anna, 1967).
148In Strumenti eritici, 2 (1968), pp. 314-19; now in Tre saggi
su Montale (Torino: Einaudi, 1970).
149In Modelli semiologiei nelta Commedia di Dante (Milano: Bom-
piani, 1975).
ISO Strumenti eri/iei, 17 (1972).
151 1976.
152See T. S. Eliot: le strutture profonde (Bologna: 11 Mulino,
1973) and Otelto, l'Eros negato (Mi1ano: Il Formichiere,
1978).
312 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI

munications. This field, owing to its communi-

Segre, whose vast activity as a critic and essayist
has culminated in two important books: I segni cational implications, its interest in "strong"
e la critica l53 and Le strutture e il tempo. 154 The first
codifications, and in the "normal" structuring of
volume still belongs to the area of structuralist messages conceived of as a basis for deviations
semiotics depending upon linguistic studies. The and for various autonomous expressions, imme-
author considers the creative, inventive, and diately found an organic connection with the new
anticonventional aspects that characterize the usediscipline.
of signs in an expressive dimension. In the sec- In the mid-sixties, Italian semiotic activity in
ond book, on the other hand, narratological and the spheres of advertising, television, and jour-
communicational aspects are combined, and a nalistic language was outstanding in comparison
semiotic reevaluation of the historical dimension with other countries, at least in terms of the large
of the literary text and main lines of the ana- number of studies undertaken and published,
lytical approach is proposed. Segre recently pub- and for the methodological originality of some
investigations.
lished Semiotica filologica, 155 in which the pragmatic
dimension of literary communication as well as The semiosis of advertising has been StUdlE'-'
the unity of the text, conceived as the focus of from two basic perspectives. One focuses on th,-
audio-visual structures of messages, and there-
the investigation, are explicitly defined. Signs are
considered in their modalities of production and fore on the relations between word and image
reception, with reference to unconscious com- and their mutual semiotic interactions. The other
ponents, and using the interpretative criterion focuses on the language of advertising. Dorfles l59
of intertextuality. studied some ideological values (safeness, soft-
In Eco's Lector in Jabula (1979), the receiverness, etc.), as reference points in a connotative
(model reader) is presented as thoroughly reading of advertising messages, regardless of
involved in the making ofliterature. A pragmatic their medium of expression. In the same year,
perspective is also dominant in Pagnini's book, Lamberto Pignotti l60 studied all possible inter-
Pragmatica delta letteratura. 156 actions and mutual interconnections between
With regard to the intersection of literary advertising and poetic language.
semiotics and psychoanalysis, Francesco Orlan- In 1968, ECO l61 applied Jakobson's function-
do's Letturafreudiana delta "Phedre"157 and Per una
alist model to the advertising text, emphasizing
teoria freudiana delta letteratura l58 should be men-
the presence of the aesthetic and especially the
emotive function. The advertising message aims
tioned. Italian literary semiotics looks, therefore,
at persuasion by means of some aesthetic allure,
like a melting pot of different critical approaches
(all of them, however, concerned wi th the formalexpressive surprise, and also rhetorical patterns.
aspects of texts), rather than like a field for the-
He thus proposes a rhetorical investigation of
oretical elaboration and methodological praxis advertising according to the two basic perspec-
independent of any local tradition. Being an tives of the verbal and visual systems. In the
organic development of an earlier tradition rather
latter, three levels of codification may be singled
than a radical alternative has perhaps caused out: the iconic, charged with a strong emotive
connotation; the iconographic, attentive both to
Italian literary semiotics to stand out among other
kindred practices, and has enhanced its position the his tory of imagery and to the specific imagery
at the editorial and academic levels. of advertising; and the tropological (pertaining
to the figures of speech), in which the visual
equivalents of the figures described by tradi-
F. Mass Communications tional rhetoric are identified. Eco illustrates his
Advertising, television, and the analysis of theoretical and methodological position with the
journalistic language were the original interests analysis of a few advertising messages.
of Italian semioticians working on mass com- Other interesting studies based on a "corpus"
of texts include: "Deus ex machina," by Paolo
153(Torino: Einaudi, 1969).
154(Torino: Einaudi, 1974).
155 (Torino: Einaudi, 1979). 159In Nuovi riti, nuovi miti (Torino: Einaudi, 1965).
156(Pa1ermo: Sellerio, 1980). 160"Linguaggio poetico e linguaggi tecnologici," La Battana,
157(Torino: Einaudi, 1971). 5 (1965).
15B(Torino: Einaudi, 1973). 161 La struttura assente.
 ITALY
Baldi and Mauro Wolf,162 and Carosello 0
dell'educazione serale, by Omar Calabrese. 163 Baldi
and Wolf, analyzing some films advertising a
brand of olive oil, consider the language of com-
mercials as a parasitic instrument which assim-
ilates semiotic materials and systems which are
preexistent in the context, thus giving rise to a
thoroughly factitious, and al ready constituted,
symbolic universe. Calabrese, on the other hand,
in his analysis of television advertising, res orts
to Aristotelian rhetoric, used as an actual the-
oretical model of mass communications. Besides
the rhetorical approach, Calabrese makes use of
semiotic investigations on the language of film
and the methodological instruments proposed by
Propp and Greimas. Paolo Fabbri's position, on
the other hand, is developed in a more theoret-
ical perspective. 164
The relationships between advertising posters
and urban space are scrutinized in other works:
Maldonado's La speranza progettuale/ 65 G. Roma-
nelli's "Citta-pubblicita,,166 and 11 sup~rnulla/67
and Pignotti's Pubbli-citta. 168 Maldonado and
Romanelli, both referring to the city of Las Vegas,
question a spontaneist interpretation of its urban
outfittings, as was developed by some contem-
porary scholars. Along the same line, Pignotti
proposes to arrange the various forms of adver-
tising in the urban space into categories and
subcategories.
The investigations of Gianfranco Folena and
Ugo Castagnotto, on the other hand, are lin-
guistically oriented. Folena,169 who studies the
morphology of verbal advertising, is a forerun-
ner in this field, both in Italy and abroad. In
Castagnotto's Semantica della pubblicita/ 70 the
semantic analysis also embraces an extralin-
guistic element, the speaker, as a measure of the
personal participation in the production of con-
sent. The mystification of advertising, therefore,
exploits the subjective and unconscious dispo-
sitions of the addressee in order to insinuate
162Paper delivered in 1974 at the first Congress of the lASS,
now in S. Chatman et al., eds., A Semiotic Landscape (The
Hague: Mouton, 1979).
163(Firenze; CLUSF, 1975).
16'See the short essay, "I processi pubblicitari: analisi semi- un progetto di ricerca sui generi televisivi,175 edited by
otica," Sipra, 6 (1973).
165(Torino: Einaudi, 1970).
1660p. eit., 25 (1972).
167(Firenze: Guaraldi, 1974).
168 (Firenze: CLUSF, 1974).
'69"Aspetti della lingua contemporanea: la 1ingua e la pub-
blicitä.," Cultura e scuola, 9 (1964).
17°(Roma: Silva, 1970).
313
inferential meanings. In this way Castagnotto
anticipates, in the linguistic field, the position of
Baldi and Wolf.
As for the application of semiotic analyses to
television, at the meeting held in Perugia in 1965
devoted to "Televisione e pubblico" (Television
and Audience), a group of young scholars (Eco,
Fabbri, Pierpaolo Giglioli, and Gilberto Tinacci
Mannelli) delivered papers on the possibilities
and conveniences of studying television com-
munication at a serniotic level. In Bettetini's book,
La regia televisiva,171 a parasemiotic approach to
television is proposed on the basis of technical
and theoretical assumptions. Eco and Bettetini
would later investigate the field of television again
from a semiotic viewpoint, the former in "Lignes
d'une recherche semiologique sur le message tel-
evisuel,"I72 the latter in "Segno e simbolo nella
nostra societa.,,173 The two scholars (especially
Bettetini) have conducted many investigations
of the semiotic aspects of the television message,
primarily at the "Istituto Agostino Gemelli per
i Problemi della Comunicazione" in Milan, and
at the "Servizio Opinioni" of the RAI (Radi-
otelevisione Italiana).
The Istituto A. Gemelli is concerned with a
structural analysis of meaningful units in the
languages of cinema and television, as well as
with general theoretical problems of television
communication, the semiotics oficonicity, build-
ing up information on the small screen, and
audiovisual didactics. All of these topics and
many others are approached in an interdiscipli-
nary perspective, interlacing the semiotic view
with sociological, psychological, and psycholin:-
guistic ones.
Casetti, Beppe Cereda, Grasso, Farassino,
Mimmo Lombezzi, and Ugo Volli are the schol-
ars in this area most attentive to the semiotic
dimension. Casetti and Farassino have co-au-
thored 11 tele.film sperimentale. Saggio di lettura semiol-
ogica delta serie televisiva "Autori Nuovi, ,,174 produced
by the Servizio Opinioni of the RAI, which
increasingly resorts to a semiotic approach in its
analyses. An interesting result of this activity of
the Servizio Opinioni 5~ Contributi bibliogra.fici ad
171 (Brescia: La Scuola, 1965).
172Various authors, Recherche sur les systemes signifiants (The
Hague: Mouton, 1973).
173 Bit International, 8/9 (1972).
'7i(Mimeograph, 1972).
I75(Roma: mimeograph, 1977).
314 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANGESCO CASETTI
Bettetini, Casetti, Fabbri, Fua, Lombezzi, and
Wolf, who propose some perspectives of semiotic
inquiry emphasizing the notion of "genre." These
hypotheses were later verified in the research
"Indagine su alcune regole di genere televisivo,"
sponsored by the Rizzoli Foundation and carried
out by Casetti, Lucia Lumbelli and Wolf under
the direction of Bettetini. 176 Elisa Calzavara and
Enrico Celli's ideas on the subject stern from the
ambit of the Servizio Opinioni and from the
didactic praxis of the RAI and are collected in
the popular volume, II iavoro dz· spettatore, 177 m •
which a semiotically founded critical attitude
toward the ftow of audio-visual images is
presented.
The field of journalistic language, which is the
third guiding line of I talian semiotic research
applied to mass communications, has been
investigated by Maurizio Dardano 178 and Patri-
zia Violi. 179 In this area, as well as in the area
of television, a great many of the studies done
have been conducted at the Istituto Gemelli, the
Rizzoli Foundation, and university departments.
They have often served as the subject matter of
debates and conferences involving both I talian
and foreign scholars and cultural operators.
With regard to comics, Caprettini's "Gram-
matica dei fumetto,"180 as well as the large con-
tribution by several university departments,
should be mentioned.
At this point, it can easily be noticed that
Italian scholars have not been intent on for-
mulating general theories of mass communica-
tions in a semiotic perspective but have preferred
to test approaches derived from other research
areas (Iinguistics, film, literature, iconism). See,
for instance: Fabbri's "Le comunicazioni di massa
in I talia: Sguardo semiotico e malocchio della
sociologia,"181 a methodological rather than
theoretical text; Wolfs "Aspetti teorici nello stu-
dio delle comunicazioni di massa;"182 and the
critical synthesis by Bettetini, Casetti, and
Farassino, "Produzione dei senso e studi semi-
otici. ,,183 N evertheless, the application of semiot-
176In Ricerche sulla comunicazione (Istituto Gemelli), 2, 1980; 3,
1981.
177(Roma: Armando, 1975).
178 Il linguaggio dei giornali italiani (Bari: Laterza, 1973).
179"Illinguaggio di Lotta Continua," VS,6 (1973).
180Strumenti critici, 13 (1970).
181Various authors, La ricerca in Italia sulle comunicazioni di
massa (Bologna: Forni, 1978).
182Ibid.
Is3Ibid.
ics to mass communications, in Italy, has
produced some outstanding scientific results.
G. Music
Musical semiotics in Italy is represented by
some of Dorftes' contributions, a study by Pag-
nini, and above all by Gino Stefani's research.
Dorftes has studied the problems of commu-
nication and signification concerning the musi-
cal event. Among other contributions, see his
lecture delivered at the First Congress of the
IASS I84 and his comparative analyses in L'inter-
vallo perduto .185
Pagnini, aiming at a semiotic definition of
musicallanguage, has investigated the relation-
ships between language and the semiotic struc-
ture of music in Lingua e musica. 186
Stefani, dealing with the semantic dimension
of musical communication, has emphasized the
cognitive aspects of music rather than its emo-
tional value. His "reading" at the level of deno-
tation concerns the first and immediate meaning
codified by the cultural context, while his notion
of connotation refers to all the cultural units that
the signifier may recall to the addressee's mind.
Stefani then presents a vast and intricate survey
of possible connotative components, ranging from
intentional values (cadence, timbres, etc.) to
global axiological connotations, which may give
the musical work a moral and political sense.
Such a semantic attitude overcomes the tra-
ditional debate about the "meaning" of music
by means of a reference to a semiotic frame-
work-the correspondence between articulation
at the level of expression and articulation at the
level of content. Given the highly aesthetic com-
ponent of the musical message, its ambiguity is
not questioned at all: the structural approach,
consisting of several possible readings, is pro-
posed. Stefani's most significant works are
"Semiotique en musicologie," 187 Musica barocca:
. 188 an d SemlOtzca
poetica e ideoiogza, . . deiia muszca.
. 189
184Now in S. Chatman et al., eds., A Semiotic Landscape (The
Hague: Mouton, 1979).
185His 1atest book, ci ted above, note 106.
186(Bo1ogna: 11 Mulino, 1974).
187VS, 5 (1973).
188(Mi1ano: Bompiani, 1974).
189(Pa1ermo: Sellerio, 1976).
 ITALY
Musical semiotics is one of the topics devel-
oped in Bettetini's latest book, Tempo dei sen50, 190
in which the temporality in filmic enunciation
and its contribution to the production of sense
are contrasted with the case of musical
performance.
The domain of semiotics of music does not,
therefore, seem to be very fertile. In spite of the
commitment of the scholars involved, and the
high quality of their work, the semiotic issue has
not yet been thoroughly accepted in the tradi-
tional musical environments. As in the case of
architecture, cultural anthropology and theater,
the "official" scholars and cultural operators are
more curious about semiotic practices than per-
suaded of their efficacy or sometimes even of
their legitimacy. In the case ofmusic, the burden
of traditional training and practices is particu-
larly restricting, and even suffocating, in a coun-
try like Italy.
H. Nonverbal Communication
Nonverbal communication is a domain scarcely
investigated by Italian semioticians, who have
just popularized, or rather propagated, the work
done abroad, have proposed some areas of
inquiries, and have developed a few studies at
so me universities. Paralinguistics, kinesics, and
proxemics have aroused great interest and have
often been presented as working hypotheses or
magical and mysterious formulas for the solution
of complex semiotic problems, but they have
never produced any outstanding and original
research or theoretical proposals. All the aspects
of nonverbal communication, therefore, are con-
sidered as legitimate and even determinant in
any semiotic analysis, and are also interpreted
according to imported models. But they are dis-
missed when original research is involved; in this
case, the basic issues of semiotics are often stated,
but their solutions are not even hin ted at.
Thus, after the definition of its scope and sub-
ject by Eco, 191 and after De Mauro's introduction
to La comunica;::ione non verbale/ 92 there have been
just a few contributions in the areas of theatrical
semiotics, folklore semiotics, and communicative
190(Milano: Bornpiani, 1979).
1915ee Eco, in La struttura assente.
192(Bari: Laterza, 1974).
315
interactions between sensorially impaired
subjects.
Eco defines paralinguistics as the study of voice
tones and nonpertinent variants accompanying
linguistic communication, and hypothesizes its
systematization (also in the case of motivated
and natural features) and its conventionaliza-
tion. As for kinesics, Eco anticipates its extension
to all gestures, body movements, and postures.
Physiological determination is discarded in favor
of cultural variables. In the proxemic field, Eco
points out a kind of specificity in the study of
so-called micro-cultural manifestations, inde-
pendent of the biological his tory of the subject
and of phonological implications, and which can
be divided into fixed configurations (e.g., city
plans), quasi-fixed configurations (e.g., coffee
shops and railroad stations), and informal ones,
which may be subjected to Hall's classification.
De Mauro, on the other hand, diachronically
retraces the interest in nonverbal languages,
emphasizing the new researches on animal com-
munication and paralinguistic phenomena.
Oddly enough, these notions were not well
received in I taly, while Stankiewicz, in his stud-
ies of emotive language, explicitly refers to Ter-
racini's stylistic analyses (although criticizing his
overwhelming emphasis on cognitive language),
and anthropologists such as De Jorio and Coc-
chiara have given attention to communicational
problems connected with gestures.
In the domain of semiotics of the theater, Fer-
ruccio Marotti 193 shows the systematic dissocia-
tion between gesture and speech in the classical
oriental theater, so that gesture is endowed with
a capability of autonomous signification. In the
mimicry of the Noh theater, the sign function of
gesture hinges on some principles, in which a
few semiotic operations, singled out by Marotti,
can provide a code.
Also in 1974, Franco Ruffini, 194, studying the
interaction of word and gesture, defines a com-
plex function, a kind of sign co-production, that
can no longer be narrowly inscribed in either of
the domains of the two different codifications.
193"Per un'analisi dei testi orientali: la codificabilita del 'ges-
tuale'. La gestualita tra 'significazione' e 'pratica'," in
Letteratura e critiea, Studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno III
(2.I)(Rorna: Bulzoni, 1974).
191"Serniotica del teatro: la stabilizzazione del senso," Biblio-
leea leatrale, !Oll I (1974).
316 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI

Bettetini also faces the problems of providing "La funzione dellinguaggio nell'Acte.sans parole
a semiotic system of gestures, at both the addres- di S. Beckett,"199 in which the author stresses
ser's and the addressee's level. 195 Going back to the preeminence of the poetic function of lan-
the work of Greimas, Bettetini proposes a clas- guage over the referential one, even within the
sification of the different typologies of gestures scope of the written text, although Beckett's work
used on the stage, starting from the most phys- seemingly exhibits a linguistic reference. The
iologically determined (which can be found in written text is decomposed into discrete mean-
any culture whatsoever) up to the most arbitrary ingful units, which provide a much clearer pic-
and conventional ones. tu re of the production proced ures (e.g.,
Marco De Marinis, a young scholar interested repetition) than the one that can be attained at
in the relations hip between semiotics and the the level of representation.
theater, in introducing a recently published Segre's research is midway between the lin-
anthology of essays by mimes and scholars of guistic and the so-called literary line--the latter
mime, refers to a few semiotic issues. 196 focusing on the written text as its object of
As for studies of the communicative behavior research, a choice that has stirred up many
of sensorially impaired persons, we may mention polemics among scholars. This perspective is
Maria Ester Civelli's investigations from within shared by Pagnini,200 who, although paying some
the perspective of symbolic interactionism. attention to the large number of non-linguistic
Arecent synthesis of Italian and foreign stud- levels interacting in a play, distinguishing "oper-
ies in the field of nonverbal communication is ational complex" from "script complex," and
found in Patrizia Violi's book La comunicazione proposing film recording as a document of the
non verbale. 197 performance to be analyzed by the semiotician,
nevertheless gives top priority to the written text
as a kind of deep structure of stage communi-
I. Theater cation. The dynamic units of the text, therefore,
should be located-with reference to Chomsky's
Italy has been, and is, a seminal ground for theories-in the framework of a particular deep
both rethinking and developing semiotic studies structure, namely, "writing." Pagnini, then, pro-
of the theater, first as a place for documentation, poses to test his own assumptions with an anal-
exchange, and bibliographic research and later ysis of a scene from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Besides
as an internationally known center of original this, he is one of the first scholars in Italy to
elaboration and cultural promotion. Italian operate in the perspective of semiotics of the
semiotics of the theater is a remarkable scientific theater. 201
experience, although the tradition al institutions Paola Gulli Pugliatti also accepts the primacy
in this field (production, critics, press, and uni- of the written text over the other elements of a
versity) are not yet completely open to the new play, although he moves in a different direction
theoretical and methodological issues. from Pagnini and other Italian and foreign schol-
Three main trends may be singled out: a lin- ars. For this author, the text is conceived of as
guistic line, concerned with the use of language the metalinguistic translation of a pretextual sce-
as an instrument of communication on the stage; nic project. In I segni latenti. Scrittura come virtualita
a literary line, involved in the semiotic issues of scenica in "King Lear, ,>202 Gulli Pugliatti proposes
the written text; and a broadly semiotic line, to analyze the units of the written text not as
focusing on all the sign components of the the- elements to be trans la ted into the staging of the
atrical performance. play, but rather as "the linguistic transcription
To the first trend belong Giovanni Nencioni's of a scenic potentiality which is at the basis of
essay "Parlato-parlato, parlato-scritto, parlato- the written text." Such a tentative and mediating
recitato, " 198 and also, to a certain extent, Segre's
199In Strutture e il tempo, cited above.
19'In Produzione dei senso e messa in seena (Milano: Bompiani, 200"Per una semiologia del teatro classico," Strumenti eritiei,
1975). 12 (1970).
196Mimo e mimi (Firenze-Milano: La casa Usher, 1980). 201 Already seriously considered in Struttura letteraria e metodo
197(Milano: Editoriale Espresso, 1980). eritieo (Firenze-Messina: D'Anna, 1967).
198Strumenti eritiei, 28 (1976). 202(Firenze-Messina: D'Anna, 1976).
 ITALY 317
text is presented as bearing both explicit and models in order to face the complex articulation
implicit indications of nonverbal elements and, of codes in a play.
therefore, as structured at many levels of sig- Ruffini's "Semiotica deI teatro; ricogmzlOne
nification. The theoretical treatment is followed degli studi,,207 criticizes the mechanical trans-
by a elose and brilliant reading of Shakespeare's position of linguistic methods to other semiotic
King Lear. spheres, as well as the lack of rigorous definitions
Midway between the analysis of the written of some basic concepts (such as code, metalan-
text and that of the whole semiotic structure of guage, etc.) in their references to the theater.
the theatrical performance is Serpieri's essay, Ruffini does not agree with the trend emphasiz-
Otello. L'Eros negato (quoted above), in which the ing the literary text, and focuses instead on an
meanings produced by the metaphoric system of integrated text, constructed by me ans of the lin-
the play are scrutinized. Serpieri also directed a guistic code and furnishing all possible infor-
study in which the text is the starting point of mation concerning staging, gestures, mimicry,
the investigations of the potentialities of a scenic paralinguistic behaviors, lighting, and so on. Such
performance. 203 an integrated text should be composed with a
Let us now consider the third trend, which is resort to all possible sourees, descriptions, evi-
concerned with the semiosis of the playas per- dence, and iconographic documents, so that a
formed on stage. In 1972, the Venice Biennale socio-anthropological approach, inscribed within
organized a round table significantly entitled "Per the semiotic one, is possible. In "Per
una semiotica del teatro." Eco, in his paper pre- un'epistemologia deI teatro deI '700: 10 spazio
sen ted for this round table, minimized the scenico in Ferdinando Galli Bibbiena,,,208 Ruf-
semiotic power of the written text and gave pride fini ascribes a metonymie value to the perspec-
of place to "a human body that exhibits itself tive space of the Bolognese playwright,
and moves" as the primary aspect of the the- contrasting it with the basically metaphoric con-
atrical communication. The possibility of trans- ception of Baroque scenography.209
forming real objects or natural events into Within the scope of these issues, an interesting
theatrical signs is taken into account, and "sim- and original text is Bettetini's aforementioned
ulation" is studied in all its implications by means Produzione de! senso e messa in scena. The author,
of signifying procedures. This lecture 204 is con- al ready involved in a presemiotic approach to
eluded by a proposal to apply the devices of stage performance in Il segno, dalla magia jino al
syntactic and semantic analysis (transforma- cinema,210 and starting from theoretical founda-
tional-generative grammar ineluded) to theat- tions, ventures on a semiotic investigation of two
rical fiction, which is considered the place par communicational domains: cinema and theater.
excellence for checking some syntactic and sem an- From a theoretical point of view, Bettetini elab-
tic issues. orates the notion of"sense production," allowing
De Marinis and Patrizia Magli,205 although for the socio-cultural, operational, ideologieal,
accepting Mounin's hypothesis concerning the economic, and above all the "discourse" con-
theater as action, emphasize its comrmnica- text-the last one consisting of intertextual con-
tional aspects and propose a translinguistic nections, determining the emergence of a
approach. This text was later rewritten by De message, or a text, in the communicational mar-
Marinis,206 who suggests the planning of mul- ket. Once he has made it elear that every com-
tidimensional (heterogeneous and nonspecific) munication event, even the most referential one,
entails a kind of staging, the author confronts
the two types of mise en scene-the screen and the
2°'Now in various authors, Gome comunica il teatro: dal testo alla
scena (Milano: 11 Formichiere, 1978).
201Now in Andre Helbo, ed., Semiologie de la representation Biblioteca teatrale, 9 (1974).
207

(Bruxelles: Complexe, 1975). Biblioteca teatrale, 3 (1972).

20S"Pour une approche semiotique du theatre comme mes-
sage multilineaire," lecture delivered at the First Congress
of the lASS, now in S. Chatman et al., eds., A Semiotic
Landscape (The Hague: Mouton).
2061n "Problemi e metodi di un approccio semiotico al tea-
tro," Lingua e stile, 10/2 (1975).
208
209Ruffini's later works are: "Semiotica dei teatro: per
un'epistemologia degli studi teatrali" and "Analisi con-
testuale della Calandria nella rappresentazione urbinate
del 1513: I. 11 luogo teatrale," both in Biblioteca teatrale,
1976, 14 and 15/16.
210(Milano: I, no. 7, 1962).
318 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
stage-in which the distancing between signifier
and signified, and the shaping of a world other
than the one of everyday life, are structured in
a concrete and non-metaphoric space, namely,
the cinema and theater.
These two spheres of performance may be
approached with a single semiotic methodology,
which preserves their respective technical dif-
ferences, a position derived from Garroni's afore-
mentioned Progetto di semiotica. I t mayaiso be
approached by means of two notions referring
to the whole communicational circuit of per-
formance: on the addresser's side, the notion of
mise en scene, conceived as a productive organi-
zation of discourse and as adefinition of aspace
for performance; on the receiver's side, the notion
of "multidimensional and productive reading"
(derived from Barthes), which underlines the
contributions to the formation of meaning. After
having dealt with the issue of the code structure
of a text (in the case of theater, "text" means
the performance, the scenic event) and of the
hierarchies between the different systems of
codes-with an emphasis on the notion of "tex-
tu al role," representative of many codes-Bet-
tetini tackles the controversial subject of the
semiotically oriented transcription of a stage
event and proposes different solutions depending
on its particular features. Bettetini's la test book
on semiotics, Tempo del senso, is also largely
devoted to problems of the semiotics of the thea-
ter, namely, the structuring of time by the stage
event, and its bearing on meaning. The stage is
considered as an apparatus producing time, or,
better yet, producing signification by means of
time. An interdisciplinary approach is therefore
set forth, in which the semiotic dimension min-
gles with the psychological one in order to elu-
cidate the modalities of the relations between
the time of the stage performance and the "inner"
time of the audience.
Italian semiotics of the theater, as we have
already no ted at the beginning of this section,
has been marked by many documentary and,
more specifically bibliographical interests. In the
perspective of the latter, De Marini's and Mag-
li's essay, "Materiali bibliografici per una semi-
otica dei teatro, ,,211 and Bettetini's and De
211VS, 11 (1975).
Marini's volume, Teatro e comunicazione,212 which
largely form the earlier research, should be
mentioned.
The high standard of Italian studies of semiot-
ics of the theater is not matched by analyses of
single performances. The aforementioned con-
tributions are in the main theoretically or at most
methodologically founded, with very few
instances of analysis-almost all of them focus-
ing on the written text. In other words, I talian
semiotics of the theater talks a lot about theater,
a lot about itself (in this domain the internal
debate is more lively and vivacious than any-
where else), and focuses on (ascinating and reli-
able projects, but, at the same time, is not an
assiduous theatergoer. It is a fussy, sophisti-
cated, and hypercritical spectator, unwilling to
approach to the actual place of the performance,
for fear either of compromising itself or of being
bitterly disappointed. Could it be laziness or, as
some scholars maintain, insufficient structures
and poverty of means? Let us wait with confi-
dence. In the coming years we williearn whether
in Italy the application of semiotic models to the
theater has been just a fashionble linguistic exer-
cise, undeservedly celebrated with academic
acknowledgments, or has turned out to be a rig-
orous and useful scientific procedure.
We hope that the situation will improve,
because the stage seems a fundamental place for
semiotic practice, thanks to its multilinear com-
plexity at the level of codes, its connotative rich-
ness, and the pragmatic issues activated in the
communicational exchange.
J. Visual Communication
Visual communication has been a touchs tone
for semiotics. First of all, semiotics, faced with
phenomena that seem to operate upon "spon-
taneity" and "immediacy," had to prove that
they too are bound by effective-though not
apparent-codifications and rules of construc-
tion. Second, semiotics had to experiment with
becoming independent of linguistics. Faced with
research instruments which are reliable insofar
as they belong to a guiding science, but ineffi-
cient insofar as they are not related to an essen-
tially visual field, semiotics has been compelled
212(Rimini-Firenze: Guaraldi, 1977).
 ITALY
to formulate new categories of analysis. Third,
this discipline had to find the range of applic-
ability of its models. The great variety of signs,
ranging from snapshots to graphs, raised the issue
of whether, and to wh at extent, a single theo-
retical matrix could· embrace aB of them. It is
easy to und erstand now why there have been,
in Italy, so many impassioned studies of icon-
icity. Even before focusing on a specific field,
such studies investigated the consistency, reach,
and significance of semiotics.
The issue of iconicity was first extensively
debated by Eco. In La struttura assente/ 13 Eco
criticized the tradition al way of stating the prob-
lem. To say that an icon is similar to its deno-
tatum because of so me common features is either
a false statement (the painting of Queen Eliza-
beth has none of the characteristics of Queen
Elizabeth in the ftesh) or a tautology (an icon is
similar because of its ... similarity). The anal-
ysis should not start from the equivalence between
image and object, but rather from that between
perception of the image and perception of the
object. In this case, one will easily realize the
existence of some design features, allowing the
recognition of an object (e.g., the stripes of a
zebra), as weB as the existence of graphie devices,
allowing the understanding of a figure (e.g., the
play of light and shade, rendering the sensation
of stripes). An iconic code, therefore, is what
connects the design features of an object with
the graphie devices of an image. Making use of
this code, an iconic sign may choose and arrange
its own components in such a way that the rep-
resentational pattern is homologous to the per-
ceptual pattern. Both elements, however-i.e.,
the design features of the objects and the graphie
devices of the images-are the product of cul-
tural conventions. This means that the iconic
code and sign are ruled by the principle of arbi-
trariness and may, therefore, be dealt with
according to a linguistic model.
Eco's intervention started a lively discussion
in the subsequent years. The first issue to be
debated pertained to the referent. Many scholars
maintained the independence oficon and reality.
Alberto Farassino,21 for instance, examines some
cases in which an object is used as a sign-for
213(Milano: Bompiani, 1968).
214"Richiamo al significante," VS, 3 (1972).
319
example, a lighter being used to mean "lighter"-
and concludes that, in such instances, there is
no reference to reality, but rather reality is used
to express a concept. Francesco Casetti215 studies
the possibilities of defining the "content" of an
image by means of other images, in the same
way as the content of a discourse can be expressed
by means of other discourses. Aglobai framing
of the problem was provided by Eco, who claims,
in Segno 216 and Trattato di semiotica generale,217 that
the meaning of any sign-and therefore of any
iconic sign-is a cultural unit, socially and his-
toricaBy determined. In other words, the referent
is nothing but a ground or a horizon, something
which can be directly experienced by means of
"factual judgments" and mayaiso provide the
material of the sign vehicle, but it is at the same
time something which is alien to the interests of
semiotics, because this discipline is concerned
with the processes of communication and sig-
nification of things, and not with the things
themselves.
Eco's position was attacked by Tomas Mal-
donado,218 who defends the cognitive value of
the icon. The iconic sign really and directly refers
to its denotatum, and this very relations hip per-
mits the comprehension of reality. This renewal
of interest in the referent is to be viewed from
within the perspective of two methodological
options: on the one hand, operationalism, which
leads Maldonado to consider iconicity as a prod-
uct as well as a verifiable construction; on the
other hand, a "critical his tory" of the techniques
of indexical iconicity, with the aim of explaining
in what ways material reproduction becomes a
sign vehicle, and vice versa. The artifactual
nature of the icon and the variety of manufac-
turing procedures, therefore, may suggest that
the introduction of the referent into semiosis is
nevertheless "mediated," and that such a media-
tion is produced by technical-operational prac-
ti ces rather than by cultural determinants in the
broad sense.
Instead of following the debate stirred up by
Maldonado's paper, we are going to conclude
this trend in research with a reference to U go
215"Discussione sull'iconismo," VS,3 (1972).
216(Milano: ISEDI, 1972).
217(Milano: Bompiani, 1975).
21S"Appunti sull'iconicita," Auanguardia e ra;;;ionalitii (Torino:
Einaudi, 1974).
320 GIANFRANCO BETTETINI AND FRANCESCO CASETTI
Volli's essay, "Analisi semiotica della comuni-
cazione iconica,"219 which is midway between
the two positions. Voll i maintains that iconic
phenomena may be represented by functions in
the logico-mathematical sense. Given two sets,
the starting set A and the projection set B
(broadly speaking, all the points of an object and
all the points of a figure), the transition from A
to B is ruled by such criteria as the preservation
of a pertinent structure (the culturally marked
elements are emphasized), the preservation of
an analytic structure (B reproduces the partial
arrangement of the design features in A), and
the preservation of a contextual structure (the
elements and the features are never isolated).
Hence, set B may preserve the topological char-
acteristics of A (order, measure of distances, and
proportions), thus making it possible to study
the relations between A and B as geometrical
transformations, but also to point out the dif-
ferent degrees of iconism: "high" degrees, when
congruences and similarities are respected, and
"low" degrees, when only the topological char-
acteristics are transferred.
The other trend in the debate on iconicity has
concerned the relations between image and word,
rather than between image and reality. It is
another way of focalizing the nature and struc-
ture of the iconic sign, in both its specific and
its more general characteristics. The coexistence
of the two kinds of signs-namely, their inter-
twining in a composite syntagma-has been
studied by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle in his dose
analysis of posters. 220 Bettetini investigates
instead the ways in which visual discourse is
conditioned by linguistic patterns. He examines
some cinematographic metaphors in silent mov-
ies and observes that many of them are an actual
mise en seime of equivalent verbal metaphors. 221
Segre, moreover, studies an interesting case of
circularity between verbal enunciation and fig-
urative representation. He analyzes some inven-
zioni" (inventions) by Leonardo da Vinci-i.e.,
designs of works still to be painted-stressing
both the moments in which the word "trans-
lates" the image, and the moments in which the
word "explicates" the image. In particular, spa-
tial and temporal values are emphasized in the
219Ikon, 95 (1975).
220 Parolai Immagine. Maniftsti de! Museum of Modern Art (Parma:
Istituto di Storia deli 'Arte, 1971).
221"La crisi dell'iconicita nella metafora visiva," VS,3 (1972).
two languages, as weIl as the function of per-
spective in providing a framework capable of
balancing the viewpoints of the sender and the
. 222
receIver.
To this aspect of the debate also belongs a
very interesting contribution, meant as a sketch
of the foundations of a semiotics of the icon:
Garroni's lmmagine e linguaggio. 223 The author
wonders under what conditions an image may
"exhibit" a linguistic conceptual structure. ("To
exhibit" does not refer, here, to the mere trans-
lation of one language into another but to the
visual counterpart of a conceptual relation
expressible by means of a linguistic proposition.
In other words Garroni studies the possibility of
an image being endowed with meaning
(expressed in a verbal form too), and its capacity
to refer to such a meaning in order both to be
recognized for its denotatum and to be assumed
in the dass of images constituting the counter-
part of the same conceptual relation (better yet,
exhibiting the same "verbal definition"). One of
the most crucial issues at stake here is the iden-
tity of an icon and its possible variants. More
specifically, when mayageometrie figure, the
author wonders, be assumed to be an image of
a cirde, and to what extent maya circumference
be alte red without turning into something else,
for instance, a triangle? Although this example
concerns a geometric figure, the same questions
may be asked about a picture, a realistic paint-
ing, and so on. In his quest for a solution, Gar-
roni discovers that the variability of an image
depends on the number of conditions expressed
by the "verbal definition" (which is exhibited by
the image), upon the explicitness of such con-
ditions, and on the peculiar ways in which the
image is used. In condusion, the recognition of
any image whatsoever depends upon the con-
nection established with the conceptual, and lin-
guistically expressible, meaning which is
exhibited by the image. In other words, an image
cannot attain a semiotic status without reference
to a "verbal definition."
The I talian debate on iconicity was not
restricted, of course, to the aforementioned top-
ics. At present, for instance, there is a tendency
222"La descrizione al futura," in Semiotica filologica (Torino:
Einaudi, 1979).
223(Urbino: Centra Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguis-
tica, 1973).
 ITALY 321
to analyze visual commuication in terms of speech Pavia (Facolta di Lettere), Naples (Istituto Ori-
acts theory and the utterance theory, although entale), Bologna (several courses in the Dipar-
the results are still to be verified. timento d'arte, musica, spettacolo of the Facolta
di Lettere), and in Milan (Scuola Superiore delle
comunicazione sociali). Many professors in other
departments-especially Italian literature, for-
IV. Institutional Framework eign literatures, aesthetics, architecture, cinema,
etc.-are involved in semiotic research, which is
After having presented the various areas of also apart of the subject matter of their courses.
research, we are going to conclude this survey Besides the universities noted above, other inter-
of semiotics in Italy by sketching a map of the esting universities are in Palermo, Florence, and
operational centers of semiotic activity. Parma. In Parma, there is also a university-con-
The first to be mentioned is the Associazione trolled institution, the Centro studi e archivio della
italiana di studi semiotici (AISS), founded in comunicazione, directed by Arturo Carlo Quinta-
1972 and located at the Facolta di Lettere of valle, Professor of Art History. This center con-
Pavia University. The AISS publishes a news- tinuously organizes, often according to semiotic
letter and holds annual meetings, many of which criteria, exhibits of art, design, and photography.
have been devoted to specific topics: in 1975, for There are also other organizations which have
instance, the notion of code; in 1976, some aspects promoted and financed semiotic studies. First of
of iconicity; in 1978, semiotics of culture, in one all, the Istituto A. Gemelli, in Milan, which has
section, and semiotics and education in another; carried out pioneering activity in this field, is
in 1980, his tory of semiotics. The proceedings involved in visual communication research and
of these meetings have al ready been published. publishes two journals, Ikon and Ricerche sulla
The AISS attracts most of the Italian semioti- comunicazione; the Servizio Opinioni of the RAI (the
cians and, at the same time, functions as a link public broadcasting system), which sometimes
between some regional centers, each of them uses a semiotic approach in its investigations;
working in an autonomous direction. Among and the Fondazione Rizzoli, which is mainly inter-
these are: the Circolo semiologico siciliano, which is ested in mass communications.
devoted to studies of culture and folklore and As for serial publications designed to accom-
publishes aseries of "quaderni" (notebooks, of modate book-length contributions to the theory
which there are already 20 titles) and has orga- of signs, the following can be singled out: Semi-
nized some important international conferences, otica e pratica sociale, directed by Maldonado,
the first in 1970, on "Structures and genres in Prieto, Rossi-Landi, and Schaff, and published
ethnic literatures"; the Centro romano di semiotica, by Feltrinelli; Studi Bompiani, edited by Eco, Corti,
which is active mainly in the field of teaching Bonomi, Bettetini, and others, and published by
and has published some interesting didactic Bompiani; Segno e interpretazione, directed by Pie-
contributions; the Centro di ricerche semiotiche of tro Montani and published by Officina; and Studi
Turin, which is animated by literary interests linguistici e semiologici, published by Il Mulino;
and is involved in the organization of lectures the Quaderni of the Centro semiologico siciliano;
and the editing of aseries of books published by and the Working Papers of the Centro interna-
Giappichelli; and the Centro comasco di semiotica, zionale di semiotica e linguistica, in Urbino.
which specializes in research on iconicity. The Other publishing houses interested in semiotics
Centro internazionale di semiotica e linguistica of but having no series of books devoted to it include
U rbino, which for several years has organized Einaudi, Flaccovio, Il Saggiatore, Pratiche, and
seminars and symposia each summer and has Sellerio.
published an important series of working papers, Among the periodicals most directly con-
deserves special mention because of its inter- cerned with semiotics we will mention Versus (VS),
national renown and the vast number of its a specialized journal edited by Eco and pub-
activities. lished by Bompiani since 1974; Lingua e stile,
The university is, however, the main frame- published in Bologna by Il Mulino; Strumenti cri-
work in which semiotic research is carried out. tici, published in Torino by Einaudi; and Uomo
Semiotics is taught in Turin (Facolta di Lettere) , e cultura, published in Palermo by Flaccovio.
 CHAPTER 14

Semiotics in Japan
Tomonori Toyama

I. The Historical Development J apanese his tory (compiled in 712), and

of Semiotics in Japan Nihonshoki 3 (compiled in 720), for example, we
cannot find the word kigo, but only shirushi and
A. Japanese Traditional Concepts of shirusu. Shirushi in these writings is a polysemous
a Sign l word, and various matters are called shirushi.
For example, there is one "shirushi," resulting
The word sign is usually translated into J apanese from a prayer to God, which stands for the fact
as kigo. The word kigo, however, originated in that a bird was killed by casting aspeIl. The fact
Chinese and was introduced intoJapanese a long functions as a prediction that the vow would
time ago. We call such Sino-Japanese words come true. 4 What is called shirushi in Kojiki and
kango, whereas native J apanese words are called Nihonshoki depends on various situations. How-
wago. In wago, kigo is shirushi. Shirushi is usually ever, it seems we can recognize a general idea
trans la ted as mark in English. covered by the term "shirushi." This leads to the
The word shirushi has various meanings: an statement that shirushi is a kind of vehicle which
impression, a tally stick, a visible object of known has the function of letting someone know some-
position, a ftag design, a notice, a symptom, an thing, according to Ichiro Yamamoto's expla-
omen, a clue, or an effect. The verbal form of nation. 5 Yamamoto explains the function of
shirushi is shirusu, which means to memorize, to shirushi in his book by quoting a poem from
record, to note, to sign, to name, to register, or Man'yoshii 6 compiled in 759, the oldest existing
to chronicle. These differences that fall within collection of poems in Japan. In the poem the
the meaning of shirushi or shirusu can be rep- function of shirushi is represented.
resented by the use of different kanji (ideogram The exact age when the word kigo was brought
introduced from Chinese). in from Chinese cannot be determined as yet.
In Kojiki,2 the oldest existing book on early
"Nihonshoki, notcd by Iukichi Takeda, 6 vols., Nihon Koten
'Tomonori Toyama, "The Traditional Idea of Sign in Jap- Zensho (Tokyo: Asahi-Shinbunsha, 1948-1957).
anese Usage" (inJapanese), Sludia Semiolica, I OASS, 1981), 'Kojiki, pp. 197-199. .
pp. 35-48. . 'Ichirö Yamamoto, Koloba no Telsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanaml-
'''Kojiki,'' noted by Kenji Kurano, in Kojiki Norilo, Nlhon Shoten, 1965), p. 365.
Koten Bungaku Taikei, I (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1958). 6Man'yöshii, not~d by Ichinosuke Takagi, Tomohide Gomi
and Susumu üno, 4 vols., Nihon Koten Bungaku Talkei,
Tomonori Toyama • Department of Education, Shizuoka 4-7, No. 18.4096, IV, (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1957-1962),
University, Shizuoka, Japan 422. 281.

323
324 TOMONORITOYAMA
The oldest literature, however, so far as I know,
in which the word kigö appears, is a religious
writing, Shöbögenzö.7 It was written some time
between 1231 and 1253 by the Buddhist priest
Dögen (1200-53) who founded Zen in Japan.
He uses the word kigö in the form of averb,
kigösuru, in the sense of keeping in mind and
remembering something. 8 It is clear that he is
using the kango "kigösuru" in place of the wago
"shirusu." As an example of its usage he refers
to keeping in mi nd and remembering the place
where a Buddhist priest hung his gown by means
of a mark consisting of a letter enclosed in a
circle. 9 It can be easily supposed that the mark
itself came to be called kigö. In fact it appears
in the writing by Morisada Kitagawa (181O-?),
"Morisada Mankö."10 Morisada was a folklorist
and described the custom of his age. From the
description of marks and symbols in "Morisada
Mankö," we can see that he explains the word
kigö as a synonym for shirushi, which was in cur-
rent usage at the time. 11 Also he notes the dif-
ference between a kigö and a letter or a crest,
and the method of designing a kigö from letters
or crests. 12
At the end of the nineteenth century the words
for mathematical "sign" and chemical "symbol"
were translated as "kigö" with the introduction
of European science. 13 It seems that the word
kigö became popular in education texts, bringing
a limited signification to such symbols as +, -,
=, and so forth. The word symbol, by the way,
as a term of literary criticism and aesthetics, was
translated from French with a newly coinedJap-
anese word shöchö, also at the end of the nine-
teenth century.14
Thus, things which were called shirushi in the
past had particular and concrete meanings, and
'Dögen, "Shöbögenzö," in Taishö Shinshii Dai:dikyii, Vol. 82,
No. 2582 (Tokyo: Daizö-Shuppan, 1965).
8Ibid., p. 184.
9Ibid., p. 3l.
IOMorisada Kitagawa, "Morisada Mankö," in Kinsei Füzoku
Jiten, trans. and ed. Tsutomu Ema, Toranosuke Nishioka
and Giichirö Hamada (Tokyo: Jinbutsuöraisha, 1967).
"Ibid., pp. 174, 41l.
12Ibid., pp. 25, 48, 174, 41l.
l'Nihon Kagakushi Gakkai, ed., Nihon Kagaku Gijutsushi Taikei,
Vo1s. 1 and 8 (Tokyo: Daiichihöki-Shuppan, 1964 and 1969),
538 and 549; 78, 86, 140, 182, 193-97, 316, 507-09 and
529-30, respectively.
14Izuru Shinmura, Gogen wo Saguru, ed. Takeshi Shinmura
(Tokyo: Kyöiku-Shuppan, 1976), pp. 74-76.
the reason why they were called shirushi lay in
their various symbolic functions. This is not far
from the definition of a sign in modern semiotics.
Later the word kigö ca me to be used as a syn-
onym of shirushi. But it became more abstract,
more figurative, and narrower in definition with
the introduction of the European sciences, as we
see in the alodern usage of this term.
B. Semiotics in }apanese Tradition
Semiotics as such did not develop in Japan.
There are, however, some works in the classics
which are interesting and significant for semiot-
ics, in the fields of religion, poetics, aesthetics,
and philosophy. They have yet to be reviewed
from the view point of semiotics, so that I shall
refer only to some of these works, and provide
only a rough sketch of the historical context
below.
1. Religion
Buddhism was introduced toJapan from Korea
and China beginning in the sixth century, and
developed into aJ apanese form. Mikkyö or Shin-
gon Buddhism, founded by Kükai (773-835) in
the early eighth century, is a religious sect influ-
enced by Tantric Buddhism, and Mikkyö is a
complex of sign systems. Its doctrine and its
manners consist of many types of signs which
are based on its distinctive epistemology. It is
very remarkable, for example, that the method
of entering into meditation is explained by Taikö
Yamasaki as a process composed of three stages l5
which correspond exactly to Charles S. Pierce's
three categories.
Although most of these semiotic characteris-
tics of Mikkyö are due to the Tantra, we should
not disregard the contributions of Kükai's own
disposition: to a remarkable degree his thought
is both systematic and semiotic. For example he
explains the function of sentences in the intro-
duction of Bunkyö-hiforon, which is a systematic
guide to composition, as follows. Senten ces must
have an obvious signified object and logic, so
that their signification and context are plain;
people understand the words through the written
characters and get the signification through this
15Taikö Yamasaki, Mikkyii Meisiihö (Kyoto: Nagata-Bun-
shödö, 1974), pp. 221-32.
 JAPAN
reading process, and only then do they under-
stand it for the first time. 16
This is the first work in Japan, so far as I
know, on semiotics. It may be said that Kilkai
corresponds to St. Augustine in the his tory of
European semiotics, as a pioneer who dealt with
semiotics of language at approximately the same
period.
2. Poetics and Aesthetics
Japanese traditional poems belong to two dis-
tinctive forms: waka and haikai (haiku). Waka is
the earlier form. Haikai was developed from
waka. Man'yiishii is the oldest extant collection
of waka. In Man'yiishii we can find some theories
of waka composition.1 7 Japanese tradition al
poetics was closely related to the development
of waka and haikai. The poetics for haikai was
virtually completed by Basho (1644-1694). While
Ferdinand de Saussure refers to the immutability
and the mutability of sign in his GOUTS,18 Basho
does the same in his poetics.!9 It is calledfoeki-
ryiikii 'immutability-mutability' theory, and is
one of the most important theories in his poetics.
It actually originated, however, in Shunzei Fuji-
wara's (1114-1204) poetics for waka. 20 We can
find some similarities between Shunzei's poetics
and Basho's.2! This means that Basho evolved
his theories on haikai from the traditions of waka.
It is a kind of signification theory, and relates
closely to the theory of No, which is Japanese
traditional theater.
No was established on the traditions of Den-
gaku folk-art theater, which was popular since
ancient times. As the result of this continuous
lGKukai, "Bunkyö-hifuron," in Kijbij Daishi Zenshii, ed. Mik-
kyö Bunka Kenkyusho, 3 (Osaka: Mikkyö Bunka Kenk-
yusho, 1965), p. 2; Kukai, "Bunkyö-hifuron-Jo," in Nihon
no Meicho, 3, ed. Köji Fukunaga (Tokyo: Chuö-köronsha,
1977), p. 303.
17Haruo Fujihira, "Karon no Nagare," in Karon-shii, noted
by Fumio Hashimoto et al., Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshu,
50 (Tokyo: Shögakukan, 1979), p. 5.
lBFerdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale, ed. Tul-
lio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1975), pp. 104-13.
19Bashö, BashO Haikai Ronshii, ed. Toyotaka Komiya and
Saburö Yokozawa, Iwanami Bunko (Tokyo: Iwanami-
Shoten, 1939), pp. 28-37.
2°Shunzei Fujiwara, "Korai Futei-shö," noted by Tamotsu Ari-
yoshi, in Karon-shii, 5th ed. Nihon Koten Bungaku Zenshu,
50 (Tokyo: Shögakukan, 1979), pp. 271-465.
21Tsutomu Ogata and Makoto Öoka, Basho no Jidai, Energy
Taiwa, 16 (Tokyo: Esso Standard Sekiyu Kabushiki Kaisha
Köhöbu, 1980).
325
development, the aesthetics of theater was quite
refined as a sign system. Fiishikaden written by
Zeami (1363-1443)22 is a representative example
of writing on the topic of the sign system of No.
The Japanese semiotic tradition which origi-
nated in the age of Man'yiishii was refined in the
age of Zeami and Basho. Related to this is the
fact that the tea ceremony was perfected in the
sixteenth century. Thus many key concepts were
developed through these traditional folk arts, and
they compose a significant part of the concepts
of Japanese aesthetics today.
3. Philosophy
Kilkai was not only a great religious figure,
but also a great philosopher. Takeshi Umehara
says that Kilkai grasped the cosmos on the level
of representation, so that the doctrine of Mikkyo
is neither merely idealistic nor merely materi-
alistic. 23 This is also the reason why the doctrine
is a complex of sign systems.
On the one hand, a systematic epistemology
was developed through Mikkyo and on the other,
a psychological and symbolic epistemology was
developed through Zen. The semiotic and epis-
temological comparison between Zen and Mik-
kyo may be an interesting subject in the future
of semiotic studies. In this respect we should
examine the work by Kyoson Tsuchida,24 which
is the semiotic analysis of the symbolism in the
Avatamsaka Sutra.
Baien Miura (1723-1789) was a philosopher of
the Yedo period whose theory had considerable semi-
otic characteristics. The principle of his philoso-
phy is based on the principle of dialectical theory
called the hankangiiitsu, which means a unification
of two opposing concepts. He distinguishes three
categorized existences, ko, ki, and Ti within the con-
cept which unifies various sensuous impressions.
"Ko" refers to individual events which actually
occur; "ki" refers to substantial and material exist-
ence; "ri" refers to universal existence. 25 It seems
that these are the three stages of experience.
22Zeami, Fiishikaden, noted by Toyoichirö Nogami and Minoru
Nishio, Iwanami Bunko (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1958).
23Takeshi Umehara, Kiikai no Shiso ni tsuite, Ködansha Gaku-
jutsu Bunko (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1980), pp. 42, 74 and 110.
24Kyöson Tsuch~a, ShOcho no Tetsugaku, Sösho Meicho no
Fukkö, 13 (1919; rpt. Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1971).
25Baien Miura, Miura Baien Shii, ed. Hiroto Saigusa,Iwanami
Bunko (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1953), pp. 16-20; Hiroto
Saigusa, Nihon no Chisei to Gijutsu (Tokyo: Daiichishobö,
1939), pp. 40-42.
326 TOMONORITOYAMA
"Rigaku Hiketsu," written by Ryuko Kamata
(1754-1821) in 1815, also has somewhat semiotic
characteristics. He explains knowledge as the
product of perceptions, and memory as the prod-
uct of habits. 2G
C. Studies in Traditional Marks and
Symbols
There are some references to traditional sym-
bols in Morisada Kitagawa's "Morisada
Manko:" crested coats, marks of fire companies,
shop marks, and so on. 27 Thc first general studies
in heraldry were made by Raisuke N umata
(1867 -1934).28 The seal, which is another typical
traditional symbol, has been studied by several
scholars: Minahiko Ogino, for example, studied
it historically.29 Nihon no Shirushi written by Mas-
ato Takahashi is a study of Japanese general
traditional marks and symbols, from the view-
point of the use of design in Japanese folk art. 30
Folk art as a science was established in Japan
by Kumagusu Minakata (1867-1941).31 Min-
akata's understanding of the mandala in Mik-
ky6-Minakata Mandala,32 so to speak-can be
regarded as a kind of semiotics. I t is an inter-
pretation of the mandala in Mikkyo as a sci-
entific methodology. It is also a kind of process
toward conception of a Weltanschauung, which
consists of "mind," "substance," "occurrence,"
"essence," and "image": the mind dctermines
the substance; the correlation of the mind and
the substance brings an occurrence; the occur-
rence remains as the essen ce; and the image is
the reftection of the essence. 33 "Essence" in Min-
akata Mandala probably corresponds to Myogo,
(niimiidheya in Buddhism), which is a kind of
symbol, and the semiotic distinction between the
26Ryukö Kamata, "Rigaku Hiketsu," in Nihon Kagaku Koten
Zenshii, 6th ed. Hiroto Saigusa (Tokyo: Asahi-Shinbunsha,
1942), pp. 493-526.
27Kitagawa, pp. 25, 174 and 411.
2"Raisuke Numata, Nihon Monsha Gaku (1926; rpt. Tokyo:
Jinbutsuöraisha, 1972).
'''Minahiko Ogino, Inshii, Nihon Rekishi Sösho, ed. Nihon
Rekishi Gakkai, 13 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa-Köbunkan, 1972).
'lOMasato Takahashi, Nihon no Shirushi, 4 vols. (Tokyo: I wa-
saki-Bijutsusha, 1973).
31Kumagusu Minakata, Minakata Kumagusu Zenshii, 12 vols.
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1971-1975).
3'Kazuko Tsurumi, Minakata Kumagusu, Nihon Minzoku
Bunka Taikei, 4 (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1978), pp. 77-81.
!IIbid., pp. 333-42.
myogo and signs IS being studied by
philosophers. 3t
Also, I should refer to Shuzo Kuki's (1888-
1941) works, which made clear the structure of
the key concepts of J apanese tradi tional aes-
thetic: iki,Jiiryii, andjocho. 35 He analyzes the aes-
thetic quality "iki" as a sign which presents the
past and present mode of existence and individ-
ual historical culture. 36 Also, he does this not
according to its causation, but according to its
hermeneutic phenomena. 37 Then he designates
"dyadic possibility" as the existential condition
characteris tic of both the in ten tional phenomena
and the mode of existence of iki. 38 Takeshi
Yasuda and Michitaro Tada have noted in their
colloquy the semiotic aspects of Kuki's work. 39
Most works on Japanese traditional signs,
however, are not based on an interest in modern
semiotics. We can list a large body of literature
which might be concerned with semiotic studies,
if we disregard whether the works are based on
modern semiotics or not. The endeavor to
describe J apanese culture based on semiotics is
continued by Shunsuke Tsurumi and his fellow
members of the Kigo no Kai 'the group for the
study of signs'. They issued special numbers of
the monthly journal Shiso no Kagaku in 1965 and
1969 concerning that sort of semiotic work. 40 Also,
Reiichi Horii, a linguist, is pursuing J apanese
semiotics from the perspective of folk legends. 41
D. Modern Semiotics inJapan
1. A Classic of Modern Semiotics in Japan
Kyoson Tsuchida's (1891-1934) semiotics is
a forgotten classic of modern semiotics in Japan.
He wrote his thesis about the phenomenological
31Tokuryu Yamauehi, "Shingö, Kigö, Myögö," Ryiikoku Dai-
gaku Ronshii, 383 (Ryukoku University, 1967), pp. 1-29.
"'Shuzö Kuki, 'Iki' no Kaza (Hoka Ni-Hen), Iwanami Bunko
(1930; rept. Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1979).
36Ibid., p. 12.
17Ibid., pp. 18-19.
38Ibid., pp. 22-23, 27, 50-51 and 58.
39Takeshi Yasuda and Miehitarö Tada, " 'Iki no Közö' wo
Yomu," Asahi Sensho, 132 (Tokyo: Asahi-Shinbunsha,
1979).
4°"Nihonjin no Shöehö," Shisa no Kagaku, 34 Oanuary 1965);
"Nihon no Kokoro to sono Kigö," Shisa no Kagaku, 94 (Oeto-
ber 1969).
11Reiiehi Horii, "Kigögaku to Gengogaku," Bungaku Ronsa,
47 (1972), pp. 51-75.
 JAPAN 327
consideration of cognition in 1918. In the fol- contents, that is, forms, "Sollen," "concept" and
lowing year he developed the last chapter into "unum."50 According to his definition, the con-
a book on the philosophy of symbols. 42 It is a tent of the intentional experiences and the form
phenomenological study of symbols. In his book of the requiring experiences are irrationally com-
he proposes a Wesenswissenschaft called Zeichens- bined in symbols, so that the ego is symbolized
lehre to deal with signs in general, as the basis in the contents and at the same time the object
of linguistic philosophy and g'rammar. 43 His phi- is symbolized in the forms. 51
losophy of symbols, therefore, is apart of the Tsuchida's philosophy is based on Husserl's
Zeichenslehre. And it is limited to "logical expe- phenomenology, and also refers to Natorp, Bol-
riences" among the "intentional experiences" zano, Brentano, and others. He refers to the phi-
which are pure experiences of consciousness. 44 losophy of Buddhism, too. The semiotic
Within intentional experiences he distinguishes interpretation of Buddhism is realized in his con-
the "act" and the "contents," that is, the "mean- sideration of symbols. 52
ing" which is correlated with the act, and the Another forgotten original semiotic work in
"object. ,,45 The structure of his theory is that the Japan was named Hyägen-gaku, a theory of rep-
meaning mediates between the ego and objects resentation, and published in 1935 by the phi-
through the intentional act. 46 Tsuchida enum- losopher Ken Yamazaki (1903- ) .53 The
erates three types of acts of logical experiences: object of this theory is a sign which has the
"emotional acts," "judgments" and "acts of rep- relation with its object, on the one hand, and
resentation. ,,47 Therefore three contents and three with its interpretation, on the other. That is, he
objects of these acts are distinguished: the con- thought of the sign as the representation of
tents are "value," "fact," and "representation"; something-the object of the sign, which will be
and the objects are "fact," "representation" and interpreted by somebody. Although the begin-
"intuitive idea."48 That is, the object of the emo- nings of his theory run parallel to Peirce' s
tional acts is the contents of the judgment, and semiotics, it is regrettable that it was developed
the object of the judgment is the contents of the in only an introductory manner.
acts of representation. I tappears that these three
types of acts of the intentional experiences cor-
res pond to "argument," "dicent" and "rheme" 2. Introduction of the Classics of
in Charles S. Peirce's division of signs. 49 But Modern Western Semiotics
Tsuchida does not refer to this. He was probably
unaware of Peirce's categories and division of I t is very regrettable that no one followed
signs. Tsuchida says that these intentional expe- Tsuchida's semiotics. Afterwards only the intro-
riences are based on the point of view of the ego, duction of the European and the American
and in addition we can posit contrary experi- semiotics achieved success. Most of the signifi-
ences, named "requiring experiences," from the cant classics of modern semiotics had been intro-
point of view of the object. He called the three duced by 1960. I t seems, however, that they were
types of acts in the requiring experiences "act- rarely considered together under a unified dis-
requiring-Sollen," "act-requiring-composition" cipline, namely, semiotics. Ferdinand de Saus-
and "act-requiring-existence." And he called their sure's theory was regarded only as apart of
generallinguistics; that of C. K. Ogden and I. A.
Richards as part ot semantics; Charles S. Peirce's
42Tsuchida, pp. 339-41.
43Ibid., p. 33. as part of philosophy; Charles W. Morris's as
44Ibid., pp, 41, 76. part of behavioral science; and Susanne K. Lan-
45Ibid., p. 43. ger's as part of symbolic philosophy or aesthet-
"'Toshirö Ueki, "Tsuchida Kyöson no Shogai," in ShöchO no ics. This means that the aspects of semiotics one
Tetsugaku, by K. Tsuchida (Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1971),
p.342.
happened to notice depended on one's particular
47Tsuchida, p. 77.
48Ibid., p. 79. 50Tsuchida, pp. 168-70.
49Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 5IIbid., p. 190.
ed. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss and Arther W. Burks, 52Ibid., pp. 196-203.
8 vol. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965-1966), "Ken Yamazaki, Hyögen-gaku Gairon (Tokyo: Töenshobö,
2.250-253. 1935).
328 TOMONORI TOYAMA
field of interest. This made interdisciplinary-
minded activities difficult to carry out, and
remains the situation today. An outline of the
introduction of the semiotic classics would be as
folIows:
As for Ferdinand de Saussure: The first trans-
lation of the Gours (edited by Bally and Seche-
haye) into Japanese was published in 1928. 54
The last revised edition was in 1972. 55 The trans-
lation of the Gours edited by Robert Godel was
published in 1971,56 and the translation of Tullio
de Mauro's commentary followed in 1976. 57
Hideo Kobayashi's article on the conditions sur-
rounding the introduction of Saussure's linguis-
tics in Japan a ppeared in Gengo, V 01 urne 7. 58
A translation of Ogden and RichaFds' The
Meaning oJ Meaning was published in 1936. 59 The
fourth reprint has been issued. In his comment
added to the translation, Shigehiko Toyama refers
to the conditions surrounding the studies of
Ogden and Richards' theory in Japan before and
after its publication. 60
As for C. S. Peirce, although pragmatism had
been introduced to Japan at the end of the nine-
teenth century,61 Peirce's theory was somehow
ignored for many years, except in the appendix
to The Meaning if Meaning. 62 It was in 1950 that
Peirce's semiotics was introduced in Japan for
the first time by Shunsuke Tsurumi. He explained
Peirce's semiotics as the principle of pragmatism
and as a "thought-measuring technique."63 But
54Ferdinand de Saussure, Gengogaku Genron, ed. Charles Bally
and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Hideo Kobayashi (Tokyo:
Oka-Shoten, 1928).
55Ferdinand de Saussure, Ippan Gengogaku Kögi, ed. Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Hideo Kobayashi, 3rd
ed. (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1972).
56Ferdinand de Saus sure, GengogakuJosetsu, ed. Robert Godel,
trans. Kimio Yamauchi, (Tokyo: Keisöshobö, 1971).
57Ferdinand de Saussure, 'Saussure Ippan Gengogaku Kiigi' Kiichii,
Tullio de Maura, trans. Kimio Yamauchi ed. (Tokyo: Jir-
itsushobö, 1976).
58Hideo Kobayashi, "Nihon ni akeru Saussure no Eikyö,"
Gengo, 7, No. 3 (March 1978), 44-49.
59C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Imi no Imi, trans. Kötarö
Ishibashi (1936; rpt. Tokyo: Shinsensha, 1967).
6OShigehiko Toyama, "Kaisetsu," in Imi no Imi, by C. K.
Ogden and I. A. Richards, trans. K. Ishibashi (Tokyo:
Shinsensha, 1967), pp. 466-68.
61Ikuo Uotsu, "Nihon ni okeru Pragmatism," Shisii, 383 (May
1956), pp. 39-59.
620gden and Richards, pp. 361-76.
63Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Sügaku-Sokuryö Gijutsu kara
Sekaikan e," in American Shisiishi, ed. Shisö no Kagaku
Kenkyükai, 3 (Tokyo: Nihon-hyöronsha, 1950), pp. 85-
86.
the publication of Japanese translations did not
come untillater: "Questions Concerning Facul-
ties Claimed for Man,,,64 "Some Consequences
of Four Incapacities,"65 "The Fixation of
Belief,"66 "How to Make Our Ideas Clear,,,67
"What Pragmatism Is,,,68 "Issues of Pragmati-
cism,"69 "The Law of Mind,"70 and "Evolution-
ary Love,,71 in 1968,72 "On a New List of
Categories,,73 in 1975/4 and "Division of Signs,,75
in 1977. 76
As for Charles William Morris: Shunsuke
Tsurumi introduced the theoretical system of
Morris's semiotics in 1947,77 and Signs, Language,
and Behaviorwas published in Japanese in 1960. 78
TheJapanese translation of Susanne K. Lan-
ger's Philosophy in a New Key was published in
1960,79 and Problems in Art in 1967. 80
3. Activities in the Individual Fields
and Interdisciplinary Activities
Original works and movements in semiotics
followed the introduction of the modern Western
classics. These became numerous after the 1950s.
The interest in semiotics increased, following the
interest in cybernetics, systems engineering,
information theory, and linguistics in the 1960s.
64Peirce, 5, 213-263.
65Ibid., 5, 264-317.
66Ibid., 5, 358-387.
67Ibid., 5, 388-410.
68Ibid., 5, 411-437.
69Ibid., 5, 438-452.
7°Ibid., 6, 104-163.
71Ibid., 6, 287-317.
72Charles S. Peirce, "Ronbun-shü," in Sekai no Meicho, 48,
ed. S. Ueyama, trans. Shunpei Ueyama and Masao
Yamashita (Tokyo: Chüö-köronsha, 1968), pp. 51-262.
73Peirce, CP, 1.545-559.
74Charles S. Peirce, "Atarashii Category Hyö ni tsuite," trans.
Tomonari Toyama, et al., Kagakusha Undii, 2 (May 1975),
pp. 86-102.
75Peirce, CP, 2.227-273.
76Charles S. Peirce, "Kigö Bunrui," trans. Tomonori Toy-
ama, Teruyuki Monnai, et al., Gendai Shiso, 5, No. 1 Oan-
uary 1977), 44-62.
"Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Morris no Kigöron Taikei," in Tsu-
rumi Shunsuke Chosakushii (1947; rpt. Tokyo: Chikumashöbö,
1975), pp. 330-52.
78Charles W. Morris, Kigii to Gengo to Kiidö, trans. Kinkichi
Ryö (Tokyo: Sanseidö, 1960).
79Susanne K. Langer, Symbol no Tetsugaku, trans. Masato Yano,
Yasuta Ikegami, Kenji Kishi and Hiroitsu Kondö (Tokyo:
Iwanami-Shoten, 1960).
80Susanne K. Langer, Geijutsu towa Nanika, trans. Yasuta
Ikegami and Masato Yano, Iwanami Shinsho (Toky<J:
Iwanami-Shaten, 1967).
 JAPAN
This activated journalistic interests in semiotics:
the journal Gendai Shisii published special issues
in 1973 on Ferdinand de Saus sure, Roman
Jakobson, and Noam Chomsky,81 in 1975 on the
language,82 in 1976 on linguistic theory,83 and in
1979 on semiotics today;81 the journal Gengo pub-
lished special issues in 1977 on linguistic phi-
10sophy,85 and in 1978 on Saussure;86 and the
journal Shisii published a special issue in 1977
on the semiotics of culture. 87 The journalistic
activities accelerated the introduction o( the lat-
est European semiotics, especially French and
Soviet, so that modern Western semiotics became
very well known. But the uneven introduction
also created confusion, because of the prolifer-
ation of types of semiotics. People also lacked
adequate information on the history of semiotics
and semiotic studies, so it was difficult to develop
an understanding of the subject. Another prob-
lem is the lack of a faculty for the academic study
of semiotics at universities. Nevertheless, inter-
disciplinary activities and discussions were lim-
ited to journalistic treatments except in a few
cases. Most semiotic studies have contributed to
the development of individual disciplines rather
than the development of semiotics. And the
uneven introduction created a gap between the
semiotic studies in traditional J apanese culture
and those inftuenced by European semiotics.
It was under these conditions that the Japa-
nese Association for Semiotic Studies UASS) was
launched by a number of academic and prag-
matic researchers in April 1980, under the
leadership of Shigeo Kawamoto ofWaseda Uni-
versity and Masao Yamaguchi of the Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies. Thomas A. Sebeok
of Indiana U niversity was invited to its opening
ceremony, and he presented a lecture on non-
verbal communication.
Preceding the foundation of the JASS, there
were a few activities which provided the back-
ground for interdisciplinary studies. One was the
Hl"Tokushii-Gendai no Gengoron: Saussure, Jakobson,
Chomsky," Gendai Shiso, 1, No. 10 (Oetober 1973).
82"Tokushii-Gengo: Ningensonzai eno Atarashii Shiten,"
Gendai Shiso, 3, No. 6 Uune 1975).
83"Tokushii-Gengoron: Gendai Shiso no Atarashii Kagi,"
Gendai Shiso, 4, No. 10 (Oetober 1976).
84"Tokushii-Gendai no Kigoron," Gendai Skiso, 7, No. 2
(February 1979).
85"Tokushii-Gendai Tetsugaku to Gengo," Gengo, 6, No. 13
(Deeember 1977).
Hh"Tokushii-Saussure: Gendai Gengogaku no Genten,"
Gengo, 7, No. 3 (March 1978).
87"Bunka no Kigoron" Shiso, 640 (Oetober 1977).
329
research project on the semiotics of culture coor-
dinated by M. Yamaguchi in 1977 at the Tokyo
University of Foreign Studies, and another was
the Association for Designers and Design
Researchers of Environmental Semiotic Systems
(ADDRESS) started in 1975 by Manfred Speidel
of the Technische Hochschule Aachen, Tomo-
nori Toyama, and their colleagues. The third
was a group for concrete poetry, UMU, founded
by Shütarö Mukai of the Musashino Art Uni-
versity in 1979.
It is expected that the JASS will function to
improve existing conditions and to develop stud-
ies in semiotics and international exchange.
11. Semiotic Fields and
Practices
A. General Semiotic Theory and
History of Semiotics
It is remarkable that in Japan, where general
semiotics has yet to develop, Y oshio Sezai in
1960 published a book on the history of semiotics
from Hellenism to modern theories, as well as
its theoretical structure. 88 I t is ftawed in that it
does not contain references to Galen, St. Augus-
tine, Bolzano, or applied semiotic studies, but
this may be partly due to Sezai's interest in
semiotics as a sign-behavioral theory, and partly
because of the conditions of semiotic studies in
Japan. At any rate it is as yet the only Japanese
book on the complete his tory of semiotics.
As far as St. Augustine is concerned Masao
Yamashita published a paper in 1963,89 analyz-
ing St. Augustine's semiotics, compared it with
Peirce's semiotics, and concluded that the his-
torical characteristic of modern semiotics was a
revival and the successor to scholasticism. 90 There
is another paper by Yamashita on the semiotics
of ancient Greece, in which he distinguishes two
kinds of semiotics, namely, the theory of infer-
ence and the theory of language. 91
l18Yoshio Sezai, Kigoron Josetsu, 3rd ed. (Tokyo: Surugadai-
Shuppansha, 1970).
H9Masao Yamashita, "Augustinus no Kigoron to Peiree no
Kigoron," Jinbun Ronkyii, 14, No. 3 Uinbun Gakkai of Kan-
seigakuin University, 1963), 80-93.
90Ibid., p. 93.
"Masao Yamashita, "Greece ni mirareru Futatsu no Kigo-
ron," Tetsugaku Kenkyii Nenpo, 1 (Tetsugaku Kenkyiishitsu
of Kanseigakuin Univ., 1960), pp. 75-85.
330 TOMONORI TOYAMA
Yuji Yonemori is one of the Japanese
researchers who attempted to go back to Peirce's
semiotics for the investigation of the methodo-
logical and philosophical ground of modern
semiotics. In his writings he criticizes the words
"interpretant," "meaning," "habit" and their
relations, in connection with the method of
. q2
pragmatlsm ..
B. Philosophy and Semiotics
It was in 1964 that Shunsuke Tsurumi pub-
lished a book on philosophy, based on semiot-
iCS. 93 As apart of its development he wrote a
critique on the imprecise terminology of usual
philosophy in 1949,91 and a considera tion of the
method of pragmatism as eclecticism in 1956. 95
A book on the philosophy of language written
by IchinS Yamamoto is a pragmatics-oriented
investigation of philosophical problems from the
stand point of language. 96 Shunpei Ueyama, a
translator of Peirce's writings, published, in 1963,
his study comparing the dialectics of Marx and
of Peirce.'J7 Thus in this field, interest in semiot-
ics is more or less in accord with an interest in
pragmatism.
Analytical philosophy, however, has a tend-
ency to lead to semiotics. 98 Shigeo Nagai's work
is such an example of the extension of analytical
philosophy to semiotics. 99 Hiroshi Usami's work
is an application of analytical philosophy to the
'''Yuji Yonemori, "Peirce Kigögaku no Kenkyu (sono 3):
Kaishakunaiyö to Imi to Shukan," Bulletin oJ the Division oi
Education, University oJ Ihe Ryukyus, 13 (March 1970), 1-16.
' 13 Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Tetsugaku no Hansei," in Tsurumi
Shunsuke Chosakushii, 1 (1946: rpt. Tokyo: Chikumashobö,
1975), pp. 237-62.
'''Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Tetsugaku no Gengo," in Tsurumi
Shunsuke Chosakushii, 1 (1949); rept. Tokyo: Chikumashobö,
1975), pp. 263-77.
'''Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Setchushugi no Tetsugaku toshite no
Pragmatism no Höhö," in Tsurumi Shunsuke Chosakushii, 1
<)6(1956; rpt. Tokyo: Chikumashobö, 1975), pp. 283-302.
. Yamamoto, Koloba no Telsugaku (Tokyo: Iwanaml-Shoten,
1965).
<17 Shunpei Ueyama, Benshöhö no Keift (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1963).
'JHSeiji Ueda, "Kigöshugi no Seiritsu," Shiso, 408 Uune 1958),
pp. 23-39; Philosophy of Science Society Japan [Nihon
Kagaku Tetsugaku Kai], ed., Kigo, joho, Romi, Kagaku
Tetsugaku,7 (Tokyo: Waseda Univ. Press, 1974); Philos-
ophy of Science Society Japan [Nihon Kagaku Tetsugaku
Kai], ed., Gengo 10 Hi-Gengo, Kagaku Tetsugaku, 12 (Tokyo:
Waseda University press, 1979).
""Shigeo Nagai, Bunseki Telsugaku lowa Nanika: Sekaikan no
Keisei no Tameni (1973; rpt. Tokyo: Kinokuniya-Shoten,
1979).
philosophy of education, within a semiotic
framework. loo Taneomi U chida, who is a
research er in modal logic, endeavors to develop
a pure semiotics. He stresses the necessity of the
establishment of pure semiotics for the valid
application of semiotics to individual fields. IOI
In contrast to the above there are some other
philosophers who approach semiotics, especially
semantics, from epistemology.I02
C. Law and Semiotics
It is easy to imagine the extension of semiotics
to law, because law is one of the refined sign
systems. Semiotics has been actively applied in
the fields of philosophy and sociology of law
since the 1950s. It seems that there are two types
of applications. One is to regard law as a sign
system. For example, Jun'ichi Aomi regards law
as a sign system which is subordinated to lin-
guistic sign systems. He first stresses the dis-
tinction between Nominaldefinition, Sacherklärung,
and Zeichenerklärung based on the definition of
law, according to Walter Dubislav's theory, then
he explains law as a semiotic technique of social
contro!. He also applies semiotics to the explan-
atory theory of law. I03 Another type of appli-
cation is the use of semiotics as a tool for legal
studies. For example, Takeyoshi Kawashima
regards social control as a sign system and has
constructed a logical model 104 This approach
leads to the application of symbolic logic rather
than of semiotics. A critical article on Kawa-
shima's semiotic approach to law appears in
IOOHiroshi Usami, Shiko, Kigo, Imi: Kyöiku Kenkyii ni okeru
'Shiko' (Tokyo: Seishinshobö, 1968).
lf"Taneomi Uchida, "Kanösekai towa Nanika: Rescher no
Kösei Höhö," Kagaku Kisoron Kenkyii, 14, No. 4 (May 1980),
7-12; Taneomi Uchida, "Kigöron no Kihon Mondai to
Kanö Sekai Imiron," jinbun Shakaigaku Kenkyii, 17 (Rikö
Gakubu Ippankyöiku Jinbun Shakaigaku Kenkyukai of
Waseda University, March 1979), pp. 79-98 .
102Wataru Hiromatsu, "Gengoteki Sekai no Sonzai Közö:
Imi no Ninshikironteki Bunseki eno Shikaku," Shisö, 541
Uuly 1969), 1-25; Hiromatsu Wataru, Mono, Koto, Kotoba
(Tokyo: Keisöshobö, 1979).
JO"Jun'ichi Aomi, Hotelsugaku Gairon, rev. ed. (Tokyo:
Köbundö, 1964), pp. 49-59,91-101 and 123-64;Jun'ichi
Aomi, '''Hö Da Gainen' nitsuite Da Oboegaki," in Hii no
Gainen (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1963), pp. 111-29.
JO'Takeyoshi Kawashima, ed., ser. Hoshakaigaku Koza, 4
(Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1972), pp. 323-54; Mitsukuni
Yasaki, HÖletsugaku, Gendai Högaku Zenshu, 2 (Tokyo:
Chikumashobö, 1975), pp. 189-93.
 JAPAN
Number 27 of the yearbook of the ]apanese
Association of Sociology of Law. l05
D. Communication and Information
Theory and Semiotics
The increase in the interest in cybernetics, sys-
tems engineering, information science, and com-
munication theories in the 1960s provided many
opportunities for one to be led toward semiotics.
In 1967 Yasumasa Tanaka introduced semiotics
into his information science,106 and Tamito
Y oshida developed a semiotics-oriented com-
munication theory. 107 The ] apanese Society of
Social Psychology published a yearbook in 1974
concerning communication between different
symbol systems. 108 This yearbook also contains
articles on a psychiatric case lO9 and on the com-
munication of primates. 110 In] apan there have
been many studies on monkeys,111 and a few
years ago a group at Kyoto University started
studies of teaching language to chimpanzees. Also
there are semiotic approaches in ethology and
zoosociology.112
E. Aesthetics and Semiotics and
Semiotic Analysis of Design and Art
Y6nosuke Natori (1910-1962), a photogra-
pher, was aprecursor in constructing a semiotic
theory of interpreting photographs. He regarded
I05Mitsukuni Yasaki, "Höshakaigaku Köza Shoshü no
Kawashima Ronbun ni taisuru Comment," in Hiishakai-
gaku no Hiihii (Tokyo: Yühikaku, 1974), pp. 25-34.
106Yasumasa Tanaka, Kigiikiidii-Ron: Imi no Kagaku, Jöhö
Kagaku Köza, ed. Toshio Kitagawa (Tokyo: Kyöritsu-
shuppan, 1967).
I07Tamito Yoshida, "Jöhö Kagaku no Kösö," In Shakaiteki
Communication, by Tamito Yoshida, Hidetoshi Katö and
Ikuo Takeuchi (Tokyo: Baifükan, 1967), pp. 1-287.
108TheJapanese Society of Social Psychology, ed., Language,
Symbols, and Communication, The J apanese Annals of Social
Psychology, 15 (The Japanese Society of Social Psychol-
ogy, 1974).
109Kösei Kido, "Bunretsubyösha no Communication: Tokuni
Kotoba no Imi no Ijö ni tsuite," in Language, Symbols and
Communication, The J apanese Annals of Social Psychology,
15 (The Japanese Society of Social Psyehology, 1974),
pp. 55-75.
11':Jun'iehirö Itani, "Reichörui no Dentatsukikö," in Lan-
guage, Symbols and Communication, The Japanese Annals of
Social Psychology, 15 (TheJapanese Society ofSoeial Psy-
chology, 1974), pp. 31-54.
IllMasao Kawai, Nihonzaru no Seitai (Tokyo: Kawadeshobö-
shinsha, 1969).
II'Toshitaka Hidaka, "Döbutsu ni okeru Kigöködö," Gengo,
I, No. 5 (August 1972), 12-18.
331
a photograph as a sign and dealt with the anal-
ysis of the characteristics of photograph as a
. 113
slgn.
In 1960, Shunsuke Tsurumi wrote of a theory
of art based on semiotics. 114 It is a manifesto of
the "marginal art" situated between fine art and
pop art, and it is an application of pragmatism
to the theory of art. Also, the semiotics of Morris
and Langer have influenced aesthetics and design
theories in]apan. 115 It was in 1966 that a book
on artistic semiotics was published. 116 As a
reflection of the tendency toward a semiotic aes-
thetics, Max Bense was invited and presented a
lecture on semiotic aesthetics in ] apan. 117
Recently the rate of use of semiotic approaches
has accelerated with the boom in the coverage
of semiotics in the mass media, because the terms
of linguistic semiotics can be easily applied to
works of art or design. K6ji Taki is one of the
few artistic critics who realized that we could not
obtain methods useful for designing by a simple
adaptation of concepts derived from a structure
of language. 118 But he hesi ta ted to call his
approach "design semiotics" because he found
that semiotics was only a means to explain design
phenomena. 119 In contrast to this, Tetsuo
Kawama endeavored to develop design semiot-
ics as a science. 120 There were also studies in
semiotic musicology, 121 and the semiotics offilms
and images. 122
I!3Yönosuke Natori, Shashin no Yomikata, Iwanami Shinsho
(Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1963), pp. 46-74.
114Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Geijutsu no Hatten," in Tsurumi Shun-
suke Chosakushii, 4 (1960; rpt. Tokyo: Chikumashobö, 1975),
pp. 3-39.
115Hiroshi Kawano, "Gendai ni okeru Geijutsu Kigöron no
Tenkai," Risii, 345 (February 1962), 63-77.
116Toshio Takeuchi, ed., Geijutsu Kigiiron, Köza Bigaku Shin-
shiehö, 3, 5th ed. (Tokyo: Bijutsushuppansha, 1975).
117Max Bense, "Gendai Bigaku," trans. Shütarö Mukai (Tokyo
Deutsch Bunka Kenkyüsho, 1967).
118Köji Taki, Kotoba no nai Shikii (Tokyo: Tabata-Shoten, 1972),
pp. 139-146.
119Köji Taki, "Kigö to Kigö no Kanata," Shisii, 640 (Oetober
1977), 139-46.
120Tetsuo Kawama, "Kankyö ni tsuite no Kigöronteki Kösatsu
I," Design Gaku Kenkyii, 29 (The Japanese Soeiety for Sei-
enee of Design, 1979), 21-34.
121Yuki Minegishi, "Ongaku Kigögaku no Shomondai," Jour-
nal of Musicolagy, 23, No. 2 Uapanese Musieologieal Soei-
ety, 1977), 134-44; Ichirö Itö, "Kigö Taikei toshite no
Ongaku," Gengo, 5, No. 8 (August 1976), 30-35.
122Kenji Iwamoto, "Eiga no Kigögaku," Engekigaku, 16 (Engeki
Gakkai ofWaseda University, March 1975),95-107; Keiji
Asanuma, "Eizö no Imiteki Seikaku I: Mozö to Kigö,"
332 TOMONORITOYAMA
The practice of concrete poetry has been
actively pursued in Japan because of the char-
acteristics of theJapanese writing system. Thus,
some designers and artists have approached con-
crete poetry employing semiotics. Originally there
were two groups engaged in concrete poetry;
VOU, founded in 1964 by Seiichi Niikuni (1925-
1977), and ASA, founded in 1950 by Katsue
Kitasono (1902-1978); but at the present time
only one group, UMU, founded in 1979 by Shu-
taro Mukai, is active. Mukai's articles on con-
crete poetry appeared in Semiosis 13 and 19. 123
The Japan Sign Design Association was
founded in 1965. I t started with the idea of being
a craft union, but it has developed into an attempt
to reorganize the relation between urban envi-
ronment and the various fields of design. 124 With
this development the members' interests have
been extended from the study of a sign as a
design object to the search for a comprehensive
theory of signs.
F. Architecture and Semiotics
An analogical application of Saussure's lin-
guistics to architectural theory was presented by
Mosuke Morita in 1950. 125 It may have been a
harbinger of architectural semiotics in Japan.
Morita has been involved in the study of the
typology of architecture. 126
It was after 1970, however, that genuine stud-
ies in architectural semiotics came into being.
Takashi Tanaka's article in 1972 was a critical
essay on the subject of architectural theory as
Hiisiigaku Kenkyü, 17 (NHK Sögö Hösö Bunka Kenkyüsho,
March 1968), 5-32; 3 "Eizö no Imiteki Seikaku 11: Eizö
to Kigö," Hiisiigaku Kenkyu, 20 (March 1969), 5-30: 3 "Eizö
no Imiteki Seikaku 111: Tan'i Kigö to Kigö Tan'i," Hiis-
iigaku Kenkyü, 22 (March 1971),83-108; 3 "Eizö no Imiteki
Seikaku IV: Eizö Taikei to Imiteki Genjitsu," Hiisiigaku
Kenkyü, 24 (March 1972), 127-55; Osamu Nakano, "Eizö
no Kigögaku," in Kotoba to Symbol, Nihongo to Bunka Shakai,
4th ed., Kikuo Nomoto and Masamichi Nobayashi (Tokyo:
Sanseidö, 1977), pp. 279-308.
123Shütarö Mukai, "Zwischen Universität und Individuali-
tät," Semiosis, 13, Heft I (1979),41-51; "Form als Urbild,"
Semiosis, 19, Heft 3 (1980), pp. 5-12.
I24Japan Sign Design Association, ed., Manual 01 Sign Design
in Japan (Tokyo: Graphic-Sha, 1976), pp. 12-14.
I"Mosuke Morita, "Kobayashi Hideo Cho 'Gengogaku Tsü-
ron' wo Yomite," Kenchiku Zasshi, 65, No. 769 (December
1950), pp. 16-20 and 22.
126Mosuke Morita, "Kenchikugata to Shitsugata," Transac-
tions 01 the Architectural Institute of Japan, 241 (March 1976),
165-70.
architectural semiotics. 127 His dissertation 128 was
an elaboration upon the theory outline in the
essay. Manfred Speidel completed his study of
the semiotics of man-made environment in
Japan. 129
Recently there has been a remarkable tend-
ency, injournalistic writings and in architectural
practices, to be inftuenced partly by American
architectural semantics and partly by the struc-
turalist method of "reading architectural
texts.,,130 The application of semiotics to archi-
tectural design methodology is another modest
but distinctive movement inJapan. Tetsuo Segu-
chi presented studies in the language of design-
ing,131 and Okinori Taniguchi presented studies
in the language of planning from the viewpoint
of semiotics as logic basis. 132 Tomonori Toyama
published an article on Peirce's semiotics as the
basic theory of designing. 133 According to Toy-
ama's semiotic design methodology, which was
developed in collaboration with Teruyuki Mon-
nai, whereas architecture is regarded as a sign,
the design thinking of architects and the behav-
ior of dwellers can be regarded as semioses.1 34
127Takashi Tanaka, "Kigöködöron to Kenchikuteki Naru-
koto," Kenchiku Zasshi, 87, No. 1054 Uuly 1972), 737-39.
12BTakashi Tanaka, "Kenchiku (teki) Jishö no Kenkyü," Diss.
Kyoto University, 1977.
129Manfred Speidei, "Semiological Consideration on Man-
Made Environment, 1-3," Transactions 01 the Architectural
Institute of Japan, 197, 198 and 202 Uuly, August and
December 1972), [197:] 41-50, [198:] 19-27; [202:] 49-
58; Manfred SpeideI, "Semiotic Consideration on Man-
Made Environment: Problems of Information in Archi-
tecture under the Aspects of a Theory of Signs," Diss.
Waseda University, 1973.
130Minoru Takeyama, Gairo no Imi, SD Sensho, 121 (Tokyo:
Kajima Shuppankai, 1977); Hajime Yatsuka, ed. anthol-
ogy, Kenchiku no Bunmyaku Toshi no Bunmyaku (Tokyo: Shö-
kokusha, 1979); Seiken Fukuda, "Kenchikukaidoku to
Kenchikusekkei: Raphael no Grotesque wo Rei toshite,"
Kenchiku Zasshi, 84, No. 1149 (April 1979),51-54; Kunio
Kudö held the exhibitions of arehitectural semantic works
in Tokyo, in Nagoya and in Toyohashi in 1979.
131Tetsuo Seguchi, "Sekkei Gengo ni Kansuru Kenkyü-
sono 1-3," Transactions of the Architectural Institute of Japan,
260,264, and 266 (Oetober 1977 and February and April
1978), [260:] 115-25; [264:] 107-15; [266:] 123-32.
1320kinori Taniguchi, "Keikaku ni okeru Igiköi to Hyöjiköi
(sono land 2)," Transactions 01 the Architectural Institute of
Japan, 277 and 278 (March and April 1979), [277:] 91-
97; [278:] 129-34.
I33Tomonori Toyama, "Peirce Kigöron no Saikentö," Gendai
Shisii, 4, No. 10 (Oetober 1976), 154-68.
131Tomonori Toyama, Semiotic Studies on Design Methods, Report
of the Institute of Industrial Science, 26, No. 4 (The Insti-
tute of Industrial Seienee ofthe University ofTokyo, March
1977); "Aspeets of Design Semiotics," Semiosis, 6, Heft 2
(1977); Tomonori Toyama and Teruyuki Monnai, "Sekkei
 JAPAN
This means that the architectural function as a
whole is regarded as a sign in the capacity of its
conception, in comparison with Petr Bogatyrev's
distinction between the practical functions and
the semiotic functions of architecture. 135
G. Anthropology and the Semiotic
Analysis of Culture
Roland Barthes created a well-known work,
having gained insight through contact withJap-
anese culture. 136 J apanese researchers of semiotic
anthropology are examining and analyzing J ap-
anese culture with a semiotic model: for exam-
pIe, Masao Yamaguchi's semiotic analysis of a
J apanese classic novel, 137 which is an application
of the method of structural anthropology;138
Shin'ichi Nakazawa's semiotic analysis of pop-
ular shows as Japanese folklore,139 which is an
enhancement of Paul Bouissac's method l40 so as
to apply it to Japanese culture. There may be
problems, however, in adopting the semiotics of
culture, in consideration of the fact that there is
an immense accumulation of Japanese folklore.
To address this problem it may be possible to
suppose other approaches, such as that of Min-
ako Terai or Manfred Speidel. Terai regards
kimono design as a sign to describe Japanese
culture. 141 In this case there is no extern al model
except for the point of view of regarding kimono
design as a sign. Speidel researches Japanese
pI aces of pilgrimage. 142 I t seems that he is
searching for so me semiotic structure or doctrine
Höhoron toshite no Design Kigöron no Kisoteki Kenkyu,"
Transactions of the Architecturual Institute 01 Japan, 275 (Jan-
uary 1979), 119-29.
135Petr Bogatyrev, "Costume as a Sign," in Semiotics of Art,
ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1977), pp. 13-19.
l'"Roland Barthes, Hyiichii no Teikoku, trans. Sakon Sö, Sösho
Sözö no Komichi (Tokyo: Shinehösha, 1974).
137Masao Yamaguehi, "Novel and Cosmology: The Case of
the Tale of Genji," manuseript written for the leeture pre-
sen ted on 29 J anuary 1980, at Indiana U niversity.
138Masao Yamaguehi, Bunka to Ryiigisei (Tokyo: Iwanami-
Shoten, 1975); Masao Yamaguehi, "Bunka-Kigöron
Kenkyu ni okeru 'Ika' no Gainen," Shisii, 640 (Oetober
1977), 40-59.
139Shin'iehi Nakazawa, "Gairo no Shigaku," Shisii, 640
(Oetober 1977), 123-38.
14°Paul Bouissae, Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
141 Minako Terai, Hitotsu no Nihon Bunkaron, Ködansha Gaku-
jutsu Bunko (Tokyo: Ködansha, 1979).
14'Manfred Speidei, 'Japanese Plaees ofPilgrimage," a + u
(January-Deeember 1975), pp. 49-60.
333
which dominates the system of the man-made
environment of pilgrimage.
Linguists and philosophers also have made an
attempt to approach the semiotics of culture. 143
H. Linguistics and Semiotics
There was a significant semiotic argument in
linguistics that occurred in connection with the
introduction of Saussure's Cours by Hideo
Kobayashi. 144 It originated out of Motoki Tokie-
da's (1900-1967) language-process theory which
was presented in opposition to that of Saus-
sure. 145 This discussion concerning Tokieda's
theory and Saussure's continued for years. It
became apparent that Tokieda's objection was
due to his misinterpretation of Saussure's text.
Shir6 Hattori pointed this out and referred to
the effectiveness of Tokieda's theory.146 As a
result, Tokieda's language-process theory was
accepted as being in accord with Saussure's,147
and these discussions deepened the studies of
Saussure's linguistics. A list of the J apanese lit-
erature on the studies appears in Gengo,
Volume 7. 148
It was not long ago, however, that interest in
semiotics increased. This new trend has led to
another problem concerning the relation between
linguistics and semiotics. It seems there are three
kinds of approaches to the development of lin-
guistic semiotics: the first is to view language as
a sign system,149 the second is to extend the con-
143Takashi Isoya, "Gengo Kigöron no Tötatsuten," Shisii, 640
(Oetober 1977), 1-23; Yoshirö Takeuehi, '''Sözöryoku no
Bunka Kigögaku' Josetsu," Shisii, 665 (November 1979),
31-47.
144Saussure, Gengogaku Genron.
145Motoki Tokieda, Kokugogaku Genron (Tokyo: Iwanami-
Shoten, 1941), pp. 57-92.
116Shirö Hattori, "Gengokateisetsu ni tsuite," [1957] in his
Gengogaku no Hiihii (Tokyo: I wanami-Shoten, 1960), pp. 149-
65; "Saussure no Langue to Gengokateisetsu," [1959], ibid.,
pp. 166-218.
147Hideki Maeda, "Saussure to 'Gengokateisetsu'," Gengo, 7,
No. 3 (March 1978), 50-55.
148Hideki Maeda, ed., "Shiryö: Saus sure Högo Bunken
Ichiran," Gengo, 7, No. 3 (March 1978),58-60.
149Yasuo Ohashi, "Kigö Kihonközö kara mita Shizengengo,"
in Language, Symbols and Communication (The Japanese Annals
01 Sodal Psychology, 15) (The J apanese Society of Soeial
Psyehology, 1974), 11-30; Nobuhiro Hirakawa, "Kigö no
lehi-Taikei toshite no Gengo," 1-5, Kenkyii Kiyii, 12-16
(The Faeulty of General Edueation of Kinki Univ., 1973-
1974), [12:]89-96; [13:]35-43; [14]1-8; [15]13-21; [16:]
13-25.
334 TOMONORITOYAMA
cepts of linguistics to linguistic semiotics,150 and
the third is to develop the semiotics of culture. 151
In the second approach Shigeo Kawamoto feels
that linguistic semiotics must be able to deal with
the creativity of linguistic arts, which linguistics,
as an example, cannot do at present. 152 Tsutomu
Miura stresses that linguistics must consider the
analysis of discourse in order to be capable of
semiotics. 153 In this sense, Tokieda's linguistics,
which premises a speaker, a situation, and a
material as the conditions of linguistic exist-
ence, 154 has the possibility of developing into a
linguistic semiotics. In fact, Tokieda's linguis-
tics, which considers the functional aspect of lan-
guage to be important,155 also pays attention to
literature and to the social aspects of language. 156
In the third approach we can distinguish the
secondary difference, whether it is the structur-
alist method or not. 157
The problem of the relationship between lin-
guistics and semiotics is connected to the prob-
lem of the distinction between, or the relation
between, verbal signs and nonverbal signs. 158
Some writings on this problem refer to the
importance of paying attention to the aspects of
verbal signs which are not in accord with non-
verbal signs. 159 This may be another possible
extension of linguistic semiotics.
There are many other interesting discussions
about the Japanese language which could be
15°Shigeo Kawamoto, Koloha to Kokoro, Iwanami Shinsho
(Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1976); Tsutomu Miura, Gen-
gogaku 10 Kigiigaku (Tokyo: Keisöshobö, 1977).
15lReiiehi Horii, "Kigögaku to Gengogaku," Bungaku Ronsii,
47 (The Literary Association of Aiehi University, Mareh
1972), pp. 51-75; Isoya "Gengo Kigöron no Tötatsuten,"
Shisii, 640 (Oetober 1977), 1-23.
152Kawamoto, p. 60.
153Miura, p. 34.
154Motoki Tokieda, Kokugogaku Genron (Tokyo: Iwanami-
Shoten, 1941), pp 38-56.
155Motoki Tokieda, Kokugogaku Genron: Zokuhen (Tokyo:
Iwanami-Shoten, 1955), pp. 71-94.
156Ibid.
157Yoshihiko Ikegami, "Bungaku ni okeru Gengogakuteki
Höhö," in Hikakubungaku no Riron, Köza Hikakubungaku,
8, ed. T. Haga, S. Hirakawa, S. Kamei and K. Kobori
(Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1976), p. 160.
158Yoshihiko Ikegami, "Gengokigö to Hi-Gengokigö," Gengo,
I, No. 5 (August 1972),33-41; Miura, pp. 50-158.
159Keizaburö Maruyama, "Gengo no Hi-Kigösei to Imi Sözö,"
Gendai Shisii, 5, No. 2 (February 1977), 108-21; Eiichi Chino,
"Gengo-Kigö no Hi-Kigösei," Studies in Linguistics, 10 (Lin-
guisties Circle of the Tokyo University of Edueation, 1970),
36-42.
related to semiotics, but most of them have not
yet actually been discussed from the semiotic
viewpoint. They are sure to bring fruitful con-
tributions to linguistic semiotics in the near
future. Approaches from sociolinguistics are also
worthy of notice. 160
I. Literature and Semiotics
Hitherto the most conspicuous activity in this
field was the translation and introduction of
European semiotics. In recent years, original
semiotic works have gradually appeared, and it
seems that the main interest is in rhetoric. Nobuo
Satö, the trans la tor of Pierre Guirard's La
Semiologie 161 and Roland Barthes's Systeme de la
mode,162 published a book on rhetoric in 1977,163
in which he stresses that "rhetoric" is the real
name of something nicknamed "logic."164
Köichirö Shinoda published an essay on semiot-
ics-oriented criticism in 1979. 165 Takashi Isoya,
the translator of Lotman's and Stepanov's writ-
ings,166 published in 1980 an essay on theories
of translation ?;enerally based on Roman Jakob-
son's theories. 67
There are also interests in applying semiotic
approaches to the various language arts, that is,
texts, literature and poems. A book on this sub-
ject was recently published. 168
We may be able to discover, in addition to the
recent semiotic work, interesting work among
the conventional studies in Japanese literature.
160Kikuo Nomoto and Masamiehi Nobayashi, ed., Kotoha to
Symbol, Nihongo to Bunka Shakai, 4 (Tokyo: Sanseido,
1977).
16lPierre Guiraud, Kigögaku, trans. Nobuo Satö Bunko Que
sais-je? No. 1421 (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1972).
16'Roland Barthes, Mode no Taikei, trans. Nobuo Satö (Tokyo:
Misuzushobö, 1972).
163Nobuo Satö, Kigii Ningen (Tokyo: Taishükan-Shoten, 1977).
164Ibid., pp. 279-80.
165Koiehirö Shinoda, Hihyö no Kigiigaku (Tokyo: Miraisha,
1979).
166Yury M. Lotman, Bungakuriron to Kiiziiskugi: Text eno Kigö-
ronteki Approach, trans. Takashi Isoya (Tokyo: Keisöshobö,
1978); Bungaku to Bunka-Kigiiron, ed. and trans. Takashi
Isoya (Tokyo: Iwanami-Shoten, 1979); Yury S. Stepanov,
Kigöron Nyiimon, trans. Takashi Isoya and Takashi Fuji-
moto (Tokyo: Keisöshobö, 1980).
167Takashi Isoya, Honyaku to Bunka no Kigiiron (Tokyo: Kei-
söshobö, 1980).
168Eiiehi Chino, ed., Gengo no Geijutsu, Köza Gengo, 4 (Tokyo:
Taishükan-Shoten, 1980).
 JAPAN 335

111. Institutional Framework a course for semiotics and semantics in 1980.

and Publications The topic during the first year was the theoret-
ical development of linguistic theory to the level
of semiotics of culture.
Kigo no Kai, a "group for the study of sign~, ~ The Association of Designers and Design
started in 1951 as a subordinate group of Shlso
Researchers of Environmental Semiotic Systems
no Kagaku Kenkyukai, the "Institute for the.S~i­ (ADDRESS) was started in 1975 for providing
ence of Thought," founded in 1946. The actlvlty
contacts and an information service and encour-
of Kigo no Kai can be divided into three periods.
aging the study of semiotics. It ha~ distributed
The first period was from 1951 to 1954 and bas.ed
newsletters and documents among Hs members.
in Tokyo. It was a reading circle with the alm
Articles giving information about the activities
of understanding signs comprehensively and
of ADDRESS appeared in Semiosis 4,5, and 19. 172
considering a method of classifying and analyz-
A research project on the semiotics of culture
ing them. The second period continued from 1~55 in Eastern Europe was carried out in 1977 at the
to 1960 in Tokyo with a critical approach takmg
Institute for the Study of Languages and Cul-
into account both the unconscious dimension and
tures of Asia and Africa at the Tokyo University
the historical dimension of the meaning of signs,
of Foreign Studies. Scholars of European lan-
which was also the central problem of the first
guages and cultures and anthropol?gists partic-
period. The third period started in 1961 in Tokyo,
ipated in this interdisciplinary proJect.
and is being continued with the aim of compre-
The group for concrete poetry "UMU" ,
hensively describing signs produced inJapan~se
founded in 1979, is active and is working in col-
culture. 169 Kigo no Kai published two speCIal
laboration with scholars in such fields as phi-
editions of Shiso no Kagaku, which is considered
losophy, linguistics, literature, poetry, and desig?
the organ of the Shiso no Kagaku Kenkyukai.
This group held an exhibition in Osa~a a~d m
The topic of the first edition was symbols of the
Tokyo in 1979 along with a lecture by SlegfnedJ.
Japanese people,170 and that of the second was
Schmidt, Bielefeld University.
the Japanese mind and its signs. l7l
TheJapanese Association for Semiotic Studies
In 1967 the Department of the Science and
OASS) was launched in April, 1980 by ~ead~rs
Design was founded at the Musashino Art Uni-
in many fields such as philosophy, 10gIC, Im-
versity. Since then, the university has offered a
guistics, literature, architecture, design, art.' aes-
course of study in semiotics which consists of
thetics, theater, and anthropology. The alm of
Semiotics land 11. Both are required subjects.
the Association is to encourage interdisciplinary
Semiotics I is a one-year course on the general
contacts and studies. This organization is not
theory of semiotics given to sophomores, and
yet fully developed, though t~e c?mmittees for
Semiotics 11 is a lecture on design semiotics given
information, studies, and pubhcatlOn have been
to juniors. Nara Women's University bega~ a
formed. The Association published the News-
postgraduate course for the study of comparatlve
letter 01 the Japanese Association Jor Semiotic Studies,
culture in 1980 and the course has a lecture and
nos. I through 6,173 and Studia Semiotica annu-
a seminar on the semiotics of culture. The uni-
ally since 1981. 174 JASS also held an annual con-
versity is expected to offer a one-year course on
semiotics for the undergraduate students of the 172Manfred Speidel, "ADDRESS: Association for J?e:igners
Faculty of Literature, beginning in 1981. Also, and Design Researchers of Environmenta1 SemlOtlc Sys-
tems, Tokyo, Japan," Semiosis, 4, Heft 4 (1976), pp. 56-
Wako University has offered a one-year course
57' Shütarö Mukai, "ADDRESS," Semiosis, 5, Heft 1 (1977),
on semiotics for the theory of arts for und er- p. '61; Teruyuki Monnai, "ADDRESS,' Semiosis, 19, Heft 3
graduate students in the Department of ~rt since (1980), pp. 72-74.
around 1977. Since 1966, the Tokyo InstItute for 173 Newsletter of the Japanese Association Jor Semiotic Studies, No. 1
Advanced Studies of Language has offered pro- (November 30, 1980); No. 2 (February 28, 1981); No. 3
(May 31,1981); No. 4 (August 31,1981); No. 5 (May 31,
gressive courses in its curriculum. Then it began 1982); No. 6 (September 15, 1983).
174 Studia Semiotica 1: Aspects of the Sign (The J apanese Asso-
169Shunsuke Tsurumi, "Kigö no Kai ni tsuite," Shiso no Kagaku, ciation for Semiotic Studies, 1981); Studia Semiotica 2: Per-
94 (October 1969), pp. 150-51. Jormance-Signs/ Acts/ Expressions (The J apanese Association
17°"Nihonjin no Shöchö." for Semiotic Studies, 1982); 3: Semiosis-the Module of Cu/-
I7I"Nihon no Kokoro to sono KigÖ." ture (1983); 4: Significance-Locus of Semiosis (1984).
336 TOMONORI TOYAMA
gress since 1981,175 as weH as four semmars so
far. 176
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 CHAPTER 15
Semiotics in the Low Countries
Pierre Swiggers
I. Prolegomena
Before embarking on a survey of semiotic activ-
ity in the Low Countries, I must impose some
restrictions on its scope. An extensional restric-
tion will be made to work published by 20th-
century Belgian and Dutch scholars. This allows
me to exelude the writings of "Netherlandic"
speculative grammarians, such as Siger de Cor-
traco, who were active in the cirele of modistae
(more specifically, the later generations of this
intellectual trend) at Paris, I at a time when the
We assume the reader to be familiar with Chapter C ("Vers
des etudes semiologiques: La situation en Belgique") of the
book edited by A. Helbo, Le champ semiologigue. Perspectives
internationales (Brussels: Ed. Complexe, 1979), in which can
be found a rather narrow survey of semiotic practice in Bel-
gium, focusing on semiotics of music, visual arts, and culture
and offering almost eX:laustive information on research done
by Helbo's team. Although filling the gaps in that survey
chapter, the present study broadens the semiotic perspective
and focuses on the theoretical foundations of semiotic prac-
ti ce in the Low Countries.
IFor surveys of speculative grammar, see Jan Pinborg, Die
Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter (Copenhagen and
Münster: Frost, Hansen & Aschendorff, 1967); Geoffrey L.
Bursill-Hall, Speculative Grammars ofthe Middle Ages: The doc-
trine of partes orationis of the modistae (The Hague: Mouton,
1971); J an Pinborg, Logik und Semantik im Mittelalter: Ein
Ueberblick (Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holz-
boog, 1972) andJ ean Stefanini, "Les modistes et leur apport
a la theorie de la grammaire et du signe linguistique," Semi-
otica, 8 (1973), 263-275. For a bibliography, see Earline J.
Pierre Swiggers • Faculty of Philosophy and Letters,
Belgian National Science Foundation, Louvain, Belgium B-
3000.
343
geographical frontiers were different (and dif-
ferently conceived) from the present ones. Also
exeluded are the dispersed remarks of pre-20th
century theologians (e.g. Arnold Geulincx), and
of theoreticallinguists 2 (e.g. J acob van Ginneken,
Antoine Gregoire), concerning the (linguistic)
Ashworth, The Tradition of Medieval Logic and Speculative Gram-
mar jrom Anselm to the End of the Seventeenth Century: A Bibli-
ography jrom 1836 onwards (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Medieval Studies, 1978) and the additions in my review of
this bibliography, in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 42 (1980), 142-
143. Charles Thurot's Notices et extraits de divers manuscrits
lalins pour servir ii I 'histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen
lige (Paris: Imprimerie imperiale, 1868) remains an indis-
pensable sourcebook for the his tory of medieval gramm ar.
2Information on these linguists can be found ;n the extant
histories of linguistics. For a bibliography of these, see
Edward Stankiewicz, "Bibliography of the History of
Linguistics," in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Current Trends in
Linguistics, Vol. 13: HistoriographyofLinguistics (vol. eds. Hans
Aarsleff, Robert Austerlitz, Deli Hymes, Edward Stankiew-
icz) (The Hague: Mouton,1975), pp. 1381-1446; E. F. K.
Koerner, Western Histories of Linguistic Thought. An Annotated
Chronological Bibliography 1822-1976 (Amsterdam: J. Benja-
mins, 1978); and my survey articles "Histoire et historio-
graphie de la linguistique," Semiotica, 31 (1979), 107-137
(= a review article on Current Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 13)
and "The Historiography of Linguistics," Linguistics, 18
(1980), 703-720 (= a review article of two books by E. F. K.
Koerner). For Belgian linguistics, see the excellent survey
by Kare! Roe!andts, "Linguistics in Belgium since 1830,"
in Belgium and Europe. Proceedings oj the International Francqui-
Colloquium, Brussels-Ghent, 12-14 November 1980 (Brussels:
Academie, 1981), pp.199-228 (Dutch version: "De taal-
kunde in Belgie sinds 1830," Verslagen en Mededelingen van de
Koninklijke Academie voor Nedtrlandse Taal- en Letterkunde, jg.
1981, afl. 2, pp. 146-176). This survey contains a very rich
bibliography; for biographical information one can use the
344 PIERRE SWIGGERS
sign. The second restriction, intensional in nature,
concerns the notion "semiotic activity." As is
weil known, the pervasiveness of the semiotic
perspective makes it difficult to exclude from a
survey of semiotic activity grammatical writings
or literary studies, although these works may
weil be written by authors totally ignorant of
semiotics (as a scientific discipline). In order to
resolve this difficult problem, I think it necessary
to define "semiotic activity" as the kind of work
that is carried out, explicitly and consciously,
within the framework of a theory of (linguistic
and/or nonlinguistic) signs or sign-systems. This
restriction allows me to exclude from this survey
all the publications on literary and artistic works,
on technical and natural languages, on physio-
logical symptoms, and on various cultural phe-
nomena, which have been written from a non-
semiotic point of view.
These restrictions laid down, it may be useful
to point out that within the jield 01semioticl I
include zoosemiotics, the study of olfactory signs,
of tactile and visual communication and of taste-
codes, paralinguistics, medical semiotics, kinesics
and proxemics, the study of musical, linguistic,
formal, and cultural signs and sign systems, text
theory, the study of plot structure, the study of
aesthetic texts and mass communication, and
rhetoric. 4 Not all these sub-fields have received
the attention of Belgian and Dutch semiotic
scholars. As a matter of fact, the majority of the
publications we will discuss here belong to an
area left unmentioned by Eco," vi,;:;. the theory
(and his tory) of semiotics. This meta-disciplinary
Biographie Nationale and the Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek,
whieh eontain relevant information concerning seientific
seholars.
'My "extensional" definition of the field of semiotics follows
that of U mberto Eco, A Theory rif Semiotics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 9-14. For some thought-
provoking views on the field of semiotics, see Thomas A.
Sebeok, "Semiotics: A Survey of the State of the Art," in
Thomas A. Sebeok ed., Gurrent Trends in Linguistics, Vol. 12:
Linguistics and Adjacent Arts and Seiences (The Hague: Mouton,
1974), pp. 211-264, and the same, "The Semiotic Web: A
Chronicle of Prejudiees," Bulletin rif Literary Semiotics, 2(1975),
1-63. Both studies are reprinted in Thomas A. Sebeok,
Contributions to the Doctrine 01 Signs (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1976), pp. 1-45 and 149-188.
4Beeause of lack of space, I will not attempt to systematize
Eco's division, whieh would gain in homogeneity if based
on asolid classifieation of sign-types. Of course, such a
classifieation still remains a strong desideratum.
'This theory of semioties belongs to wh at G. Klaus, ealls
sigmaties (Sigmalik). See Georg Klaus, Semiotik und Erkennt-
interest may be regarded as typical of Belgian and
Dutch work in the field of the human sciences
(linguistic and literary studies, psychology, phi-
losophy, anthropology, etc.). Semiotic activity in
the Low Countries has been mainly restricted to
a few areas: the his tory of sign theories, the study
of the epistemological basis of contemporary
semiotics (beginning with Charles Morris), the
broadening of logic into (analytical) pragmatics,
literary semiotics (combined with structuralist
narrative studies), and the study of rhetoric. Its
practitioners are philosophers (oflanguage), lin-
guists, and literary scholars, the majority of them
with strong historical interests. One work how-
ever must be singled out for its originality and
for its date of publication. In 1943, Eric Buyssens
published his masterly study Les Langages et le
discours. 6 This booklet stands at the beginning of
the his tory of theoretical semiotics/ and prefi-
gures Belgian and Dutch semiotic work pub-
lished from the 1960s on. Ironically enough, this
inspiring book is nowadays commonly ignored,8
not least by Belgian and Dutch scholars.
To redress the balance, therefore, we will start
with the analysis of Buyssens's programmatic
text.
11. Buyssens's Les Langages et
le discours9
The Belgian linguist Eric Buyssens (born 1900;
Emeritus Professor at the U niversi ty of Brussels
[U niversite libre de Bruxelles] was the first to
nistheorie (Munieh: Fink, 1963). For some remarks on the
theory of semioties, see my "La Semiotique a la recherche
de l'essenee des sens," Linguisticae Investigationes, 4 (1980),
420-430.
6Erie Buyssens, Les Langages et le diseours. Essai de linguislique
flnctionnelle dans le cadre de la semiologie (Brussels: Lebegue,
1943).
'For ajudgment on the value of Buyssens' book, see Thomas
A. Sebeok, Gonlributions 10 lhe Doctrine rifSigns, op. eiL, p. 164.
Slt seems to me that the work of Luis]. Prieto is a genuine
eontinuation, both by its seope and its method, of Buys-
sens's pioneering work. See Luis]. Prieto, Principes de noologie
(The Hague: Mouton, 1964), Messages el signau~ (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de Franee, 1966) and Eludes de
linguislique el de semiologie generales (Geneva: Droz, 1975). On
the fate of Buyssens's monograph of 1943, see Thomas A.
Sebeok, Gonlribulions 10 Ihe Doctrine rif Signs, op. eiL, p. 164.
9Buyssens's book originally appeared in 1943; a slightly revised
version of it ean be found in Erie Buyssens, La Communication
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
introduce the structuralist-functionalist perspec-
tive into semiotics. 1O In his book of 1943, he
explicitly rejects the historical (or diachronic)
approach, and defines the communicative act by
appealing to its social function from a synchronie
point of view. In each communicative act, the
author distinguishes the content or substance, and
a particular modality (informative, interrogative,
injunctive, interpellative). "Tout acte de com-
munication a manifestement pour fonction d'e-
tablir l'un des quatre rapports fondamentaux
suivants: informer, interroger, enjoindre, ou
interpeller.,,11 Communication is considered here
to be a process by which the interlocutor (or the
partner in the communicative act) understands
the goal of the behavior of the speaker (or the
starting-point in the communicative act). The
conceptual aspect of the process is called "seme"
by Buyssens; consequently, the communicative
act is an "acte semique." This conceptual aspect
of the communicative process implies that the
object of semiotics is not the concrete semic act,
but the general and abstract invariant of the
sign-process, vi;::.., the seme.
"L'objet de notre etude n'est pas I'acte semique dans toute
sa realite concrete, mais une abstraction rendue possible par
la repetition-reelle ou virtuelle-de I'acte. En d'autres
termes, le semiologue doit commcncer par substituer une
abstraclion a l'acte concret qu'il prend en consideration ( ... )
En resurne, derriere I'acte semique qui parait n'etre qu'une
association de deux termes concrets-Ie fait pereeptible et
I'etat de conscience-susceptibles de varier d'une [('petition
a I'autre, il existe dans notre conscience ct dans notre me- rhetorical terms: substitution and addition. The first
moire un acte ideal qui ne varie pas, ou du moins pas sen-
siblement: cet acte ideal est le seme. Celui-ci est une association
de deux abstraetions: I'abstraetion relative a I'acte percep-
tible est laJorme du seme, l'autre est sa signification."12
el I'articulation linguistique (Brussels: Presses Universitaires, ing systems), the meaning of the seme is the form
1967), pp. 9-74. The monograph has the following chap-
ters: "Semiologie el linguistique fouctionnelles"; "L'Acte
de communication"; "Analyse psychologique de I'acte de
communication"; "La Semie et le signe"; "Classification
des semies"; "Rapports entre semies"; "Le Discours et la
pensee"; "Les nations systematiques propres au discours";
"Conclusion." References are to the original version of 1943.
lIlBuyssens uses the Saussurean tcrm simiologie throughout
his book. However, far reaSOllS of uniformity, 1 will use
he re the term semiotics, which is mare frequently used in
the English-speaking scholarly world, and 1 will use this
term as an equivalent of French simiologie (I am aware that
these terms, belonging to different traditions of research,
are not entirely coextensive).
11 Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours, op. eil., p. 10.
12Ibid., pp. 24-25.
345
The communication of this abstract contene ö
establishes a sociallink 14 between addresser and
receiver. The latter, in order to understand the
relevance of the message, must ren der the seme
concrete.
According to Buyssens, semes are paradigmat-
ically grouped together into semies. The semes
belonging to a particular semie share some prop-
erties while possessing some differences. The
common and indivisible properties are called
signes; each sign is a union of form and meaning
(signification; valeur). 15 In their turn, the signs (the
definition of which may be compared with
Bloomfield's definition of the morpheme) can be
grouped together into formal categories. Buys-
sens attributes three aspects to these formal cat-
egories: a qualitative, a quantitative, and a
temporal. Signs which have all three aspects are
called integral signs (signes integraux). The two
other formal categories are those of the quan-
titative signs and the temporal signs. 16 Buyssens
stresses the fact that all signs must be studied
within their discursive context; this procedure
avoids thc problem of homonymic signs.
Semes and semies may or may not have an iconic
link with what they indicate or mean. In the first
case, they are intrinsic; in the latter case, they
are purely conventional and extrinsic. Some signs
(e.g. geographical maps) are partly intrinsic and
partly extrinsic.
In his study of the relations existing between
different semies, Buyssens introduces two ancient
concept is used to differentiate between various
semiotic levels (e.g. reality-thought-lan-
guage-metalanguage).17 With direct or imme-
diate semies, the meaning of the seme is an abstract
mental state; in substitutive semies (such as writ-
of another seme.
13This abstract component renders Buyssens's semiotic the-
ory akin to the Stoic theory of the sign.
14See Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours, op. cit., p. 59.
15The sign is defined as "l'element indecomposable commun
a plusieurs semes du double point de vue de la forme et
de la signification" (ibid., p. 37; see also p. 41).
16Ibid., pp. 38-39.
17For abrief dcscription of these semiotic levels, see Innoeent
Maria Bocheriski, The Methods ofContemporary Thought (New
York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 51. This
book was originally published as Die zeitgenössischen Denk-
methoden (Beru: Francke, 1961).
346 PIERRE SWIGGERS
"Pour obtenir une vue exacte des faits, il y a lieu de separer
les deux points de vue et de proceder a deux classements
complementaires. Le premier part de la definition de la semie
substitutive et classe les caracteres d'ecriture d'apres leur
signification; on distingue ainsi comme categories reelles ou
possibles: fIes caracteres alphabetiques, representant les
phonemes; 2° les caracteres syllabiques, representant les syl-
labes; 3° les caracteres lexiques, rcpresentant les signes; 4°
les caracteres toniques, representant le ton ou certaines dc
ses caracteristiques (intonation ou rythme): ponctuation,
guillernets du discours direct, soulignement ou choix de car-
acteres speciaux po ur marquer le mot accentue."18
Within this semiotic perspective, the author
distinguishes between parole and discours (the lat-
ter being the Junctional substance of the former), 19
and between dis course and though t (pensee):
"La comparaison entre les semies nous permet de donner
au discours sa place exacte dans la vie psychique. Pensee et
discours ont longtemps ete confondus et cela s'explique. Au
penseur plonge dans ses speculations, le discours apparalt
avant tout comme un moyen precieux-comme le seul, en
dehors du formulaire scientifique-d'objectiver sa pensee de
fa<;on a pouvoir la contempler comme tout autre objet. Mais
c' est etre victime de la deformation professionnelle que de
voir dans le discours uniquement ce qu'il est pour le penseur,
a savoir un moyen de s'exprimer, une objectivation. Pareil
usage du discours le detourne de sa fonction essentielle qui
est la collaboration sociale. Si I'on neglige I'aspect semique
du discours, on le confond avec la parole; des lors on a le
droit de I' etudier comme le graphologue etudie I' ecriture,
c'est-a-dire avec I'intention, non de degager les caracteris-
tiques inherentes a son fonctionnement social, mais d'etablir
des liens de causalite, des liens intrinsequcs, entre les etats
de conscience et la fa<;on individuelle de parler. Du coup,
I'on doit attacher de I'importance a tous les faits de la parole
qui vont a l'encontre de I'usage. En outre, on n'a plus le
droit de separer la signification des paroIes et leur mobile:
la linguistique doit alors englober I'etude de I'art litteraire,
des manifestations verbales de la politesse, de la morale, etc.
Comme l'ecrit Serrus (Paralltlisme logico-grammatical, p. 150):
"La parole n'est le symbole de la pensee que quand toute
la parole se dresse en face de toute la pensee." Il s'agit alors
de la parole et non du discours. ,,20
In the final chapter of his book, Buyssens ana-
lyzes some grammatical categories (subject; pred-
icate; person; number; parts of speech) from a semiotic
point of view. Throughout this analysis, the
18Buyssens, Les Langages et le discours, op. cit., p. 50.
19Ibid., p. 30, "J'entends en effet par parole l'acte semique
oral, par discours le seme oral. Le discours est la partie flnc-
tionnelle de la parole."
2°Ibid., p. 63-64. See also Buyssens's articles "La Nature du
signe linguistique," Acta Linguistica, 2 (1940), 83-86, and
"De l'abstrait et du concret dans les faits linguistiques: la
parole, le discours, la langue," Acta Linguistica, 3 (1942-
1943),17-23.
author maintains his distinction between the
substance and the modality of communication.
In his conelusion, Buyssens stresses the idea
that language has to be viewed within the frame-
work of all the semiotic systems known to us,
and that these systems cannot be studied ade-
quately without taking into account their con-
textual use. Furthermore, the author expresses
his conviction that the study of the structure and
systemic organization of the various semies would
be an important contribution to the theory of
knowledge.
As al ready mentioned, Buyssens's text has had
a rather restricted inftuence on scholars in the
Low Countries; the author himself returned to
his semiotic perspective in the late fifties. 21
111. From Decline to
Proliferation
For several reasons, most ofwhich still remain
unclear, interest in semiotics deelined after 1945.
The "crisis" seems to have been widespread, since
in both the United States and Europe there
appeared no major publications in the field
between 1945 and 1960. One of the reasons may
have been the loss of interest in semantics and
functionalism, combined with an excitement
about formal descriptive techniques (which would
eventually lead to transformational grammar).
It is significant that the semiotic insights of the
Dutch philosoph er of language HendrikJ. POS22
fell into oblivion, mainly because of their elose
"See his studies: "Le Langage par gestes chez les moines,"
Revue de l'Institut de sociologie de Bruxelles, 29 (1956), 537-
545; Virite et langue. Langue et pensee (Brussels: Editions de
l'Institut de Sociologie, 1960); La Communication et l'articu-
lalion linguistique (Brussels and Paris: Editions dc l'U ni-
versite & Presses Universitaires, 1967). In recent years,
Buyssens has written two studies dealing with problems of
theoretical linguistics: Les Categories grammaticales du franfais
(Brussels: Editions de l'U niversite, 1975) and Epistemologie
de la phonematique (Brussels: Editions de l'U niversite, 1980).
The latter work includes a select bibliography of Buyssens'
writings (pp. 73-74).
22HendrikJ. Pos receives ample treatment in Herman Parret
and Roger Van De Velde, "Structuralism in Belgium and
in the Netherlands," Semiotica, 29 (1980), 145-173. This
article also contains a useful bibliography of Pos's writings
(pp. 171-172). Sc hol ars who do not read Dutch can find
the essence of Pos's ideas in his paper "Perspectives du
structuralisme," Trauaux du Cercle de Linguistique de Prague,
8 (1939), pp. 29-47.
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
assocation with Prague structuralism and Hus-
serl's phenomenology, both dying trends at that
moment. In his work, Pos attributes a central
role to the speaking subject, who expresses his
intentions and who constitutes a particular shape
qf speech. The interest in the development of lin-
guistic techniques also explains the relative suc-
cess of such splendid books as Reichling's Het
Woortf 3 and Stutterheim's Het begrip metaphoor,24
unfortunately written within a traditionalist
framework and based on semantic intuitions, the
formal basis of which was rarely accounted for.
The lack of continuity in the transformation of
the semiotic "spirit" and the absence of a uni-
form methodological approach would lead to a
diversity of semiotic interests, at tim es without
theoretical foundation, in both Europe and the
United States.
We will offer in what follows a survey of the
semiotic interests of Belgian and Dutch scholars
from the late fifties on.
A. Theory of Argumentation-
Rhetoric
At the end of the fifties, Chaim Perelman
(1912-1982) and Lucie 0lbrechts-Tyteca (U ni-
versity of Brussels [Universite libre de Brux-
elles]) published their very important Traite de
l'argumentation/ 5 in which rhetoric is regarded as
a complex semiotic activity based on logical con-
duct and leading to a conversational interaction.
This "new rhetoric" constituted an important
broadening of classical rhetoric: all types of dis-
course (with the exception ofaxiomatic systems)
were now considered to be rhetorically loaded.
Of course, in order to judge these discursive types,
one needs a many-valued logic involving pragmatic
considerations, whether of a historical, geo-
graphical, cultural, or personal nature. Each type
of dis course is studied as being a particular type
of argumentation, having its own form, its own
media, and its specificpublic.
23 Antoon Reichling, Het Woord. Een studie omtrent de grondslag
van taal en taalgebruik (Zwolle: Tjeenk Willink, 1935).
24Cornelis F. P. Stutterheim, Het begrip metaphoor. Een taal-
kundig en wijsgeerig onderzoek (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1941).
25Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, Traiti de l'ar-
gumentation. Nouvelle rhitorique (Paris: Presses U niversitaires
de France, "1958). A third edition of this book appeared in
1976.
347
Whereas in his earlier studies Perelman insisted
on the validity of these discursive types, 26 his
last writings manifest a genuinely philosophical
interest in the historical specificity and value of
these types of discourse. 27
"La mission du philosophe est de presenter une vision rai-
sonnable de l'homme, de sa place dans l'univers, de ses
rapports avec les autres, et eventuellement, avec Dieu, de la
maniere dont il organise et hierarchise son systeme de valeurs
et de la proposer a l'adhesion de tous. Ce qui veut dire que
chacun est invite a prendre position, a soumettre des cri-
tiques et des objections auxquelles le philosophe se doit de
repondre. C'est ainsi que s'engagera le dialogue philoso-
phique. Une conception rhetorique de la philosophie, d'une
philosophie qui se veut acceptee, conduit immanquablement
a une philosophie en dialogue. 11 est normal que le progres
de la philosophie passe par la controverse, par l'opposition
des idees et par la tentative de depasser cette opposition.
C'est peut-etre ainsi qu'il faut concevoir la dialectique de
Hegel. Mais s'il en est ainsi, on comprend que le dialogue
puisse etre continuellement repris, que les questions ne soient
pas tranchees d'une fa<;on definitive. En effet, ce qui est
admis dans un etat de la societe, du savoir et de la culture
n'est pas acceptable dans un autre."28
This new interest in rhetoric, which is ex-
emplified by the writings of Roland Barthes,
Kenneth Burke, Jacques Derrida, Marcel
Detienne, Donald Douglas, Gerard Genette,
Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wilbur
Samuel Howell, and J ulia Kristeva, gave rise in
the Low Countries to a stream of publications
26This insistance was mainly due to Perelman's strong jur-
idical interests.
2'See Chaim PereIman, Le Champ de l'argumentation (Brussels:
Presses Universitaires, 1970); the same, L'Empire rhitorique
(Paris: Vrin, 1977), and "Philosophie et rhetorique,"
Tijdschrifl voor Filosofie 41 (1979),433-446.
28Perelman, "Philosophie et rhetorique," op. cit., p. 444. The
mission of the philosopher is to present a reasonable view
of man, of his place in the universe, of his interactions with
others, and possibly, with God, of the way in which he
organizes and hierarchizes his system of values and to pro-
pose this view for universal adhesion. This means that
everyone is invited to take astand, to sub mit criticisms
and objections which the philosopher must address. It is
in this way that a philosophical dialogue will be started.
A rhetorical conception of philosophy, of a philosophy which
wants to be accepted, inevitably leads to a philosophy in
dialogue. It is the normal progression of philosophy to pass
through controversy, .through the opposition of ideas and
through the attempt to surpass this opposition. It is perhaps
in this way that Hegel's dialectic should be conceived. But
if this is so, one then understands that the dialogue can
continually be taken up, that the questions cannot be def-
initely solved. Indeed, that which is admitted into one stage
of society, of knowledge, and of culture, is not acceptable
in another.-Ed.
348 PIERRE SWIGGERS
from 1970 on, dealing with the rhetorical study
ofliterar/" and philosophical texts.~o In his book
Retoriek en filosofie,ll Samuel Ijsseling (b. 1932;
U niversity of Louvain [Katholieke U niversiteit
Leuven]) offers a historical and thematic survey
of the conft ict between philosophy (taken as the
search for the final truth) and rhetoric (the prac-
tical ability to present a clear and convincing
argument, as well as the theoretical reftection on
this ability); the book ends with the semiotic
question "What happens when someone is speaking or
writing, and who is actually speaking whenever some-
thing is said?"
In recent years, the main ideas of Perelman's
writings have been revived by Dutch scholars:j2
interested in the structure of argumentation.
B. Logic of Action-Analytical
Pragmatics
A student of Carnap, Piaget, and Perelman,
Leo Apostel (b. 1922; U niversity of Ghent [Rijks-
universiteit Gent]) was the first philosopher in
the Low Countries to take an active interest in
pragmatics, the study of man's use of signs within
a social context. Apostel combined this interest
2"See Jacques Dubois et al, (= Groupe fL of the University
01' Liege), Rhitorique generale (Paris: Larousse, 1970); A.
Kibedi-Varga, Rhitorique et litterature. Etudes de stmetures clas-
siques (Paris and Brussels: Didier, 1970).
300f special importance here are the publications of the Dutch
philosopher of language Samuel Ijsseling: "Filosofie en
retorica," Dietsehe Warande en Belfort, 118 (1973), 333-343;
Retoriek en .!ilosofie. Wat gebeurt er wanneer er gesproken wordt!
(Bilthoven: Ambo, 1975); Rhetorie and Philosophy in Conflict.
An Historical Survey (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1976 = trans-
lation ofIjsseling [1975]); "Rhetorique et philosophie. Pla-
ton et les sophistes, ou la tradition metaphysique et la
tradition rhetorique," Revue philosophique de Louvain, 74 (1976),
193-210; "Retoriek, filosofie en macht," Wijsgerig Perspectie/,
17 (1976-1977), 237-252. Other, more international man-
ifestations of this "rhetorical interest" are the foundation
of the journal Philosophy and Rhetorie (1968-) and the pub-
lication of issue 5 of Poetique, entitled Rhitorique et Philosophie
(1971).
"For the references, see the preceding footnote. I have
reviewed the English translation of Ijsseling's book in
Tijdsehrifl voor Filosofie, 40 (1978), 527-528.
'''For a survey of Belgian and Dutch work (by E. M. Barth,
J. van Benthem, W. J. Drop, R. Feys, C. Keers, C. W.
Krabbe, K. Kuypers, J. L. Martens, H. Roelants) on the
theory of argumentation, see F. H. van Eemeren, R. Groo-
tendorst and T. Kruiger, Argumentatietheorie (U trecht and
Antwerp: Hel Spectrum, 1978), which contains a rich
bibliography.
with his work on logical theories. According to
Apostel,33 pragmatics must be integrated within
a theory oJ action. In his most recent publications,34
Apostel attributes a central place within this the-
ory of action to the theory oJ texts. He defines the
text as a "cooperative means of logical action"
which sets up some basic action patterns. From
these basic patterns more complex strategies can
be derived by applying a (limited) number of
formative rules. In his description of these action
patterns, Apostel uses the semantic model out-
lined by Winograd.~5 An outgrowth of Apostel's
logical and metalogical activity is his cognitive
theory of the metaphoric process, which accord-
ing to the author can be given the status of a
formal science. 36
By the seventies, pragmatics had become a
full-time occupation for a few Belgian linguists,
such asJefVerschueren (University of Antwerp
[U niversitaire Instelling Antwerpen] and Bel-
gian National Science Foundation [N.F.W.O.])
and Johan van der Auwera (University of Ant-
werp and Belgian National Science Foundation),
who both did postgraduate studies at the Berke-
ley campus of the University of California. Ver-
schueren is the author of a bibliography on
pragmatics,37 and of a monograph on speech-act
verbs. 38 He is also a member of the editorial
board of the Journal oJ Pragmatics (in which he
regularly publishes a current bibliography of
pragmatics) and co-editor (with Herman Parret)
of the new series Pragmatics and Beyond. Van der
Auwera has written an introduction to linguistic
33See Leo Apostel, "Further Remarks on the Pragmatics 01'
Natural Languages," in Pragmaties 01 Natural Languages, ed.
Y. Bar-Hillel (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971), pp. 1-33.
S!Leo Apostel, Logique et aetion (Ghent: Communication &
Cognition, 1979); - , "Pragmatique praxeologiq.ue: com-
munication et action," in Le Langage en contexte. Etudes phi-
losophiques et linguistiques de pragmatique, ed. H. Parret
(Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1980), pp. 193-315.
lSTerry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (Edin-
burgh: University Press, 1972); - , "Towards a Procedural
Understanding 01' Semanties," Revue Internationale de Phi-
losophie, 30 (1976), 261-303.
3IiLeo Apostel, "Persuasive Communication as Metaphorical
Discourse under the Guidance of Conversational Maxims,"
Logique et Anafyse, 22 (1979),265-320.
37J ef Verschueren, Pragmaties: An annotated bibliography, with
partieular refirence to speech ael theory (Amsterdam: J. Benja-
mins, 1978).
3HJef Verschueren, On Speech Act Verbs (Amsterdam: J. Ben-
jamins, 1980). This book appeared as volume 4 in the series
"Pragmatics and Beyond."
 THE LOW COUNTRIES 349

pragmatics,39 and a thesis on empirical senten- mising: this becomes clear as soon as we want
tiallogic. 40 In his writings, the author pleads for to pi ace propositions und er the scope of a quan-
a broadening of logic into a pragmatically based tificational operator (in nonfree logical systems),
theory of reasoning. Van Der Auwera is also the or when we are making statements (correspond-
editor of a volume on the Semantics of Determiners ing to tru th-values) abou t propositions. Of
which contains the Proceedings of a colloquium course, it is possible to introduce variables which
held at Antwerp University in February 1979. correspond not to propositions, but to other val-
Interesting semiotic work has also been done ues (this is for instance the case in substitutional
by the Belgian logician Paul Gochet (U niversite quantification): however, this is only a strategy
de Liege), whose writings belong to the field of to deplace commitment, not to avoid it. 4:1
analytical (or formal) pragmatics. In his most Syntactically, the least committing way to
recent book,4! Gochet provides a theory oJ the prop- define the proposition is to consider it as the
osition from the point of view of methodological filling of a schematic letter. This filling must be
nominalism. By a theory, the author understands recurrently recognizable, and for this reason it
a consistent explanatory framework, which is self- is necessary to impose the criterion of univocity
expansive: "A theory does not merit the name and typographical identity on this filling.
unless it is capable of solving by itself, i.e. with- Semantically, the proposition is commonly
out external contribution of ad hoc solutions, considered to be the subject of the predicate "true/
many problems it was not specifically designed Jalse." But it should be noted that true can be a
to solve.,,42 As to the proposition, the book exam- predicate de re, de dicto, or de dicto dicti: it is there-
in es the interdependent meanings of the term fore essential to specify the level on wh ich pre-
"proposition" as it is used in logic, ontology, phi- dication takes place. On each level, truth can
losophy of mind, and the theory of meaning. then be defined as a satisfaction-relation (cf.
More specifically, Gochet deals with three main Tarski) obtaining between a linguistic expression S
questions: (I) how can the proposition be defined, (the subject of the possible predication "-is
and what is being presupposed in each of the true") and a correlating reale (individuals or n-
definitions which have been given of it? (2) what tupI es of individuals).
are propositions about? (3) what is the criterion Pragmatically, the proposition can be defined
for the identity of propositions and how does the as the asserted statement, or better, as the pos-
proposition behave in indirect discourse? The sible content of a particular assertion (as a mat-
results of Gochet's investigation are: a three-fold ter of fact, a proposition can be entertained
semiotic definition of the proposition and a wi thou t being asserted).
refinement of the criterion of ontological com- Gochet then discusses the problem of the ref-
mitment as applied to propositions. Let me first erence of a proposition: does a proposition refer
consider the latter issue, which I take to be very to a fact, to a sentence's meaning, or to a belief?
important. As no ted by Gochet, some uses of the Granted that propositions in some way refer to
term proposition (or the variable p) are compro- facts, there still remains a problem concerning
the status of these facts: are they temporal events,
39J ohan Van Der Auwera, Inleiding tot de linguistische pragmatiek or linguistic reports on events? The first answer
(Leuven: Acco, 1977). This book contains an almost is unacceptable, since the fact that I have my
exhaustive bibliography of the author's previous writings.
'apart of this thesis was published as volume 3 (1981) of wallet with me is not an event, and the second
"Pragmatics and Beyond": Johan Van Der Auwera, What solution would eliminate the proposition (and
Do We Talk About When We Talk? Speculative Grammar and the replace it by the reported fact).
Semantics and Pragmatics 0] Focus (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, Are proposltlOns then belief-con ten ts?
1981). The volume edited by Van Der Auwera, The Seman-
tics of Determiners, appeared in 1980 (London: Croom Helm). Although this would be an economical solution
H Paul Gochet, Outline of a Nominalist Theory 0] Propositions. An
Essay in the Theory 01 Meaning and in the Philosophy 0] Logic 4:lAs noted by Gochet (ibid., p. 30), there are also more
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980). This book is a translation, incor- practieal reasons which invite us to avoid this way out: "As
porating substantial revisions, of Gochet's work Esquisse is weil known, linguistie signs which are possible substi-
d'une tMorie nomina liste de la proposition (Paris: Colin, 1972). tuends for variables form a denumerably infinite set, whereas
"Paul Goehet, Outline of a Nominalist Theory 0] Propositions, op. the value range for dass variables is a non-denumerably
eil., p. 3. infinite set-as Cantor has shown in his set theory."
350 PIERRE SWIGGERS

(propositions could then be used as free varia- that intensions are treated here as set-theory con-
bles, to be substituted for objects of belief and struets, with all proposition al variables ranging
knowledge), it is much more reasonable to say over the same domain. In his conclusion, Gochet
that propositions are like belief-contents in that points out that one of the major tasks for (nom-
they represent something. However, a proposi- inalist) logicians will be to redefine all the inten-
tion is not a belief-content: some propositions (e.g. sional concepts allowed by Montague in non-
"John hasjust said: 'It will rain tomorrow' ") involve committing (i.e., extensional, or at least accept-
no particular belief; also, belief is not always able to the methodological nominalist) terms. It
propositional (e.g., the belief in conjugal fidelity). is to be expected that future publications of
Are propositions meanings of sentences? The Gochet will be concerned with these and other
problem here is to avoid a Platonist conception problems connected with the elaboration of a
of meaning as an ideal object which exists inde- nominalist theory for logical pragmatics.
pendently of the speaker's intentions, a concep- In The Netherlands, the interest in logic is
tion which js self-undermining if one is willing strongly historical, and, in the writings of Lam-
to accept that the meaning of a sentence changes bertus Maria de Rijk and Gabriel Nuchelmans
when used in different contexts. To avoid these (both of the University of Leyden [Rijksuni-
Platonist assumptions, several "solutions" have versiteit Leiden]), specifically concerned with the
been proposed: a behavioristic theory of mean- semantics of ancient and medieval logic~l the-
ing, Ryle's chess theory of meaning, and Witt- ories. De Rijk is an internationally known spe-
genstein's picture theory of meaning. The last cialist in medieval logic manuscripts and
theory has much to recommend it: there is first medieval semantics. 44 Nuchelmans must be
the useful distinction between sentences and lists mentioned for his detailed account of ancient
01 names and attributes; secondly, this theory offers and medieval theories of meaning,45 and for his
a way to recover the reference of propositions introduction to the philosophy of language,46
through the principle of isomorphism. Here, Gochet which contains a few pages on semiotics. 47
sees a link between the Wittgensteinian picture
theory of meaning and recent attempts to con-
struct full-scale semantic theories (Katz-Fodor; C. Visual Communication-Mass
Keenan-Faltz). As a nominalist, Gochet has to
Communication
reject these theories because the ontology they Applied semiotics seems to have met with litde
imply is far too rich. success in the Low Countries. A notable excep-
In the tenth chapter of his book, Gochet deals tion is the study of visual communication, which
with pro positions in indireet discourse. Gochet sur- has been the (monopolistic) concern of Jan-Marie
veys the attempts to account for the status of
word sequences in indirect discourse. Syntactic 44De Rijk's major publieation is his Logica Modemorum. See
approaches suffer from one basic defect: in so me Lambertus Maria de Rijk, Logica Modemorum. A Contribution
to the History rif Early Terminist Logic (Assen: Van Goreum,
way or another, they want to do away with the 1962-1967). For a synthesis of de Rijk's work on medieval
notion of (mental) proposition (or propositional con- philosophy, see Lambertus Maria de Rijk, Middeleeuwse
tent), but in practice they all use the criterion of wijsbegeerte. Traditie en vemieuwing (Assen and Amsterdam:
propositional identity. Semantic approaches (Frege, Van Goreum, 1977) 2nd rev. ed., (1980).
"See GabrieJ Nuehelmans, Theories 01 the Proposition. Ancient
Church, Carnap) suffer from a permanent and Medieval Conceptions 01 the Bearers 01 Truth and Falsity
anchoring of "talk about sense" in extensional (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1973),
language. Hintikka has tried to avoid the de- as weil as his Late-Scholastic and Humanist Theories rif the Prop-
fects of syntactico-semantical approaches by osition (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company,
(I) positing a concept of identity through pos- 1980). A review article of the latter volume appeared in
Leuvense Bijdragen, 72 (1983), 153-175, und er the title
sible worlds, and (2) by appealing to the speak- "Gleanings from the History ofLinguistics" (see the seeond
er's knowledge. The latter topic has, however, part of the article).
not been sufficiently explored by logicians; the 46Gabriel Nuehelmans, Taaljilosofie. Een inleiding (Muider-'
former has given way to Montague's pragmati- berg: D. Coutinho, 1978). A review of this book appeared
in the Revue beige de philologie et d'histoire/ Belgisch tijdschrij/
cally oriented approach. This program seems voor filologie en geschiedenis, 60 (1982), 564-567.
appealing to Gochet, who points out that the "See Nuehelmans, Taaljilosofie, op. eit., pp, 25-27 and (pas-
great merit of Montague's theory lies in the fact sim) pp. 27-55.
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
Peters (b. 1920; since 1963 Professor at the Uni-
versity of Louvain [Katholieke U niversiteit Leu-
yen]). This Dutch scholar has devoted many
studies to the language of films, to the meaning
and reference of motion pictures, and to the the-
ory of audio-visual communication. 48 At the
University of Louvain, Peters has joined the
research team for mass communication,49 the
medium of which is the journal Communicatie.
Tijdschrift voor rnassamedia en cultuur. However, most
of the members of this team are scarcely inter-
ested in providing a semiotic foundation for their
case studies.
D. Semiotic Insights in Linguistic
and Literary Studies
The development of post-war Belgian and
Dutch linguistics was very slow until the sixties,
with sporadic influences from European and
American structuralism. From the mid-sixties on,
a great number of linguists 50 became strongly
interested in transformational-generative gram-
mar, the insights of which were immediately
adopted, often very uncritically. Other linguists
continued to work within a tradition al or struc-
turalist framework. However, there was no
"SeeJan-Marie Peters, De taal van defilm (The Hague: Gov-
ers, 1950); "Bild und Bedeutung. Zur Semiologie des Films,"
in Semiotik des Films, ed. F. Knilli (Munich: Fink, 1971),
pp. 56-69; Leggere l'immagine (Turin: E.D.C., 1972); Theorie
van de audiovisuele communicatie (Groningen: Tjeenk Willink,
1972); Retoriek van de communicatie (Groningen: Tjeenk Wil-
link, 1973); Principes van de beeldcommunicatie (Groningen:
Tjeenk Willink, 1974); Pictorial communication (Claremont:
David Philip, 1977); Semiotiek van het beeld. In het bij:::.onder
van de film (Leuven: Centrum voor Communicatieweten-
schappen, 1978).
"See, among others, the publications by Gust De Meyer and
Guido Fauconnier: Gust De Meyer, "De mededelingsana-
Iyse in het massacommunicatieonderzoek," Politica, 23
(1973),411-430; Guido Fauconnier, Massamedia en samen-
leving (Kapellen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1973); the
same, Massacommunicatie. Een inleiding (Groningen: Tjeenk
Willink, 1974); the same, Mass Media and Society (Leuven:
University Press, 1975).
50For surveys, see M. C. van den Toorn, "Der Stand der
modernen niederländischen Sprachwissenschaft," Zeit-
schrift flr Mundartforschung, 35 (1968), 62-65; the same,
Nederlandse taalkunde (Utrecht and Antwerp: Het Spectrum,
1973); the same, "De nederlandse spraakkunst in de twin-
tigste eeuw," in Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taalkunde, ed.
D. M. Bakker and G. R. W. Dibbets (Den Bosch: Malm-
berg, 1977), pp. 161-194. See also H.J. Verkuyl et al.,
Transformationeie taalkunde (Utrecht and Antwerp: Het Spec-
trum, 1974).
351
attempt to integrate the semiotic perspective into
linguistic theory.51 Joe Larochette (b. 1914; Pro-
fessor at the University of Antwerp [Rijksuni-
versitair Centrum Antwerpen], and, until 1977,
also at the University of Louvain [Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven]) has shown some interest
in semiotic problems, as can be gathered from
his preliminary discussion concerning reference
and meaning in the first part of his Le Langage
et la rialite. 52
Also inter es ted in semiotics is Frederik G.
Droste (b. 1928), a Dutch linguist who has been
Professor at the University of Louvain since 1968.
Droste has been concerned with patterns in
human and animal communication, with sign-
systems used in human and animal societies, and
also with the definition of the sign (index, icon,
symbol) .53 In recent years, Droste's interest seems
to have shifted from a semiotic theory of lan-
guage (and language use) towards logical gram-
mar (and more precisely, Montague-grammar).54
The neglect of semiotic problems, methods,
and trends is also apparent in the historiography
of linguistics produced by Belgian and Dutch
scholars. The well-known studies of Van Hamef5
and Lero/ 6 only mention Saussure's project of
"For some remarks on the integration of the semiotic per-
spective within linguistic theory, see my article "The His-
tory Writing of Linguistics: A Methodological Note," General
Linguistics, 21 (1981), 11-16.
"Joe Larochette, Le langage et la realite. Problemes de linguistique
generale et de linguistique romane (München: W. Fink, 1974).
See also the follo~ing article by Larochette: "La represen-
tation de la realite," Folia Linguistica, 6 (1973),177-184.
53See Frederik G. Droste, "The Grammar of Traffk Regu-
lations," Semiotica, 5 (1972), 257-262; the same, Bij wij:::.e
van spreken. Over taal, gedrag en communicatie (Baarn: Ambo,
1977) and "On Reference and Referents," in Linguistics in
the Netherlands 1974-1976, ed. W. Zonneveld (Lisse: Peter
de Ridder, 1978), p. 35-45.
"For a statement of Droste's views on grammatical theory,
see his book Taaltheorie en taalbeschrijving. Enkele hoifdlijnen
(Leuven: Acco, 1980). For his work on Montague-gram-
mar, see Frederik G. Droste, Frans Heyvaert, and Roger
Vergauwen, "Montague-grammatica. Eenvoudig ver-
klaard voor linguIsten," Leuvense Bijdragen, 69 (1980), 129-
165.
55 A. G. Van Harne!, Geschiedenis der taalwetenschap (The Hague:
Servire, 1945).
56Maurice Leroy, Les Grands Courants de la linguistique moderne
(Brussels: Presses Universitaires, 1963); rev. ed. (1971).
An English translation of this book appeare<l in 1967, under
the tide The Main Trends in Modern Linguistics (Oxford and
Berke!ey: B. Blackwell & University of California Press).
The most recent edition of the French version appeared in
1980 (Brussels: Editions de I'Universite); see my review
352 PIERRE SWIGGERS
a science of signs (semiologie), which has been
studied in more detail by De Pater. 57 Verburg's
monumental work,58 dealing with the evolution
of linguistic theories from the Middle Ages to
the 19th century, offers some dispersed remarks
on the his tory of sign theories. Finally, Ver-
steegh's study'"9 on the inftuence of Greek gram-
mar on early Arabic grammarians focuses on the
linguistic and philosophical (more specifically,
logical) aspects of the cultural heritage.
In the field of literary studies, a lively interest
in semiotics has arisen since the mid-sixties. The
main areas in which the semiotic perspective has
imposed itself are plot structure, text theory and com-
parative literature. With regard to plot structure,
all the semiotically oriented studies show strong
inftuences by Barthes, Todorov, Genette and
Greimas. In 1977, Mieke BaI published an intro-
duction to Greimas's narrative theory, and two
recently published collections (Bronzwaer et al.,
eds., 1977; Grivel, ed., 1978)60 contain several
semiotic contributions dealing with the meth-
odology of literary analysis. Some authors (e.g.,
Van Gorp, Fokkemat have been inftuenced by
article "Comment ecrire l'histoire de la linguistique?" Lin-
gua, 55 (1981), 63-74.
"See Wim Antonius de Pater, "Linguistiek: de wetenschap
van het taalteken. Een overzicht," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie,
29 (1967),585-642 (separate edition: Leuven: Acco, n.d.).
For a summary of this article, see my article "Western
Histories of Linguistic Thought: Additional Bibliography,"
Language Problems and Language Planning, 5 (1981),279-290
(p.283).
58Pieter Adrianus Verburg, Taal en fonctionaliteit: Een histo-
risch-critische studie over de opvattingen aangaande de foncties der
taal vanaf de prae-humanistische philologie van OrUans tot de ratio-
nalistische linguistiek van Bopp (Wageningen: H. Veenman &
Zonen, 1952).
59Cornelius H. M. Versteegh, Greek Elements in Arabic Lin-
guistic Thinking (Leiden: BrilI, 1977).
6°Mieke Bai, Handleiding bij het hestuderen van de verteltheorie van
Algirdas Julien Greimas (V trecht: Instituut voor Theoretische
Literatuurwetenschap, 1977); W.J. M. Bronzwaer, D. W.
Fokkema, and E. Kunne-Ibsch, eds., Tekstboek algemene li-
teratuurwetenschap (Baarn: Ambo, 1977); Charles Grivel, ed.,
Methoden in de literatuurwetenschap (Muiderberg: D. Coutinho,
1978). See also the current literature on literary analysis
published in the journal Forum der Letteren.
61See Hendrik Van Gorp, "Structureel romanonderzoek,"
Spiegel der Letteren, 15 (1973), 130-139; "Semiotische liter-
atuurstudie," Dietsche Warande en Beiftrt, 117 (1972), pp.
465-472; "Tekstcommunicatie, vertelsituatie en verhaal-
functie," Spiegel der Letteren, 17 (1975), 23-37; D. W. Fok-
kema, "Semiotiek en structuralisme in de Sovjetunie," Forum
der Letteren, 15 (1974), 138-156; D. W. Fokkema and E.
Kunne-Ibsch, Theories rif Literature in the Twentieth Century:
Structuralism, Marxism, Aesthetics rif Reception, Semiotics (Lon-
don: Hurst, 1977). Concerning Propp's model, see J. P.
Russian formalism, and more specifically by
Propp's M01fologija skazki. In a very informative
article, W. de Pater has offered a survey of struc-
turalist text-analysis, preceded by an annotated
bibliography on linguistics, philosophy of lan-
guage, logic, and semiotics (pp. 241-246).62 In
his survey, de Pater first discusses Russian for-
malism (pp. 249-255), structuralism (Saussure,
Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, Mukarovsky) and then
analyses the narrative models of Propp (p. 267-
271), Levi-Strauss (pp. 271-277), and Greimas
(pp. 277-292). A case study in text analysis was
published by Van Iersel. As evidenced by this
paper, theologians in the Low Countries are
slowly becoming aware of the importance of
semiotically oriented studies of Bible criticism;
a stimulating factor is the existence of the journal
Linguistica Biblica, edited by E. Güttgemanns.
Belgian and Dutch publications on text theory
also reftect inftuences from French structuralism,
or, as in the case of T. Van Dijk, generative
grammatical theory.63
Finally, re cent developments in translation
theory and comparative literary studies64 witness
Guepin, "Propp kan niet en waarom," Forum der Letteren,
13 (1972), 129-147 and 14 (1973), 30-51.
62See Wim Antonius de Pater, "Struktureie tekstanalyse:
enkele achtergronden," Tijdschrifi voor Theologie, 18 (1978),
247-293; the bibliographical survey preceding this article
is entitled "Theologie en linguistiek: Situering en biblio-
grafie," ibid., pp. 234-246. De Pater's articles are followed
by a case-study in literary analysis of Biblical texts: Bas
Van Iersel, "Terug van Emmaüs. Bijdragen tot een struc-
turele tekstanalyse van Lc 24, 13-35," Tijdschrifl voor Theo-
logie, 18 (1978), 294-323.
63See especially the publications by Mark Adriaens (strongly
influenced by Greimas) and Paul Claes (influenced by
Greimas, Barthes, Kristeva, Genette): Mark Adriaens, Li-
teratuurwetenschap en linguistiek (Leuven: Acco, 1973); the same,
Strukturalisme, poetiek en narrativiteit (Leuven: Acco, 1978);
the same, "Modellen voor linguistische tekstgrammati-
ca's," in Methoden in de literatuurwetenschap, ed. Ch. Grivel
(Muiderberg: D. Coutinho, 1978), pp. 237-260; Paul Claes,
Het netwerk en de nevelvlek. Semiotische studies (Leuven: Acco,
1979). As for Teun Van Dijk's publications, I will restrict
mys elf to the most important ones: Taal, tekst, teken: Bij-
dragen tot de literatuurtheorie (Amsterdam: Athenaeum, 1971);
Moderne literatuurtheorie. Een eksperimentele inleiding (Am ster-
dam: Van Gennep, 1971); Some Aspects of Text Grammars
(The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1972);-ed., Pragmatics rif
Language and Literature (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub-
lishing Company, 1976); Text and Context: Exploration in the
Semantics and Pragmatics rif Discourse (London: Longman,
1977); Taal en handelen: een interdisciplinaire inleiding in de prag-
matiek (Muiderberg: D. Coutinho, 1978).
6'See James S. Holmes, Jose Lambert, and Raymond Van
Den Broeck, eds., Literature and Translation. New Perspectives
in Literary Studies (Leuven: Acco, 1978); Andre Lefevre,
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
the importance of the semiotic perspective for
the study of the dependencies and interactions
between literary poly-systems, and for the construc-
tion of an adequate comparative model.
E. The History of Semiotics-
Introducing Semiotics
In Belgium, the his tory of sign theories has
become a subject of scientific research, carried
out mostly by professors at the University of
Leuven (Louvain) and by members of the Bel-
gian National Science Foundation.
Herman Parret (b. 1938; Fellow ofthe Belgian
National Science Foundation) has written on this
subject since 1969. His first publications deal
with Saussurean semiology and theory of lan-
guage, interpreted from a philosophical point of
view. Later on, Parret became strongly inter-
ested in Derrida's interpretation of European
structuralism and in the his tory of the debate
between empiricism and rationalism in linguistics
and semiotics. According to Parret, there exists
a fundamental dichotomy between theories with
a mentalistic foundation (language being
regarded here as the expression of preexisting
thought) and theories which attribute a creative
role to language in the expression of thoughts
and feelings. In 1980, Parret and Van de Velde
(Antwerp University) published a study on the
background of European structuralism as prac-
tised in Belgium and the Netherlands. 65
Tramlating Poetry: Seven Strategies and a Blueprint (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1975); Raymond Van Den Broeck, Inleiding tot de
vertaalwetensehap (Leuven: Acco, 1972); and my articles "A
New Paradigm for Comparative Literature," Poeties Today,
3 (1982), 181-184; "Methodological Innovation in the
Comparative Study of Literature," Canadian Journal if Com-
parative Literature, 9(1982), 38-45.
65See the following publications by Herman Parret: "In het
teken van het teken," Tijdsehrifi voor Filosojie, 31 (1969),232-
260; Language and Discourse (The Hague: Mouton, 1971);
"Taal als uitdrukking, betekenis en communicatie," Alge-
meen Nederlands Tijdschrijt voor Wijsbegeerte, 64 (1972), 253-
263; "Expression et articulation. Une confrontation du point
de vue phenomenologique et structural concernant la forme
linguistique et le discours," Revue philosophique de Louvain,
71 (1973),72-113; Het denken van de grem. Vier opstellen over
Derrida's grammatologie (Leuven: Acco, 1975); "Ideologie et
semiologie chez Locke et Condillac: la question de I'au-
tonomie du langage devant la pensee," Vt Videam: Contri-
butiom to an Vnderstanding of Linguistics, ed. W. Abraham
(Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1975), pp. 225-248; Filosojie en
taalwetenschap (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979); "Une theorie
linguistique sans concept de signe est-elle possible?," in A
Semiotic Landseape. Panorama semiotique, eds. S. Chatman, U.
353
The his tory of semiotics (especially logically-
oriented theories of the sign) is one of the main
preoccupations of the Dutch logician and phi-
losopher of language W. de Pater (b. 1930; since
1969 professor at the University of Leuven). His
interests are widespread: they concern Aristo-
telianism, contemporary philosophy of lan-
guage, logical theories, the analysis of religious
language and its epistemic and non-epistemic
content, the his tory of linguistics, and the theory
of meaning. In 1970, de Pater wrote a survey of
semiotic activity in Poland; and in recent years
he published two important articles on the def-
inition oflogic. 66 In his unpublished course "Phi-
losophy 01 Language" (Leuven, mimeographed), de
Pater offers a survey of the his tory of semiotics
(from antiquity to contemporary research) and
an analysis of the division between syntax, seman-
ties, and pragmatics.
A thorough connoisseur of ancient and medieval
philosophy, Gerard Verbeke (b. 1910; Emeritus
Professor at the University of Leuven; now Sec-
retary of the Belgian Academy of Sciences) has
written a very detailed study of Stoic semiotics.
In this study, the author examines the compo-
nents of the Stoic sign theory, its epistemological
foundations and its presuppositions. The author
also points out the originality of the A.EKTOV doc-
trine, and the sensitive base of the (T'T]/-LELOV, as
Eco, andJ. M. Klinkenberg (The Hague and New York:
Mouton, 1979), pp. 341-344; ed. Le Langage en contexte.
Etudes philosophiques et linguistiques de pragmatique (Amster-
dam: J. Benjamins, 1980); with Roger Van De Velde,
"Structuralism in Belgium and in the Netherlands," Semi-
otica, 29 (1980), 145-174.
66See the following publications by Wim Antonius de Pater:
Reden von Gott. Reflexionen zur analytischen Philosophie der reli-
giösen Sprache (Bonn: Linguistica Biblica, 1974); "Erschlies-
sungssituation und religiöse Sprache," Linguistica Biblica,
33 (1974),64-88; "Semiotiek in Polen," Tijdschrijt voor Filo-
sojie, 36 (1974), 762-773; "Wissenschafts theoretisches zu
Theologie und Glauben. Neuere Entwicklungen," Linguis-
tiea Biblica, 37 (1976),69-102; "Problemen rond een def-
initie van logika," Tijdschrijt voor Filosojie, 41 (1979), 636-
669; "Logika in breder verband: Semiotiek en soorten taal-
gebruik," Tijdsehrijt voor Filosojie, 42 (1980), 325-371; with
W. R. deJong, Van redenering totformeie struktuur. Enige hoofd-
stukken uit de logika (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981); see my
review in Tijdsehrijt voor Filosojie, 44 (1982), 369-370. Also
interesting from the semiotic point of view are de Pater's
earlier studies Les Topiques d'Aristote et la dialeclique platoni-
cienne. La methodologie de la dijinition (Fribourg: Ed. St. Paul,
1965) and Taalanalytisehe perspektieven op godsdiemt en kunst
(Antwerpen: De Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1970). For the
survey of the his tory of linguistics wh ich de Pater published
in 1967, see note 57.
354 PIERRE SWIGGERS
defined by the Stoic philosophers. Readers inter-
ested in Stoic semiotics should also read Ver-
beke's articles on Stoic philosophy in
philosophical dictionaries and encyclopedias. 67
The present writer has contributed studies on
sign theories in the 17th and 18th centuries, and
some reviews and articles dealing with the his-
tory and the definition of semiotics. 68 The gen-
{"See Gerard Verbeke, "Der Nominalismus der stoischen
Logik," Allgemeine Zeitschriftfur Philosophie, 3 (1977), 36-55;
"La philosophie du signe chez les Stolciens," in Les Stolciens
et leur logique. Actes du Golloque de Ghantilly, 18-22 septembre
1976 (Paris: Vrin, 1978), pp. 401-424; "Le stoicisme, une
philosophie sans fron tieres, " in Aufttieg und Niedergang der
Römischen Welt, 1: Von den Anfängen Rome bis zum Ausgang der
Republik (Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 1973), pp.
3-43; and several contributions to Ritter's Historisches Wor-
terbuch der Philosophie. A bibliography (up to 1976) of Ver-
beke's writings has been compi1ed by Willy Vanhamel,
"Gerard Verbeke-Notice bio-bibliographique," in Images
of Man in Aneient and Medieval Thought. Studia Gerardo Verbeke
ab Amicis et Gollegis Dicata (Leuven: University Press, 1976),
pp. 3-16. On Stoic philosophy of language, see also my
survey article "Logica en grammatica bij de Stoa," Tijd-
schrift voor Filosofie, 45 (1983), 256-260.
68See the following publications: review of E. Holenstein,
Linguistik-Semiotik-Hermeneutik, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 41
(1979), 530-531; review of R. Jakobson, Goup d'oeil sur le
developpement de la semiotique, ibid., 41 (1979), 531-532; review
of E. Walther, Allgemeine Zeichenlehre, ibid., 41 (1979),532-
533; "The Linguistic Conceptions of the Encyclopedie,"
Lingua, 49 (1979), 239-253; "La Base leibnizienne des
dechiffrements de G. F. Grotefend," Orientalia Lovaniensia
Periodica, 10 (1979), 125-132; "La semiotique a la recherche
de l'essence des sens," Linguisticae Investigationes, 4 (1980),
420-430; "Taal en taa1kunde in de Encyclopedie," Tijd-
schrift voor Filosofie, 42 (1980), 372-384; "Linguistic Con-
siderations on Reference," in The Semantics of Determiners,
ed. J. van der Auwera (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp.
166-188; review of]. Culler, Saussure, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie,
42 (1980), 189; review of S. Auroux, La Semiotique des ency-
clopedistes, ibid., 42 (1980),404-406; review ofT. A. Sebeok
ed. The Tell-Tale Sign, ibid., 42 (1980), 834-836; review of
J. Trentman ed. Vincent Ferrer: Tractatus de suppositionibus,
Studies in Language, 4 (1980), 426-432; "Sur I'histoire du
terme "valeur" en linguistique," Revue roumaine de linguis-
tique, 26 (1981), 145-150; "Taalpragmatiek en taalfiloso-
fie," Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 43 (1981), 730-733; "La
grammaire dans l'Encyclopedie: Signe et sens," Romanische
Forschungen, 93 (1981),122-137; "Two Dimensions in Kar!
Bühler's Sign Theory," Ars Semeiotica, 4 (1981), 53-56; "La
theorie du signe a Port-Royal," Semiotica, 35 (1981), 267-
285; "The Supermaxim of Conve~sation," Dialectica, 35
(1981), 303-306; review of A. Keller, Sprachphilosophie,
Tijdschrifl voor Filosofie, 43 (1981), 196-197; review of Zeichen,
Text, Sinn. Zur Semiotik des literarischen Verstehens, ibid., 43
(1981), 765; review of B. Malmberg, Signes et symboles, ibid.,
43 (1981), 771; review of R. Jakobson, The Framework 01
Language, ibid., 43 (1981), 773-775; "La semiotique de
Condillac ou la pensee dans la pensee," in Gondillac et les
eral background of these studies is provided by
American semiotic work and analytical philos-
ophy of language; recently, a short study on
Bühler's definition of the sign appeared in Ars
Semeiotica.
In The Netherlands, historical work in the
field of semiotics has been restricted to the his-
tory of logic. Here we must mention again the
names of de Rijk and Nuchelmans,69 and the
importantjournal Vivarium, which regularly pub-
lishes articles (by de Rijk, C. H. Kneepkens and
H. A. Braakhuis) on medieval grammar and log-
ical theory (especially, problems of suppositio).
To conclude this seetion, we must mention the
introduction to semiotics published by A. van
Zoes t. 70 This introd uction con tains three parts:
in the first, the author defines the basic notions
of semiotics. This part is centered on Charles
Peirce, but although it is intended to be a rather
technical introduction to Peirce's theory, there
are some important shortcomings: for instance,
the author should have stuck more closely to
Peirce's writings when dealing with the different
aspects of semiosis, or when dealing with the divi-
sion between syntax, semanties, and pragmatics
(which is not a genuinely Peircian division). Fur-
thermore, no mention is made of Peirce's
key notion of abduction. The second part of the
book illustrates how semiotic theory can be
problemes du langage, ed. J. Sgard (Geneve: Slatkine, 1982),
pp. 221-242; "Lost in the Semiotic Landscape," Semiotica,
38 (1982), 369-380; "On Pragmatics and Nominalism,"
Semiotica, 48 (1984); "Theorie de la grammaire et theorie
des signes chez les encyclopedistes," Semiotica, 40 (1982),
89-105; "Maupertuis sur l'origine du langage," Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 215 (1982),163-169; "La
Grammaire de Port-Royal et le parallelisme logico-gram-
matical," to appear in Orbis (1984).
69For a list of their major publications of interest to semi-
oticians, see notes 44-46.
70 A. J. Van Zoest, Semiotiek. Over tekens, hoe ze werken en wat
we ermee doen (Baarn: Ambo, 1978); see also the same author's
studies "Een semiotische analyse van Morgensterns Fisches
Nachtgesang," Levende Talen, 278 (1971), 359-377; "De
bruikbaarheid van Peirce's begrip 'icon' bij het be noemen
van bepaalde verschijnselen in (bijv.) Franse poezie," Han-
delingen van het 32' Nederlandse Filologencongres, 5-7 april 1972
(Amsterdam: Universiteitspers, 1974), 187-193. In 1977,
Theresa Calvet de Magalhaes submitted a doctoral dis-
sertation, supervised by Jean Ladriere at the Universite
catholique de Louvain, on Peirce's semiotic theory. The
thesis was published under the title Signe ou symbole. Intro-
duction ala tMorie semiotique de C. S. Peirce (Louvain-Ia-Neuve
and Madrid: Cabay, 1981). A review ofthis study appeared
in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 46 (1984), 358-359.
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
applied to the study ofliterary texts (with special
emphasis on text structures, and disregarding
the extra-literary aspects of these texts, which
can also be studied from a semiotic point ofview).
The third part of the book is taken up by a
catalog of applications of semiotic insights in
architecture, film, music, psychological theories,
etc.
F.. The Sociology of Semiotics
As shown by Kuhn, institutional factors play
an important role in the development of sci-
ence. 71 The brilliant study by Hymes and Fought
has provided evidence for the application of this
idea to linguistics. 72 As a matter of fact, aca-
demic and other professional organizations
determine the (changing) content of the notion
scientific and have a very great impact on the
nature and production of "scientific" literature.
With regard to semiotics, it must be regretted
that the social organization of this discipline is
still very underdeveloped. This may be due to
the vastness of the field and to the fact that its
practitioners are recruited from varied orienta-
tions. Although this difficulty is evident (and
weIl known, since it was al ready discussed at the
first International Congress of 1974), it is not a
sufficient reason for the poor social and insti-
tutional organization of semiotics.
In the Low Countries, there is no specific organ
or journaC 3 which would enable semiotic schol-
ars to communicate with each other or to work
out programs for conferences, collective enter-
prises, etc. Also, propagation of semiotic meth-
ods and information on semiotic theories are
"See Thomas A. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiftc Revolutions
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); rev. ed.
(1970); for the role of institutional and societal factors in
science, see alsoJoseph Agassi, Science and Society (Dordrecht
and Boston: Reidel, 1981).
'2See Dell Hymes and John Fought, "American Structur-
alism," in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Current Trends in Lin-
guistics, Vol. 13: Historiography qfLinguistics, assoc. eds. Hans
Aarsleff, Robert Austerlitz, Dell Hymes, and Edward Stan-
kiewicz (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 903-1176; an
updated version was published in book form under the
same tide (The Hague: Mouton, 1981). See my review in
Language in Society, 12 (1983), 371-377.
73The journal Degris: Revue de synthese aorientation simiologique
(Brussels) is less semiotically oriented than its subtide might
suggest; the general background of this journal seems to
be (a philosophically interpreted version of) European
structuralism.
355
almost non-existent: journals or periodicals offer
litde if anything on semiotic theories. Books and
articles on semiotics can only be found (with a
few exceptions for general works on signs and
sign theories) in university libraries, and more
specifically in the department libraries of phi-
losophy, linguistics, literature, anthropology, and
sociology. Semiotics is not taught as an auton-
omous program or sub-program at Belgian and
Dutch universities. As a matter of fact, more
than a few students of the human sciences in
Belgium and The Netherlands do not even know
what "semiotics" me ans or what it is about! In
Belgium semiotics is taught at the universities
of Leuven and Antwerpen (Universitaire Instel-
ling Antwerpen) as part of a literary course
(translation theory; narratology; comparative
literature; science of literature), a sociological
course, or a course in the philosophy oJ language.
In The Netherlands semiotics is taught, also as
part of literary, sociological, and philosophical
courses, at the universities of Amsterdam, Lei-
den, U trecht, and Groningen. A recendy awak-
ened interest in semiotic analysis among
theologians can be seen in the description of
courses taught at the faculties of theology in Leu-
ven and Nijmegen.
G. Perspectives
In spite of a serious underdevelopment of
applied semiotics (witness the absence of zoö-
semiotics, kinesics, proxemics, and medical
semiotics), there is a positive interest in semiotics
among Belgian and Dutch scholars. The interest
is perceptible in most fields of the human sci-
ences, and is often based on asolid historical
perspective.
At present, Belgian and Dutch semioticians
seeni to be working on several problems: (a) the
definition of semiotics and the delimitation of
the semiotic (sub )fields; (2) the historical devel-
opment of sign theories; (3) the definition of the
sign, and its various cognitive and non-cognitive
aspects; (4) the construction of a theory of for-
mal pragmatics. Practical studies, in which the
semiotic perspective may be somewhat more
implicit, will probably continue to be published
by literary scholars and sociologists.
It is to be hoped that the current work on
theoretical problems in semiotics will be inten-
sified and developed. On these points, semiotic
356 PIERRE SWIGGERS
activity in the Low Countries has already so me
merits. However, the development of a theory
(and metatheory) of semiotics still remains a far-
away ideal. Together with the urgent need for
institutionalization, this constitutes "le grand diji"
for Belgian and Dutch semioticians.
IV. Postscript (September,
1984)
Since the above survey was completed, the
goals and orientations of Belgian and Dutch
semiotic work have hardly changed. However,
some subdomains have attracted incrcasing
interest between 1980 and 1984, and have wit-
nessed the publication of a number of funda-
mental studies. This is especially the case with
pragmatics, the his tory of semiotics, and trans-
lation theory.
With regard to translation theory (and com-
parative literature), I have to mentionJose Lam-
bert (U niversity of Leuven), who in recent years
has published a number of foundation-Iaying
articles integrating into translation theory and
comparative studies the notion of (national) lit-
eratures as polysystems. Other scholars working
within this framework are Hendrik van Gorp
and Lieven D'Hulst. 71
In the field of pragmatics, Herman Parret and
74See the following publications:J. Lambcrt, "Plaidoyer pour
un programme des etudes comparatistes. Litterature com-
paree et theorie du polysysteme," to appear in the Actes du
Congres de la Societe Franqaise de Littirature generale et comparie,
Montpellier, 18-21 septembre 1980; - , "Production, tra-
dition et importation: une elef pour la description de la
litterature et de la litterature en traduction," Revue Cana-
dienne de Littirature Comparie, 7 (1980), 246-252; - , "Theo-
rie de la litterature et theorie de la traduction en France
(1800-1850) interpretees a partir de la theorie du polysys-
teme," I. Even-Zohar and G. Toury, eds., Translation Theory
and Intercultural Relations (special issue of Poetics Today), 1981,
pp. 161-171; - , "L'eternelle question des frontieres: lit-
teratures nationales et systemes litteraires," in Langue, Dia-
leete, Littirature. Etudes romanes a la memoire de Hugo Plomteux,
C. Angelet, L. Melis, F. J. Mertens, and F. Musarra, eds.
(Leuven: University Press, 1983), pp. 355-370;J. Lambert
and H. Van Gorp, "Geschiedenis, theorie en systeem: valse
dilemma's in de literatuurwetenschap," Spektator, 10 (1980-
1981), 514-519;J. Lambert and H. Van Gorp, "Describing
Translations," to appear in Th. Hermans, ed., The Manip-
ulation oJ Literature. Essays on Translated Literature (London:
Croom Helm); L. D'Hulst, ['Evolution de la poesie en France
(1780-1830) . Introduction aune analyse deJ interferences systemiques
(Leuven, Ph.D. diss., 1982).
J ef Verschueren continue their interdisciplinary
series "Pragmatics and Beyond" in which Parret
has published two books;75 Verschueren annually
publishes supplements to his bibliography of
pragma tics in the Journal of Pragmatics. J ohan van
der Auwera will publish a revised version of his
doctoral dissertation in the "Pragmatics and
Beyond Companion Series" under the tide Lan-
guage and Logic. A Speculative and Condition-theoretic
Study. Other Belgian scholars who have contrib-
uted to this series are Michel Meyer (Meaning
and Reading. A philosophical Essay on Language and
Literature, P&B, IV:3, 1983) and Roger van de
Velde (Prolegomena to lnfirential Discourse Process-
ing, P&B, V:2, 1984). Further information on
the study of pragmatics in Belgium can be found
in my article "Taalpragmatiek en taalfilosofie,"
Tijdschrift Door Filosofie, 43 (1981), pp. 730-733.
For The Netherlands, I have to mention the work
by Teun van Dijk, who published in 1983 Strat-
egies 01 Discourse Comprehension (with W. Kintsch)
(New York: Academic Press), and in 1984 a
booklet on Prejudice in Discourse. An Analysis 01
Ethnic Prejudice in Cognition and Conversation
(Amsterdam: J. Benjamins).
For logic (or analytical pragmatics), mention
must be made of the work of Paul Gochet, who
has been revising his books Esquisse d'une theorie
nomina liste de la proposition (Paris: A. Colin, 1972)
and Quine en perspective (Paris: Flammarion, 1978)
for translations into the major European lan-
guages. Michel Meyer has published a short the-
oretical synopsis of analytical pragmatics under
the tide Logique, langage et argumentation (Paris:
Hachette, 1982; a review of this book will appear
in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie). For argumentation
theory one important volume has to be men-
tioned: Argumentation: Approaches to Theory For-
mation (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1982). It
contains four contributions by Dutch (Barth,
Krabbe) and Belgian (Apostel, Van Dun) schol-
ars. In 1982 the Dutch philosophers F. van
Eemeren and R. Grootendorst published their
article "The Speech Acts of Arguing and Con-
vincing in Externalized Discussions" in Journal
01 Pragmatics, 6 (1982), pp. 1-24.
Among the Dutch and Belgian linguists who
have touched upon problems of semiotic theory
"Gontexts oJ understanding (P& B, 1:6, 1980); Structural Semiotics
and Integrated Pragmatics. An Evaluative Gomparison oJ Goneep-
tual Frameworks (P&B, IV:7, 1983).
 THE LOW COUNTRIES
(and theorizing), I would single out F. Droste
and J. Larochette. The latter has put forward a
theory of semantics in his book Le Langage et la
realite, tame II (München: Fink, 1980),76 whereas
the former is especially interested in philosoph-
ical aspects of theoretical semantics and in the
theory of metaphor. 77
The his tory of semiotics and the philosophy
of science have been a major interest of Herman
Roelants (b. 1937; University of Leuven), who
organizes an annual seminar on selected topics
in these fields. Together with W. de Pater, Roe-
lants has founded a new series, "Studies van het
Centrum voor Logica, Wetenschapsfilosofie en Filosofie
van de taal," the two first volumes of which (by
W. de Pater and P. Swiggers) appeared in 1984
(Leuven: Acco). W. de Pater has also been
updating and expanding his introductory course
on the philosophy of language (Leuven: Acco,
1985), a m'ajor part of which deals with the his-
tory of semiotics. In the same field one must also
7l;See my review artide of this book, in Studies in Language, 8
(1984),415-438.
"See the following publieations by F. G. Droste: "Bete-
kenistheorie: wijsgerige en taalkundige aspeeten," Tijd-
schrift voor Filosofie, 43 (1981), 3-17; "Metaphory as a
Paradigmatie Funetion," Poetics, 11 (1982), 203-211;
"Meaning What? On Possible Worlds and Possible Seman-
ties," Saint Louis University Research Journal, 14 (1983), 1-79.
357
mention the third volume of Gabriel Nuchel-
mans's Theories ojthe Proposition (From Descartes to
Kant, Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing
Company, 1982), and the collective volume by
E. Berns, S. Ijsseling, and P. Moyaert, Denken
in Parijs (Alphen a/d Rijn, Brussels: Samson,
1979). Finally, the reader may refer to some of
the present writer's publications relating to the
his tory of linguistic and semiotic theories. 78
78"Saussure a I'usure," Semiotica, 42 (1982),297-309; "Gram-
maire et theorie du langage chez Buffier," Dix-huitieme siede,
15 (1983), 285-293; "Les 'parties du diseours' dans la
grammaire fran~aise au XVIII' siede," Revue roumaine de
linguistique, 28 (1983), 153-163; "La categorie du "com-
pellatif" chez Silvestre de Sacy," Studii Xi eercetari linguistice,
34 (1983), 19-21; "Remarques sur I'arbitraire," Studii Xi
cereetari linguistiee, 34 (1983),171-173; "Studies on the French
Eighteenth Century Grammatieal Tradition," Studies on
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Gentury, 219 (1983), 273-280;
"Theorie grammaticale etßefinition du diseours dans le
Sophiste de Platon," Les Etudes Glassiques, 52 (1984), 15-
17; "Position ideologique et scientifique de la grammaire
fran~aise aux XVII' et XVIII' siedes," Trames: Actualiti
de l'histoire de la langue Jram,aise; mithodes et documents (Li-
moges: Presses Universitaires, 1984),33-41; Les Goneeptions
linguistiques des encydopidistes. Etude sur la constitution d'une
thiorie de la grammaire au siede des Lumieres (Heidelberg: J.
Groos; Leuven: University Press, 1984); "Cognitive Aspects
of Aristotle's Theory of Metaphor," Glotta, 62 (1984), 40-
45; "Locke--Condillac-Bn'al-Saussure: le sens d'une
tradition semiotique," to appear in Semiotiea.
 CHAPTER 16
Semiotics in Mexico
Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo
I. Historical Development of
Semiotics in Mexico
Semiotics as an autonomous discipline has been
practiced in Mexico since about 1976 with the
aim of attaining its consolidation first in the
field of research and, later on, in the field of
teaching.
In the area of research, the earliest contri-
butions were carried out mainly at the Center
for Linguistic-Literary Research at the Univer-
sity of Veracruz (Centro de Investigaciones
Lingüistico-Literarias de la Universidad Vera-
cruzana); the Ins ti tu te of Philological Research
(Instituto de Investigaciones Filologicas) and the
Institute of Social Research of the University of
Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de
la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico),
mentioned according to their chronological order
of appearance.
The pioneers in the field of teaching were the
professors of the Department of Communica-
tions at the Metropolitan University, Xochim-
ilco (La Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana,
U nidad Xochimilco). At present, semiotics
already forms apart of the programs of study
Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo • Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,
Mexico D. F., Mexico 04510.
359
that are available at different schools and facul-
ties, primarily those concerned with communi-
cation, art, and architecture.
A. Deve10pment of Research
1. Seminars
a. Semiotics research in Mexico began in 1976,
with the creation of the Semiotics Seminar at the
Center of Linguistic-Literary Research at the
University of Veracruz (Centro de Investiga-
ciones Lingüistico-Literarias de la Universidad
Vera cruzana), in J ala pa, under the direction of
the philosoph er .and linguist Renato Prado Oro-
peza. The Seminar is attended by researchers at
the Center and by students in their last two years
of bachelor's and master's degrees in Arts.
The Seminar is devoted to the analysis of
literary language from a semiotic perspective,
and with an interdisciplinary vision. The main
emphasis is on sociological and psychoanalytic
aspects. The members of the Seminar work indi-
vidually and in teams. Their investigations fol-
low very closely the methodological and concep-
tual schema ofR. Barthes, C. Bremond, A. Grei-
mas, V. Propp, C. Segre, and T. Todorov.
Their outlet for publications is Semiosis, which
is published semiannually. The first issue of this
magazine appeared in December 1978.
360 REGINA JIMENEZ-OTTALENGO
b. In 1978, the Poetics Seminar was formed
at the Institute of Philological Research of the
U niversity of Mexico (Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Filologicas de la U niversidad N acional
Autonoma de Mexico), under the direction of
Jose Pascual Buxo and with the help of Helena
Beristain, Tatiana Bubnova, Luis Sendoya, Cesar
Gonzalez, Jorge Alcazar, and Patricia Treviiio.
The first objective of this Seminar is to achieve
an approach to the analysis of the literary text
through the different principles, conceptions, and
methodologies of linguistics and semiotics. At
present the seminar is trying this type of analysis
in other aesthetic-expressive environments.
The seminar works in two dimensions, the the-
oretical and the practical; the results of their
lucubrations and investigations appear in two
different types of publications: the Acta Poetica
(annual journal) and Cuadernos dei Seminario de
Poetica. The first, Acta Poetica, is a publication
intended to promulgate advancements in literary
theory and research on literary texts. It pub-
lishes original artides written by the members
of the Seminar, as weil as the contributions of
researchers from other institutions and coun-
tries. At the same time the journal contains a
section of notes and sketches. The journal is
devoted to discussion of the following issues:
(a) theory in linguistics and semiotics and meth-
odology of literature; and (b) the relation between
linguistic, literary, and ideological systems.
Cuadernos dei Seminario de Poetica are publica-
tions intended to make known the theoretical
and empirical work carried out by the research-
ers. Four have so far been issued: Introduccion a
la poetica de Roman Jakobson (Introduction to the
Poetics of Roman Jakobson), by J. Pascual Buxo
(1970); Las estructuras de la narracion y los conceptos
de "actante" y funcion (The Structure of Narration
and the Concepts of "Actant" and Function),
elaborated by Luisa Puig (1978); La poesia colo-
quial de Mario Benedetti (The Colloquial Poetry of
Mario Benedetti) by Monica Mansour (1979);
and Once Poemas de Garcia Lorca (Eleven Poems
of Garcia Lorca) by Maria Andueza (1979). Two
of the more recent publications are: Los extremos
dei lenguaje en la poesia tradicional espaiiola (The
Extremes of Language in Spanish Traditional
Poetry) by Raul Dorra, and Analisis estructural dei
texto literario (Structural Analysis of the Literary
Text) by Helena Beristain (1981, enlarged version,
1984).
The members of the seminar are defined as
followers of the European tendency in semiot-
ics-Barthes, Benveniste, Greimas, T. Van Dijk,
Todorov, Segre-although they know and ana-
Iyze the contributions of the Anglo-Saxon tend-
ency-Ogden and Richards, Peirce, Jakobson,
Chomsky.
c. A Linguistics Seminar for Sociologists was
started in 1978, at the Institute of Social Research
of the National University of Mexico (Instituto
de Investigaciones Sociales de la U niversidad
Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), with the objec-
tive of conveying to some researchers the knowl-
edge of other disciplines that could be of some
use, not only for the development of their theo-
reticallucubrations, but also for the construction
of tools capable of giving them a more objective
understanding of their elements of study.
This seminar was given, under the coordina-
tion of Professor Oscar Uribe Villegas, to a group
of researchers and assistant researchers: Maria
Luisa Rodriguez Sala, Regina Jimenez-Ottal-
engo, Leticia Riz de Chavez, Georgina Paulin-
Siade, Virginia Lopez-Manjarrez, Edna Ibar-
rondo, Aurora Tovar, Adrian Chavero. The
seminar members' research prüjects related to
the sociology of science and knowledge, the
problems of mono- and bilingualism, questions
of abnormal behavior, and problems of com-
munication-a varied program that has as a
common factor the problem ofidentity, ideology,
and meaning.
The coordinator of the seminar, Oscar Uribe
Villegas, started fifteen years ago a project of
sociological research regarding the linguistic sit-
uation in Mexico. The results ofthis project have
appeared in several publications at a theoretical
level, as weil as in some research es of an empir-
ical nature that gave shape to a very deep con-
cern about sociolinguistic problems.
As a result of his in-depth study of these prob-
lems, Villegas had the idea of diffusing his lin-
guistic and sociolinguistic knowledge to other
colleagues, at the seminar level. This seminar
gave way in 1979 to another one, called Semiology
of Culture. The transformation was due to the
dynamics of the different works carried out within
the seminar, where it was found that semantics
was the branch of linguistics düsest to the soci-
ological concerns of each of its members.
Every researcher expressed his concern, not
 MEXICO 361
only for the problems of knowledge and com- work of Greimas about scientific discourse and
munication within human society, but also for the studies of EIlis and Ure regarding "register."
the role that the sign plays in them. Hence, the (5) In their concern for sociological investi-
first contribution of the Seminar, at the theo- gation, they try to grasp, in concrete inquiries,
retical level, was the study of the tripartite dis- the largest possible number of signs, in order to
tinction, syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics, integrate the paralinguistic findings with socio-
from a communicative point of view. This anal- logical ones that may make it possible to cover
ysis was based on the reading of papers pre- the semiotic field in all its aspects.
sen ted at the latest international linguistics In their concerns-the main problematic is
congresses, as weIl as on some books on semiotics found in the various ideological and analytical
published in Spanish. The result of this analysis perspectives that the treatment by different dis-
was the book entitled Readings in Semiology, ciplines may make possible-the sources of their
Emphasis on Semantics (1980), as weIl as three other theoretical and methodological inspiration derive
works yet to be published. (a) Sociology and ·from the contributions of Peirce and Morris,
Semiology: Two Sciences of the Human; (2) Semiology Guiraud, Mounin, and Greimas in semiotics;
within the Framework of Social Research; (3) The Sign from the contributions of Crystal, Quine, and
from the Sociological Point of View. Remsky as to paralinguistic matters; from those
It is convenient to re mark that the group of of Marx, Manheim, Scheler, Pareto, and the
researchers in the Seminar expressed some of French ideologists in the sociology of knowledge;
their basic concerns at the Second International and from the explorations carried out by Him-
Semiotics Congress held in Vienna in 1979, melestrand and AIlard with respect to the soci-
namely: ological studies of the welfare state.
(1) The impossibility of providing aglobai By the end of 1980, the Seminar had devel-
explanation of the problems of knowledge, co m- oped at two levels: one devoted to the basic
munication, and interaction through the single research and the other to applied research. The
approach of a particular discipline, and conse- theoretical part has been carried out by the Alpha
quently the need for interdisciplinary analysis to group organized by the following researchers:
transcend the limitations of each. Maria Luisa Rodriguez Sala, Georgina Paulin,
(2) As a result of the previous point, they and Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo; the practical
recognize the need to establish a relation with portion is performed by the Beta group, with the
the pragmatic dimension of semiotics (relation coIlaboration of: Leticia Ruiz de Chavez and
of the sign with the meaning and its users) ReginaJimenez-Ottalengo, Edna Ibarrondo and
and the sociology of knowledge (the branch of Virginia L6pez.
sociology devoted to the study of ideology) in
order to be able to go deeper into the analysis d. At the end of 1980, a Semiology Seminar
of ideology. They think that the subject of was created in the Department of Communi-
semiotics can be conveyed by study of the works cations of the Academic Unit of Xochimilco of
of Destutt de Tracy, de Volney, Marx, Man- the Metropolitan U niversity of Mexico (U nidad
heim, Scheler, and Pareto, using the research Academica de Xochimilco de la Universidad
presented in Cosenza by some members of the Aut6noma Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Mex-
Italian Society of Linguistics, in relation to the ico), whose basic objective is to make teaching
interference of ideologies in the study of lin- personnel familiar with semiotic matters, in order
guistics and semiotics. to be able to apply this type of analysis to the
(3) They consider that the analysis of the sign problems of social communications. Within the
from the pragmatic point of view, due to its teaching-Iearning system practiced at this Uni-
excessive formalization, could lead to an impov- versity, the seminar is basically destined to the
erishing reductionism; thus, it is necessary to academic improvement of its teaching personnel.
resort to the rich sociological reality. Ana Maria Nethol is the coordinator of the
(4) They express the desire of exploring, with Seminar, formed by: Hector Schmuler, Mabel
a semiotic vision, aIl types of knowledge (from Pechini, Consuelo Beas, Lizi Monserrat, Ray-
the perceptual to the philosophical, going through mundo Mier, Eduardo Andion, Margarita Zires,
the scientific), considering as a starting point the Margarita Guerra, and Josefina Vilar.
362 REGINA JIMENEZ-OTTALENGO

The seminar is not compulsory; the professors With regard to the first one, Propp, it deals with
of the department can either take part in it or the morphology of the folk tale and with Levi-
not. There are two attitudes from the professors Strauss's criticism of his works, as well as the
regarding the seminar: some back it, because improvements of Bremond at the beginning of
they consider semiotics a useful tool for the anal- Russian formalism. As to Todorov, it points out
ysis of the communications process, others oppose the semantic, verbal and syntactic aspects of his
its existence, arguing that semiotics does not have work; for Barthes, it refers to the level of func-
the necessary theoretical and methodological tions, actions, and narration, as well as to the
elements for it to be considered a science. analysis of codes (cultural, hermeneutic) and of
At first the seminar devoted itself to the the- actions (semantic and symbolic); finally, with
oretical research investigation of the different regard to Greimas, it analyzes the actantial model
semiotic approach es and to the preparation of a and the transformation patterns of functions.
teaching program. The main issues of this pro- M6nica Mansour, La Poesia Coloquial de Mario
gram were: (1) the concept of semiotics and its Benedetti (The Colloquial Poetry of Mario Bene-
place with respect to social communication; detti), Ser. Cuadernos deI Seminario de Poetica,
(2) basic concepts on which semiotics operates; No. 3 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Aut6n-
(3) semiotics and semantics; (4) signifying sys- oma de Mexico, 1979). She tries to characterize
tems; (5) application of semiotic elements to the what is known as colloquial poetry, in order to
analysis of discursive material. locate Benedetti's work within this current. She
The analysis that the members of the seminar makes an analysis of several of his poems from
made with the collaboration of the undergrad- phonological, syntactic, and semantic points of
uate students was recorded in mimeographed view. Finally, there is a discussion of a certain
form under the aus pi ces of the Research Work- conception of the ideological.
shop of Mass Communications (TICOM). Maria Andueza, Once Poemas de Garcia Lorca
Lately the seminar has not been working due to (Eleven Poems ofGarcia Lorca), Ser. Cuadernos
the temporary absence of its coordinator, Dr. del Seminario de Poetica, No. 4 (Mexico: Univ-
Nathol. ersidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, 1979).
The work consists of a commentary on the texts
of the Spanish poet. The treatment is carried out
2. Publications (Books) with a traditional approach.
Raul Dorra, Los extremos del lenguaje en la poesia
a. Poetics Seminar. Jose Pascual Bux6, tradicional espaiiola, (Extremes of Language in
Introduccion a la Poetica de Roman Jakobson (Intro- Spanish Traditional Poetry), Mexico, Univer-
d uction to the Poetics of Roman Jako bson), Ser. sidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico, 1981, Ser.
Cuadernos del Seminario de Poetica, Number 1 Cuadernos del Seminario de Poetica, No. 5,
(Mexico: Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de makes a comparison of the poetry of Luis de
Mexico, 1978). The book has an introduction Gongora with the popular poetry of the time.
and four chapters that make reference to Helena Beristain Analisis estructural del texto liter-
J akobson's work: (1) Language of Poetry and ario (Structural Analysis of Literary Texts) Mex-
Language of Practical Communications, ico, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico,
(2) Introduction to Poetics, (3) Linguistics and 1981 (enlarged version 1984), Ser. Cuadernos
Poetics, (4) Folk Poetry between Textuality and del Seminario de Poetica, No.6, gives a pres-
Chance. entation of the theory of narration, illustrating
Luisa Puig, La Estructura de la Narracion y los it with a story of the Mexican Revolution written
Conceptos de Actante y Funcion (The Structure of by Rafael J. Muii6z. She makes an analysis of
Narration and the Concepts of "Actant" and the functions, the actions, and the discourse.
Function), Ser. Cuadernos del Seminario de Poe- In Process: Cesar Gonzalez, El Texto Literario
tica, Number 2 (Mexico: Universidad Nacional y sus Teorias (The Literary Text and its Theories ),
Aut6noma de Mexico, 1978). This book presents will be published und er the sponsorship of the
the theories and methodologies of four well- Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico. In
known structuralists: Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan this work, Gonzalez covers some of the most
Todorov, Roland Barthes, and A. J. Greimas. important literary theories from the Russian
 MEXICO
formalists up to different contemporary tend-
encies, analyzes the domains of the different the-
ories and proposes their classification, and speaks
about theoretical work and methodological eval-
uation. FinaHy, he makes a theorical proposal
for attaining a multidisciplinary approach to lit-
erary studies.
b. Semiology of Culture Seminar. As
mentioned before, the discussions resulting from
the theorical outlines of the lectures presented
during the seminar crystaHized in the publica-
tion entitled Lecturas de Semiologia, Enfasis en
Semantica (Readings in Semiology, Emphasis on
Semantics), published by the Universidad
Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico (National Uni-
versity of Mexico) in 1980. The book has an
introduction, prepared by Maria Luisa Rodri-
gue~ Sala and Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo, as weH
as three sections: (1) The Sign, Meaning, and
Sense; (2) Semiology and Semantics; and
(3) Codification and Decodification.
In the first part, the foHowing works, al ready
translated and reviewed, are discussed: K. Hor-
alek on meaning, content, and sense; E. M. Vas-
iliu on the value of truth and transformations;
Z. D. Wittoch on the purpose of the lexical-
semantic system of language; and M. Satarelli
on the nature of lexical readings.
In the second part, they cover the works of
Guiraud, dealing with linguistic semantics within
the complex of the semantic disciplines and the
role of signification in the relations hip between
man and nature, as weH as between men them-
selves; the work of R. Lord on the "homonema";
and the reftections on sign and reality by Regina
Jimenez-Ottalengo, Maria Luisa Rodriguez Sala,
and Georgina Paulin-Siade.
In the third part are presented the works of
J. C. Marshai, on the mechanisms of the socio-
linguistic process; of L. Renzi, on the limits of
the understanding of language in the newspa-
pers; and of M. Genna, on the language of tele-
vision advertisements.
In 1984, Sociologia y Semiologia was published
by the Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mex-
ico, compiled by Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo. The
text is divided into five chapters: (1) Sociology
and Semiology as Human Sciences; (2) The Sign
from the Sociological Point of View; (3) A Prag-
matic Approach to Ideologies and Their Back-
ground; (4) The Semiotic Approach to Different
363
Levels of Knowledge; (5) A Questionnaire of
Axiological Exploration and Its Adaptation to
Mexican Reality.
In Chapter 1, on sociology and semiology as
human sciences, G. Paulin covers the three
dichotomies of Medina Echeverria: naturalism-
culturalism, abstraction-understanding; special-
ism-synthesis, in regard to human social behav-
ior in sociology and its relation to psychology
and semiotics.
R.Jimenez tries to put thedifferent disciplines
that deal with man into historical perspective,
showing their interdependence for any attempt
to understand social reality and its significance.
L. Ruiz de Chavez deals with reality and the
variety of signalization, the intersubjective char-
acter of signals, the variety of signaling systems
in social life, the reintegration of the objectives
and the interpretation of sense by means of
understanding, as weH as semiotics as a formal
social discipline.
B. Ibarrondo analyzes the possibilities that the
pragmatics and sociology of knowledge offer for
the study of men of ftesh and blood, of concrete
men as the generators and interpreters of signs.
O. Uribe Villegas describes the work done by
the seminar on the semiology of culture at the
Institute of Social Research.
In the second chapter, on the sign from the
sociological point of view, the authors R. Jime-
nez-Ottalengo and G. Paulin examine the ques-
tion of the multidimensionality of social reality
and its possibilities of analytical comprehension,
as weH as the moments and modes of social
expression and the sociological problem of
ideologies seen from a pragmatic viewpoint.
In the third chapter, a pragmatic approach to
ideologies and their background is taken by V.
L6pez-Manjarrez. She covers the subject ofideo-
logies as a center of interest for sociology and
semiotics, and makes a historical resume of the
concept of ideology from the time of Destutt de
Tracy to the ideologists of the French journal
Dialectique.
In the fourth chapter, Maria Luisa Rodriguez
Sala analyzes the seven types of knowledge of
Gurvitch's thesis, which is the basis for setting
forth a future semiotic investigation within the
field of Mexican scientific research.
In the fifth chapter, L. Ruiz de Chavez pre-
sents a questionnaire ofaxiological exploration
adapted to Mexican reality.
364 REGINA JIMENEZ-OTTALENGO
3. Publications (Periodicals)
Semiosis. Semiannualjournal, Centro de Inves-
tigaciones Literarias, J alapa, U niversidad de
Veracruz (Center of Literary Investigations,
J alapa, U niversity of V eracruz): N umber I, J uly-
December, 1978; Number 2,January-June, 1979;
Number 3,January-June, 1980; Number 4,Jan-
uary-J une, 1981.
Acta Poetica. Annual journal, "Seminario de
Poetica," Instituto de Investigaciones Filo16gi-
cas, Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico
(Institute of Philological Investigations, National
University of Mexico): Number I, 1979; Num-
ber 2, 1980; Number 3, 1981.
4. Association
Although the Mexican Association of Semiol-
ogical Studies (Asociaci6n Mexicana de Estu-
dios Semiol6gicos) was legally established in May
1979, it had originally been formed under the
name of Mexican Semiological Association
(Asociaci6n Mexicana de Semiologia) at the end
of 1978, and under this name it had become
affiliated with the International Association of
Semiotics Studies (lASS) and had also become
a member of the Semiotic Society of America.
The change of name was due to the fact that the
present one better reftects the objectives of the
Association.
The Association has the following objectives:
"To investigate scientifically sign phenomena in
their tri pIe manifestation, syntactics, semantics,
and pragmatics, and to teach and diffuse the
results of these investigations. For its goals, the
Association ineludes two elasses of members:
regular members and associated persons. The
first are academics, the second nonacademic.
Within the members there are two levels: Pro-
fessors and Officials. The highest body is the
Great Academic Council (Gran Consejo Aca-
demico), made up of regular members. It has
no President but rather aDean, a Secretary, and
a Treasurer. At present the Great Council is
formed by the following professors: Oscar Uribe
Villegas, Maria Luisa Rodriguez Sala, and
Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo. Acting as Dean is
Oscar Uribe Villegas, as Secretary Virginia
L6pez, and as Treasurer Adrian Chavero.
Semiologia, the first issue of which appeared in
1984, publishes the research of its members, as
weil as papers of other specialists in the field.
B. Development of the Teaching of
Semiotics
a. In 1976, the course of study called Social
Communications was started at the Metropoli-
tan University (Universidad Aut6noma Metro-
politana). Within this course of study, there
appeared for the first time in the field of instruc-
tion in Mexico the systematic teaching of scmiot-
ics. It came into existence as part of a course on
Theories and Models ofCommunications, which
dealt with semiotics as a useful element for the
understanding of the communicative message.
The bibliography used in this course is based on
the works of Greimas, Barthes, Martinet, Gui-
raud, Prieto, Ver6n, and Eco. The students work
in elose relation with the members of the Semiol-
ogy Seminar of that University.
At the same University, in its Xochimilco Unit,
the specialty of Graphic Design is taught. This
ineludes the subject of Semiotics of the Image,
with the main objective of analyzing the mean-
ings, connotations, and denotations that are
expressed by images. It is under the charge of
Professor Daniel Prieto, whose plan of studies
contains four parts: (1) position and concep-
tualization of semiotics as a discipline within
design; (2) structure and elements of semiotics;
(3) qualities of the sign, and (4) syntagmatics
and paradigmatics. The basic bibliography is
formed by the works of Greimas, Barthes, and
Lecortin.
Another subject taught within this course of
study is Design of Graphic Communications,
which covers semiotic themes. It is also taught
by Professor Prieto, with a fundamental bibli-
ography based on the works of M. L. De Fleur,
Eco, Barthes, Metz, V. Morin, F. Todela, A.
Lorentz, and Gilberto Jimenez.
b. By the same year, at the School of Arts
of the University of Veracruz (Facultad de Filo-
sofia y Letras de la Universidad Veracruzana),
certain semiotic elements were incorporated into
the courses for the last undergraduate years and
for Master of Arts studies. The basic bibliog-
raphy is integrated with the work of Greimas,
 MEXICO
Barthes, Bremond, and Propp. The professors
in charge of these classes are members of the
Semiotics seminar of this University.
c. Three years later, semiotics appeared in
the curriculum of the Journalism and Mass
Communications courses at the School of Social
and Political Sciences of the University of Mexico
(Facultad de Ciencias Pollticas y Sociales de la
Universidad Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico). In
the program of this subject, semiotics is pre-
sen ted more as a group of proposals than as a
body of knowledge already constituted, having
nonetheless a possible place within the sciences
of man. The basic bibliography is farmed by
works of Carnap, Schaff, Rossi-Landi, Sebeok,
Peirce, Morris, Greimas, and Zawadovsky. When
teaching this subject, special emphasis is given
to the different systems of signs: from linguistic
systems to non-linguistic ones, from aesthetic
systems to religious ones. Some of the professors
in charge of this subject are members of the
Semiology of Culture Seminar of the Institute
of Social Research (Instituto de Investigaciones
Sociales) .
d. In the same year, 1979, Linguistics and
Semiotics appeared as an optional subject for
the students of Masters degree of Sciences of
Communications at the same Faculty of Politi-
cal Sciences. In this course are analyzed the
humanistic, phenomenological and behavioral
approaches to semiotics; semantics in relation to
socio-psychological expectations and social
action; the role of semiotics in relation to the
possible shaping of a theary of communications;
semantic and non-semantic components ofinfar-
mation signs, systems, and structures of the lex-
icon. The basic bibliography comprises works of
K. Johnson, Malcolm Crick, Osgood, Slama-
Cazacu, Zawadovsky, Sebeok, and Coseriu. This
subject is taught by the author of this paper,
who is a member of the Seminar of the Institute
of Social Research (Instituto de Investigaciones
Sociales) .
e. A course on Philosophy of Language and
Semiotics is included in the present plans which
are in effect in the undergraduate studies (a)
Arts and Sciences and (b) Communication
Techniques, at the Ibero-American University
365
centered in Mexico City. For the students of Arts
it is an optional subject, attended when the option
of studying Philosophy of History is taken;
whereas far the students of Communications it·
is compulsary, one of the basic subjects of this
specialty. The objectives of the course are to
enable students to criticize the different concep-
tions of the sign, to reconstruct an axiomatized
system, and to determine the elements that are
indispensable in human communications.
The professor in charge of this course is Luis
Fernando Alvarez, whose program covers four
main points: (1) language, (2) semiotics with the
schema of Marris and Buchenski, (3) meaning
and definition (the meaning of the ward, defi-
nition through equivalent words, definition by
denotation, connotation, and vagueness), and
(4) some practical aspects.
The basic bibliography of the course is com-
prised by works of: J. Hasper, Leo Apostel, L.
Cople, and Charles Morris. Due to the optional
status of this subject for Arts students, they show
no interest in it, and although it is compulsory
for the students of Communications, only a very
small percentage (10%) are really interested in
semiotics. Nevertheless, two theses have been
presented-one for a master's degree, another
for a Ph.D.-that approach the problems of lan-
guage and meaning. Both were written by Maur-
icio Beuchot: The Problem of Universals in Medieval
and Contemporary Philosophy, and The Problem 01
Language in Philosophy.
If in quantitative terms little has been done
in Mexico (due to the fact that research on this
subject has been carried out for a relatively short
time), we consider the works accomplished
important, as they have exhibited prudent fore-
thought, have clarified the need to bridge some
gaps, and have contributed to the shaping of
theories capable of explaining reality. They have
brought awareness of the need for an adequate
treatment of the sign within a general and
encompassing approach, basically by bringing it
into relation with the different disciplines which
study man, and with the help of the formal sci-
ences (mathematics and logic) and the exact
SClences.
Up to this point it can be said that we have
described what little is being done in Mexico in
the field of semiotics in a systematic and ins ti-
tutional way. Nevertheless, there exists great
366 REGINA JIMENEZ-OTTALENGO

concern about this subject since despite its lack interest of the students to pursue the school of
of real concretization, there are some signs of its thought represented by Greimas.
being able to be formed in the near future. Based
on the contributions already made and on the
awakening of so much interest, we think that the
2_ Architecture and Semiotics
future of semiotics in Mexico is promising. We have been informed that lectures and
In the next and coneluding section , we will reviews are carried out at the Center of Archi-
describe what are now being detected as prob- tectonic Research of the School of Architecture
lems but may yet have some possibility of being of the National University of Mexico (Facultad
developed in the near future. de Arquitectura de la Universidad Nacional
Aut6noma de Mexio). This research has as its
objective the attainment of a novel point of ref-
Co Prospective
eren ce that may allow students to understand
and interpret certain objects of the urban envi-
1. Mass Communications and Semiotics
ronment. The researchers believe that semiotics
During the first months of 1981 a joint pro- can provide them with useful theoretical and
gram was started by the Social Research Insti- methodological means by which to answer ques-
tute (Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales) and tions concerning architectonic forms, and to
the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of understand the reasons for which architectonic
the National University of Mexico (Facultad de modifications, even more than construction tech-
Ciencias Politicas y Sociales de la Universidad niques, can change aesthetic tastes.
Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico), in order to carry The research that centers on signs and lan-
out a semiotic investigation, in elose relation with guage in relation to urban design and architec-
the faculty members, into the field of mass co m- tonic phenomena is due to the specific individual
munications. This provided the basis for the cre- concerns ofthe researchers involved. Neither the
ation of the Circle for Semiological Studies plans of studies which are in effect in the under-
(Circulo de Estudios Semio16gicos), which is graduate and master's level programs in this field,
charged with the following basic tasks: (1) The nor the concrete researches undertaken by the
construction and development of a linguistics different centers of investigation that exist at the
and semiotics laboratory for the design andtest- School, give consideration to the systematic study
ing of tools for semiotic analysis; (2) The recon- of semiotics.
struction and promulgation in the Spanish Nevertheless, in the area of urban morphol-
language of the his tory of semiotics from Clas- ogy, a growing interest is emerging in the use of
sical Greece up to the Middle Ages; (3) The cre- semiotics as a tool to give a significant place to
ation of a library containing semiotic theses; and the urban organizations within existing physical
(4) A biennial International Colloquium on structures. That js, they conceive semiotics as a
Semiotics for the analysis of communication, technique useful for analyzing the significance
which would allow the professors and research- that is created in the use of buildings and other
ers to keep up to date on the advances made in architectonic constructions, and for analyzing
other countries. such use of these significances as might serve to
The Circulo is formed by professors of the strengthen or modify the structure of the urban
Department of Communication of the school center. Among the subjects they attempt to
itself and by the researchers of the Semiology of investigate, and which they consider to require
Culture Seminar at the Institute, as well as by a semiotic treatment, are (1) modification of the
students of the most advanced undergraduate urban prospect, and (2) morphology and mod-
levels in journalism and mass communication ification of the image.
SClence. Among the researchers of the Centro that have
Two new members have joined the postgrad- shown concern regarding these subjects are Fer-
uate division of the Faculty of Social and Polit- nando Moreno Martin deI Campo and Tomas
ical Sciences, Rocio Amador and Rafael Resendiz, Garcia Salgado. In June 1980, Garcia Salgado
both of whom studied in Paris with Greimas and presented a work about the relation between
wish to share their experiences and arouse the architecture and linguistics in which he made
 MEXICO
reference to the important role played by the
"semiotic reading" of the constitutive elements
of spatial systems, a reading that he believes
must be complemented by interpretations of
sociological and anthropological character.
Within the field of architecture, other spe-
cialists have shown their interest in semiotics:
Jose Angel Campos, who is working on a mas-
ter's thesis on the modification of the urban pros-
pect; Ruth C. Crebonod, who carried out her
bachelor's thesis on urban semiotics; Santos Ruiz
G6mez, working on the image in architecture;
and Victor Ortiz, who is making an investigation
about the image of the house.
3. Psychology and Semiotics
Within the psychological disciplines, espe-
cially in psychoanalysis, we are beginning to see
a possible relation to semiotics. Luis Castro,
M.D., of the Department of Experimental Gen-
eral Psychology in the Faculty of Psychology at
the National University of Mexico (Facultad de
Psicologia de la Universidad Nacional Aut6n-
oma de Mexico), is preparing a work in which
he tri es to show the possibilities that semiotics
offers for the recognition of certain diseases. He
considers that by finding certain theoretical bases
367
for the identification of diseases or mental mala-
daptations as communication phenomena,
semiotics will help, in the process of psychoan-
alytic interpretation, to distinguish the different
manifestations and classes of signs as symptoms
indicating when the disease is organic, and when
it is mental.
The importance of semiotic analysis within
the field of psychology lies in the fact that the
physician and the psychoanalyst observe signs,
not diseases. Diseases are deduced from signs,
so an analysis based on the discrimination of
signs-the most accepted because it is the most
functional-is easier to verify and can be more
useful than the kind based on the differentiation
of diseases. A semiotic analysis, according to
Luis Castro, will help in a significant way to
determine if the signs manifested by a human
being are produced deliberately, or emitted in a
passive way by the body.
In the same Department, Dr. Marquez and
Dr. Bernardo Vallejo have shown their concern
for the study of language and semiotics in rela-
tion to psychology. Dr. Emilia Ferreira and Dr.
Maria Salud of the Institute of Educational
Research of the National Polytechnic Institute
(Instituto Politecnico Nacional) located in Mex-
ico City, have also expressed their concern in
this respect.
 CHAPTER 17
Semiotics in Norway
Sven Storelv
1. The Historical Development
of Semiotics in Norway
In attempting to give a survey of the develop-
ment of semiotics in Norway I must begin by
emphasizing three points: (1) As the develop-
ment of Norwegian semiotics belongs to the
re cent past, the very nearness of the historical
scene one wishes to observe and describe makes
it rather difficuIt to discern the historical move-
ment and the major strands. The observer and
analyst may no ti ce what makes up and char-
acterizes the different fields and practices among
which he finds hirnself situated, but he can form
no clearly outstanding picture of how the land-
scape will appear from a greater distance; (2) The
nearness not only preverits hirn from seeing the
relatively permanent trends or "schools," but also
keeps hirn from doing justice to scholars and
their works, and picking out those worthy of
mention and comment; (3) As a matter of fact,
it is impossible to reduce the development of
semiotics to a simple line of evolution. Neither
do the different semiotic fields and practices
coincide in following parallel or simuItaneous
lines of development. Inftuences from key figures
in international semiotic activity or from the
major theoretical and methodological models or
Sven Storelv • Department of French, Universitetet i
Bergen, Bergen, Norway 5000.
369
approach es may make themselves feIt at differ-
ent moments and with unequal force within the
various fields and practices.
In dealing with the different fields and prac-
tices we are going to consider the differences as
to the chronological appearance of semiotics in
Norway. In a general survey of the historical
development it is possible to some extent to
neglect these differences and to situate the rise
of interest in semiotic theory and methodology
within some broad chronologicallimits. Thus we
may observe a growing use of semiotic insights
and theories in the period following the Second
World War. In the wake of prevailing structural
linguistics in Norway in the postwar years an
awakening interest in the semiotics of Saussure
may be noticed in a certain number of areas of
research. At the same time the international
growth of semiotic activities, especially from the
1960s onwards, came to inftuence Norwegian
scholars. This inftuence was channeled to a large
extent through the publications of the Interna-
tional Association for Semiotic Studies, founded
in 1969, for instance by the series of studies pub-
lished in Approaches to Semiotics and the journal
Semiotica, appearing from 1969 onwards. Some
inftuence can also be attributed to the Interna-
tional Center for Semiotics and Linguistics at
the University of Urbino in Italy. Norwegian
scholars have participated in introductory and
research courses in this center from the 1970s
onward and have followed its activities through
370 SVEN STORELV
the various publications which have come
forth.
The most important factor for the develop-
ment of semiotics in Norway in the 1960s and
1970s has been the prevailing influence of the
French structuralist movement, which conveyed
the legacy of Saussurian semiology.
In Norway the importance of Roman Jakob-
son for the development of a semiotic discipline
was discovered mainly through the works of
French intermediaries. In discovering Roman
Jakobson, Norwegian scholars were brought into
contact not only with the two different semiotic
traditions of Peirce and Saussure, but also with
the achievement of Russian and Czech formal-
ism. The linguistic contributions of Jakobson
were certainly known by linguistics specialists,
but his works on poetics, poetical analysis, and
semiotics remained practically unknown until
about 1960. A number of insights from Russian
and Czech formalism had nevertheless become
familiar through the famous book of Wellek and
Warren, Theory qf Literature/ and V. Erlich's
study, Russian Formalism,2 had alerted scholars
and students to the importance of this vital school
of criticism. Nevertheless the rediscovery of the
Russian formalists by the French structuralist
movement contributed to devefopment in Nor-
way focusing interest on the formalist critics. A
prominent role in the rediscovery of Jakobson
and the formalist school of criticism was played
by the Franco-Bulgarian scholar Tzvetan Todo-
rov, whose presentation and translation of some
of the major formalist texts proved an excellent
and most useful introduction.
Todorov also opened the way for the poetics
of J akobson in the French review Poetiqui by
publishing translations of some major texts
(1971). Two years later he edited a comprehen-
sive collection of Jakobson's contributions to
poetics, Questions de poetique (1973)4. This intro-
duction to the works of Jakobson had been ini-
tiated ten years earlier by the first translation
into French of some of J akobson's linguistic con-
tributions, Essais de linguistique generale (1963),
which contained the key article Linguistics and
'Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949).
'Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Mou-
ton, 1965).
'Tzvetan Todorov, Poitique, 7 (1971), 275-333.
4Roman Jakobson, Questions de Poitique (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1973).
Poetics. 5 This famous article encouraged the lin-
guistic and semiotic approaches to literary stud-
ies and convinced a number of Norwegian literary
scholars of the need to be conversant with lin-
guistic and semiotic theories and methods in order
to avoid flagrant anachronisms. It generated a
strong interest in the principles of Saussure's
structural semiology, the model of the six factors
and functions of verbal communication, and the
binary principle as the key to the description of
semiotic systems.
Another article by Jakobson (published in col-
laboration with Levi-Strauss), the famous anal-
ysis of "Les Chats de Baudelaire" (1962),6 which
gave rise to an interesting international discus-
sion on the validity of Jakobson's approach, also
found a vivid echo among Norwegian scholars. 7
It is worthwhile noting that J akobson's influ-
ence passed through the French resumption and
development of his theories and methods, which
came to be known as late as the 1960s and 1970s.
This influence, it must be admitted, did not
always come directly from the French source, but
was conveyed by translations into Scandinavian
languages8 and through articles in Scandinavian
literary reviews or magazines. Very important
in Scandinavian cultural life are the inter-
Scandinavian activities in intellectual and sci-
entific fields. Considerable credit must be
ascribed to Danish intellectuals who made great
efforts to present and disseminate not only the
theories of Russian formalism, but also the mul-
tifaceted achievement of Jakobson and the French
structuralists who had been inspired by hirn. Two
Danish journals (now defunct) played a prom-
inent part in familiarizing Norwegian universi-
ties with the theories and methods of the key
figures of French structuralism: Poetik (1967-
1976)9 and Exil (1962-1975).\0 The impetus given
5RomanJakobson, "Closing Statement; Linguistics and
Poetics," in Style in Language, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-377.
6Roman Jakobson and Claude Levi-Strauss, "Les Chats de
Baudelaire," L'Homme, 2 (1962),5-21.
'See Sven Storelv, "Les Chats de Baudelaire (Fleurs du Mal
LXVI) En diskusjon av diktet," ·in Strukturalisme og semiologi,
2nd ed. (Oslo: Solum Forlag, 1985), pp. 43-55 (Nordisk
sommeruniversitets skriftserie, No. 2, Denmark, Grenaa:
GMT,1973).
"For instance, Roman Jakobson, Poetik & lingvistik, ed. Kurt
Aspelin and Bengt Lundberg (Stockholm: Norstedt & Soner,
1974).
9Poetik. Tidsskriftfor aestetik og litteraturvidenskap (Copenhagen:
Munksgaard).
IOExil. Tidsskriftfor tekstteori (Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag).
 NORWAY
by the French structuralists can also be noted
in the activities of the groups and seminars pre-
paring the Scandinavian Summer University
sessions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As a
result of these seminar discussions an interdis-
ciplinary group of scholars at the University of
Bergen published a collection of articles on
structuralism and semiotics, Strukturalisme og
semiologi (1973),11 edited by the Scandinavian
Summer University Press. These articles, writ-
ten by specialists in literature, social anthropol-
ogy, linguistics, and philosophy, without
presenting a common conception of semiology,
echoed on numerous points the works of the
French structuralists and semioticians (Roland
Barthes, Gerard Genette, Algirdas J ulien Grei-
mas, Emile Benveniste, J acques Lacan, J acques
Derrida, and Claude Levi-Strauss). The partic-
ipants in these Summer University seminars have
since published studies based upon semiotic the-
ories and methods (see below under the different
fields and practices). As an example of these
semiotically oriented studies one can mention
the Ph.D. thesis of Ade Kittang, Diseours et jeu.
Essai d'analyse des textes d'Arthur Rimbaud (1975).12
This outstanding study shows the profit literary
study can derive from various semiotic fields and
practices. Kittang pertinendy combines insights
from game theories, new and ancient rhetorics,
and German hermeneutics with theories and
analytical concepts borrowed from the key fig-
ures of French structuralism (Barthes, Greimas,
and Derrida).
In the postwar years, Norwegian linguists also
underwent a conversion to structuralism. The
development of Norwegian linguistics from co m-
parative and historical linguistics towards a
structuralist approach can be followed in the book
published by Alf SommerfeIt, one of the most
distinguished and representative figures of Nor-
wegian linguistics, Diachronie and Synchronie Aspects
rif Language, Selected Articles. (1962).13 An article
he wrote in English, based on aseries of lectures
given at the U niversity of Michigan, "Language,
"Kjell S. Johannesen and Arild Utaker, eds. Strukturalisme
og semiologi, 2nd ed. (Oslo: Sol um Forlag, 1985); Nordisk
sommeruniversitets skriftserie, no. 2 (Grenaa: GMT, 1973).
12 Atle Kittang, Discours et jeu, Essai d'analyse des textes d'Arthur
Rimbaud (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, Grenoble: Presses
Universitaires de Grenoble, 1975).
13 Alf SommerfeIt, Diachronie and Synchronie Aspects 01 Language
Selected Articles ('sGravenhage: Mouton, 1962). For a pre-
sentation of this linguist see Georg Morgenstierne, "Nek-
rolog," Kratylos (1965), pp. 108-110.
371
Society and Culture" (1954),14 may serve as an
example of this conversion to structuralism, as
also of the influence of American linguists like
Sapir, Bloomfield, Whorf, but equally of Bau-
doin de Courtenay, Jakobson, Halle, and even
Levi-Strauss. The article concludes by asserting
that a "formal, structural analysis must (... )
form the basis of all research on language."15
A key figure in the postwar period as far as
the teaching of structural linguistics at a uni-
versity level is concerned was C. Hj. Bergs-
tmm,16 who introduced a whole generation of
Norwegian students to modern linguistics. But
neither he nor Sommerfelt can be said to have
applied semiotic theories and methods in their
linguistic research.
The first structuralist to have made use of
semiotic theory and insights in his papers on
linguistics seems to be Leif Flydal. 17 Flydal's
studies (from the 1950s onwards) show a marked
interest in the theory of signs, and focus on prob-
lems concerning the line of demarcation between
linguistic systems and other systems or means
of communication. He distinguishes generally
between linguistics as a sign system and other
means of communication as symbolic systems.
His concern for symbolic systems has lead hirn
to study the symbolism of literary texts. Thus
he is also the first to apply the resources of struc-
tural linguistics and semiotics to the study of
style. 18
Apart from Flydal there has been no attempt
to establish a semiostylistics on the basis of struc-
tural linguistics. The influence of the French
structuralists has not given rise to any important
theoretical study apart from passages on style in
literary studies. Since the beginning of stylistics
14Ibid., pp. 87-136.
15Ibid., p. 134.
16See Carl Hj. Borgstmm, Innforing i sprogvidenskap (Oslo and
Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup
Bokförlag 1958).
17See for a presentation of this linguist and a bibliographical
list of his works Milanges d'itudes romanes rifforts aLeiv Flydal,
Etudes Romanes de l'Universite de Copenhague, Revue
Romane, No. 18 (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag 1979), pp.
1-8,13-14.
1BFor his main contributions to stylistics see: (I) "Remarques
sur certains rapports entre le style et I'etat de langue."
Norsk Tidsskriflfor Sprogvidenskap, 16 (1952), 240-257; (2) En
spraklig analyse av norske boktitler 1952 (Moifemene i rek-
lamens tjeneste), Skrifter fra Norges Handelsheyskole: Sprak-
lige avhandlinger No. 6 (Bergen, 1954); (3) "Les instruments
de l'artiste en langage," Lefran~ais modeme, 30, No. 3 (Paris,
1962), 161-170.
372 SVEN STORELV

in Norway at a rather late date (about 1910), for decorating and embellishing speech and
apart from the outstanding article by Knut Lies- literature.
t01, "Nynorsk mälf0ring i tale og skrift saman- Since 1930, several Norwegian scholars have
likna med gamalnorsk" (191O)19_a comparative studied the relations hip between rhetoric and the
analysis of the means of expression at disposal saga literature. 23 They have focused on style in
in Old Norse and New Norwegian-most of the a narrow linguistic sense as weIl as on narrative
studies in stylistics have been focused on indi- technique in the European tradition. But other
vidual styles of individual works. 20 The theoret- textual types have also been examined, for
ical framework is based mainly on philology and instance the genre of the letter, and the devices
prestructuralist linguistics combined with indi- of the skaldic poetry.24 Bjarne Fidjest0l has in
vidual psychology and a mimetic-expressive the- some of his later papers (from the 1970s) ana-
ory of the meaning of the literary work. The lyzed the Icelandic saga and the system of met-
organizing principle of style is the author or his aphorical relations of the Old Norse skaldic
personality or psychology, not the textual or poems on the basis of linguistic and semiotic
functional organization of the texts. Some stud- models. 25
ies, however, attempt to take account of period The main line of the classical rhetorical tra-
style, "genre" style, or textual type, for example dition was to be maintained through the Middle
E. Eiken Johnsen's Stilpsykiske studier (1949),21 Ages by the teaching of the trivium in the "Latin"
but without systematic methodological explo- schools and at the University. This tradition has
ration of the style and genre involved. not left any textbooks or treatises on rhetoric in
A number of studies on style may be classified Norway earlier than the beginning of the 19th
under the heading of rhetoric, and may be situated century. The year 1810 saw the publication of
in the rhetorical tradition descended from Old a treatise on the main categories of the ancient
Norse literature and rhetorical treatises. This system of rhetoric, ForsfJg til en Rhetorik,26 written
tradition may in turn be related to the classical by Jakob Rosted, headmaster and later univer-
tradition. There is some reason to believe that sity professor. Since then no modern presenta-
the Old Norse scholars had read in Latin the tion of the tradition al rhetoric has been written.
Latin treatises of Donatus and Priscian. How- One can only find books that deal with the sub-
ever, this relation between ancient rhetoric and ject matter of the fifth part of traditional rhetoric
the Old Norse literature has not yet been prop- (actio): the delivery of the speech or oration. As
erly studied. for the three other important parts of tradition al
A textbook of grammatical analysis and the rhetoric, they have been absorbed into a variety
use of rhetorical devices, Den trerije ogjjd!rde ajhan- of fields, some old, like philosophy, and other
dling,22 by the Icelandic skald Olafr Thordarson more modern, like semantics, stylistics, poetics,
(and his continuer), is based in part on the Latin literary criticism, discourse analysis, textuallin-
rhetorician Donatus (about 350 A.D.). These guistics, mass communication theory, propa-
treatises, which reffect pride in Old Norse lit- ganda analysis, and so on.
erature as far as it makes use of the same devices The works already mentioned in the field of
as described in the rhetoric of antiquity, are literature and stylistics contain elements of
focused on elocutio, the various means available rhetorical analysis. If the concept of "persua-
sion" is extended beyond its traditional scope,
novels, drama, and poetry may be considered as
19Knut Liestld, "Nynorsk malf0ring i tale og skrift saman- persuasive arts. In this perspective narrative,
likna med gamalnorsk," Maalog Minne (Oslo, 1910).
2°For studies of individualstyles, see bibliographical refer-
ences in the two following books: Pierre Guiraud, Stilistikk "For these studies see Pierre Guiraud, Stilistikk, trans. Johs.
trans. Johs. A. Dale (Oslo: Det norske samlaget, 1960), pp. A. Dale (Oslo: Det norske samlaget, 1960), p. 21.
86-87, and Willy Dahl, Stil og struktur (Oslo: Universitets- 24Ibid., p. 21.
forlaget, 1965), pp. 147-154. 25Bjarne Fidjestel, (1) "Kenningsystemet. Fors0k pa en
21Egil Eiken Johnsen, Stilpsykiske studier i 1890 arenes norske lingvistisk analyse," Maal og Minne (1974), pp. 4-11;
litteratur (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1949). (2) "Kenningsystemet. Gjenm.ele til Peter Hallberg," Maal
22Bj0rn Magnusson Olsen, ed. Den trerije ogjjterde grammatiske og Minne (1974), pp. 9-27; (3) "Algirdas Julien Greimas
Ajhandling (Copenhagen: Fr. G. Knudtzons Boktrykkeri, og Ramnkjell Fmysgode," Edda (1977), pp. 193-203.
1884). 26Jakob Rosted, Forseg til en Rhetorik (Christiania, 1829).
 NORWAY
dramatical and poetical analysis may fall within
the scope of modern rhetoric. In this field may
be listed the works of Willy Dahl, Stil og struktur
(1965) ;27 Ellisiv Steen, Kristin Lavransdatter. En
estetisk studie (1969)28 Asbj0rn Aarseth, Episke
strukturer (1976) ;29 Atle Kittan~ and Asbj0rn
Aarseth, Lyriske strukturer (1968). 0 These works,
which all make use of the concept of structure
in dealing with literary texts, do not in any strict
sense belong to the semiotic discipline. More
interesting from a semiotic point of view is the
introduction to dramatical anal~sis by P. W.
Zapffe, Indforing i litterter dramaturgi31 ) 1961. Zapffe
describes the dramatical elements which con-
tribute to the internal organization and persu-
asive autonomy of the dramatic text, discusses
taxonomic problems, and studies the dramatical
work as an act of communication.
In the late 1970s it became possible to no ti ce
a vivid interest in Anglo-American pragmatism
and the speech-act theories of Austin and Searle.
These theories inftuenced not only political sci-
ence and philosophy, but also linguistics (socio-
and psycholingistics, textuallinguistics). In the
departments of Scandinavian Languages and
Literatures courses were started on the analysis
of non-literary texts (different types of non-
literary texts) applying a theoretical framework
borrowed from pragmatics and speech-act theory.
I t is for the time being too early to ex~ect
results from university teaching in this field. 2 It
seems again that this study of language use has
been stimulated through Danish intermediaries
from the 1970s. 33
The only work of importance inftuenced
directly by the Anglo-American theory in this
field is the study on textuallinguistics published
in 1980 by Bernt Fosseswl, Tekst og tekststruktur.
27Willy Dahl, Stil og Struktur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1965).
28Ellisiv Steen, Kristin Lavransdatter. En estetisk studie, 2nd ed.
(Oslo: Aschehoug, 1969).
29Asbjern Aarseth, Episke strukturer (Oslo, Bergen, Tromse:
U niversitetsforlaget, 1976).
30Atle Kittang and Asbjern Aarseth, Lyriske strukturer (Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget, 1968).
31Peter WesseI Zapffe, Indforing i litterdJr Dramaturgi (Oslo:
U niversitetsforlaget, 1961).
"See for the university teaching the two books of Olaf 0ys-
tebe: Stil og spriikbruksanalyse (Oslo, Bergen, Tromse: Uni-
versitetsforlaget, 1978), and Spriiklig kommunikasjon (Oslo,
Bergen, Tromse: Universitetsforlaget, 1979).
"See for the contributions of the Danish scholars Nydanske
studier, Nos. 1-5, (1970-1973).
373
Veier og mal i tekstlingvistikken. 34 Fossest01 analyses
the text as a hierarchic system, an organized
message of lexemes and sentences, and an act
of communication.
In the 1970s the use of digital computers as
tools of linguistic and semiotic exploration made
new types of research possible. No important
works in this field have yet come into existence,
but promising attempts have been made in the
field of stylistics by a scholar in Russian litera-
ture, Geir Kjetsaa. 35
In psycholinguistics, semiotic theory and
methodology constitute to a large extent the
framework of the books of R. Rommetveit deal-
ing with language, thought, and human com-
munication. 36 Rommetveit has been interested
in issues of communication and message struc-
ture since the 1940s. Many of his social psycho-
logical studies seemed to converge in intriguing
problems concerning interrelationships between
language, action, and thought. The most impor-
tant factor in his development has been his
encounter, as a visiting professor at American
universities in the 1960s, with the very hetero-
geneous and rapidly expanding field of psy-
cholinguistics and structural linguistics in the
United States. He got acquainted with a variety
of theoretical approaches such as the Illinois
34Bernt Fosseswl, Tekst og tekststruktur. Veier og miil i tekst-
lingvistikken (Oslo, Bergen, Tromse: Universitetsforlaget,
1980).
"See the following papers by Geir Kjetsaa: (I) "Lomonosov's
Sound Characteristics," Scando-Slavica, 20 (1974), 77-93;
(2) "Storms on the Quiet Don. A Pilot Study," Scando-Slav-
ica, 22 (1976), 5-74; (3) "Problema avtorstva v romane
Tichij Don," Scando-Slavica, 24 (1978), 91-105; (4) "Written
by Dostoevskij?" Scando-Slavica, 26 (1980), 19-31.
36(1) Ragnar Rommetveit, Words, Meaning and Messages (New
York and Oslo: Academic Press and Universitetsforlaget,
1968); (2) "Verbal Communication and Social Influence,"
in Communication and Drug Abuse, eds. J. R. Wittenborn et
al. (Springfield: Charles C Thomas, 1970), pp. 69-78;
(3) "Language Games, Deep Syntactic Structures, and
Hermeneutic Circles," in The Context if Social Psychology: A
Critical Assessment, eds. J. Israel and H. Taifel (London:
Academic Press, 1972), pp. 212-257; (4) "Deep Structure
of Sentences versus Message Structure, Some Critical
Remarks on current Paradigms, and Suggestions for an
Alternative Approach," Norwegian Journal if Linguistics, 26
(1972), 3-22; (5) Spriik, tanke og kommunikaijon. Ei innforing
i spriikpsykologi og psykolingvistikk (Oslo: U niversitetsforlaget,
1972); (6) On Message Structure (London, New York, Sydney,
Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1974); (7) Ragnar Rommet-
veit and Rolf Mikkel Blakar, eds., Studies if Language, Thought
and Verbal Communication (London, New York, San Fran-
cisco: Academic Press, 1979).
374 SVEN STORELV
measurement of affective meaning and the elab-
oration of mediation theory of meaning, the J ohns
Hopkins studies of associative word-meaning and
semantic-associative networks, the early Har-
yard application of information theory in explo-
ration of sequential constraints, and the rapidly
expanding Harvard-MIT program of psycho-
linguistics inspired by Chomsky's initial work on
transformational grammar and subsequent ram-
ifications into interpretative generative seman-
tics. Rommetveit's own theoretical work, in
reaction against dogmatic scientific disciplines
or formalistic escapism, is characterized by an
edectic and open-ended representation of the
whole field of psycholinguistics. Since the begin-
ning of the 1970s a new direction is noticeable
in his work, inspired by such apparently diver-
gent sources as Wittgenstein's Philosophical Inves-
tigations, Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's
phenomenological explorations, Bateson's stud-
ies of communication disorders, the semiotic
investigations of Levi-Strauss, and even the lit-
erary analysis by the structuralists of the Prague
schooI. The colleagues and collaborators of
Rommetveit at the Department of Psychology
of the University of Oslo show in their scientific
research much the same theoretical framework.
Language is not studied in vacuo but in the light
of the whole contextual background as an act of
verbal communication. Communication theory
and semiotic insights form, for instance, the fun-
damental persfective in the papers published by
R. M. Blakar3 from 1969 onwards on language,
power, so ci al dass and education, double-bind
theory, and psychopathology.
37(1) Rolf Mikkel Blakar, "Context Effects and Coding Sta-
tions in Sentence Processing," Scandinavian Journal if Psy-
chology, 14 (1973), 103-105; (2) "An Experimental Method
for Inquiring into Communication," European Journal if Social
Psychology, 3 (1973), 51-68; (3) Sprdk er makt (Oslo: Pax,
1973); (4) "How the Sex Roles are Represented, Reflected
and' Conserved in the Norwegian Language," Acta Sociol-
ogica, 18 (1975),162-173; (5) RolfMikkei Blakar and H. A.
Sl1Ilvberg, "Communication Efficiency in Couples with and
without a Schizophrenie Offspring," Family Process, 14
(1975), 515-534; (6) Rolf Mikkel Blakar, "Language as a
Means of Social Power," in Pragmalinguistics: Theory and
Practice, ed.J. L. Mey (The Hague, Paris, New York: Mou-
ton, 1979); (7) Rolf Mikkel Blakar and Ragnar Rommet-
veit, Studies if Language, Thought and Verbal Communication
(London, New York, San Francisco: Academic Press, 1979).
For detailed references to the works and papers of Blakar,
see the bibliographical list published by the Department
of Psychology of the University of Oslo (November 1977).
In social anthropology and ethnology the influ-
ence of Levi-Strauss' semiotic investigations can
be observed from the late 1960s onward. In this
field the Summer University seminars have
played an important part in the introduction of
a structuralist and semiotic theoretical frame-
work. 38 Especially the scholars working at the
Department of Social Anthropology of the Uni-
versity of Bergen have in a fruitful and pertinent
manner applied structuralist and semiotic pro-
cedures in their research work. 39 Reidar Gnm-
haug, Professor at the Department of Social
Anthropology in Bergen, was one of the first to
attempt to use structuralist theories and methods
in his research work. 40 The impact of Levi-
Strauss' semiotics can be dearly recognized,
especially in the early papers of the 1970s. 41 The
semiotic approach of Gf0nhaug and his col-
leagues is a relatively new feature of Norwegian
social anthropology. Fredrik Barth, who has
influenced most of the Norwegian scholars in
this field, has been the connecting link between
British and American "schools" and the Nor-
wegian research milieu. Barth, however, in
opposition to the ahistorical, anti-subjectivist and
static structuralism of Levi-Strauss, has stressed
the dynamic transformational activities of enter-
prising individuals-the "entrepreneurs"-social
interaction, and transaction. 43 Gnmhaug and his
3·See Strukturalisme og semiologi, reference citation Nos. 7 and
11.
39Ibid.
40Reidar Gnmhaug, Micro-Macro Relations. Social Organization
in Antalya, Southern Turkey (Bergen: Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Bergen, 1974).
41Reidar Gmnhaug, "Konstruksjon og destruksjon av tegn,"
in Strukturalisme og Semiologi, Nordisk Sommeruniversitets
Skriftserie No. 2 (Grenaa: GMT, 1973), pp. 69-88.
"See Ragnar Numelin, Fältforskare och kammarlrerde. Drag
ur socialantropologiens idihistoria (Helsingfors: Söderström &
Co. Förlagsaktiebolag, 1947), pp. 243-249, and Arne Mar-
tin Klausen, Antropologiens historie (Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk
Forlag, 1981) pp. 134-164.
43(1) Fredrik Barth, ed., The Role of the Entrepreneur in Social
Change in NorthernNorway (Bergen: Scandinavian University
Books, 1973); (2) Fredrik Barth, ModelsofSocial Organization
(Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ire-
land, Occasional Paper No. 23, 1966); (3) "On the Study
of Social Change," American Anthropologist, 69, No. 6 (1967),
pp. 661-669; (4) Socialantropologiska problem (Vännersborg:
Prisma, 1971); (5) Ritual and Knowledge among the Baktaman
if New Guinea (New Haven: Yale University Press; Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget, 1975). (6) "Models Reconsidered," in
Process and Form in Social Lift, Selected Essays of Fredrik Barth
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 76-105.
 NORWAY
colleagues, while applying structuralist meth-
ods, seem in their later works to take into due
accQunt the dynamic perspective and the social
transformation processes of individuals in trans-
action and interaction, on these points following
the main lines of Barth's theoretical studies. 41
J. P. Biom (at the Department of Social Anthro-
pology of the University of Bergen) seems early
(from the late 1960s) to have made use of semiotic
systems and procedures in an interdisciplinary
field where social anthropology, music, and folk-
loristics meet in some overlapping boundaries.
In several papers he has been dealing with nota-
tion systems and the problem of describing the
rhythmic patterns of Afro-American, Balkan, and
Norwegian folk music. 45
In folkloristics new areas of research have been
opened up, and new methodological tools have
been adapted and refined during the postwar
years. Most of these tools have been taken over
from sociology, demography, social anthropol-
ogy, linguistics (semantics), semiotics, and
s tructuralism. 46
From the 1970s onwards a number of scholars
working at the Department of Folklore of the
For an assessment of the aehievement of Barth on an inter-
nationallevel see: A. M. Klausen, Antropologiens historie, pp.
108-113; Robert L. Bee, Patterns and Processes (London:
Macmillan, 1974), pp. 214-126.
44Reidar Gmnhaug, ed., Transaction and Signification in Human
Relations (Oslo and Bergen: Seandinavian University Press,
1981).
45(1) Jan-Petter Biom, "Afro-amerikanske rytmer: instinkt
eller tradisjon," in Mennesket som samfonnsborger, ed. F. Barth
(Oslo- Bergen-Tromso: U niversitetsforlaget, 1971), pp. 22-
35; (2) "Notasjonsproblemer i folkedansforskningen," Norveg,
16 (1972), 91-114; (3)Jan-Peter Biom andJ.J. Gumperz,
"Soeial Meaning in Linguistie Strueture: Code-Switehing
in Norway," in Directions in Sociolinguistics (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 407-434; (4) Jan-Petter
Biom, "Rytmestrukturer i folkemusikken pa Balkan, kilder
og prinsipper," in Strukturalisme og Semiologi, Norsk Som-
meruniversitets Skriftserie No. 2, eds. K. S. Johannessen
and A. Utaker (Grenaa: GMT, 1973), pp. 56-68.
See also the following works for the Bergen school of
social anthropology: (I) Henning Siverts, "Report on Eth-
nographie Proeedures," Folk, 8-9 (1967), 325-334;
(2) Drinking Patterns in Highland Chiapas: A Teamwork Approach
to the Study of Semantics through Ethnography (Oslo-Bergen-
Tromso: Universitetsforlaget, 1973); (3) "Broken Hearts
and Pots," in Transaction and Signification in Human Relations
(Oslo-Bergen: Seandinavian University Press, 1981).
46For a survey of folkloristie research in postwar Norway,
see Ronald Grambo, "Folkloristie Research in Norway 1945-
1976. Ideas and Results in Profile. An Introductory Essay,"
Noroeg, 22 (1977),221-286.
375
University of Oslo have made use of the meth-
odological framework offered by semiotics and
communication theory. Ronald Grambo, inspired
by Levi-Strauss, has given a semiotic description
of magical procedures (1975).47 He has worked
out binary oppositions so that a certain arche-
typal pattern emerges. In the perspective of com-
munication theories, Grambo considers magic a
sort of message. The one performing the magic
is the sender, the magic is the message, and the
victim is the receiver. This chart presupposes a
mutual frame ofreference, a mutual platform for
understanding the message. This knowledge of
tradition is identical with the deciphering key
which is included to crack the code. If the mag-
ical procedure (the code) is too esoteric, too little
known, the message will not come through. 48
Grambo also analyzes iconographic materials on
the basis of structural and semiotic ideas. In the
perspective of communication theory the artist
may be regarded as the sender, the iconographic
item, whether crucifix or pictorial representa-
tion, is the message, and the specta tor the
receiver. The iconographic item contains a code
or a code set, to which both the sender and the
receiver have the deciphering key.49
Colleagues of Gramb0 50 like A. Gjostein Biom,
who studies folk songs in a communication per-
spective, and Bjarne Hodne, who analyzes pop-
ular conceptions of death as messages, have
equally made interesting contributions to fol-
koristics in the semiotic field.
47(I) Ronald Grambo, "Models of Magie. Some Preliminary
Considerations," Noroeg, 18 (1975), 77-109. (2) Norske troll-
flrmler og magiske ritualer (Oslo, Bergen, Tromso: U ni-
versitetsforlaget, 1979). (3) Ronald Grambo, "Models of
Metaphorieal Riddles. Preliminary Considerations on Cog-
nitive Folkloristies," in Acta Ethnographica Academiae Scien-
tiarum Hungaricae, 28 (1-4) 1979,351-373.
""See Noroeg, 22 (1979), 277-278.
49Ronald Grambo, "Ikonografi og struktur," in Tradisjon og
samfonn, eds. Knut Kolsrud, Bjarne Hodne, Ronald Grambo
and Anne Swang (Oslo, Bergen, Tromso: Universitetsfor-
laget, 1978),251-272.
5°Adel Gjostein Biom, "Visor i kulturell kommunikasjon,"
in Färeläsninger og diskussionsinnlägg oid 21:a Nordiska etno-
logkongressen i Hemse Gotland 12.-15.juni 1978, ed. Arvid Brin-
geos and Göran Rosander (Lund, 1979), pp. 129-143. Bjarne
Hodne, A leva med deden. Folkelige flrestillinger om deden og de
dede (Oslo, 1980). See also Wigdis Espeland, "Soeialt sam-
spel i eit lokalmiljo med kjokemeisteren som dome," in
Studiet af fister, eds. Flemming Hemmersam and Bjarne
Hodne (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel AIS, 1979),
pp. 139-151.
376 SVEN STORELV
As far as nonverbal communication is con-
cerned, semiotic disciplines like kinesics and
proxemics have not yet entered the Norwegian
Universities, in spite of the great interest aroused
by the popularized presentations of Desmond
Morris.
Studies on animal communication, on the con-
trary, have developed during the last 20 years
in the wake of the constant progress in research
tools such as chromatographic techniques for the
isolation and identification of small quantities
of chemical substances released by living orga-
nisms, and electronic equipment for the analysis
of the ultra-sounds of acoustic communication.
Animal communication studies have since the
early 1960s been pursued by a number of schol-
ars working at the Department of Zoology and
Zoophysiology of the University of Oslo. K. B.
Doving,51 known for his electrophysical and
chemical studies of olfaction, has written numer-
ous papers on communication in teleosts, insects,
frogs, and small rodents. In examining olfactory
communication in fish, Doving concludes that
their olfactory receptors are sensibly attuned to
biologically meaningful odors (pheromones) and
that the olfactory system is capable of detecting
and discriminating among various odors. The
presence and meaning of different pheromones
can be described as a sign-system.
In a number of scientific disciplines it is dif-
ficult to discover any interest in semiotics or
semiotic research activities prior to the 1980s.
An interest in film semiotics and visual com-
munication inspired by the works of Christian
Metz 52 may be noted in the seminar activities
and the research projects of a number of young
51 (I) Kjell Doving, "Studies of the Relations Between the
Frog's Electro-olfactogram (EOG) and Simple Unit Activ-
ity in the Olfactory Bulb," in Acta Physiologica Scandinauia,
60 (1964), 150-163; (2) Electrophysiological Studies on Olfactory
Discrimination in the Frog (Stockholm: A. B. Thule, 1966);
(3) Comparative Electrophysiological Studies on the Olfac-
tory Tract of some Teleosts, Journal of Comparative Neurology,
31 (1967),365-370; (4) "Introduction to the Physiology of
the Olfactory Sense," in Proceedings of the 3rd Nordic Aroma
Confirence, (1972),97-181; (5) KjellDovingetal., "Selective
Degeneration in the Rat Olfactory Bulb Following Expo-
Sure to Different Odours," Brain Research, 82 (1974), 195-
204; (6) Kjell Doving and Kjell Holmberg, "A Note on the
Function of the Olfactory Organ of the Hagfish Myxine
glutinosa," Acta Physiologica Scandinavica, 91 (1974),430-432.
"( I) Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification du cinema, I-lI
(Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1968-1972); (2) Langage et
cinema (Paris: Larousse, 1971).
scholars (at the Department of Sociology of the
University of Oslo and at the Department of
Drama, Film, and Theater of the University of
Trondheim), but no publications have come forth
yet to testify to their activity. The only outstand-
ing book making use of a theoretical framework
borrowed from European and American film
theory and semiotics has been written by Lars
Thomas Braaten, a scholar teaching at a regional
high school: Filmfortelling og subjektivitet (Oslo:
U niversitetsforlaget, 1984). .
As to the semiotics of music, the same assess-
ment of the academic situation can be made.
Since 1980, a number of seminars and research
programs have been started at the Institute of
Music, inspired mainly by the French branch of
the Saussurian tradition through the work of
Pierre Schaeffer, Traiti des objets musicaux. 53 Apart
from some popularizing journal articles and dis-
cussions pro et contra the structuralist and semiotic
methods, in Ballade,54 a journal for new music,
theoretical discussions and research activities
have not yet found expression in the publication
of books or research papers.
Architecture may be regarded as a form or
branch of visual communication, and as such
can be described and analyzed according to co m-
munication theory and semiotics.
Students and teachers of architecture at the
Technical University of Norway in Trondheim
have since 1968 shown interest in the discussions
about attempts to establish within the European
semiological tradition the constitutive units of
the architectural communication process. But the
outstanding work (which merits citation here)
does not belong to this tradition. The work of
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architec-
ture,55 is in many respects atypical as [ar as it
links up more with the Anglo-American tradition
of semiotics than with that of Saussure. This
doctoral thesis aims at establishing a compre-
hensive theory of architecture on a semiotic basic.
The analysis of an architectural totality (as both
an empirical and a logically unified system) must
be structural and must describe the architectural
elements or units and their relations. The inter-
related units, the main dimensions such as a
53Pierre Schaeffer, Traite des objets musicaux (Paris: Editions
du Seuil, 1966).
"Ballade. Tidsskriflfor ny musikk, 3 (1980), pp. 23-31.
55Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Oslo:
U niversi tetsforlaget, 1963).
 NORWAY
building task, form, and technics, manifest a task,
a "content." A building and even a whole city
may thus have a sign function, and may be inter-
preted as a conventional symbol or sign, or as
an iconic sign based on structural similarity
(isomorphy) .
To fine arts considered as visual communi-
cation, semiotics seems to have been applied only
sporadically, as for instance in the papers of
Grambo on iconographic structures al ready
mentioned.
Several departments at Norwegian Universi-
ties (for instance, the Departments of Sociology
of the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, and the
Departments of Social Sciences of the U nivers-
ities of Oslo and Tromso), have formed teams
of scholars for research into mass communica-
tion. The major part of these studies is carried
out according to weil established empirical soci-
ological methods. Sporadically, and by some
individual researchers only, the methodological
framework of semiotics has been put into use in
order to describe systematically the whole phe-
nomenon of mass communication. A growing
interest however in semiotic questions and prob-
lems can be observed among young research
scholars at the Department of Sociology at the
University of Oslo. Among these researchers
Stein Briiten has published aseries of books and
papers on mass communication where commu-
nication processes have been analyzed and
described from a semantic, pragmatic, or semiotic
poin t of view. 56 Braten started his theoretical
reflections in departing from the empirical
semantics of Arne Na:ss, from whom he learned
to study language utterances and meaning in a
communication perspective, and adopted (from
1968 onwards), in accordance with this point of
departure, a broad, eclectic view of semantics
and communication, integrating into this theory
56(1) Stein Braten, Marknadskommunikation (Stockholm: Beck-
mans Bokfcirlag, 1968); (2) Mass- och miss kommunikation
(Stockholm: Beckmans Bokfcirlag, 1971); (3) "Koding-
skretsop i symbolsk samhandling," Tidsskrift fir samfunns-
forskning, 14 (1973), 47-63; (4) "Model, Monopoly and
Communication," in Acta Sociologica, 16, No. 2 (1973),98-
107. (5) "Coding, Simulation Circuits During Symbolic
Interaction, " in Actes du 7' Gongres International de Gybernitique
(Namur: Association Internationale de Cybernetique, 1974).
(6) "Dialogical Systems Approach: Dissonance, Dualities
and Time," in Sosiologi og metodologi [Sociology and Meth-
odology J (Oslo: Universitetet i Oslo, Instituttet for Sosiol-
ogi, 1980), pp. 147-176.
377
strands from psycholinguistics (the school of
Ragnar Rommetveit), semantics (the semantics
of Ogden and Richards), behaviorist theories of
meaning as a stimulus-producing process
(Osgood), computer programs for semantic
treatment of information (Bobrow) and cyber-
netic theories, social psychology, and sign theory
(derived from Peirce and Morris). Abrief pres-
entation of this variety of approaches can be
found in a book on signs and communication,
Tegnbehandling og Meningsutveksling. 57
In theology, biblical exegesis, and text anal-
ysis, the procedures of structurallinguistics, dis-
course analysis, narratology, and semiotics have
not as yet been adopted. Two books,58 however,
in preparation by the young research scholar
Daniel ApolIon at the Department of the Science
of Religion of the University of Bergen apply to
a large extent the methods of French structur-
alist narratology (Barthes, Bremond, Greimas)
together with methods borrowed from modal
logic, mathematics, communication theory, and
sign theory.
During the postwar years contact with inter-
national semiotics was encouraged by the phil-
osophical milieu of Norwegian Universities. Then
the theories of French structuralism, European,
and American semiotics were media ted and
channeled by a number of philosophers inter-
es ted in semantics and the philosophy of lan-
guage. The key figure of Norwegian philosophy,
Arne Na:SS,59 in many respects the founder and
instigator of modern philosophy in Norway, had
since his nomination as Professor in the Depart-
ment of Philosophy at the University of Oslo in
1939 oriented the interests of students and schol-
ars towards semantics and communication prob-
lems. Scholars like Rommetveit, Braten, Zapffe,
have learned from the semantic investigations of
Na:ss not to examine language and thought in
vacuo, but to analyze utterances and propositions
as part of a communicative situation.
The two traditions in semiotics have been
reflected in the works of two groups of scholars:
the Anglo-American tradition through the books
"Stein Bdten, Tegnbehandling og meningsutveksling (Oslo, Ber-
gen, Tromso; Universitetsforlaget, 1973).
58(1) Daniel ApolIon, The Structural Approach to the Problem rif
BiblicalInterpretation (to appear); (2) Steps toward an Empirical
Melhodology of the Sludy rif Biblical Texts as Literature (to appear) .
5!' Arne N "'ss, Interpretation and Preciseness, A Gontribulion 10 the
Theory of Gommunication (Oslo: Jacob Dybwad, 1953).
378 SVEN STORELV
and papers of Dagfinn F011esdal and Ingemund
Gullvag, the European tradition in the early
papers of Arild Utaker, Kjell S. Johannessen,
and Audun 0fsti (see footnote 11 and Norsk Filo-
sofisk Tidsskrifl, nos. 1-4, 1970).
The early papers60 of Ingemund Gullvag may
not strictly speaking be characterized as belong-
ing to the field of semiotics. They examine and
discuss the "analysis of meaning" within the the-
oretical framework of logical empiricism and the
empirical semantics of the communication the-
ory of Arne Ncess. Later papers 61 from 1969
onward, oriented by the pragmatism of Peirce,
Morris, and Carnap, discuss a metatheory of
language and language use in a communication
situation when all the factQrs-sender, receiver,
sign system, and reference-are taken into
account in the analysis of meaning. Gullvag has
also the merit of having introduced the large
Norwegian public to the life and works of Peirce. 6
The papers of Dagfinn F011esdal on the phi-
losophy of language and the theory of meaning63
may in so me respects be related to semiotics, in
the sense that the study of semantics or the
meanings of language utterances may be said to
form an integrated part of the science of signs
and the use of signs. That F011esdal has a thor-
ough, comprehensive, and weH documented
knowledge of the whole field of semantics can
easily be seen in one of his latest papers,
"Semantik,,64 (1980), a contribution to a
6°(1) Ingemund Gullvag, "Definiteness of Intention," Filo-
sofoke Problemer, 17 (Oslo, 1955); (2) "Criteria of Meaning
and Analysis of Usage," Synthese, 9, No. 6 (1954), 341-361;
(3) "Referanse, mening og eksistens," Filosofoke Problemer,
34 (Oslo, 1967).
61Ingemund Gullvag, "Pragmatikk," Norsk Filosofok Tids-
skriji, I (1980).
62Ingemund Gullvag, Charles Sanders Peirce (Oslo: Pax Forlag,
1972).
63(1) Dagfinn Fl'Illesdal, "Mates on Referential Opacity,"
Inquiry, I (1958), 232-238; (2) Riferential Opacity and Modal
Logic (Oslo: Oslo University Press, 1966); (3) "J. H.
Mohanty: Edmund Husserl's Theory of Meaning" (The
Hague: Nijhoff 1964), Foundations rif Language, 2 (1966),
266-268; (4) "Comment on Stenius' 'Mood and Language-
Game,' " Synthese, 17 (1967), 275-280; (5) "Indeterminacy
of Translation and Und er-Determination of the Theory of
Nature," Dialectica, 27 (1973), 255-272; (6) "Meaning and
Experience," in Mind and Language: Woifion College Lectures,
ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), pp. 25-44.
64Dagfinn Fl'Illesdal, "Semantik," in Handbuch Wissenschajis-
theoretischer Begrifft, Uni-Taschenbücher, No. 968, Band 3,
ed. I. J. Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980),
pp. 568-579.
dictionary of epistemological concepts. This
paper gives a short but clear account of the def-
inition of the concept, the main issues, the most
important facts, the different forms and trends,
and the most important theories.
Of so me interest in a semiotic perspective may
be the studies of Knut Midgaard, a scholar
working at the Department of Political Science
at the University of Oslo. His works from 1965
combine communication theory, game theory,
and the speech-act theory of Austin and Searle
in the study of interaction and conflict in inter-
national policy.65
K. S. Johannessen and Arild Utaker played
an important role as group leaders of the orga-
nizational seminars held prior to the sessions of
the Scandinavian Summer University from 1968
onward. This activity expressed itself materially
in a number of publications of the papers pre-
sented at the seminars held at the University of
Bergen on the topic of structuralism and semiot-
ics during the years 1969-1971. The papers from
the 1969 seminar were published by the Norwe-
gian Journal oJ Philosophy66 and the papers from
1970 and 1971 appeared as a book from the Scan-
dinavian Summer University Press, Struktural-
isme og Semiologi. 67 In the opening article of this
book Arild Utaker wrote an introduction to the
main concepts of the semiotics of Saussure.
Most of the papers on structura1ism and
semiotics written in the following years had the
character of presentations of the main European
semioticians. The only personal contributions to
the theory of semiotics came froll!- Arild Utaker.
65(1) Knut Midgaard, Strategisk tenkning: Noen spillteoretiske
emner (Oslo: Norsk Utenrikspolitisk Institutt, 1965); (2) "Co-
ordination in 'Tacit' Games: Some New Concepts," Coop-
eration and Conjlict, 2 (1965),39-52; (3) "On Auxiliary Games
and the Modes ofa Game," Cooperationand Coriflict, I (1966),
64-81; (4) "Some Comments on the Meaning and Use of
Game Theory," Cooperation and Conjlict, 2 (1968), 108-130;
(5) "SomeNotes on Two-Person Games Where the Players'
Preference Structures Are Not Known and Cannot Be
Known," in La Decision, Agrigation et dynamique des ordres de
prifirence (Paris: Colloques internationaux du Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique, No. 171, 1969), pp.
153-173; (6) Communication and Strategy (Oslo: Universi-
tetsforlaget, 1970); (7) Halvor Stenstadvold and Arild
Underdal, "An Approach to Political Interlocutions," in
Scandinavian Political Studies (1973); (8) "On the Problem of
Objectivity in the Social Sciences with a Particular View
-to the Significance of Situational Logic," Danish Yearbook
rif Philosophy (1977).
66Norsk Filosofok Tidsskriji, No. I, pp. 31-41, No. 2, pp. 81-
110, 111-124, Nos. 3/4, pp. 145-170, 171-189.
6'See reference, footnote 11.
 NORWAY
U taker's studies 68 focus on the epistemological
problems of semiotics. In his main work, Pilen
og bildet69 (1974), he attempts to circumscribe a
semiotic space limited by indices and images
(meta phor). The theoretical basis of this space
must be assured by a critique of the European
and American traditions in semiotics. A semiotic
critique of the ideology of semiotics must-in
order to be valid and not ideological itself-relate
semiotic theories to the social reality which IS
producing them and in which they function.
11. Semiotic Fie1ds and
Practices
The foregoing historical survey of the semiotic
activities in Norway in the postwar years needs
to be completed by an analysis of the different
fields and practices.
No Norwegian contributions have been made
to the history and historiography of semiotics.
However, the critical remarks made by K. S.
Johannessen and Arild Utaker in their review
article of E. F. K. Koerner's book Ferdinand de
Saussure (See Note 68[5]) on the principles of
linguistic historiography may also have some rel-
evance for the elaboration of a theoretical frame-
work for the historiography of semiotics. The
model for a general approach to linguistic his-
toriography adopted by Koerner and assessed
by Johannessen and Utaker may prove useful
and operative in semiotic investigaiton. The
model, borrowed from the now-famous essay of
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure 01 Scientific Revo-
lutions, may serve to criticize the methods of·tra-
ditional historiography which consider the growth
of knowledge, methods, and skills as a development
(;8(1) Arild U taker, "Ferdinand de Saussure," in Struktural-
isme og semiologi (see reference, footnote 11); (2) "On the
Binary Opposition," Linguistics, 134 (1974), 73-94;
(3) "Structure et signification," in Simanlique el logique, ed.
Bernard Pottier (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1976);
(4) "Semantics and the Relation between Language and
Non-Language," in Pragmalinguislies, Theory and Practice, ed.
J. Mey, Janua Linguarum, series major, 85 (The Hague:
Mouton, 1979), pp. 103-128; (5) Arild Utaker and Kjell
S. Johannessen, "E. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure: Lin-
guistic Historiography and Ferdinand de Saussure (Braun-
schweig: Friedrich Vieweg and John Grubh, 1973),"
Linguistics, 196 (1977), 65-82.
h'lArild Utaker, Pilen og bildet (Bergen: Stensilserien, Filoso-
fisk Institutt, No. 29, 1974).
379
by accumulation. The notion of paradigm, the cor-
nerstone of Kuhn's theory and adopted by
Koerner, may be used as an efficient tool for
defining the scope and goals of historiographic
investigations: The paradigm governs as weIl as
constitutes the conceptual horizon of the scien-
tific community at a given period. Science
advances as one paradigm is replaced by another.
The history of a scientific discipline is thus the
his tory of aseries of partly non-cumulative rup-
tures between differing paradigms. The critical
review by J ohannessen and U taker is useful inso-
far as it clearly defines the use of the paradigm,
and stresses the fact that a scientific paradigm
does not constitute a well-defined corpus of
theses: it is rather a more or less hidden config-
uration of concepts that leads research in a spe-
cific direction (partly in an unconscious manner).
So one does not necessarily have the theory one
claims, or believes oneself, to have. Explicit the-
oretical statements belong to the surface rather
than to the basis of the theory they claim to
formulate.
A. General Semiotic Theory and
Methodology
In the field of general semiotic theory we have
already mentioned U taker's studies in the epis-
temology of semiotics. The main point in his
critique of semiotic theories may be traced to
some constitutive factors of Kuhn's paradigm
theory as a model for analyzing the scientific
activity of a given period. In studying the semiotic
achievement of a given period, theories and
practices must be studied in the light of the gen-
eral intellectual climate of opinion of that time,
which provides the only adequate context for
determining the precise place and character of
the achievement under investigation, and it must
be related to the social reality in which it is pro-
duced and in which it functions as an ideological
superstructure. This last point-the interrela-
tion of semiotic theories and social reality-is
clearly thematized in U taker's Pilen og bildet, but
the book does not make any specific reference to
Kuhn's paradigm theory.
In stressing the ideological character of
semiotic theories, U taker does not try to elimi-
nate ideological elements in order to keep intact
what may be considered "pure" elements founded
on asound scientific basis. Since ideology still
permeates the whole field of semiotics, this field
380 SVEN STORELV
must be reformulated and restructured on the
basis of an understanding of its ideological char-
acter. The restructuring of semiotics must be
attempted as part of a critique of the way in
which semioticians like Saussure, Peirce, Ben-
veniste, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida have tried to
define and to structure the semiotic "space." A
restructuring of this space must take account of
the narrowness of the linguacentrisme advocated
by these semioticians, the inadequacy of their
definitions of arbitrariness, codification, sign
types, and the main factors of semiosis.
The rejection of linguacentrisme constitutes the
theoretical backbone of another important paper
of U taker, "Semantics and the Relation between
Language and Non-Language" (1979)/° in which
he defines the conception of semantics as both
linguistic and nonlinguistic-i.e. a "trans-lin-
guistic" semantics, capable of accounting for such
obvious relationships as those between the study
(in social anthropology) of kinship systems, social
objects, and institutions on the one hand, and
on the other, the study (in semantics) of the
vocabulary for these same phenomena.
B. Linguistics, Psycholinguistics,
Literature, Stylistics, and Discourse
Analysis
The preceding historical survey should have
given some idea of the different key figures, trends,
and intellectua1 climate of structuralism in the
postwar years. French structura1ism and the
Saussurean branch of the semiotic tradition had
a most durable influence on literary studies. In
linguistics, the impact of American trends and
"schools" seems to have prevailed. Other influ-
ences, however, are discernible. Leif Flydal may
be situated in a double European tradition. Dur-
ing his formative years in France he initiated
hirnself into the linguistic theories of Gustave
Guillaurne, and later on he acquired a thorough
knowledge of the theories of functional linguis-
tics (especially the theory of the French linguist
Andre Martinet). The point of origin and main
inspiration of Flydal's reflections on the theory
of the sign is the linguistic circle of Copenhagen,
the school that formed around Louis Hjelmslev
in the 1940s. The theoretical framework of Fly-
70See referenee footnote no. 68 (4).
dal's studies 1S thus constituted main1y by
glossematics.
Flydal's interest in sign systems has led hirn
to examine the organization (codification) of
deviant sign systems, and the linguistic ca te-
gories employed to describe them.
In a certain number of review articles 71 he has
discussed the description of Parisian "idiolects,"
the idiolect of 17 Parisian intellectuals studied
by A. Martinet and H. Walter in their "Dic-
tionnaire de la prononciation fran<;aise dans son
usage reel,"72 and the idiolect used by workers
and artisans of the small French town Argen-
teuil, near Paris, studied by D. Fran<;ois: "Fran-
<;ais parle-Analyse des unites phoniques et
significatives d'un corpus recueilli dans la region
pans1enne." 73
He has also studied the relations hip between
style and language system in "Remarques sur
certains rapports entre le style et ['etat de lan-
gue," the conflict of systems ("Un probleme
social. Le conflit des genres en Dano-norve-
gien")/4 and a certain number of micro-systems
such as the language used by man in speaking
to horses ("Sprakteikn og symbol i manns tale
tiI0yk"), and "short forms" following, within lan-
guage texts, rules of their own, which are of a
more-than-linguistic, universal character.
It is difficult in most of Flydal's papers to
single out what may pertain specially to lin-
guistics, semiotics, or stylistics. They touch in
various degrees on all these fields. One of his
first studies, En sprdklig analyse av norske boktitler75
(1952), reveals a multifaceted approach to the
book titles studied. On one hand the linguistic
analysis is pursued by the use of the terminol-
ogical apparatus of glossematics, on the other
the style is described as a function of choice and
selection made in view of a certain socia1 situ-
ation or context. This social situation influences
the selection of linguistic elements by the sender
71 For bibliographie al references see Milange d'itudes ofterts Ci
Lei[ Flydal (Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1979), pp. 13-
14.
72NorwegianJournal of Linguistics, 29 (1974),1-33.
73 Norwegian Journal ofLinguistics, 30 (1976), 101-126.
74La Linguistique, 11, No. I (1975), pp. 17-29. See also Leif
Flydal, "Sprilkteikn og symbol i manns tale til oyk," Nor-
wegianJournal of Linguistics, 18 (1957), 370-378; Leif Flydal,
" 'Formes reduites' et 'farmes breves'," Norwegian Journal
of Linguistics, 27 (1973), 15-23.
"Leif Flydal, En sprdklig analyse av norske boktitler 1952 (Morfe-
mene i reklamens !jeneste) (Bergen: Skrifter fra Norges Han-
delshoyskole: Sprilklige avhandlinger 6, 1954).
 NORWAY 381

who by his choice seeks to persuade the receiver presupposes knowledge of the complete inven-
to buy the book. The buyer or reader is drawn tory of different substances in which these aspects
by the title's linguistic form and expression into are realized. Flydal distinguishes between
a catalytic operation in which he tries to com- expression and content (according to Hjelmslev
plete the presuppositions of the book-tide. and glossematic theory) and further between
Thus the study of language and style is placed cenematic figurations (figurations on the level of
in the communicative situation, a situation of expression, like onomatopeia) and plerematic fig-
exchange, where sender and receiver commu- urations (on the level of content), but stresses
nicate through a system of signs, adapted to a at the same time that every figuration is seman-
certain social context. tic, i.e. it supports a content. On the plerematic
Flydal has taken up the question how to con- level, a figuration constitutes a relation between
sider the notions of system and structure, and a "denotative" signified and a metaphoric sig-
the rel<itionship between macro- and micro-sys- nified for which the denotative signified serves
tems, in a review article of Paul Diderichsen's as signifier. This relation is not based on discrete
book Helhet og struktur,76 and in one of his last linguistic features, but on the principle of resem-
papers, "Latences et liaisons en fran<,;ais."77 In blance (isomorphy) between content and its
the latter article Plydal criticizes the notion of expression. This motivation through resem-
system understood as a relation of solidarity blance abolishes the sign in the Saussurian sense.
between all units of a natural language. Only A motivated symbol is thus grafted onto the lin-
certain very artificial and very simple codes seem guistic sign. The process of figuration creates a
to correspond to such a solidarity. Naturallan- conftict between structurations and figurations
guages can be described by unilateral presup- which Flydal examines in its effect on the par-
pos i tions (a ~ b) bu t also by relations of adigmatic organization of language. The "trans-
"constellations," that is, free and optional com- position" of a morpheme from one paradigm to
binations of elements (a + b). another brings about a figuration which affects
Apart from his study of book tides, Flydal has not the hierarchical status of the transferred
not tried to analyze literary or rhetorical texts morpheme or its signifier, but the denotative sig-
stylistically. But in his reftections on the notions nified and its structural functions. This process
of sign and symbol as they are defined in the of figuration is commented upon and illustrated
glossematic theory of Hjelmslev, he tries to elab- in a more substantial article, "Les Instruments
orate a theory of linguistic figuration and to dis- de l'artiste en langage,"79 The artist using lan-
cern and classify the linguistic tools by which an guage as his substance makes it speak and per-
artist (writer) transforms the linguistic me ans at form in grafting onto it figurative elements and
his disposal in a given natural language into a in organizing on the level of expression as well
text that may qualify as art. In a shorter article as on the level of content an interplay of iden-
("Fonctionnement intersystematiques du lan- ti ti es and symmetries destined to have an agree-
gage: Transpositions paradigmatiques, meta- able effect on the reader.
phorisations et extensivites constitutionnelles"), 78 The tools of the artist-the means through
Flydal focuses on the "figurative aspects" of lan- which the created text may be considered art-
guage, which comprise not only the structural are classified into four categories (with sub-cat-
elements organized in established systems egories): (1) figurations, (2) identities and sym-
(according to models described by Saussure and metries, (3) agreeable (or disagreeable) units
his disciples), but also the figurative elements (euglossia and cacoglossia), (4) discordances (for
(iconic elements studied by Jakobson and Peirce). instance between expression and content of
The study of the figurative aspects of language expression, content and context of content,
expression and content, etc.).
76Leif Flydal, "Paul Diderichsen, Helhet og struktur. Selected The inventory established and classified by
Linguistic Papers (Copenhagen, 1966)," Studia Neophilologiea, Flydal is intended to furnish a detailed and com-
39, No. I (1967),216-224. prehensive conceptual apparatus capable of giv-
77Leif Flydal, "Latences et liaisons en fran.;ais-Systemes
ing a relatively exhaustive stylistic description
coexistants ou un seul?" in Estudios rifreeidos a Emilio Mareos
Lloraeh, 3 (Oviedo, 1978),43-68.
7"In Actes du X Gongres International des Linguistes, vol. I
(Bucharest, 1967), 403-408. 79Lefranfais moderne 30, No. 3 (1962), 161-170.
382 SVEN STOREL V
of scientifically observable and verifiable textual
phenomena.
The research papers of Flydal had their point
of origin in European structural linguistics, the
glossematic theory of the linguistic circle of
Copenhagen, and the functional linguistics of
Andre Martinet. In contrast, the Ph.D. thesis of
Bernt Fossestol, Tekst og tekststruktur, shows the
inftuence of American pragmalinguistics. On the
basis of the Norwegian language, Fossestol's text-
linguistic study aims at describing the intuitive
text-competence of the user of the Norwegian
language, i.e. his faculty to produce and under-
stand a sequence of senten ces as a communi-
cative act governed by intention. In examining
this competence Fossestol tries to establish:
(I) the macro-structural semantic deep-struc-
tures of the text; (2) the rules for a coherent
linking of sentences in a linear sequence; (3) the
pragmatic conditions for the adequacy of the
text, that is, the specifications of the situational
and communicative conditions which make the
text into a functional totality; (4) the rules for
how to relate the syntactic-semantic linkage to
the content structure and the pragmatic frame
of the text.
Fossestol recognizes that this aim is vast and
ambitious and that nobody as yet has been capa-
ble of covering the whole field with one co m-
prehensive theory. The concept of text has many
aspects, and partial problems must be solved
separately before any interrelation may be
attempted. Fossestol discusses the various prag-
malinguistic theories in dealing with the partial
problems of textual linguistics, the semantic-
syntactic framework necessary for the produc-
tion of the text, the pragmatic parameters which
govern the codification of the text, and the tex-
tual strategy organizing the textual units
(semantic factors, predications, paragraphs, and
chapters) and adapting them to the communi-
cative situation. Fosseswl's book constitutes a
good introduction to the problems of pragma-
linguistics and textual linguistics. It shows per-
tinently how the theories under discussion may
be used to analyze texts in the Norwegian
language.
Flydal stresses the importance of studying the
graphie side of linguistic expression in order to
analyze the artistic use of language. The impor-
tance of describing the graphie side of non-lit-
erary texts has been emphasized by two
Norwegian linguists, Lars Otto Grundt and Lise
Lorentzen, who in studying the scientific vocab-
ulary of the Middle Ages have used semiotic
methods as well as computers to analyze the
distinctive features of writing in a medieval man-
uscript ("Essai d'une description graphematique
d'un manuscrit fran<;ais du XV e siecle."so This
study aims to verify the basic hypo thesis that
written language constitutes a total system of
communication based on systematic oppositions
between written signs. In this sense the paper
distinguishes between graphie and phonic
systems.
A certain number of studies may be located
on the borderlinebetween structurallinguistics,
rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. Taking his
point of departure in the definitions of form and
substance in the philosophy of Aristotle, the lin-
guistics of Saussure and Hjelmslev, Harald Gul-
lichsen discusses the use of these notions in the
analysis of literary texts. SI Gullichsen shows how
the most important problems of the recent the-
ories of literary structuralism may be looked at
from a linguistic and semiotic point ofview. May
the language of connotation (in the sense of
Hjelmslev) be described by the same rigid sci-
entific methods as in the linguistic analysis of
ordinary language? I t is possible to analyze the
form of content by establishing the rules that
govern the formal units of the content (motives,
themes, sequences, isotopies, superisotopies, and
the elements of composition)? Is it possible also
to organize the formal elements of the expression
(rhythm, intonation, phonemes, sound configu-
rations) according to linguistic and semiotic
principles? Gullichsen argues in favor of a formal
linguistic and semiotic analysis on these levels
in illustrating his argument with an interpreta-
tion of the poem Metope by the Norwegian poet
Olav Bull.
As we have already mentioned in our his tor-
ical survey, French structuralism had a decisive
inftuence on literary studies in the postwar years.
SOLars Otto Grundt and Lise Lorentzen, "Essai d'une
description graphematique d'un manuscrit fran<;:ais du XV'
siede," in Actes du 6' Gongres des Romanistes Scandinaves Upsal
11-15 aoat 1975, ed. Lennart Carlson (Stockholm: Almquist
& Wiksell, 1977), pp. 11-123.
81Harald Gullichsen, "Problemet form/substans i sprakfilo-
sofi og poetisk praksis," in Fransk pä norsk. Festskrifl til Anne-
Lisa Amadou (Oslo: Narcisse, Franskseksjonen ved Univ-
ersitetet i Oslo, 1980), pp. 15-36.
 NORWAY
The structuralist emphasis on systematic coher-
ence and the organization of distinctive features
into pertinent structures furthered a more rig-
orous approach to literary texts. The stimulating
effect of a structuralist approach to literary anal-
ysis may be found-as already mentioned-in
the studies of A. Kittang. One of the key notions
of his Ph.D. thesis, l'illisible, borrowed from
Roland Barthes, has given Kittang a pertinent
clue to the analysis of the texts of Rimbaud, and
to a characterization of the development of his
poetry. By me ans of this concept Kittang is able
to examine the crisis of Romantic discourse
underlying the work of Rimbaud-the rejection
of the dis course of the Master, that of the French
bourgeoisie of the period. The effects of this cri-
sis, the rejection of the lisibility, the linearity of
the communicative act, the univocity of lan-
guage, the coincidence of the poetic discourse
and the language of the people, and the principle
of the Same are studied in detail in the mech-
anisms of Rimbaud's poems.
The practice of infinite metamorphoses and
change of masks, the constant play on the sig-
nifier and the signified may account for the illi-
sibility of Rimbaud texts, his sociological solitude,
but also for the emancipatory effect of his work.
That Kittang is weil familiar with the whole
framework of French structuralism is apparent
in the book of his selected essays, Litteraturkritiske
problem. Teori og analyse,82 where he discusses the
theories of Barthes, Goldmann, Althusser,
Genette, Benveniste, Greimas, Todorov, Kris-
teva, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, and Derrida. In an
essay on literary realism, "Littener realisme:
Form, Kode, Ideologi,"83 he gives a pertinent
description of the signs characteristic of the code
of literary realism (a descriptive, narrative and
readable discourse) and discusses the ideological
problems of the realistic mimesis, its double rela-
tion to the social reality outside the text.
Besides Kittang two other scholars use meth-
ods based on French structuralist theories:
Asbj0rn Aarseth has shown the interest of the
methods of French narratology in his introduc-
tion to the study of epic structures, and in a study
of the idea of freedom in Ghosts, Rosmersholm, and
8'Atle Kittang, Litteraturkritiske problem. Teori og analyse (Oslo,
Bergen, Tromso: Universitetsforlaget, 1975).
83 Atle Kittang, "Form, Kode, Ideologi," in Literature and Real-
ity. Creatio versus Mimesis, ed. Alex Bolckmans (Ghent: Scan-
dinavian Institute, University of Ghent, 1977), pp. 22-43.
383
John Gabriel Borkmann B1 he has used the semiotic
square borrowed from Greimas to structure the
opposition between the sphere of imagination
and the sphere of circulation, between the inner
world of the spirit and the outer world of public
life, in relation to the idea of freedom. The same
structure, the contact between the outer and inner
world, is analyzed in a study of Ghosts85 from
another point of view, in relation to the orga-
nization of the scenic room in the play. Room
and light are interpreted as signs entering the
general code of the play, and repeating on the
non-textuallevel the fundamental duality of the
world of Ibsen.
Later structuralism has tried to integrate the
dynamic aspect into the description of struc-
tures. The theories of Jean Ricardou,86 together
with the theories constructed on the central notion
of intertextuality, focus on the dynamic char-
acter of texts. Inspired by Ricardou and Kris-
teva,87 Karin Gundersen has analyzed a text of
the French poet Nerval according to the prin-
ciples of the theory of intertextuality, in Textualiti
nervalienne. Remarques sur la lettre de l'Illustre Bri-
sacier. 88 Gundersen's textual analysis is pursued
on the level of immanence. The object of the
study is the text itself, independent of its mimetic-
expressive function as a reflection of the bio-
graphical personality of the author or the social
reality of which he is a more or less important
part. It is imperative for the textual analysis to
describe and characterize the textual interac-
tion-the productive and transformatory inter-
play of texts introduced from other texts outside
the text und er investigation: "The intertextuality
is the text considered in a textual space, and the
opposite, a whole textual space recognized and
reread within one given text."89 The importance
84Asbjorn Aarseth, Episke strukturer (Bergen, Oslo, Tromso:
Universitetsforlaget, 1976); "The Idea of Freedom in Ghosts,
Rosmersholm and John Gabriel Borkman," Contemporary
Approaches to Ibsen, 4 (Oslo, Bergen, Tromso: Univer-
sitetsforlaget, 1978), pp. 22-33.
85 Asbjorn Aarseth, "Scenisk rom og dramatisk erkjennelse i
Ibsens 'Gjengangere' ," in Dramaanalyser fra Holberg til Hoem,
ed. Leif Longum (Oslo, Bergen, Tromso: Universitetsfor-
laget, 1977), pp. 41-53.
80] ean Ricardou, Problemes du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1968).
87]ulia Kristeva, "Problemes de la structuration du texte,"
in Theorie d'ensemble (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 298-317.
RBKarin Gundersen, Textualiti nervalienne. Remarques sur la leUre
de l'Illustre Brisacier, Diss. U niversity of 0510 1980.
89Ibid., pp. 57-58.
384 SVEN STOREL V

of a text in this perspective is measured by its advantages and shortcomings of subdivision of

capacity to integrate, to reread and rewrite other semiotics into separate problem areas. Is it pos-
texts. The essential feature of the text is, then, sible, for instance, to distinguish between the
its dynamic transformational capacities. rules of the language as system, on the one hand,
Another example of the influence from Saus- and conditions and effects of language use on
surean semiotics may be found in the study of the other? How are linguistic elements tagged
the harmonic imperative in Romanticism by H. onto the non-linguistic habitat in which they
Groven Michaelsen, Den gylne lenke. 90 Groven occur? In what ways do the aims of psycholin-
Michaelsen's methodological point of departure guistic inquiries deviate from those of, e.g., the
has been the stylistic theory of the Spanish scholar structural linguist and the logician who study
Damaso Alonso, who has developed and extended natural languages?
the Saussurean theory of the sign. For Alonso Those are the questions which Rommetveit
the signified not only conveys a notion, but a tries to answer in one of his most important
series of partial signifieds. He also considers the works, Words, Meanings and Messages. Theory and
relation between signifier and signified as a moti- Experiments in Psycholinguistics. 91 For the solution
vated link. Two directions are open, according of the problems involved, he recommends inter-
to Alonso, for stylistical analysis: (I) that leading disciplinary cooperation and research strategies
from signifier to signified, and which reveals the (although this cooperation and common strate-
outer form of the work under investigation, and gies may in turn also be rather problematic).
(2) that leading from signified to signifier, and The syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules
which gives the aesthetic experience of the inner of a spoken naturallanguage are interwoven in
form (la forma interior). Groven Michaelsen has subtle ways and its inherent properties can only
chosen the latter procedure for the analysis of be fuHy understood when the scope of inquiry
some poems from the Romantic period, and fol- into utterances is expanded to include the extra-
lows the thematic thread to the description of linguistic communication setting. A behavioris-
poetic technical devices and the composition of tic psychology of language may then focus entirely
the text. The inner form (the principle of har- upon conditions and effects of usage, whereas
mo ny ) found in some poems of the N orwegian linguistic disciplines may devote their attention
poet Wergeland is then comparatively related to to syntactic and semantic rules inherent in the
the whole of his work and to the period back- language system. The field of psycholinguistic
ground, but the relation of inner form to the research emerges out of a convergence of psy-
whole work and the social context has neither chological and linguistic research objectives as
been posed as a problem nor set as a theme. psychologists begin to inquire into internal cog-
Ragnar Rommetveit and his research team in nitive processes and linguists direct their research
the Department of Psychology at the University interests toward rules of production and com-
of Oslo are primarily interested in the experi- prehension of speech.
mental investigations of the psychological con-
ditions of language usage. As natural languages
are sign systems, his research strategy is situated C. Institutional Framework
within a general science of signs. Thus psy- (Research and Teaching) and
cholinguistics may be regarded as constituting a Publications
sub-field of semiotics. As a point of departure There is in Norway no research center for
Rommetveit adapts Morris's definition of lan- semiotic studies. Semiotic research work has been
guage as a set of signs linked together by syn- pursued only sporadically at various universities
tactic, semantic, and pragmatic rules. These rules and high schools and it is difficult to localize this
are interdependent in very complex and subtle form of study or approach to particular ins ti-
ways, and the study of language within a general tutions or university departments. The most
science of signs must try to decide what are the important factor for the development of interest

90 Aslaug Groven Michaelsen, Den gylne lenke. Norsk littera- 91Ragnar Rommetveit, Words, Meanings and Messages. Theory
turutvikling og det hannoniske imperativ (Oslo: Dreyers Forlag, and Experiments in Psycholinguistics (N ew York and Oslo: Aca·
1977). demic Press and Universitetsforlaget, 1968).
 NORWAY
in semiotic theories and methods has been the
Nordic institution "Scandinavian Summer Uni-
versity" (Nordisk Sommeruniversitet) in the 1960s
and 1970s. During its summer session and the
circles and seminars preparatory to them, French
structuralism was presented, discussed, and crit-
icized. From this institution, influence and inspi-
ration were conveyed further to the university
milieu, and the semiotic activities and teaching
research work at the Departments of Philosophy,
Social Anthropology, Romance Languages and
Literatures, and General Science of Literature
at the University of Bergen have been strongly
influenced by the Summer University activities.
The research and teaching at the University of
Oslo have been less marked by the French struc-
turalist approach to semiotics-apart from some
scholars working at the Departments of Folk-
loristics and Romance Languages and Litera-
tures (Flydal, Gullichsen, Gundersen). On the
contrary, Anglo-American linguistics, pragma-
linguistics, psycholinguistics, theory of com-
munication, speech-act theory, and the semiotics
385
of Peirce and Morris have inspired research work
and teaching in the Departments of General Lin-
guistics, Nordic Languages and Literatures, Psy-
chology, Sociology, Philosophy, and Political
Science. Studies in animal communication have
been systematically pursued at the Departments
of Zoology and Zoophysiology.
As far as publications are concerned, no jour-
nals have been founded-as they have in Den-
mark-for the presentation, discussion and
reviewing of national and international semiotic
activities or research work. Norwegian contri-
butions to semiotics can be found in journals
such as Norvegljournal 0] Norwegian Ethnology, Nor-
wegian Journal 0] Linguistics, Norwegian Journal rif
Philosophy (Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift), Norwe-
gian Journal 0] Social Sciences (Tidsskrift for Sam-
funnsforskning), Maal og Minne, Scandinavian
Journal 0] Physiology, and Acta Physiologica
Scandinavica.
Research work in Norway is generally pub-
lished by the Scandinavian U niversity Press
(Oslo, Bergen, Troms0: Universitetsforlaget).
 CHAPlER 18
Semiotics in Peru
Enrique Ballon
J. The Historical Development
of Semiotics in Peru
In the development of Peruvian semiotics, two
stages are clearly differentiated: the first from
1970 to 1975, which could be called the period
of pedagogic dissemination of the semiotic dis-
cipline, and the second from 1975 to 1980, the
period of consolidation and growth of the inves-
tigative process. According to the program envis-
aged for the near future, a third stage is
forthcoming-one which will bring together aca-
demic and university activities, and which will
work toward the development of the investiga-
tive process by aiming to formulate a theory and
practice of semiotics more closely adapted to the
comprehension of the different objects of semiotic
knowledge which are produced by the multil-
ingual, multicultural society of Peru.
During the initial stage, the first courses on
semiotics were taught by the Academic Pro gram
of Linguistics, Literature, and Journalism of the
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos,
and by the Program of Letters and Human Sci-
ences of the Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica del
This chapter was translated from the Spanish by Jose Ballon
and Miriam Ellis.
Enrique Ballon • Manco Segundo 2617, Lince, Lima,
14, Peru.
387
Peru. These courses, while their content was
semiotics, were offered under titles which did
not indicate the specificity of the point of view
to be presented, for example, "Interpretation of
Literary Texts."l A similar situation prevails
today. The reason for this type of secret pedag-
ogy resides in the ambiguous and traditional
nature of the courses offered in those programs.
In asense, this fact led to the "smuggling" of
semiotics into the curriculum against all odds.
Furthermore, a very conservative attitude pre-
vailed at that time and was openly professed not
only by the department heads but also by the
program directors of the University of San Mar-
cos, whose viewpoint was directly imposed on
the courses. On the other hand, tradition al lit-
erary criticism, represented by Luis Alberto San-
chez among others, assumed a hostile stance
toward any attempt at revising the old approaches
of Tainean historicism, intuitionism, and stylis-
tics. Thus, the accusations of "formalism" stub-
bornly proliferated; semiotics was equated with
anti-humanism, structural idealism, analytic
imperialism (a curious accusation, since in cur-
rent Peruvian literary criticism, stale forms of
textual analysis still persist in practically every
literary journal: the irresponsible essay is the
'Course No. 28-1774 of the Univ'ersidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos; cf. Callilogo de Cursos (Lima, June 1971-
February 1972), p. 428.
388 ENRIQUE BALLON
predominant norm in criticism). Semiotics was
dismissed as an inappropriate mode of textual
explication, as positivism, or as inductive imma-
nentism-judgments that were only sustained by
the militant ignorance of the times. With the
establishment of semiotics in the Linguistics
Program of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de
San Marcos in 1975, the teaching and signifi-
cance of the discipline was officially recognized.
This example was followed by the U niversidad
de Lima and by the Universidad Cat6lica. From
that time on, the intellectual attitude toward
semiotics has been more tolerant and receptive.
In essence, the first task of semiotics was to
establish a forum for intellectual exercise by
striving to define as elearly as possible the epis-
temological boundaries within which it proposed
to carry on its work. Recognized by only a li m-
ited nu mb er of professors of literature, this
imperative acted on the contrary as a stimulus
to many groups of students who were weary of
the endless ritualistic repetition of litanies to
which they had been accustomed by the manip-
ulative modes imposed on them. This situation
accounts for the great number of dissertations
written in the initial period: the necessity for
examining texts with at least a minimal degree
of rigor and coherence led students to the semiotic
models of Barthes, Greimas, and Eco, where they
found a consistent point of departure for their
own analyses.
In May 1975, und er the personal sponsorship
of A. J. Greimas, the Peruvian Association of
Semiotics, affiliated with the International Asso-
ciation for Semiotic Studies, was founded in Paris.
From that date, the Association has centralized
semiotic studies and investigations in Peru. All
its founding members ,have undergone, post-
graduate studies in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes
en Sciences Sociales and in the Groupe de
Recherches Semio-linguistiques de Paris. The
primary project of the Association was to pro-
mote among its members research oriented
toward the development of analytic models
appropriate to Peruvian society.
In addition to making a program of courses
available (see Section III, below), the Univer-
sidad N acional Mayor de San Marcos founded
the Centro de Investigaci6n en Informatica Apli-
cada a las Ciencias Humanas in 1976. The Cen-
ter ineluded the area of "Analisis Formales y
Metodos Sociolingüisticos" and three sections;
"Semi6ticaJuridica," "Analisis Semi6ticos de la
Lengua Natural," and "Analisis Semiolitera-
rios." The same university created the "Unidad
de Semi6tica Juridica," as a result of a joint
Program of Scientific-Technical Cooperation
initiated with the Universidad de Carabobo in
Valencia (Venezuela).
As already noted, the U niversidad de Lima
ineluded courses on semiotics in its Programa
de Ciencias de la Comunicaci6n and in its Pro-
grama de Cielo Basico. The Escuela Nacional
de Bellas Artes, affiliated with the Instituto
Nacional de Cultura, proceeded in a like man-
ner. For its part, the Centro Amaz6nico de
Antropologia y Aplicaci6n Practica (CAAAP)
requested the cooperation of specialists in
semiotics; in this way interdisciplinary field work
and investigations were carried out. The later
activities represent a joint effort of vast dimen-
sions, as a result of which many studies have
been published.
In the last three years, members of the asso-
ciation have expanded their work by means of
semester or an nu al courses, seminars, lectures,
and by participating in congresses, such as those
in Venezuela (at the Universidad de Caracas,
Instituto R6mulo Gallegos, U niversidad de
Carabobo, and Universidad de Los Andes); in
the People's Republic of China (Department of
Foreign Languages, of the Universitr, of Nan-
king); and in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales de Paris, with which a very
elose relationship is maintained.
As a result of an agreement arrived at in
November 1980, the Peruvian Association of
Semiotics is composed of six founding members,
seven active members, and ten associate
members.
11. Semiotic Fiehls and
Practices
A. General Semiotic Theory and
Methodology
Semiotics as a theory and method was at first
elosely limited to the following areas only: gen-
eral literature, poetics, ethnoliterature, seman-
tics, psychotherapy, and law. However, Desiderio
 PERU
Table 1 The Literary Object
Themes Perspeetive
l. Questioning of the different Historie
eurrents of literary theory
in relation to the projeet
proposed
2. Semiotie theory of Semiotie
literature: Linguistie
(a) Problems of expression Narrative
(b) Problems of narrative Grammars
(e) Problems of diseourse Communieation, text,
enuneiation, typologies,
automatie analysis, ete.
Blanco and Raul Bueno have published an
extensive study explaining the methodology of
the model presented by A. J. Greimas. 2
In 1977, Enrique Ball6n, following arequest
by the Lithuanian scholar, proposed several
principles of an epistemological nature in order
to obtain a better definition of the concept of
literature in societies where speech and writing
are polyglot. 3 Basing hirns elf on the postulates
of Greimasian semiotics, Ball6n introduced a
general model integrating the notions of eth-
noliterature, written literature, examination of
productivity, circulation, and literary consump-
tion. 4 This proposal was aimed at establishing a
definition of the literary object different from the
occidental criteria which dominate it. The dis-
cursive strategy developed to re ach this goal is
summarized in Table 1.
Susana Reisz-Rivarola, taking as a frame of
reference the poetic theory of Roman Jakobson
and Yuri Lotman, discards from the limits of
the object of literary science the pure linguistic
description of the text, as weIl as functionalist
positions that while denying or reducing the
notion of "textual structure" only consider the
2Desiderio Blanco and RaU! Bueno, Metodoiog{a dei Anaiisis
Semiotico (Lima: Ediciones de la Universidad de Lima, 1980).
'Cf. H. G. Ruprecht, "Pour un projet de 'Theorie de la
litterature,' " Dispositio, 2, No. 7-8 (1978), 219-242. Also
published as a Document de Travail by the Centro Inter-
nazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica (Urbino: Universitll
di Urbino).
'These ideas have been discussed more extensively in Enrique
Ballon, Poetoiog{a y Escritura de eisar Valiejo (U niversidad
Nacional Antonoma de Mexico, 1985).
389
Presentation
Deseriptive and eritieal
Expositive and
demonstrative, with a great
number of illustrative
examples
"textual function" located in each specific act of
reception. From both a functionaland structural
perspective, derived from the assumption that
each culture establishes its own system of cor-
relation between textual functions and struc-
tures, Reisz-Rivarola attempts to redefine a
nu mb er of terms through which present literary
science seeks to specify its own objects (e.g., lit-
erary, poetic,fictional, etc.), and she also endeavors
to'produce the criteria for an independent typol-
ogy of literary texts, apart from the traditional
division by "genres."s
Thus, the definition of literature is delimited
by the communicative situation (effective, potential,
or ideal producer and receivers) and by "para-
literary" activity (production, diffusion, and
reception of texts), especially literary "canoni-
zation" (editorial propaganda, critical judg-
ments, academic studies). In this sense, the
literariness is determined in relation to a meta-
text which classifies the text as literary, and ori-
ents its codification and decodification according
to a complex hierarchy of norms-an aesthetic code
or a poetics-superimposed on the code of the
naturallanguage. The validity of this hierarchy
is always linked to a certain historical pi ace and
time. Due to the existence, in the same social
5Susana Reisz-Rivarola, "Predicacion Metaforicay Discurso
Simbolico. Hacia una Teoria de los Fenomenos Semiotico-
Literarios," Lexis, I, No. 1 (1977),51-99. Published by the
Departamento de Humanidades de la Pontificia Universi-
dad Catolica dei Peru, Lima. See also Susana Reisz-Riva-
rola, "Ficcionalidad, Referencia, Tipos de Ficcion Literaria,"
Lexis, 3, No. 2(1979), 99-170.
390 ENRIQUE BALLON
group, of subtypes of communicative compe-
tence, among which may be found a variable
literary competence, the reception of the text as lit-
erary depends, among other factors, on the degree
of literary competence of the receiver. Aesthetic
codes manifested in literary texts only partially
pre-exist in relation to the latter. The process of
text production includes the acceptance/transgres-
sion of the norms (a genre, an epoch, a style, etc.)
which are not anticipated by the receiver as long
as they are developed in the very process of pro-
duction. Finally, every literary text is character-
ized as much by the implicit thematicization of
the several codes convergent in it-including the
code of the language itself, or "the orientation
of the message toward itself" (R. Jakobson)-
as it is by the major informative density and
complexity resulting from that thematicization.
One of the constant preoccupations of certain
Peruvian semioticians is the strong desire to
establish a homogeneous analytical plane suit-
able to the study of the diglossic texts of oral
literature,6 or of mono lingual texts which lend
themselves to translation. In the latter case, it
was imperative to elaborate a wide theoretical
and methodological explication of the production
modes of oralliterature from the semiotic, socio-
linguistic, and socioliterary perspective/ as
applied to the specific problem of Peruvian plur-
iculturalism and multilingualism. Thus a regu-
lative model of the corpus of variants and their
textual manifestations was proposed, which
operates by means of sequences limited by
demarcators combined on the level of manifes-
tation and content. The procedural problems
involved in recording information supplied by
the narrators, and the semiotic constraints of this
practice, are also studied. This model was
employed in an interdisciplinary semiotic and
anthropological analysis of the myth of "Nunkui"
of the Aguaruna ethnic group Uibaros) of Peru. 8
6Enrique Ballon and Hermis Campodonico, "Relato Oral en
el Peru-Legibilidad y Valores," Actes du XLII' Congres Inter-
national des Amiricanistes, Vol. 4 (Paris: Societe des Ameri-
canistes, 1976), 405-433. Reprinted with modifications in
Allpanchis Phuturinqa, 10, No. 10 (Cusco: Instituto de Pas-
'toral Andina, 1977), 137-174.
7Enrique BaJlon, "Introduecion al Estudio Semiotico de la
Literatura Etnica en el Peru," Amaz:;onza Peruana, 2/3 (Lima:
Centro Amazonico de Antropologfa y Aplicacion Practica,
1978), 53-98.
8Enrique Ballon and Manuel Garcia, "'Nunkui' y la Instau-
racion del Orden Social Civilizado," Amaz:;onza Peruana, 2/3
(1978),99-158.
At the present wntmg, Gerald Taylor and
Enrique Ball6n, applying a similar but wider
perspective, are studying the Huarochiri texts,
the oldest mythical testimonies of Andean society.
For her part, Hermis Campod6nico has pro-
posed an operational method to define the idi-
olectallexemes with a view to organizing a lexical
corpus semantically dependent on the semiotics
of the natural world; for example, the lexicon
used by peasants to distinguish the different
varieties of "lands."g With regard to oral liter-
ature, she has succeeded in perfecting a proce-
dure or "strong" model to systematically evaluate
the transformations of a set of variant-tales
recorded by narrators of a specific sociocultural
area. 1O
J. L. Rivarola focuses on similar problems of
a lexical nature in Spanish, also studying mon-
osemic and polysemic phenomena. He maintains
that
the determination of polysemie and homonymic instances in
a particular language is a function of the semic analysis
applied to each case. For its part, such analysis depends on
a complete and consistent theory of the semantic composition
of the signs and of a corresponding heuristic ... the semes,
for example, are components of precarious identity, as long
as a complete analysis of the inventory of sememes of the
language in question has not been applied."
This observation affects the subsequent basic
semantic description of polyglot texts. In another
study on the his tory of language,12 the author
explains the evolution of Romanic varieties as a
"low" level, opposed to the "high" level repre-
sen ted by Latin or Arabic. In this study he pos-
tulates that "the non-literary languages may
develop, may amplify the scope of their func-
tions; they may "progress" in the sense of grad-
ually occupying spheres of expression of social
and cultural life, and may thus be transformed
into literary languages." One element of the study
9Hermis Campodonico, "Definiciones y Clasificaciones en la
Lengua Natural: Doxologfa y Configuraci6n Semica," Lexis,
2, No. 2 (December 1978), 165-199.
IOHermis Campodonico, "Litterature orale gu nord du Perou:
~pproches semiotique," 2 vols., Diss, Ecole des Hautes
Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
IIJose Luis Rivarola, "Monosemismo y Polisemismo-
Aigunas Observaciones Sobre el Problema de la Unidad
del Signo," Lexis, 2, No. 2 (1978), 253-256.
12Jose Luis Rivarola, "EI Espaiiol Medieval. Aigunos Aspec-
tos de la Formacion dei Espaiiol como Lengua Literaria,"
Revista de la Universidad Cat6lica, NS 4 (December 1978),
321-333.
 PERU 391

deals in a more direct mann er with Quechua, Roque Carrion through a multiple hypothesis
"which political adaptation and linguistic appli- which he defines asjuridical pragmatics and which
cation may transform into a literary language," includes the "analysis of the production process
a perspective that coincides with other Peru vi an and the conditions of production of legal dis-
investigations dealing with what B. Mouralis has course (considering the juridical phenomenon in
called "counter-literatures." its linguistic manifestation), as well as classic
From an original point ofview, Anne Salazar l3 problems of the legislator, the judge, legal lan-
approaches texts produced by psychotic patients guage, etc. These elements take on a coherent
(schizophrenics). Although her study is devel- shape and become visible, so to speak, on a single
oped within the boundaries of linguistic seman- level of effective functioning of legal communi-
tics, the results of the investigation, and its very cation." 14 The methodological process would
orientation, are of a semiotic nature. Because of depend on a juridical linguistic semiotics in which
the paucity of semantic and semiotic studies "the object of study is the juridical linguistic
devoted to the language and production of texts sign, understood from a theory of discourse; and
by the mentally disturbed, the Peruvian scholar- this juridical sign as discourse is at first analyzed
who presently carries on her investigations in in its specific production process, including its
the H6pital de la Salpetriere in Paris, und er the social operation (communication) in the consti-
direction of Professors Fran<;ois and Wid- tution of meaning," and, like juridicallanguage,
löcher-has considered it necessary to formulate it "is the carrier of meaning and constructor of
a complete theoretical and methodological plan, the social signification of the juridical." Thus
in order to differentiate "normal" and "psy- ... "the semiotic description attempts to deter-
chotic" speech. From the constitution of the cor- mine with scientific rigor the constitution of the
pus, to the determination of planes and levels of signification of the semantic and linguistic uni-
analysis, Salazar is attempting to clearly delin- verse of juridical discourse. " Further, interested
eate her object of knowledge: "the necessity of in the present debate of general semiotics, Car-
working with aseries of linguistic tasks and con- rion speculates on the epistemological principles
trolled contents which would permit a better the- of this discipline in order to formulate a semiotic
oretical delimitation of the disorders under the organon,15 and has founded a journal entitled
conditions in which they appear." Semiotic Investigations l6 which "intends to bring
By straightaway eliminating statistical pro- tagether principal investigations in the general
cedures and tabulation of the gaps which exist semiotic field, with its many theoretical sources
in relation to "normality," neither the hypo thesis as applied in various areas of study."
that "the linguistic units have value as a symp- In their study, Metodologia del Anrilisis Semi6tico,
tom," nor the postulate that "they carry the sign Desiderio Blanco and Raul Bueno have accom-
of a given personality organization," can be plished the task of bringing the semiotic method
accepted. Furthermore, "these units only acquire to a wider public. 17 The aim of this introductory
specific meaning in a particular operation; to work is twofold: on the one hand, it fulfills its
consider them independently of the context and stated purpose by making accessible to inter-
situation where they have been enunciated pre- ested scholars the lexicon and operational con-
supposes at least aseparation from all that which
could explain their presence and frequency." The l4Roque Carri6n, "Elementos de Semi6ticaJuridica," Anuario
goal is, therefore, not to measure the distance (1977), pp. 260-329. Reprinted with modifications in His-
between abnormality and normality, but rather loria, Problema y Posibilidad (Lima: Pontificia Universidad
to explain the operation of psychotic language Cat6lica del Peru H, 1977), pp. 17-43.
by utilizing the results of the linguistics of dis- 15Roque Carri6n, "L'Organon semiotique des sciences
sociales," paper presented at the Congress of the Inter-
course (or the linguistics of the text). national Association for Semiotic Studies, Vienna, 2-7 July
Theoretical problems concerning the semiot- 1979.
ics of legal discourse have been approached by 16This publication appears twice yearly Oune and Decem-
ber); it is put out by the Area de Semi6tica de la Oficina
Latinoamericana de Investigaciones J uridicas y Sociales
':lAnne Salazar, "Texte et continuiti' dans le discours psy- (OLIJS), Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Carabobo,
chotique," Eludes de Linguistique Appliquie, NS 36 (October- Valencia (Venezuela).
December, 1979), 122-138. 17Blanco and Bueno, Metodologia (see Note 2).
392 ENRIQUE BALLON

cepts put into practice by the model of A. J. Stöckinger l9 has specially noted the contributive
Greimas; on the other, it illustrates these con- role Peruvian semiotics has played in the inter-
cepts with non-complex examples, ranging from national effort to assure a continually greater
the oral narrative to the advertising poster, taken scientific rigor for the metalanguage of this
from a broadly-based sampie of Peruvian soci- discipline.
ety. Despite the restricted space devoted to the-
oretical principles, this study identifies certain
B. Semiotic Analysis
actantial functions of narrative from the view-
point of the iconicity of the actants in the plane
1. Culture
of textual manifestation; in addition it describes
several specific articulations on the semic plane In the definition of culture, anthropology is,
and postulates modes of articulation between as we know, a point of reference common to the
deep and surface structure. In this way, the book social sciences. Guillermo Daiiino,20 however,
is a manual which serves the specific purpose of separates hirnself from this view and prefers to
its authors, without yielding to the temptation circumscribe the field of semiotics of culture
of indiscriminately mixing epistemological within the semantic frame of the va lues of culture,
models, as has been suggested by certain inju- an operational criterion which puts into motion
dicious commentators. 18 the primary opposition culture/nonculture in every
As can be seen, the different criteria noted social formation. The implicit relativity of the
above are oriented in two directions: some schol- concept of culture compels one to consider such
ars approach semiotic theory on the basis of sin- values within each "closed, sufficient, autono-
gle objects of knowledge, from a point of mous, coherent, and systematized universe, sup-
departure which originates in Peruvian social ported by functional laws, which are transformed
formation; others prefer broader points of view, into signs and systems of communication and
undcrtaking the study of epistemological topics which guarantee the transmission of informa-
common to general semiotic speculation. In any tion." In this way, semiotics or "method of anal-
case, both perspectives are complementary, and ysis of forms of communication" can approach
thanks to this mutual effort, an attempt is being such a concept; but in spite of reducing the
made to formulate a semiotic framework which semiotic perspective to an instrumental level,
is particularized and yet at the same time of Daiiino includes a second opposition, this time
global scope, by demonstrably reinforcing, of an anthropological character, nature/culture,
through methodological applications to various which complements the first opposition and
objects of knowledge (oral narrative, poetry, legal facilitates access to the "cultural reality" in an
texts, different icons, psychotic discourse, etc.), integral way. The proposed semiotics of culture
the necessity of in-depth study, and by con- includes the three levels of knowledge--Ievel of
stantly perfecting the concepts of semiotic meta- expression, level of text, and level of content-
language, all the while preserving scientific whose components are outlined in Table 2.
coherence in the basis. For this reason, Peter The constraints characteristic of Peruvian
pluriculture require an observation of its singu-
larity, not only in its manifestations but also in
18Because Blanco and Bueno have limited themselves to a
the rules of its production. For instance, in deal-
rigorous and coherent description of Greimas' paradigm,
their study has been dismissed as a "reduction," with the ing with ethnoliterature, phonetic-phonologic
statement that "even if we accepted these reductions [sie], conditions of the basis are studied in order to
we would not understand the omission of references to preserve them in interviews with the informants
Barthes, Genette, Todorov, etc., in many respects necessary and in order to establish a correct corpus. For
to enrich or complement the Greimasian model" (cE Ricardo
Gonzalez Vigil, "En Torno al Analisis Semiotico," in the
the same purpose, it is maintained that only the
Peruvian newspaper EI Comercio, Suplemento Dominical, integral comprehension of polyglot phenomena
Seccion Letra Viva, 25 January 1981). As can be seen, the
author pursues an erudite speculation without realizing 19Peter Stöckinger, "Die Französische Schule der Semiotik.
that in this way the model becomes unnecessarily inflated. Aspekte einer Generative Theorie der Semiotik," Diss.
Of course, we are weil aware that such remarks are part Universität Salz burg 1980.
of the "humanist" manipulation of the discourse of the 2°Guillermo Daiiino, "Semiotica," Cielo Abierto (Lirna), 4,
social sciences in the hands of official commentators. No. 10 (1980), 26-31.
 PERU 393

Table 2 The Semiotics of Culture model in order to explain conditions of discur-

sive production in the cinematographic process;
I. Languages: communication systems he examines the discursive "marks" of produc-
Codes: II III tion conditions,24 and the presence of "interdis-
Media: oral-gestural written artistic-technical course" in the film texts. Blanco notes that
2. Spectacles: sequences of symbolic figures production conditions may only be known from
Myths: proverbs, tales, history, poetry discursive operations and are in turn identified
Rites: gestures, manners, ceremonies, theater from the previous understanding of structures
3. Ideology: logic of in ternal values of signification, accounting for the fact that the
Knowledge: what can belshouLd be known point of departure of film analysis is the Greimas
(science) model, while on other levels the models of
Practice: what can belshould be done J. Kristeva, J. F. Lyotard, E. Ver6n, B. Pottier,
(ethics) as weil as the contributions of psychoanalytic
------------------------------------- semiotics, may be used to advantage-in each
case distinguishing the limits of their applica-
in the production of cultural values authorizes tion. The steps to be taken in film analysis are:
an unprejudiced approach to texts originating in (I) Description of the structure of meaning on
a pluricultural society. Moreover, the co-partic- surface and deep levels; (2) Identification of pro-
ipation of several systems of cultural values does duction operations according to the paradigms
not succeed in producing hybrid objects, but applied to the study of the different levels and
rather, distinct (different and discrete) objects, codes; (3) Analysis of production conditions
which require a way of understanding which is which have determined the presence of discur-
not analogous to that applied to cultural objects sive operations contained in the film under study;
produced by social formations in which a mon- (4) Description of the implicit ideological values
oculture prevails. 21 With regard to dominant cul- and the conditions of production of meaning.
tural objects institutionalized as official culture
(e.g., written literature, iconic discourse of his-
tory, literary criticism, etc.), these are classified 3. Plastic Arts
in the area of Peru vi an sociosemiotics, while the
former are incorporated in Peruvian ethnosemiot- Planar semiotics has been the object of careful
ics. Both semiotics are dependent upon and tri- reflection on the part of Guillermo Daiiino,25 who
butaries of a general semioculture which limits their clarifies the common confusion between the var-
field of action. ious significations of the pictorial object and the
verbal translation of what is represented therein:
both semic organizations are discriminated and
2. Film treated independently, but without excluding one
The brief visits and longer sojourns of Chris- for the benefit of the other. In his attempt to
tian Metz in Peru have effectively contributed approach the general constraints of pictorial
to establishing interest in the semiotic analysis expression, Daiiino isolates the minimal semiotic
of film. Always utilizing Greimasian semiotics units of the image, considering the latter a text-
as his point of departure, Desiderio Blanco has occurrence to be analyzed, a process wh ich in
introduced certain devices, such as the actantial turn constructs the text-occurrence as a semiotic
model, narrative programs, figures of discourse, object.
etc., into the realm of cinematographic criticism. Antedating the work of J. M. Floch and F.
Blanco's analytic strategy, applied to the films Thürlemann, Daiiino directs semiotic observa-
of Bergman 22 or Buiiuel, 23 includes M. Pecheux's tion towards a consideration of the phenomenon

2lBallon, "Introduccion" (see Note 7).
22Desiderio Blanco, "'Gritos y Susurros': La Penultima
Angustia de Ingmar Bergman," Hablemos de Gine (Lima),
66 (1974), 28-31.
23Desiderio Blanco, "Tristana 0 la Circularidad Lineal,"
HabLemos de Gine (Lima), 66 (1974), pp. 31-33.
2lDesiderio Blanco, " 'Escenas de la Vida Conyugal': Este-
tica e Ideologia," HabLemos de Gine, 68 (1976), 27-34.
"Guillermo Danino, "Semiotica de la Imagen Artistica,"
Leiras, 84 (Lima: Departamento Academica de Humani-
dades de la Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, 1976),5-
15.
394 ENRIQUE BALLON
of artistic communication and cultural conno-
tations implied by the pictorial image. Similarly,
he studies the physical or material conditions of
its production and describes its systematization
on a first level: the codes 01 optic perception formed
by "optemes" (luminosity, precision, chromat-
icity, spatiality, linearity), and "semes" (figur-
ation, perspective, syntagmatic set, composition).
Two other levels belong instead to the linguistic
dis course of the object: the pictorial or lexical
metasemiotic system produced by the first level,
which is comprised of denominations of the discrete
units revealed by optic codes; and the metalin-
guistic level, which carries the linguistic signi-
fication attached to the image (titles, diagrams
in the intertextual sequence, linguistic texts, or
wri tten ma terial inserted in the image, etc.). The
investigation concludes with a hypo thesis
regarding the construction of the significative
image, and offers certain precise methodological
adjustments.
A text of pictorial exegesis by Cesar Vallejo
inspires the dissertation of Ursula Ramfrez. 26
Putting into practice Roland Barthes' guidelincs
of iconic analysis, Ramfrez identifies the plastic
objects discussed in Vallejo's article, and taking
these objects as referents of the analysis, she
explains the significations articulated in the tex-
tual discourse to describe thcm. This study is
carried out through the isotopies coded in Val-
lejo's text, explicating the generation and trans-
formation which the significations undergo in
moving from one textual purport to another. The
objective is therefore to study the process of
translation-in the semiotic sense-of different
semantic manifestations uni ted by a sole
metadiscourse.
4. Literature
a. Poetics. Susana Reisz-Rivarola reserves
the term poetic for designating any literary text
in verse form or which is organized according to
some rhythmic visual and/or auditory principle
whose application may result in a segmentation
of the phonic and/or graphie chain different from
the segmentation usually found in daily speech.
Even though she accepts the presence of at least
26Ursula Ramirez, "DeI Icono de Leonardo da Vinci a la
Iconografia de Cesar Vallejo," Programa de Letras y Cien-
cias Humanas (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica deI
Peru, 1972).
one of the several types of equivalence proposed
by Roman Jakobson, this presence is not suffi-
cient to define "poeticity. ,,27 The poetic dispo-
sition of the utterances-their regular alternation
with white margins or silenees, which isolates
them from the universe of pragmatic texts-is
only recognized as a distinctive feature in rela-
tion to a set of codes superimposed on the lan-
guage (epochal, generic, fictional-li terary,
thematic-stylistic, etc.) and in relation to the
pragmatic conditions of their use. Poetic tcxts
are apparently characterized, therefore, by an
informative identity and complexity of a higher
degree than that of other literary texts: They
store a greater concentration of non-precoded
elements in the language system-carriers of
partial additional information which overlaps
with the information transported by the pre-
coded elements.
In the same study some notions regarding the
analysis of reception and what is more impor-
tant, Lotman's thesis on the meaningfulness of all
structural equivalences, are added. Thus, Reisz-
Rivarola's semiotic literary theory is applied to
the poetic work of Catullus, where it shows the
great variety of meaning effects derived from the
recurrence of linguistic units on different levels.
Special emphasis is given to defining the rela-
tionships between equivalent elements that are
superimposed on different levels, and to inves-
tigating the interdependent relationship of phon-
ological, prosodie, syntactic and other levels with
the semantic level. In another study, 28 the author
examines the kinship and distinctive features of
two semiotic phenomena frequently represented
in literary texts, in which the literal meaning of
a textual segment or of a complete text requires
moving to a non-literal meaning. Here the met-
aphor models of K. Stierle and the symbol models
of J. Link make possible the elaboration of a
contrastive model of both phenomena to dem-
onstrate that the difference between the "iso-
lated metaphor" and the "continued metaphor"
or "allegory," marked by the opposition discon-
tinuous/ continuous, is based upon two separate sys-
tems of relations and not upon a different
extension of the manifestations of one single sys-
tem, as rhetoric would have it. In like manner,
Reisz-Rivarola presents a typology of symbolic
27Susana Reisz-Rivarola, Poetische Äquivalenzen. Grundverfahren
Dichterischer Gestaltung bei Catull, ßeihefte zu Poetica, Heft 13
(Amsterdam: Verlag B. R. Grüner, 1977).
28Susana Reisz-Rivarola, "Predicacion," (see Note 5).
 PERU
discourse, illustrated by extensive analysis of poetic
texts of different epochs, emphasizing-as she
has done in other works-the contribution of
ancient thought (in this case, Aristotle and
Quintilian) to the problem she treats herein, that
is, Platonic-Aristotelian literary theory in the light
of certain categories recently elaborated by a
semiotically oriented science of literature. 29
Special mention should be made of the rela-
tionship between the Aristotelian conception of
literature and art in general as mimesis, and Lot-
man's definition of artistic systems as secondary
modeling systems. 30 In this relationship, Reisz-
Rivarola demonstrates that mimesis implicitly
alludes to the modeling character of all the arts,
and that with Aristotelian acknowledgment of
the existence of a set of norms which regulate
the construction of the fictional world in every
literary genre, as well as of a linguistic subcode
also peculiar to each genre, the way is open to
recognizing literature as a secondary modeling
system and the literary text as the product of a
double signification, in accordance with the code
of the language or with a complex hierarchy of
artistic codes, variable for each epoch, genre,
style, etc. It should be noted that in another text
mentioned above,31 the author remarks that the
lyric is absent from the Platonic-Aristotelian
classification of literary genres because of an
accurate insight according to which it is opposed
to narrative and drama in the same way that
narrative and drama are opposed to each other.
As in the previous study, this early discovery is
related to K. Stierle's recent concept of the lyric 32
as a transgression of any kind of discursive
scheme, These findings lead to the postulation
of some criteria for the establishment of a typol-
ogy of literary discourse.
To conclude this section devoted to the poetic-
semiotic studies, it is necessary for us to consider
the problem of "fictionality" which pertains to
literary discourse. In this regard, J. Searle's the-
ory of fiction is reviewed by Reisz-Rivarola, 33
29Susana Reisz-Rivarola, "La Literatura co mo Mimesis.
Apuntes para la Historia de un Malentendido," IIl D Col-
oquio Internacional de Poetica y Semiologia Literaria,
Mexico, November 1980. Acta Poetica (Mexico). Susana
Reisz-Rivarola, "La Posici6n de la Lirica en la Teoria de
los Generos Literarios," Lexis, 5, No. I (1981), 73-86.
30Reisz-Rivarola, "La Literatura."
31Reisz-Rivarola, "La Posici6n."
32K. Stierle, "Die Identität des Gedichts-Hölderlin als Par-
adigma," in Identität (Munieh: Fink Verlag, 1979).
'''Reisz-Rivarola, "Ficcionalidad " (see Note 5).
395
who proposes as a point of departure the notion
of "intentional modification of the modalities
attributable to the constituents of the commu-
nicative situation" formulated by J. Landwehr. 34
However, moving away from Landwehr and
applying different epistemological principles, she
reconsiders not only the inventory of modalities,
but also the relation between modification of the
zones of reference (the constitu tion of the world
represented in fiction) and modification of the
producer's role (the constitution of a language
source different from that of the author). She
further proposes an inventory of types of mod-
ifications, and of possible combinations of these
types, which would allow the foundation of a
typology of literary fictions; the demonstration
is carried out with examples taken from fictional
literature. Here she emphasizes the role of the
variable poetics oJ fiction and of the verisimilitude
peculiar to each genre, as already postulated by
Aristotle's Poetics. Therefore, what differentiates
literary fiction from the nonliterary-and, in
general, artistic fiction from the nonartistic-is
that its production as well as its reception is
oriented by a normative level (by afictional poetics) ,
variable for each genre and epoch.
b. Text Analysis. Text analysis is the main
semiotic activity in Peru. The work of semiotic
specialists was directed, during its first stage,
towards a demonstration of the advantages of
semiotic methodology in describing and expli-
cating ethnoliterary and literary texts; as a result,
a good number of students adopted this meth-
odology in their investigations. The general ori-
entation of the dissertations follows the models
of Barthes, Greimas, and Eco, to which the
models of Propp and Levi-Strauss are preferably
added. This section will deal only with written
literature; works of ethnoliterature will be dis-
cussed below.
The first Peruvian dissertation-also the first
semiotic investigation published in this coun-
try-was presented by Enrique Ballon, on Cesar
Vallejo's poem, "En el momento en que el ten-
ista .... ,,35 Bringing together methodological
criteria developed up to that time by his profes-
sors, Roland Barthes and A. J. Greimas, Ballon
applies the criteria of the former to describe the
intertextual production of the poem, and those
34J. Landwehr, Text und Fiktion (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1975).
3'Ba1l6n, Vallejo (see Note 4).
396 ENRIQUE BALLON
of the latter to demonstrate the generation of the
poetic text. Thus he examines the semantic
transformations that take place between the pre-
texts and the final text, reviewing all the stages
of elaboration of the poem: the original version
of two newspaper articles, a text in prose, and
finally, the various versions of the poem. Regard-
ing the semiotic generation of the poem, he fol-
lows the process that moves from minimal units
in the deep structure to actualization in the sur-
face structure, where the figures take on a precise
shape. After describing the figurative structure,
he studies the iconization chosen by the poet to
represent these figures on the plane of textual
manifestation. However, this dissertation is not
limited to applying the operational methods of
semiotics; once the analytic description has been
concluded, criteria of interpretation are pro-
posed, making possible the definition of the
"epistemological cutting" produced by Vallejo's
writing in the evolution of Peruvian culture. 36
Other analyses of poetic texts were presented
by Ana Maria Rocha 37 and Guillermo Daiiino. 38
The first work is devoted to the study of Cinco
Metros de Poemas by Carlos Oquendo de Amat
and the latter to Rondinelas by Jose Mana Eguren.
Both studies applied the Greimas method, not
only to a single poem but to a complete book of
poems, and furthermore, in the first case, to the
spatial distribution of calligrammatic writing.
The ideological content of the verse writing in
sam pIes of Peruvian folklore was the topic of the
dissertation presented by Therencia Silva. 39
Subsequently this author has broadened and
deepened the scope of her initial work, under
the direction of Professor B. Pottier at the Uni-
versity of Paris.
Much more numerous are the dissertations
devoted to literary narrative. Two of these-by
36This work is ampIy discussed in Keith A. McDuffie, "Va-
llejo corno Paradigma (Un Caso Especial de Escritura),"
in Revista Iberoamericana (Pittsburgh), 40, No. 89 (October-
December, 1974), 719-23.
37Ana Maria Rocha, "EI Espacio y Ia Significaci6n de '5
Metros de Poemas' de Carlos Oquendo de Amat," B.A.
Diss. Pontificia Universidad Cat6Iica del Peru, Programa
de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Lima, 1972.
3"Guillermo Dariino, "EI Universo Significado de Rondine!as
de Jose Maria Eguren," Ph.D. Diss. Programa de Letras
y Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia Universidad Cat61ica del
Peru, Lima, 1972.
g9Therencia SiIva, "La Evasi6n y Otras Constantes Axio-
I6gicas en Ia Obra de Felipe PingIo," B. A. Diss. Programa
de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia Universidad
Cat6lica del Peru, Lima, 1972.
Rosa Maria de los Heros 40 and Rosario Arias 41 -
focus on the works of Gabriel Garcfa Marquez,
paying particular attention to the organization
of the narrative programs and the literariness of
the contents. The dissertations of Lucy Ruiz 42
are an extensive exposition of the micro-structural
analysis of a text by Alfredo Bryce, while Eduardo
Huarag 43 attempts to determine the criteria per-
tinent to the establishment of a semiotic approach
to narrative, taking as his point of departure the
properties of the literary utterance and applying
his postulates to Julio Ram6n Ribeyro's short
stories.
Still within the realm of literary textual anal-
ysis, but now examining the problems of prac-
tical and mythical verisimilitude in narrative,
are the studies of Antonio Gonzalez,41 treating
a short story by Enrique L6pez Albujar, and that
of Cristina Gutierrez,45 explaining the scope of
articulation of historical and narrative verisi-
militude in a novel by Francisco Vegas Semi-
nario. In a more extensive project, A. M.
4°Rosa Maria de los Heros, "Estructura Ciclica de Base en
'Cien Arios de Soledad' de Gabriel Garcia Marques," B. A.
Diss. Programa de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia
Universidad Cat6lica del Peru, Lima, 1972. Rosa Maria
de los Heros, "La Temporalidad dei Relato en "Cien Arios
de Soledad," Ph.D. Diss. Programa de Letras y Ciencias
Humanas, Pontificia Universidad Cat61ica del Peru, Lima,
1975.
41 Rosario Arias, "La Estructura de Poder en 'Los Funerales
de la Mama Grande' de Gabriel Garcia Marques," B. A.
Diss. Programa de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia
Universidad Cat61ica del Peru, Lima, 1972.
42Lucy Ruiz, "Analisis de la Estructura de Base de la Rela-
ci6n Actancial en 'Un Mundo Para Julius'," B. A. Diss.
Programa de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, Pontifieia Unive-
sidad Cat61iea del Peru, Lima, 1972. Lucy Ruiz, "La Pa-
radoja de un Relato," (Ph.D. Diss. Programa de Letras y
Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia Universidad Cat61ica dei
Peru, Lima, 1973.
43Eduardo Huarag, "Analisis Estructural del Cuento 'AI Pie
del Acantilado'," B. A. Diss. Programa de Letras y Cien-
cias Humanas, Pontificia Universidad Cat61ica del Peru,
Lima, 1974. Also- Eduardo Huarag, "Rasgos Pertinentes
en un Relato de Ribeyro," Ph.D. Diss. Programa de Letras
y Ciencias Humanas, Pontificia Universidad Cat61iea del
Peru, Lima, 1974. "Rasgos Relevantes y Estructura de Base
de un Relato deJ. R. Ribeyro," Lingüistica y Educaei6n.
In Actas de! IV Congreso Internacional de La ALFAL, (Lirna:
Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 1978), pp. 357-362.
41Antonio Gonzalez, "L6pez Albujar: De 10 Verosimil Prac-
tieo a 10 Verosimil Mitico," B. A. Diss. Programa Academ-
ieo de Literaturas Hispanicas, Universidad Nacional Mayor
de San Marcos, Lima, 1972.
45Cristina Gutierrez, "Verosimil Hist6rico y Verosimil Nar-
rativo en 'Bajo el Signo de La Mariscala' de F. Vegas
Seminario," B. A. Diss. Programa de Letras y Ciencias
Humanas, Universidad Cat61ica dei Peru, Lima, 1976.
 PERU
Gazzolo 46 chooses to describe in an exhaustive
mann er the actantial system contained in the
surface structure of a complex text by Jose Maria
Arguedas, EI Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo.
In addition to these dissertations, other text
analyses that may appropriately be mentioned
are those dealing with the Peruvian poet Cesar
Vallejo.47 Therein it is proposed to replace the
common metatextual diseourse of literary eriti-
eism by a regulated metaphrasis,48 utilizing the
methodology of semioties for the effects of intra-
textual eontrol. The poem "Trilce" is interpreted
by following the same procedure, and through
a detailed analysis of the narrative struetures of
the text its symbolie eoherenee is assured. Exam-
ination of the thematie isotopy of basis (spaee)
makes it neeessary to add two spatial positions
not taken into account by the original Greimas-
Courtes model: ectopic and atopic space. Finally,
by employing the mechanism of semantic con-
nectors between the noological and cosmological
isotopies, application of this semantic discrimi-
nator in poetry is introduced.
At the beginning of 1973, Raul Bueno read a
paper at the 17th Annual Congress of the Inter-
national Linguistics Association of the poem
"Cazador" by Federico Garcia Lorca. 49 Bueno's
hypo thesis regarding the function of the "plot"
in poetry-which, as in narrative, represents an
intelligible basis of the text-amplifies the weIl
known postulate of Roman J akobson which
characterizes the form of existence of poetic dis-
course as the projection of the paradigmatic axis
onto the syntagmatic axis of language. 5o Sub-
sequently, the "seduction" motive in a poetic
Ana Maria Gazzolo, "Estructura Actancial de Base en 'EI
46
Zorro de Arriba y el Zorro de Abajo' deJose Maria Arque-
das," B. A. Diss. Programa Academico de Literaturas His-
panicas, Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, 1974.
47Enrique Ba1l6n, "Textologia y Metafrasis, Dispositio, 2, Nos.
5-6 (1977), 239-252; "Respuesta a 'Relectura de Tri1ce
5,' " Dispositio, 2, Nos. 5-6 (1977), 226-238; "Cesar VaHejo
en Viaje a Rusia," Hispamerica, 18 (December 1977), 3-30;
"Poetica del Intersticio," Lexis, 5, No. 1 Gune 1981), 147-
169.
48Thanks to the concept of metaphrasis, in the semiotic sense,
the concepts of intertext and context can be defined.
4-9Raul Bueno, "Lectura Semiologica de un Poema de Garcia
Lorca," Letras, 84-85 (1976), 202-215.
50With this study, Peter Froehlicher's work "Lecture de un
Poema de ApoHinaire" was published. For the text of the
paper read on September 21, 1976 by the author, Professor
at the U niversity of Zurich, in the Programa de Literaturas
Hispanicas de la U.N.M.S.M., see Letras (Lirna), 84-85
(1976),111-120.
397
text by Jose Maria Eguren was utilized by Blanco
and Buen051 to illustrate at length the different
levels on which a text may be described, accord-
ing to the procedure previously developed by F.
Rastier. The theme of "plurality of readings" as
a way of approaching the text is a supplementary
aspect of this study.52
In dealing with other poetic texts, Buen053 also
employs the semiotic point of view to explicate
the significative conditioners of vanguardist
Latin-American poetry-in particular, the sym-
bolie associations characteristic of this move-
ment. While in the first of these texts the results
of semiotic interpretation applied to poetic enun-
ciation are presented, the intertextual study
makes it possible to sustain a point of departure
constituted out of the thematic isotopy of basis
and the primary figurative isotopies which sup-
port it, all of which are connected by the codes
to a wider corpus, leading to the effective deter-
mination of a group of obsessive isotopies in
Borges. It is a different matter when dealing with
Neruda's poetic writing. Here the substantial
difference between the stylistic productivity
"burdened with intuitionism and psychologism"
applied to the interpretation, and the semiotic
productivity of the literary knowledge, is clearly
apparent. On the methodological plane, a new
process, termed "semantic osmosis," is described,
while the analysis, in its true sense, rests upon
the semic category of temporality. In this way, the
positions of the poet-enunciator on the ideolog-
ical plane, as weIl as the transformation of his
vision of time (from the individualist and abstract
5lDesiderio Blanco and Raul Bueno, " 'La Niiia de la Lam-
para Azul': Fundamentos de una Lectura Plural," Hispa-
merica, 20 (August 1978), 25-44.
52It should be observed, however, that the criterion of plu-
rality of readings goes beyond its semiotic framework: in
fact, Blanco and Bueno consider that the other ways of
approaching the text constitute a plural reading, for instance,
the intuitive discourse of criticism on the same teXt. In this
sense, the co-participation of literary criticism, producer of
values, as weH as of semiotic analysis, which by definition
only describes them, is admitted. The unanimous criterion
of general semiotic theory regarding this point (cf. Roland
Barthes, S/Z [Paris: Seuil, 1970], pp. 22-23; Aigirdas J.
Greimas andJ. Courtes, Semiotique--Dictionnaire Raisonne de
la Theorie du Langage [Paris: Hachette, 1979], p. 205) does
not admit the inclusion of intuitive discourse, not even as
a comparative element to support the validity of a supposed
plural reading, which in reality is a decontroHed reading.
"Raul Bueno, "Borges y la Fobia Crepuscular," Cielo Abierto,
2 (1979), 26-30; "Para la Interpretaci6n del Poema Van-
guardista: Lectura Intertextual de 'EI Reloj Caido en el
Mar' de Neruda," Fragmentos (Caracas: Celarg, 1981).
398 ENRIQUE BALLON
to the social and materialist) are clarified. We can
therefore maintain that the topic of spatiality and
temporality in poetry is a semantic enclave un-
derlying the interpretation of Peruvian poetic
texts. With regard to the constitution of the
corpus, there is an explicit preference in the inves-
tigations of both Ballon and Bueno for the cor-
relation of intertextual variants: it is a matter of
proposing and verifying (or invalidating) the
hypotheses in a textual space extensive enough
to establish strong semiotic models from which
a possible typology of poetic dis course may be
shaped.
Alberto Escobar has been interested in the
textual analysis of narrative, and studies the short
story "Agua" by Jose Maria Arguedas, and the
variants of semantic structure in different ver-
sions of this text. 5~ While Escobar's work on the
Peruvian literary narrative was formerly his tor-
ical, stylistic, and philological, in recent years
he has turned his attention to semio-linguistic
methods 55 as a controlling referent which pre-
cedes critical analysis. For his part, Eduardo
Huarag agrees with this perspective and observes
lines of semantic coherence capable of defining
a literary movement, in this case Peruvian neo-
realism. 56
A group of works of textual analysis of both
poetry and prose is composed of the following
studies by Susana Reisz-Rivarola: In 1977,57 she
examined types of equivalence, within the
semiotics of literature, most characteristic of
Catullus' poetry. Although this work is divided
into three main parts (word repetition, syntactic
parallelisms, and semantic fields), all the anal-
ysis of the poems used to illustrate each type of
equivalence consists of exhaustive descriptions
of the complex information carried in the various
strata of the text. The same thing occurs with
the illustration of theoretical reflection in two
other papers (1977b and 1979),58 through
54The findings of this analysis will be published in the near
future.
55Alberto Escobar, "Prologo," in Vallejo Como Paradigma (Un
Caso Especial de Escritura), ed. E. Ballon (Lirna: INC, 1974),
pp. 7-13.
56Eduardo Huarag, "Estudio Semiologico Sobre el Neo-real-
ismo," Textos Universitarios, 2 (Ayacucho: U niversidad
Nacional de San Cristobal de Huamanga, 1980). His pro-
posal to establish an interdisciplinary collaboration with
sociology of literature has not been sufficiently demon-
strated in this case.
"Susana Reisz-Rivarola, Poetische Äquivalenzen.
5SSusana Reisz-Rivarola, "Predicaci6n."
numerous literary texts. Borges' fictional nar-
rative, in relation to two key notions of his poet-
ics-the "fictional but not supernatural
postulate" and the "work of reasoned imagina-
tion"-is the subject of the analysis in 1980: 59
Borges' metaliterary reflection is more suited to
interpretation than are his critical discourses on
fictionalliterature; this is also the case with Cesar
Vallejo regarding his poetic theory vis-a-vis his
poetic praxis. 60 In 1980 61 Reisz-Rivarola studied
the Renaissance practice of imitatio in a com-
parative semiotic analysis of a passage from
"Egloga III" by Garcilaso de la Vega, and its
Latin model, Virgil's Third Eclogue. As back-
ground, she offers a description of the cultural
systems and aesthetic norms manifested in both
texts-a non-Alonsonian thematic-stylistic study.
The study is completed by a comparison between
the re-created text and other re-creations and
translations of the Latin model. Finally, the
author proposes that it is more appropriate to
speak of a process of tran.ifi;rence than of one of
imitatio: it is the passage from one poetic system
to another, closed and independent, but con-
structed according to the same structural rules.
Still within the field of textual analysis, but
dealing now with psychotic texts, Anne Salazar62
proposes a corpus consisting of "texts written
spontaneously by patients" (that is to say with-
out having been requested to do so) but con-
sidered by them to be "tales." In this way, types
of expansion and construction utterances as weIl
as grammatical and lexical textual continuity are
studied, leading to the conclusion that the texts
"opera te over a broad base of nominal utter-
ances whose sentences show a hierarchization
supported mainly by relations of determinative
type ... " etc. It is evident, however, that "the
essence of the syntactic functions is present. This
observation would validate the hypothesis that
it is not at the level of disruption of competence
that it might be necessary to look for the reasons
YJSusana Reisz-Rivarola, "Borges: Teoria y Praxis de la Fic-
cion Fantiistica," paper presented at the VII D Congreso de
la Asociacion Internacional de Hispanistas, Venice (August
1980). An expanded version will appear in Dispositio.
6°Enrique Ballon, "Para una Definicion de la Escritura de
Cesar Vallejo," in Cisar Vallejo, Obra Poitica Completa (Cara-
cas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), pp. ix-lxxvii.
61Susana Reisz-Rivarola, "Transferencias Poeticas: Garei-
laso de la Vega y su 'Imitacion' de la Bucolica Virgiliana,"
Iberoman{a, NS 6 (1980), 86-121.
62Salazar (see Note 13).
 PERU 399

for this defeetive eommunieation. . .. In this tions, according to models of the generative tra-
sense, it is possible to postulate the hypothesis- jectory of signification: Thus, the micro-universe
still very general-that malfunetions of eom- of meaning is organized deductively on deep,
munieation might be situated within the limits surfaee, and discursive planes. Finally, this
of textuality: in the relationship between text investigation focuses on semantic and syntactic
and situation, in the eoherenee between verbal- structures of logical-semantic values, their
ization and type of diseourse, and, at the level investment in the syntactic axis (actantial syn-
of eontinuity, in a weak utilization of what might taxis and surface narrative model) and their
be signals for the reeeptor." eorrelation in dis course (procedures of actorial-
Finally, in addition to those studies devoted ization and spatialization).
to already extant texts, the problem of produeing The principal study is completed by a eom-
written literature based on Peruvian oral liter- parison with other textual variants of the
ature is a subjeet of investigation and analysis Hispanic-Ameriean oral narrative: by applying
aimed at establishing a general eomprehension semiotie analysis, it is possible to specity in which
of the literary phenomenon in this country.63 The elements reside the singularity that defines nar-
projeet includes a diseussion of the so-ealled rativity and the informant motifs of the selected
"folklorie origins of literature" and of the sur- corpus.
vival of "eounter-literatures" within a semiotie The "Introduetion" to this dissertation con-
and diglossie global vision. What is envisioned tains abrief geographical and historical descrip-
in this ease is the emphasizing of diglossie strue- tion of the language and culture of the area
tures in Peruvian literary invention or literary investigated. In addition to the narrator-inform-
diglossia; the outlining of Peruvian literature, ants, other elements presented include: the the-
not from the point of view of the tributary insti- matic isotopy oriented by the tale of the
tutionality of oeeidental thought, as supported "Higuer6n," the relations hip between the "tree"
by literary eritieism, but from the standpoint of and noological and cosmologieal isotopies in the
the polyglot phenomenon or material substratum real-mythic of the locale where the tales origi-
in whieh aB produetion and generation of Peru- nate, and bibliographic references for the theme.
vian literary diseourse originates. The main body of this dissertation is divided
into two large sections: procedures preliminary
c. Oral Literature. A study of major sig- to the semiotic analysis, and the analysis itself.
nifieanee in the field of Peru vi an oralliterature In the first seetion-which consists of four chap-
is the Third Cycle doetoral dissertation pre- ters-Campod6nico explains the semiotic stat-
sen ted by Hermis Campod6nieo in 1980, entitled ute of the corpus employed; the limits and plan
Literatura Oral deI Norte deI Peru: Aproximaci6n Semi- of the investigation; the working hypotheses; the
6tica. 64 In this work, a set of twenty-nine folk operational definitions or epistemological crite-
tales direetly narrated by peasants of the north- ria used; non-defined concepts eonsidered axi-
ern Peruvian coast (Chiclayo and environs) are omatieally acceptable; and, finally, descriptive
analyzed. criteria in aceordance with the generative tra-
The textual basis for this analysis is eomposed jectory of the discourse. The author includes here
of sixteen tales, the remainder being added for abrief resume of the characteristics of peasant
the sake of eomparison. The task of eomparing language in the oral narrative and, with regard
variants is earried out by means of deseribing to the establishment of the textual unit, she offers
the overlapping among the syntagmatie, para- a detailed explanation of the survey procedure,
digmatie, thematie, and figurative isotopies in its recording and transcription. An entire chap-
the tale-types. ter is devoted to describing the homogeneity of
In general terms, this dissertation puts into the corpus and the relationship of the variants;
praetiee an analysis of intertextual transforma- another deals with intertextual transformations
including the canonic formula of "strong" and
"weak" models, as weH as of the extensive corpus
63Cf. Enrique Ballon, "La Litterature Orale Quechua et les
(transformations, inversion of content and func-
Problemes Genetiques des Recits Romanesques Peru-
viens," Diss. University of Paris, 1974. tions, homologizations and isomorphism) .
64Campodonico, "Litterature Orale" (see Note 10). The paragraph devoted to semiotie analysis
400 ENRIQUE BALLON
establishes the syntagmatic organization, which
includes the micro-tales, discursive configura-
tions, sequences, motifs, and mobile sequences.
Then follows a description of the tri partite
semionarrative level: (a) as a semantic and fun-
damental syntaxis (semantic and axiological cat-
egories, desemanticization and resemanticization
procedures); (b) as a surface narrative level (iso-
topies and organization of the micro-universe of
signification in the corpus of basis, actantial syn-
taxis, narrative programs and trajectories, prag-
matic and cognitive dimensions of the folk tale,
surface syntaxis); and (c) as a discursive level
which integrates actorial and spatial organiza-
tions. This second part concludes with an account
of the elements of a narrative model, which
includes the general theme or ideology in a strict
semiotic sense, the constants obtained, the
coherence and narrative compatibility of the
tales.
The immediate precdent for this dissertation
was a paper given at the 42d International Con-
gress of Americanists of Paris,65 in which anal-
ysis was restricted to two texts taken as a
hypothesis later to be verified in the aforemen-
tioned dissertation. The paper was limited exclu-
sively to developing the surface structure of the
narrative, and it was thought necessary to expand
the criteria, which until that time had explicated
the structure of verisimilitude in oral narrative,
and to express the need to distinguish a mythical
verisimilitude for the meaning-effect produced by
the noological isotopy and the cognitive dimen-
sion, and a practical verisimilitude for the meaning
effect corresponding to the cosmological isotopy
and the pragmatic dimension. As a result of this
attempt to perfect semiotic theory and meth-
odology as applied to the verisimilitude of nar-
rative discourse, another guideline is available
to typologize the tales of oral and ethnic liter-
ature whose boundaries are still unclear. 66
Several other studies complete this panoramic
view of Peruvian oralliterature from the semiotic
perspective. The first is an analysis of the Andean
6'Ballon and Campodonico (see Note 6).
66It should be mentioned that the lexicographic investigation
of Kurt Baldinger and Jose L. Rivarola ("Designaciones
del Concepto de 'Tonto' en la Ameriea Espaiiola," in Estu-
dios Filo16gicos y Lingüisticos (Homenaje a Angel Rosenblat)
(Caracas: Instituto Pedagogico, 1974), pp. 59-81 made
possible the differentiation of the meanings of the lexeme
"zonzo" in this area of study.
myth of the "Achiquee," starting with eleven
variants,67 to which the tale of "Mama Galla"
was added. 68
One must emphasize the desire in these inter-
related studies to differentiate with semantic rigor
the opposition Andean mythic/ Christian mythic usu-
ally defined with transcendentalist pre-concepts.
In this way, the thematic isotopy of the original
set of these tales is consolidated and the partic-
ipation of other figurative isotopies is clarified,
all of which postulates a possible analogical
interpretation between the semiotics of the nat-
ural language and the semiotics of the natural
world without the interdisciplinary participation
of anthropology.
Finally, S. L6pez 69 analyzes a traditional folk-
loric legend from Cajamarca, in norther Peru.
The study is limited to the organization of the
utterance. Due to the lack of ethnological data
to reinforce the model, it is largely formulated
only at the level of hypothesis. In brief, in this
case, as in those described above, future inves-
tigations will undoubtedly help to invalidate or
confirm proposed hypotheses; such is the con-
scious dilemma of all scientific contro!. Peruvian
investigators in this discipline maintain a con-
tinual vigilance through the verifying process, to
which they subject the findings of every
investigation.
d. Essay. Semiotic examination of the poetic
and political essays of Cesar Vallejo has under-
gone several phrases: The first is of an explor-
atory nature,70 the second applies linguistics of
communication to a news paper report, 71 and the
third considers more than 250 essays, from a
point of view exclusively limited to the linguistics
of discourse and Greimasian semiotics. In the
intial exploratory study, the corpus of basis was
articulated, putting into practice the heuristic
and philological hermeneutics called for by this
67Blaneo and Bueno, "Metodologia" (see Note 2).
6BRaui Bueno, " 'Mama Galla': Las Figuras dei Mal en un
Relato Andino," Reuista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana
(Lima), 7-8 (1973), 93-103.
G9Santiago Lopez, "Aproximaeion Semiotiea a un Relato Oral
Cajamarquino," B. A. Diss. Programa Aeademieo de Lit-
eratura, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Mareos, Lima,
1981.
7°Enrique Ballon, "La Poetique de Cesar Vallejo," Diss. Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes, U niversiti de Paris-Sorbonne,
Paris, 1973.
"Ballon, "Cesar Vallejo en Viaje" (see Note. 47).
 PERU
process; subsequent linguistic and semiotic
approaches to the texts 72 take into account the
global problematics of essay writing: for this rea-
son, the circuit of production, circulation, and
consumption of the texts in the historical-soci-
ological circumstances of their composition is
initially clarified. Since the purpose is to shed
light on the evolution of the ideological values
in this writing from 1915 to 1938, the first task
is to elucidate the semantic typology of the car-
rier utterances of poetic and political discourse
in these works. Then, from a diachronic per-
spective, and following the fundamental axis of
the isotopic structure of each discourse, one can
restrict the ideological stages of integral essay-
istic discourse, its variants, and the compromis-
ing changes made on all occasions by the
enunciator when confronting his enunciatees,
thus producing a coherent outline of the modi-
fications that occur in the significative values
assumed by the enunciator. In this way, the many
critical judgments devoted to Vallejo's writing
are rectified, judgments generally intuitive and
contradictory-in short, not regulated by con-
sistent systematic analysis.
With this investigation begins an approach to
non-figurative texts in Peruvian semiotics and a
new field of semiotic exploration is opened, aimed
at evaluating the control (or decontrol) es tab-
lished through manipulated values of knowledge
in the discourse of the so-called "humanities,"
their utterances of truth, their procedures of con-
vincing and argumentation, their systems ofproof
and verification, and, in particular, the de rigueur
criteria with which fashionable discourses of lit-
erary criticism operate. In the latter case, semiotic
analysis defines itself as a second-degree meta-
text-one which has as its texts of basis those
texts which, because they al ready contain dis-
courses of literary criticism, are first-degree
meta texts. In this sense, the original literary texts
that are subjected to critical analysis take on the
function of pre-texts in relation to the level on
which semiotic analysis is carried out.
e. Translation. Peruvian semioticians have
been confronted by a fundamental problem of
translation: the determination of semantic and
semiotic terminology in Spanish. In this regard,
Jose Luis Rivarola was commissioned by Kurt
"Ballon, (see Note. 4).
401
Baldinger 73 and Klaus Heger 74 to translate their
works; subsequently, Enrique Ballon and Her-
mis Campodonico, with the collaboration of B.
Pottier, translated Semiotica: Diccionario razonado
de la teoria dellenguaj/s at the request of its authors,
A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes. 76 In both cases, a
process of adjustment was necessary in order to
regularize scientific neologisms already employed
by semantic and semiotic metalanguage in Eng-
1ish, French, and German.
Aside from this work, semiotic study of the
translation problem posed by the multilingual
Peruvian society has not yet been the subject of
specific and systematic investigation. However,
in order to formulate appropriate criteria, A. M.
Urteaga has focused on this question from the
viewpoint of linguistic semantics and semiotics.
f. Mass Media Communication. A disser-
tation by Victor Bueno 77 represents the initial
application of semiotic methodology to mass-
media communication. On the occasion of the
murder of Luis Banchero, a Peruvian fishing
magnate, the national press constructed his biog-
raphy (truly a hagiography). The narrative
mechanisms of this construction were analyzed
in order to show the manipulation used to create
"press heroes"-an academic study applied to
the service of demythologizing the material in
news paper accounts.
The collective publication in 1973 of several
semiotic works devoted to mass-media
communication 78 promoted a less mechanistic
and empirical vision of communication than was
common at that time.
Two studies, one of television commercials 79
and another of the subliminal ideological values
transmitted by a cartoon text,80 showed the extent
73Kurt Baldinger, Teorza Semrintica (Hacia una Semrintica Mo-
derna) (Madrid: Alcala, 1972).
74Klaus Heger, Teoria Semrintica (Hacia una Semrintica Moderna)
II (Madrid: Alcala, 1974).
75Madrid: Editorial Gredos, S.A., 1981.
76Greimas and Courtes (see note 52).
77Yictor Bueno, " 'Absurdo Fin de un Triunfador': Mito y
Semantizacion Ideologica en un Relato de Prensa," B. A.
Diss. Programa Academico de Literaturas Hispanicas.
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, 1972.
78See the journal Textual, 8 (Lirna: Instituto Nacional de
Cultura dei Peru, 1973).
7"Rafae! Leon, "Las Funciones del Lenguaje en la Publicidad
Te!evisada," Textual, 8 (1973), 32-39.
8°Antonio Gonzalez, " 'Bugs Bunny en el U.S. Army': Azar
o Coincidencia Ideologica," Textual, 8 (December 1973),
56-62.
402 ENRIQUE BALLON
to which semiotic analysis is capable not only of
achieving a very precise description of textual
content, but also of supporting a denunciation of
the production, transmission, and reception of
dominant values. The same purpose motivates
iconic examination of a publicity poster on the
"History of Peru,,,81 another work deals with
certain everyday products,82 and a third treats
a newspaper report. But it was Rosa Maria de
los Heros,83 with the collaboration of I. Banch-
ero, who notably developed this area of study in
nine articles devoted to an explanation, in very
concrete terms, of the ideological manipulation
that takes place when the two macrosemiotics-
the physical world (i.e., naturalized by culture),
and naturallanguages in visual representation-
come into contact.
The interdisciplinary convergence of linguis-
tics of communication and semiotics of culture
is employed to study the effects produced in Peru
by television as an instrument of domination-
of persuading and convincing-of minority
groups in the country, particularly of bilingual
Quechua-Spanish speakers. 84 In the same vein,
a hypothesis was proposed regarding the "peda-
gogic contract" established by the educational
system85 and the preservation of students' tra-
ditional cultural values.
In sum, because of the very characteristics of
mass-media communication in Peru, it is imper-
ative to seek the participation of several so ci al
sciences, compatible in their coherence and rigor,
in order to study the phenomenon in all its co m-
plexity. As the above works demonstrate, semiot-
ics is an essential point of convergence and this
fact inspires current investigators to explore yet
81 Enrique Ballon, "EI Icono de la Historia del Peru," Textual,
8 (December 1973), 70-76.
82Blanco and Bueno, Metodologia (see Note 2), pp. 218-264.
83Rosa Maria de los Heros, " 'Cosas y Signos' (Editorial),"
La Cronica. Under this seetion see the following articles:
"La Ilusion Tiene Otro Nombre," 31 Oct. 1974; "EI Pais
de las Maravillas," 12 Nov. 1974; "Para Anestesiar las
Frustraciones," 26 Nov. 1974; "Una Profesion Lucrativa,"
12 Dec. 1974; "Absurda Imagen de la Eficiencia," 7 Jan.
1975; "iServicio 0 Lucro?," 12 Feb. 1975; "EI Vals es Neus-
tro," 22 Feb. 1975; "Un Enredo con Miles de Hilos," 26 Feb.
1975.
84Enrique Ballon, Comunicacion Colectiva y Lenguajes Oprimidos
en el PerU (Lirna: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Mar-
cos, Departamento de Lingüistica, 1976).
85Enrique Ballon, "Dialogo e Informacion," Parts land 2,
La Cronica, 25 (Lirna, 28 February 1975), 4-5.
more deeply the provision al findings thus far
obtained.
C. Semiotics and Anthropology
Interdisciplinary cooperation, always pro-
claimed but rarely practiced, was the specific
topic of one issue of the journal Amazonfa Per-
uana. 86 Through the examination of several oral
folk tales from the Aguaruna and Yagua of the
Peruvian jungle, semiotic and anthropological
investigation, applied in particular to the myth
of "Nunkui", had as its operative framework the
materialist theory of language and his tory, "a
diagram of basis to articulate a materialist the-
ory of ethnic literature in Peru."
Therefore, the mutual complementary func-
tion befitting semiotics and anthropology in the
study of Peruvian society, and especially its
myths, "takes into account previous analysis of
the relations and conditions of production of the
texts, that is to say, rigorous and specific knowl-
edge of the texts in the historie moment of their
recording, which permits the avoidance of
amphibology, as weIl as conscious or uncon-
scious exploitation of the themes and symbolic
structures of the myths. This exploitation must
specifically be avoided in applying the social sci-
ences to analysis of ideologies and of (socialized)
symbol systems in any given so ci al group; it must
also be avoided in relating the systems to their
corresponding imaginary worlds. Evolution of
the great socialized systems of mythic symbols
continually directs us to the evolution of the entire
set of social relations, historically and spatially
situa ted. ,,87
In this mann er, semioanthropological inter-
disciplinarity is indispensable für the study of
myths with regard to their symbolic efficacy,
their relations hip with ideological struggle, their
connection with the evolution of economic-cul-
tural necessities, and their role in preserving and
critically enriching the cultural heritage of Peru-
vian social groups. ,,88
Amazonia Peruana, 2/3 (Lirna: Centro Amazonico de Antro-
86
pologia y Aplicacion Practica, October 1978).
87Enrique Ballon, "Editorial," Amazonia Peruana 2/3 (1978),
3--4.
88Ibid.
 PERU
The practical application is, as mentioned
above, the examination of the myth "Nunkui."S9
The study consists of four main sections, based
on the previous sequential arrangement of the
narrative (sequences common to the semiotic and
anthropological models employed). The first sec-
tion covers the typology of the narrative; the
second studies its actantial and ac tori al struc-
ture; the third is the largest, consisting of an
examination of anthropological values contained
in the myth, and of adescription of surface and
deep semiotic structures (i.e., a semiotic reading
of the narrative); finally, the fourth section is
devoted to an ethnosociological projection of the
myth. In order to make the procedures of both
disciplines compatible, the author chooses to use
an inductive-deductive procedure, while contin-
ually preserving the distinction between the fields
of study of each discipline. In this way the pos-
sible interference of paradigms which might have
produced serious theoretical and methodological
problems was avoided.
The gratifying results obtained from this
experiment constitute a very promising land-
mark for similar studies in the future. On the
one hand, semantic control for interpretation of
the narrative may be achieved through the
semioticcontribution, and on the other, semic
marks in the constitution of sememes can be
obtained only from the contextual knowledge
supplied by anthropological analysis. By inte-
grating both sets of knowledge, without restrict-
ing one discipline in favor of the other, one may
obtain more valuable results than those to be
acquired through single-discipline research. This
line of investigation has ins pi red the field work
of G. Brero on the oral narrative in Jakaru (a
dialect of the Central Andes of Peru); of E. Fer-
nandez on the Campas; of O. Adauto on the
Lamas; of S. Latorre on the indigenous com-
munities of the Cusco region; of I. Chonati on
the Yauyos Province; of E. Espinoza on the
Michiguengas, etc.
In conclusion, it is proper to take into account
the usefulness of the collaboration among these
social sciences in the study of Peruvian society.
To forget the polyglot condition of the oral nar-
rative in this pluricultural and multilingual soci-
ety, and to be unaware of the decontrol of the
8"Ba1l6n and Garcia (see Note 8).
403
texts' translation in articulating the corpus of
study, are two grave errors in approaching an
investigation-errors which the interdisciplinar-
ity described above makes it possible to avoid.
D. Semiotics and Sociolinguistics
Relations between semiotics and sociolinguis-
tics in Peru are diversified. As can be seen in
other sections of this report, both fields of knowl-
edge seek to complement each other. Certainly,
the epistemological level of homogeneity is that
of linguistics of discourse, which having dis-
placed phrasal linguistics now offers the oppor-
tunity for unifying both semiotic and
sociolinguistic criteria.
In general terms, the interest of Peruvian
semiotics is to cover the field of ideological tex-
tualization produced by the typical polyglossia
of this society, which sociolinguistics does not
reach: oral narrative, political speeches, aborig-
in al poetry, written literature, journalistic dis-
course, etc. In this regard, we should mention
L. Bartet's investigation of the political dis-
course of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana (APRA) party (a study made under
the direction of Professor J. Dubois) and that of
C. Arana on the subject of national legal
discourse.
E. Semiotics and ]urisprudence
The first analysis of a legal text from the view-
point of Peruvian semiotics was presented by
Roque Carri6n, under the tide of "Proyecto de
Ley Relativo a la Interrupci6n de la Gestaci6n,"
and approved by the Council of French Minis-
ters onJune 6,1973. 90 Following an examination
of the logical deontic modalities, syntax of the
surface structure of the text is described in rela-
tion to the modalities that every actor supports
with respect to his actance. Abrief study on the
modality of legal obligation and its treatment by
juridical logic and semiotics is also added.
Starting with this initial analysis, a juridical
linguistic semiotics is proposed in which "a differ-
ent perspective oflegallanguage should consider
90Roque Carri6n, "Exposi"" paper presented to the Semi-
naire de Semantique Generale (A.J. Greimasl. Ecole des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (16 April 1975).
404 ENRIQUE BALLON

as its principal object of study the semantic con- Seminario:

stitution of legal dis course. Obviously, every Elementos de semi6tica juridica
articulation presupposes a process. Thus, the first (d) Programa de Lingü{stica
task is to describe this process, by means of which Semi6tica lingüistica
legal discourse is established as both autono- Epistemologia de la lingüistica y la
mous and dependent; as a result, it defines its semi6tica
own semantic universe and its characteristic for- Seminarios:
mal marks. Since the objective of this semiotic Semi6tica de la comunicaci6n
inv:stigation is not the same as that of juridical, Multietnia y relato oral
loglcal, and analytic semiotics, what is then the Problemas sociolingüisticos de la
methodological purpose of a juridical linguistic narraci6n
semiotics? ... The problem which we consider Lexicografia y semi6tica
fundamental and which has taken various forms Lingüistica deI discurso
and has had different proposed solutions is that Universidad de Lima
of the signification oJ legal discourse in the effoctive (a) Programa de Ciencias de la Comunicaci6n
practice oJ law. ,,91 It is therefore incumbent upon Lenguajes de los Medios de
juridical linguistic semiotics to elucidate the Comunicaci6n
problem described, thereby filling the thematic Analisis de mensajes
and methodological void left by other disciplines (b) Programa de Ciclo Brisico
Semi6tica de la litera tu ra
w~ich do not have available to them the oper-
Semi6tica de la imagen
atIVe tools of semiotics.
Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica del Peru
(a) Programa de Letras y Ciencias Humanas
Introducci6n a la semiologia
III. Institutional Activities Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (Instituto
Nacional de CuItura deI Peru)
(a) Introducci6n al estudio semi6tico de la
A. Teaching imagen plastica
Peruvian semiotics cannot separate research
from educational activities, especially consider- B. Research
ing our socio-cultural milieu and the present state
Peruvian semioticians have been, or presently
of dissemination of this discipline among ins ti-
are, members of the following centers of
tutionalized human sciences in the country.
investigation:
Since 1975, the following courses have been
Centro de Investigaci6n en InJormritica Aplicada a las
offered:
Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CIIACHS) de la Uni-
Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
versidad Mayor de San Marcos
de Lima
(a) Area de Analisis Formales y Metodos
(a) Programa de Literaturas Hisprinicas
Semio-lingüis ticos
Interpretaci6n semi6tica de textos
Secci6n de Semi6tica Juridica
literarios
Secci6n de Analisis Semi6ticos de la
Teoria semi6tica del discurso litera rio
Lengua Natural
Teoria deI discurso
Secci6n de Analisis Semioliterarios
Seminarios:
Central Amazonico de Antropologia y Aplicaci6n Prric-
Problemas de semi6tica narrativa
tica del Peru (CAAP)
Semi6tica general
(a) Analisis semio-antropol6gicos de litera-
Teoria del relato oral
tura etnica
(b) Programa de Arte
Instituto de Investigaciones Humanisticas de la Uni-
Semi6tica de la imagen
versidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos
Semi6tica del cine
(a) Secci6n de Literatura Peruana
(c) Programa de Derecho
Universidad de Carabobo (Valencia, Venezuela),
Semi6tica juridica
Oficina Latinoamericana de Investigaciones Jurfdicas y
Sociales (OLlJS)
91Carri6n, "Elementos" (see Note 14). (a) Investigaciones semi6ticas
 PERU 405

C. Fieldwork and other forms of discourse which pervade the

Fieldwork is an activity that necessarily com-
plements teaching and research. This work takes
two directions: The first is the collection of texts
of oral literature and ethnoliterature produced
by different Peruvian ethnic groups and the
gathering of samples of legal, political, religious,
country. The second direction consists of the
utilization of these texts to articulate an inter-
disciplinary corpus: semiotic, sociolinguistic,
anthropological, etc. It is only through the active
participation of several institutions committed
to this type of research that the program can
continue to develop.
 CHAPTER 19

Semiotics in Portugal
Jose Augusto Seabra

I. Historical Development of basic facts relating to semiotic problems can

Semiotics in Portugal
The development of semiotics in Portugal is too
re cent for its his tory to be outlined. At most we
could deal with the proto-history of thosestudies
which directly or indirectly relate to it at both
theoretical and research levels-studies which
(whether or not they have made relevant use of
them) can lay some claim to its methods.
The very scarcity of linguistic studies in Por-
tugal prior to the 1960s contributed to an almost
cOIJolplete lack of knowledge of the semiology
denved from Saussure as well as the semiotics
inspired by Peirce. As a matter of fact such
pri?rity was given to the fields of philolo~y, his-
toncal and normative grammar, stylistics, and
other tradition al subj€cts within the scope of
Portuguese language and literature 1 that for a
long time :efle~ti~m on the sciences of language
(namely lmgmstlcs and semiotics) as autono-
mous sciences was minimized.
A preliminary outline of an approach to some
'Cf. Carolina. Michaelis de Vasconcelos, Li,öes de Filologia
Portuguesa (LIsbon, 1946); Epiflinio da Silva Dias Sintaxe
HistOrica Portuguesa (Lisbon, 1959); Manuel de Paiv~ Boleo,
Estudo, de Lin~uistica Portuguesa e Rom8.nica, V.I: Dialectologia
e Hzstorza.da lzngua, 2 vols., (Coimbra, 1974 and 1975); Man-
uel Rodngues Lapa, EstiHstica da Lingua Portuguesa (Lisbon,
n.d.).
Jose Augusto Seabra • FacuIty of Letters, University of
Oporto, Porto, Portugal.
be observed in the linguistic studies of Jose Her-
culano de Carvalho, who speaks about a "gen-
eral theory of signs," an expression which to hirn
has the same meaning as "semiotics or general
semio!ogy.,,2 A?optin.g Saussure's terminology,
e~p~Cl,all'y t~e dlstm~tlOn signifiant (signifier) and
~z!5.nijie (slgmfied), thlS author, however, gives def-
m~tlOns of these terms which clearly contrast
wlth those of the linguist from Geneva. Thus
according to his point of view, "the 'signifier' i~
a conventional sign," whereas "'the signified' is
a natural sign," each relating to what he calls
the "real object" (in more accurate terms: the
referent). This bears no relation to Benveniste's
crit~cis~ of Saussure's thesis concerning the
arbItranness of the relationship between "sig-
nifier" and "signified" (arbitrariness which
according to Benveniste would in fact exist but
rather between the sign as a whole and the ;efer-
ent). Wh at Herculano de Carvalho denies is that
se~iologically it may be possible, as he says (now
usmg Hjelmslev's terminology), "to abstract from
the substance of the contents." In short, what is
meant here is the realism of the "signified" in
opposition to the formalism of structuralism. But
without "form", as Hjelmslev showed, there is
no "substance" of either the "contents" or the
"expression. "
2JOSe Herculano de Carvalho, Teoria da Linguagem (Coimbra
1967). '

407
408 Jost AUGUSTO SEABRA

It was not, however, through the work of this is apart of linguistics: most accurately that part
theorist of language from the ancient U niversity which would deal with the great signifying units
of Coimbra that semiotics made its entry into of speech." It would do so in such a way that,
Portugal. It was rather through the inftuence of in the last instance, it would be the manifestation
structuralism, which can be perceived toward of the "unity of the researches which are at pres-
the end of the sixties especially in the realm of ent being carried out in anthropology, sociology,
literary criticism, and through French inftuence, psychoanalysis and stylistics around the concept
as is traditional in the Portuguese culture. of meaning."
The impact of the polemic between R. Barthes Although using those "Elements" in different
and R. Picard over the "Nouvelle Critique" dur- forms and adapting them, Eduardo Prado
ing the course of the years 1965 and 1966 caught Coelho-like the few pioneer structuralists who
the attention of some young Portuguese critics. follow him-is not in a position to pursue sys-
From this there arose the first attempts at anal- tematic and elaborate research in semiotic terms
ysis of literary texts in the light of linguistics and beyond occasional essays. For that reason, even
semiology, of which the author of Le Degre zero in 1971, when he published The Floating Kingdom
de l'ecriture had become the pioneer in France, (the tide borrowed from a sentence of Saussure's),
displaying a range of methodological perspec- the author admits that these texts are the result
tives toward which others, coming from Marx- of an activity which "constitutes a compromise"
ism and psychoanalysis as well as from the recent between the practice of critical discourse and a
explosion of human sciences, would converge. hesitating form ofliterary journalism. 3 The same
In this way, in 1967, under the aegis of struc- happens with another new critic, Nelson de
turalism (broadly speaking), texts ranging from Matos, who, in aselection proposing the "prac-
Roland Barthes to Jacques Lacan, from Michel ti ce of a reading method," which lays claim to
Foucault to J acques Derrida, from Levi-Strauss follow no less than "Althusser, Lacan, Derrida,
to Louis Althusser, among others, were trans- Barthes, and some members of the groups Tel
lated for the first time and collected in an anthol- Quel, Poelique, Communicalions, Nouvelle Crilique and
ogy-a significant milestone-a kind of eclectic others," admits in the end that his critique "is
sum of the "maitres-a-penser" of a generation to blame for having given more attention to the
undergoing' an ideological crisis. As an intro- essay and to the practice of his own method than
duction, which was at the same time an attempt to the texts under analysis themselves," even
at divulgence and a synthesis (namely between stating that one of his broadest studies "contains
marxism and structuralism), the texts referred hardly an echo of structural ... analysis.,,4
to above were presented by Eduardo Prado So far we cannot even speak of what might
Coelho, who for some years had been working be called a budding "literary semiotics," in spite
as a literary critic for news papers such as the of the theoretical and methodological references
daily Düirio de Lisboa, magazines, and the literary claimed. U nder such circumstances, these
journal Seara Nova, under the tide "Nouvelle attempts at criticism were vulnerable to the first
Critique." opposing forces that were already at the time
Worthy of notice is the fact that although in making themselves feIt against "structuralism,"
an epigraph from Barthes stress is laid on the on the part of some better informed and expe-
statement that "Structuralism is a collection of rienced essayists such as Eduardo Louren<;o, who
researches or of plans for research, which will- accepted structuralism with some reservations,
ingly range themselves under the linguistic namely Barthes', und er the allegation that he
model," no study relating specifically to linguis- would propose "a more refined vision of posi-
tics and semiology is included in the book. And tivistic criticism.,,5 The translation into Portu-
yet, as far back as 1964, Barthes had already guese of a book like Les Mols el les choses by Michel
published his Eliments de semiologie in the journal Foucault brought an opportunity to reopen the
Communications, in which he proposed the inver- debate, through the prefaces which Loren<;o and
sion of Saussure's formulation of the relationship
between semiology as a "general science" of signs
30 Reino Flutuante (Lisbon, 1971).
and linguistics. "Linguistics is not," Barthes 4A Leitura e a Gritica (Lisbon, 1971), pp. 12, 144.
wrote, "a part, even a privileged one, of the gen- 5Cf. "Critica Literaria e Metodologia," in 0 Tempo e 0 Modo,
eral science of signs, it is rather semiology that 38-39 (Maio/Junho 1966).
 PORTUGAL 409

the polemic author Vergllio Ferreira wrote for The still unsteady situation of semiological
it, questioning that the primacy of "system" and studies, and at the same time its growing attrac-
"structure" over "ego" and "man," that is, "the tion, are perfectly detectable beyond the imme-
decentering of the subject," on which Foucault, diate motives of the day. Let us examine, for
like Lacan, had laid emphasis when announcing example, a statement made by Alzira Seixo, in
the end of classical humanism. In the same line which, after mentioning the alliance of linguis-
of doubt, but reftecting a wider range, is the tics with the most recent methods of literary
study of Maria de Lourdes Belchior, whose links analysis, she recognizes that "still more impor-
to a university environment reveal the opposition tant, even if not in terms of results already
which the new methods aroused in such milieux obtained, at least in perspectives for the future,
at the outset-especially the recourse to linguis- is the role of semiology, as a subject which,
tic and semiological models. "A structuralist although generalizing its approach to innumer-
criticism is or tends to be a semiological criti- able kinds of communication and meaning, is
cism. What signs will structuralist criticism dis- characterized by a greater concrete power in the
cover in the universe of literary works? . . . Is study of the linguistic process relative to each
this not paving the way for the dehumanization semiotic field, and therefore to literary semiot-
of literature? ,,6 wonders the author, whose the- ics."g In fact, if within the scope of literary
oretical training was in the line of a stylistics semiotics the instances of systematic exploration
marked by the inftuence of Rodrigues Lapa and of its methods are infrequent, not to say non-
Damaso Alonso. existent, they are stilliess frequent in other fields,
But the ideological and political context in in spite of sporadic semiotically derived appli-
which that theoretical debate lies, and which in cations, for example to the cinema. I t is in any
France would reach its acme in the events of case symptomatic that those texts in which ves-
May 1968 and in Portugal would have its some- tiges of semiotics could be detected should have
what mimetic repercussion in a phase of "open- been expressly banned from a new book of essays
ness" in a regime approaching a crisis, gradually by Eduardo Prado Coelho published in 1972. 10
caused universities to open their doors (and, one Although the author now claims "a coherence
could almost say, the ftoodgates) to the wave of of perspectives and methods which had not
structuralist "fashion," often without sufficient existed before," the truth is that, already mir-
maturity or without meeting the requirements roring the inftections which had begun to become
of scientific accuracy, on account of the meagre perceptible in French structuralism under the
advances of linguistic and, above all, semiol- inftuence of Barthes, this book deals above all
ogical research in Portugal. This scarcity was with "variations of written criticism," and the
felt mainly by young university professors, lec- author steers clear of any preoccupation with
turers, and students, who in the early seventies being very scientifically-minded. Linguistics and
started to take an interest in those fields. Suffice semiotics are thus considered, alongside of the
it to say that it was not until 1971 that the Cours other human sciences, as instruments for the
de linguistique general/ of Saussure was translated analysis of a text, but in such a way that theo-
into Portuguese. Until that time, people devoted retical preoccupations, even within the field of
to this kind of study depended only on the skimpy poetics, do not have the upper hand.
bibliography in Portuguese and a translation of Such preoccupations are displayed more
Andre Martinet's Eliments de linguistique generale, reftectively in a book by another essayist, Fer-
dating from 1964,8 whose functional perspective, nando Guimaraes, 11 in which he tries to expound
in the meantime, had more inftuence on spe- the relations between language and ideology,
cialists in linguistics than on the novice concentrating especially on the "problem of
semiologists. poetic expression" in the light of new contri-
butions from the sciences of language, which
point to a renewal of stylistics and rhetoric while
6"Estruturalismo e Critica Literaria," in Brotiria (Lisbon:
1968).
7 Curso de Linguistica Geral, trans. Jose Victor Adragao (Lis- "Interview in "Diario de Lisboa," Sept. 1970, transcribed in
bon: 1971). Diseursos do Texto (Lisbon, 1977).
8Elementos de Linguistica Geral, trans. Jorge Morais Barbosa IOA Palaura sobre a Palavra (Porto, 1972).

(Lisbon, 1964). "Linguagem e Ideologia (Porto, 1973).

410 JOSE AUGUSTO SEABRA
converging on second-degree systems of mean-
ing. Questions of poetics, in which the influence
of Roman Jakobson is not to be ignored, now
entered upon an interesting phase and were the
cause of studies on the part of some critics and
historians of literature who until that time had
been marked by an ideologically oriented pur-
pose, as is the case with Antonio Jose Saraiva,
a university professor exiled in France and Hol-
land, who, starting from a Marxist perspective
on literary phenomena, would evolve towards a
higher estimation of their formal and aesthetic
dimensions,12 while a collaborator of his, Oscar
Lopes, remaining in that orbit though shaken by
its theoretical crisis, resorted to devoting hirnself
to research in the area of symbolic logic and
formalized grammar. 13 In the meantime, from
other university men in exile there had arrived
contributions to the advancement of the theo-
retical and methodological debate in the field of
poetics which were important especially because
of their openness to the Anglo-Saxon "New Crit-
icism" and to other trends prevalent in America.
Such was the case with Adolfo Casais Monteiro 14
and Jorge de Sena/ 5 who had settled in Brazil
and later in the U.S.A., both ofwhom were poets
and essayists as weIl as scholars. Their relativism
and even critical scepticism would contribute by
questioning the more schematic trends ofFrench
structuralism, by establishing a number of epis-
temological problems connected with its foun-
dation, and by appealing for a new method:
"Being weIl informed and practising modern
criticism, we are forced to fight for certain meth-
ods and at the same time supersede them in our
practice." In this way Sena sums up a position
which, being polemical, would throw doubt upon
the good conscience with which certain "scien-
tific" simplifications had been penetrated, under
cover of linguistics and semiology, with neither
appropriate preparation nor the required rigor.
A new generation of researchers with univer-
sity backgrounds, which was being educated in
direct contact with foreign cultural milieux, was
at that time in a position to undertake more
elaborate research work and with better support.
Thus, whereas the structuralist discourse was
"Ser ou niio Ser Arte (Lisbon, 1973).
i3 Gramatica SimbOlica de Portugues (Lisbon, 1971).
14 Estrutura e Autenticadade como Problemas de Teoria e da Critica
Literdria (Sao Paulo, 1968).
15 Dialecticas da Literatura (Lisbon, 1973).
predominantly imitative in certain second-gen-
eration followers of Barthes, so me of his disciples
(in the true sense of that term) were already
working less obtrusively but more fruitfully on
valuable projects of structural and textual <;lllal-
ysis, carried out under his guidance in the Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes. From this source
would come theses of wider scope, 16 in which the
methods of literary semiotics were put to the test
in practical terms for the first time. In the wake
of Barthes they gradually evolved in a varied
manner, and paved the way for the reception of
such different works as those of Gerard Genette,
Tzvetan Todorov, or Julia Kristeva.
When the phase of pioneering was over, the
adherents of semiology, who had become more
numerous both inside and outside university cir-
eIes, gave birth to the first specialized collection
under the significant title Colecr;iio Signos (Signs
Collection) in the "Editions of the Seventies" in
Lisbon. Even here, Barthes had a conspicuous
place. The first translation of one of his books,
Mythologies, ineIuded apreface by Jose Augusto
Seabra ("Roland Barthes, a Writer: From the
Desire to the Pleasure of Writing"), in which
there is an attempt to emphasize that besides
Barthes the theorist (linguist, semiologist) there
is the other Barthes, devoted to the task of writ-
ing,17 of which the publication of The Pleasure oJ
the Text and his latest works was the confirma-
tion. The indelible footprints that Barthes left
behind went on pointing the way far young gen-
erations, and aroused ever-growing interest in
his books, even before his death. Proof of this is
seen in the publication of nearly all his works in
"Signos," aseries which diseIosed to Portuguese
readers, as it went on, the main studies ofliterary
semiotics of French origin, ineIuding those of
Kristeva 18 and Todorov, 19 both in individual vol-
umes and in collections. 20 But at the same time
other linguistic perspectives were considered,
such as transformational generative grammar,
known at the time only through the translation
16Cf. Jose Augusto Seabra, AnaiJse structurale des Mteronymes de
Fernando Pessoa: du poemodrame au poetodrame (Paris, 1971);
Brazilian ed.: Fernando Pessoa ou 0 Poetodrama (Sao Paulo,
1973).
17This preface was developed in a book of Jose Augusto
Seabra, Poiitica de Barthes (Porto, 1980).
1BHistoria da Linguagem (Lisbon, 1974).
19 Poetica da Prosa (Lisbon, 1979); Teorias do Simbolo, (Lisbon,
1979).
20 Linguistica e Literatura (Lisbon, 1976).
 PORTUGAL
of N oam Chomsky' s Aspects rif the Theory oJ Syntax
in 1965, whose growing popularity, above all in
the field of pedagogy, made access to other basic
texts and to a complementary theoretical
developmene' indispensable. The inftuence of
this school is reftected in a study "On the Pos-
sibility of a Generative Poetics" by Vitor Manuel
de Aguiar e Silva, one of the few experts in the
theory of literature in Portuga1. 22
Also worth mentioning, for its significance in
a rather unfavorable cultural context, is the
inclusion in a book on Problems and Methods oJ
Semiology, published under the supervision of J. J.
Nattiez of the University of Montreal, of a chap-
ter which at last makes Peircean semiotics known
to the Portuguese public: Foundations oJ the Theory
oJ Signs, by Charles Morris. A translation of one
of Morris's books (Signification and Significance)
would appear as la te as 1978 in a linguistics and
semiotics series of the University Encyclopedia
books. 23 In spite of these first symptoms of an
opening to new theoretical horizons, it had but
few repercussions in the practice of research,
which in the meantime the political changes of
1974 had seemed to herald with the liberation
of the universities from old scientific prejudices.
Others, however, came to the surface, owing to
the prevalence of the marxist ideological ortho-
doxy in certain university and cultural milieux,
which at the outset occupied key posts under the
coverage of the dominant power at the time,
despite so me pockets of resistance.
Thus, although the new situation allowed the
introduction into the syllabuses of new, up-to-
date subjects in the field of linguistic and literary
studies, as well as the organization of specialized
research centers, it is not possible to state, beyond
some scattered efforts, that the development of
research and the production of original works
within the scope of semiotics was very percep-
tible. Not even project work, to which such great
importance was attributed, between the areas of
linguistics and literature (not to mention others)
has yielded the desired results, the splitting of
the two respective centers being adequate proof
of this. On the other hand, administrative
centralism hindered the attempts of some of the
21A Gramatica Generativa, (Lisbon, 1979).
"Competencia Linguistica e Competencia Literaria, (Coimbra, 1977).
"Signos e Valores, presented by Jose M. Justo (Lisbon: Via
Editora 1978).
411
more dynamic centers. Let us mention as an
example the plan for the creation of a "Center
of Semiotic and Literary Studies" at the Uni-
versity of Oporto, whose purpose was to study
literary as well as pictorial, film, and television
dis course, and which met with the vetoing of its
foundation by the Committee of the National
Institute for Scientific Research when called upon
to give their views on the matter, the result being
that in the end the project had to be confined to
a traditional "Literature Center," which did not,
however, prevent it from keeping up with its
research program or carrying on with the train-
ing of researchers.
Some courses in Semiotics-especially in the
field of literature-took place at the Faculties of
Arts in the period in which these were allowed
to work out their own programs of study or syl-
labuses autonomously. But when Act 53/78 was
passed by Parliament, no subject connected with
semiology was included, nor is its introduction
into the syllabuses, now at anationallevel, fore-
seeable. Only under the title "Modern Linguis-
tics Currents" does there exist in the modern
languages and literature course the possibility of
(eventually) including the trends connected with
the semiotics of language. In view of the freedom
to hold specialized seminars, the operation of a
seminar on semiotics did meanwhile become
possible-but only as part of the subject "The-
ory of Literature"-at the Faculty of Arts of
Oporto, for which Professor Norma Backes
Tasca, a member of the Linguistic Center of the
same University, is responsible. No matter how
odd this may seem, it was easier to reintroduce
semiotics through poetics than through linguis-
tics, on account of the resistance Portuguese lin-
guists still show to conferring scientific rank on
a subject which to a great extent they ignore,
and which is undervalued because it has been
unduly misused.
That misuse has also spread to secondary
schools, where on the grounds of a pseudo-mod-
ernism the syllabus of preparatory schools
resorted to certain models of Greimasian semiot-
ics, whose theoretical bases have in no way been
mastered by the teachers, or even by the authors
of the syllabuses themselves. 24 This paradox, the
24Cr. the critical analysis of this problem by Norma Backes
Tasca, "A proposito da inclusao da Semiotica Formal no
Ciclo Preparatorio," in Rai;;. e Utopia, No. 9-10 (1979).
412 JOSE AUGUSTO SEABRA
inversions of positions of the two levels of te ach-
ing relative to semiotics, made the pedagogical
anomaly perfectly obvious and posed a great
obstacle to the consolidation of the teaching ele-
ments on a genuine scientific basis. As a matter
of fact the work which claims to be semiotics
has wavered between two tendencies: (a) The
successive reproduction of popularized theories
and trends, strengthened by the translation of
texts not always supported by an authentie crit-
ical reflection, in the sequence of the pioneering
phase already dcscribed; (b) The more or less
mechanical application of sophisticated models
for didactic purposes, or with the aim of spread-
ing knowledge, but with no preoccupation other
than that of a technical performance (and one
could almost say technocratic, were it not for the
unsatisfactory preparation and incompetence of
some of its more enthusiastic representatives).
The first tendency has doubtless given rise to
the successive dissemination of basic works
sometimes preceded by a foreword or framed in
commentaries. For example, the series "Praticas
de Leitura" (Reading Practices), published by
Editora Arcadia und er the supervision of Maria
Alzira Seixo, has made known a wide range of
authors from Emile Benveniste to Jacques Lacan,
from J ulia Kristeva to Gerard Genette, from Peer
Aage Brandt to Philippe Hamon, from Pierre
Macherey to Christian Metz, who represent
multifarious areas of linguistics, and semiotics,
as weil as its interplay with other human sci-
ences. \Ve should point out that this series exhibits
an underlying ideological preoccupation, pre-
dominantly marxist in origin, which tends to limit
access to a plurality of methodological perspec-
tives. More neutral and diversified is the ori-
entation of series such as "Modern University"
(Don Quixote Publications), wh ich publishes
textbooks such as Keys to Semioties by Jeanne
Martinet or the Dictionary of the Seienees 01 Lan-
guage by Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov;
"University" (Vcga Publishers), which has pub-
lished the main works of Vladimir Propp;
"Imprensa Universitaria" (University Press)
(Estampa Publishers), which has made Yuri
Lotman andJan Mukarovsky known, especially
the studies of the latter on semiotics of the cin-
ema and of art; and "Novalmedina" (Almedina
Bookshop), which has started to include basic
works on semiotics in its vast bibliography.
Among these works, one deserves special empha-
sis, namely an Introduction to Narrative and Diseur-
sive Semioties by J oseph Courtes (translated by
Norma Backes Tasca), which allowed more pre-
eise knowledge of a badly needed but little known
area, the structural analysis of narrative accord-
ing to the methodology of the school of A. J.
Greimas.
The second tendency is present in more or less
successful attempts at putting one method or
another to the test in practice. This is the case,
for example, with Teehniques 01 Text Analysis, by
Carlos Reis (Coimbra, 1976), who has also pub-
lished essays on the analysis of the narrative
dis course of several Portuguese authors (E«a de
Queir6s and Carlos de Oliveira). There is nat-
urally some risk of "a didactic dimension in which
a certain schematism is present," as the author
admits. Apart from literary semiotics, other
meaningless attempts by the author, like that of
the analysis of advertising discüurse, remained
no more than mere technical exercises.
In the more recent past semiotics spread
beyond the literary fron tiers to other areas so far
scarcely explored, including, abüve all, those of
the mass media. The recent introduction of a
degree in Social Communicatiün at the N ew
University of Lisbon has provided the oppor-
tunity to include semiology in the respective cur-
riculum of subjects, provision für which is not
made in the Course of Modern Languages and
Li tera tu res .
With respect to research in the field of semiot-
ics of the media, we can already mention works
by Adriano Duarte Rodrigues. 25 But so far they
are no more than preliminary attempts in a
branch of study which is doubtless arousing great
interest among new generations of scholars.
The presence of texts which directly or indi-
rectly relate to semiological problems, in several
types of cultural magazines and not just lin-
guistic or literary ones, is proof that the field of
semiotics is gradually widening its audience, but
the lack of any specialized publication and the
small degree of importance which is still being
accorded to this field in both research and teach-
ing do not enable us to speak as yet of an authen-
tie implantation of semiotics in Portugal. It would
"Cf. "Essai d'Analyse Socio-Semiotique de la Presse des
Immign's Portugais," in Recherches Sociologiques, No. 3 (Dec.
1976), and A Communicafiio Sodale Nafiio, Historia, Linguagem
(Lisbon, 1979).
 PORTUGAL
be more accurate to say, with the conditions for
launching it having been created, that there is
now a pressing need for semiotic studies to go
through a phase of organized and systematic
research, so that they may establish themselves
once and for all.
11. Semiotic Fields
A. Literature
As has already been pointed out above, it was
doubtless in the field of literature that semiotics
met with greater development in Portugal. Above
all in the field of literary criticism, the methods
of structural analysis which so appealed to lin-
guistics and semiology aroused a great interest
during the sixties, as areaction against the two
tendencies then prevalent in that area-psycho-
logical and sociological criticism, the latter sup-
porting Marx, and both flowing from the two
more influentialliterary trends of the preceding
half-century: preseneism (a name derived from the
periodical Present;a (Presence) published since the
late twenties), and neo-realism (the Portuguese
equivalent of socialist realism, which emerged
at the end of the following decade). Only certain
generations of the fifties, such as that of the
"Cadernos de Poesia" (Poetry Notebooks) and
that of "Arvore" (Tree), had up to that time
been open to immanent methods of analyzing
the literary work, the former being more influ-
enced by Anglo-Saxon criticism (cf. above all
Jorge de Sena) and the latter by French criticism
(cf. especially Ant6nio Ramos Rosa). The so-
called "1961 Generation" marks a turning point,
on account of the greater importance given to
poetic language (cf. especially Gastao Cruz) , that
undoubtedly opened the way for the structuralist
"nouvelle critique" (new criticism) which from
that time on, as we have seen, found favorable
ground for its penetration into Portugal.
As for poetics, taken in its wider sense as the-
ory of literature, this field had not undergone
great development until the middle of the cen-
tury, the only exception being the publication in
1953 of Analysis and Interpretation 0] the Literary
Work (Introduction to the Scienee of Literature) by the
German Wolfgang Kayser, who resorts to a cor-
pus of texts of Portuguese literature, putting into
practice a method which takes the work as a
413
"linguistic structure closed and complete in
itself." The translation of Theory 0] Literature by
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren in 1955 also
permitted knowledge of the latest theoretical
perspectives, from phenomenology to structur-
alism. But in the general field of poetics these
approaches would only come to be truly und er-
stood through the translation (in the seventies)
of the body of texts on the Russian formalists,
compiled in France by Todorov under the generic
title Theory 0] Literature. Worthy of mention in
this area is a textbook by a well informed Por-
tuguese author with solid university training,
Vitor Manuel de Aguiar e Silva. 26
In the field of stylistics, few extensive studies
can be mentioned besides those carried out by
Maria de Lourdes Belchior in the tradition of
the Spanish school of Dämaso Alonso. Subse-
quently Belchior took an interest in a structur-
alist type of literary semiotics, although assuming
a critical posture in regard to it. 27
With reference to rhetoric, studies of its his-
tory have been foremost in Portugal, especially
those of Anibal Pinto de Castro RetOriea e Teo-
rizagao Literaria em Portugal-do Humanismo ao Neo-
Classieismo (Rhetoric and Literary Theorization
in Portugal-From Humanism to Neo-Classi-
cism (Coimbra, 1973) and those of R. M. Rosado
Fernandes ("Brief Introduction to Rhetorical
Studies in Portugal," Preface to the translation
of Heinrich Lausberg's Elements 0] Literary Rhet-
orie, Lis bon, 1972). Although, beyond the his-
toricist perspective, the former has kept abreast
of the trends of the N ew Rhetoric and its rela-
tions with linguistics and semiology, so far there
have been no autonomous studies of this field,
except in pedagogical terms. In the meantime,
a seminar on Poetics and Rhetoric has been in
operation at the Faculty of Arts of Oporto over
the last few years; a post-graduate course in this
area has also been announced there.
The examples of literary semiotics in Portugal
are, in short, more visible for the time being in
occasional essays than in a grounded exploration
within the framework of systematic research. 28
26 Teoria da Literatura, 3rd ed. (Coimbra, 1973).
27cr especially Os Homens e os Liuros, 2 vols. (Lisbon, 1971
and 1980).
2HOne Ph.D. thesis can be mentioned in the Faculty of Arts
of T"isbon: Le Parcours du Plaisir, by Maria Alzira Seixo,
Lisbon, 1976.
414 JOSE AUGUSTO SEABRA
B. Mass Communication
As has also been mentioned in the first section
of this chapter, mass communication is the sec-
ond area in which some attempts have lately
been made to introduce semiotics both at the
didactic level (in subjects which appear on the
Curriculum for the degree in Mass Media at the
New University of Lisbon) and at the research
level (works by Adriano Duarte Rodrigues on
the emigrant press). Recendy, the addition of
the subjects "Introduction to Journalism" and
"Communication" into the curriculum for sec-
ondary schools was met with great interest on
the part of young people, which has already given
rise to the publication of an anthology contain-
ing texts of varied origin in which the semiol-
ogical perspective is emphasized. 29
A sign of that interest on the part of the public
is seen in the success achieved by the translation
of Barthes's Mythologies, in which there are texts
on the mass media and where one can find a
final study on "Myth Today," in which the
semiological references are fundamental. The role
of Barthes as a pioneer of semiotics in Portugal
is thereby confirmed.
In other areas (visual arts, the cinema, the
theater, and music, among others) there have
been, as far as our knowledge extends, no studies
of sufficient semiotic relevance in Portugal, not-
withstanding some inftuence of semiological
metalanguage in publications of several kinds,
even in their tides. 30 Let us mention the case of
the magazine Sema, whose epigraph spoke of the
"possible significance which a stroke, a letter, or
a sign can be considered to have," but which in
its ephemeral duration was like a forerunner, in
which some texts and graphic signs met
experimentally.
In the field of scientific interdisciplinarity,
semiotics is as yet far from playing a role cor-
responding to that which Charles Morris assigned
to it: that of being "at the same time the science
among sciences and an instrument of those sci-
ences themselves," and for that reason "meta-
science" (the science of sciences) should use
29Comunicafiio Social Jornalismo, 3 vols., by Adriano Duarte
Rodrigues, Eduarda Dionisio, and Helena G. Neves (Lis-
bon, 1981).
30Cf. for instance "A Questäo Est€tica-A Func;äo Metoni-
mica na Condifiio Humana de Margritte (Supostos Kantianos
para uma Leitura)," in Filosofia e Epistemologia (Lisbon, 1977-
1978). . 32 0 Comercio do Porto (20 May 1980).
semiotics as its "organon" (Foundations ofthe The-
ory rif Signs). There are but few references made
to it, even in connection with epistemological
questions which have begun to be dealt with in
Portugal. For that reason it is worth mentioning
the bibliographical allusions to the work of Rene
Thom (Modeles Mathimatiques de La Morphogenese)
which are to be found, for example, in a work
of Fernando Gil: "The Categorical Thought: from
Symmetries to Contradictions."31 The essays of
some young scholars also contain merely passing
and occasional references to semiological prob':
lems, made in such a way that they bear no
specific methodological relevance. A more elab-
orate reftection on the philosophical grounds of
semiotics is to be found, however, In a text by
Norma Backes Tasca, under the title "Semiology
or Semiotics," published in the newspaper sup-
plement Culture and Art; in the same number there
is also an article by Maria de Grac;a Pinto, "Lin-
guistic Competence or Semiotic Competence?,,32
Worthy of notice, aside from these theoretical
contributions, is the research work of Norma
Backes Tasca on psychotic discourse and infan-
tile pre-language, the only interdisciplinary
research (Linguistics-Semiotics-Psychoanal-
ysis) we know of, which is now being carried out
in hospital institutions and kindergartens.
III. Institutional Framework
Research, Teaching, and Publications: Only in a
few teaching institutions is there any place for
semiotic studies in their syllabuses. Among the
Faculties of Arts let us mention that of Oporto,
which introduced a seminar on Semiotics within
the subject "Theory of Literature" in the years
1978179, 1979/80, 1980/81. The only Faculty of
Human Sciences in the country, namely that of
the New University of Lisbon, has a degree in
Mass Communication, where there are two fur-
ther courses in Semiotics (Semiotics I and
Semiotics II).
As for research centers, the Semiotic and Lit-
erature Center of the U niversity of Oporto (Rua
do Campo Alegre, 1055) can be rnentioned; it
has organized seminars for the training of
31 In Filosofia e Epistemologia, Grupo de Estudos de Investi-
gac;äo de Filosofia e Epistemologia, Lisbon, 1977-1978.
 PORTUGAL 415

researchers, so me of which are under the guid-
ance of foreign experts (Thomas A. Sebeok, Julia
Kristeva, Gerard Genette).
There is no specialized research program, con-
trary to wh at obtains in the field of linguistics.
The absence of specialized publications is an
obstacle to the development of semiotics in Por-
tugal. Nevertheless, the journal Nova Renascem;a,
in Oporto, has published some articles by Backes
Tasca and Monica Rector. 33 Recently, the Por-
tugese Association of Semiotics was created in
Oporto (Rua Tenente Valadium, 231), having
published the first periodicals in this field (Cruz-
eiro Semi6tics 1, 1984; and 2, 1985).
"In Nova Renascen,a, 3 (Spring 1981).
 CHAPTER 20

Semiotics in Romania
Sanda Golopentia-Eretescu

I. The History of Romanian I will also briefly allude to a natural semiotics

Semiotics component that is coextensive with both.

The his tory of Romanian semiotics has not yet

become an independent object of study in 11. Natural Semiotics
Romania. Overviews of Romanian semiotics
appear, however, in Marcus (1979a) and Voigt
Romanian folk culture includes a great num-
(1979), and a general bibliography of the subject
ber of popular beliefs, Iyrical songs, tales, leg-
has been prepared by Mihai N adin. I Informa-
ends, myths, proverbs, riddles, rituals,
tion concerning Romanian linguistic semiotics
professional and moral rules, or simply words,
or semiotics of folklore can be found in MicEiu
tha.t describe, explain or comment upon signs,
(1977a) and Marcus (1975e, 1978), respectively.
thelr structure and their evolution. These have
For useful details one can also turn to the numer-
not yet been recognized as a distinct object of
ous syntheses dealing with the history of Roman-
study. They are mentioned, though, in ethno-
ian linguistics (lordan, ed., 1978; Rosetti and
graphic, folkloric, and anthropological studies
Golopen!ia-Eretescu, eds., 1978), stvlistics and
and could represent an important chapter in the
poetics (Aurel Nicolescu, 197 5; Berc~, ed., 1976;
history of semiotics. To study them would me an
Roceric, 1978; S. Vultur, 1978a), mathematical
to accon:plish for semiotics what Herseni (1980)
and computationallinguistics and poetics (Mar-
and NOlca (1973, 1978a) accomplished for
cu.s, 1978), folklore studies (Birlea, 1974), rhet-
Roman.ian natural psychology and philosophy,
OrIC (Sasu, 1976), comparative literature (Dima
respectIVely.
and Papadima, 1972), and psychology (Herseni,
Note that natural semiotics is not to be con-
1980), as weil as to the dictionaries of Romanian
fused with the semiotics of folklore. The first
linguists (Balacciu and Chiriacescu, 1978) or
represents a store of metasemiotic folk wisdom
Romanian folklorists (Datcu and Stroescu, 1979).
anonymous and atemporal, accompanying ancI
~n the presentation that follows, I will dis tin-
from time to time permeating theoretica1,
gUJsh between a pre-semiotic and a semiotic stage.
descriptive, or applied (pre)semiotics. The sec-
I Dr. N adin has been kind enough to allow us to consult this ond represents a descriptive (pre)semiotic
bibliography. endeavor using as its corpus folkloric signs,
Sanda Golopentia-Eretescu • Department of French
strongly individualized, subject to progressive or
Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, regressive change. To study natural semiotics is
U.S.A. 02912. especially meaningful in those cultures which,

417
418 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
like Romanian culture, have a strong and highly
significant folk component.
111. Pre-Semiotics
Marcus (1979a) and Voigt (1979) situate the
beginning of Romanian semiotics in the 17th
century with Dimitrie Cantemir's Compendiolum.
Both insist, following in this Miclau (1977a), on
the semiotic relevance of Paul lorgovici's Obser-
va~ii de limba rom8-neasca (Observations on the
Romanian Language [1799]). There are other
early names that have similarly been advanced:
Simion ~tefan, Titu Maiorescu, Bogdan Petri-
ceicu Hasdeu, etc. However, we shall not insist
on tracing the connection this far back.
There is, on the other hand, a rich tradition
of research devoted to signs and sign-systems,
their functioning and their diversity, by Romanian
philosophers, psychologists, literary critics, soci-
ologists, folklorists, and linguists in the years
between World Wars land 11. Owing in part
to ideological circumstances, this semiotics avant
la lettre still receives hardly any explicit discus-
sion in Romania. For one thing, this tradition
did not stern from Marxist philosophy and one
was unable overtly to acknowledge it as such
without at the same time criticizing, rejecting,
or simply disregarding large areas of it. Fur-
thermore, many of its representatives had either
been repressed in the fifties or had left Romania
and continued their activities abroad, thus
becoming taboo as subjects of study for a long
period of time-a period, in fact, that is by no
means completely over. Thus, such pre-semiotic
endeavors as those of philosopher and poet
Lucian Blaga, psychologist Radulescu-Motru,
historian of religions Mircea Eliade, sociologists
Mircea Vulcanescu and Ion lonica, musicologist
Constantin Brailoiu, dadaist Tristan Tzara, lin-
guists Eugenio Coseriu and until recently Sextil
Pu§cariu, to mention only a few, have been
hardly, if at all, assimilated by contemporary
Romanian semiotics, though they would have
been major sources of originality and creativity.
There are, we should add, non-political reasons
as well for this lack of explicit incorporation of
previous achievements. Semiotics is still taken
to represent a radically new approach, still iso-
lated from many of the other humanistic disci-
plines, and in this we see not a specifically
Romanian but rather a general feature of its
contemporary development.
In classifying as pre-semiotic the works of the
abovementioned authors I do not imply that
theirs is a secondary, marginal research with
respect to a core semiotics. I refer rather to the
following features that I consider characteristic:
(a) pre-semiotics developed at a time when the
consciousness of a general and independent
problematic of the sign did not exist;
(b) therefore, it did not group the philosophers,
linguists, sociologists, etc. that were approaching
sign problems into a single movement of thought;
(c) pre-semiotics consisted in applying to an
implicitly semiotic object of study theories that
were borrowed from a larger variety of disci-
plines than is the case with semiotics proper
(semiotics, at least in Romania, has li mi ted the
domain of its theoretical dependency to linguis-
tics and logic). From this last point ofview, pre-
semiotics was often more daring and more diver-
sified in its approach to signs than is orthodox
contemporary semiotics.
In the following I shall present four of the
many presemioticians that seem to me not only
historically relevant for Romania; but also
potentially significant for the international
development of contemporary semiotics. These
are: Lucian Blaga, Pius Servien, Constantin
Brailoiu, and Mircea Eliade.
A_ Lucian Blaga's Philosophy of Style
Whether it be a work of art, of metaphysical
or scientific thought, or a social institution, the
set of creations pertaining to a single personality,
the set of creations that define a cultural period
of the culture of a specific country, area, etc.,
the main characteristic of a cultural fact is, for
Lucian Blaga (1895-1961), the style or mixture
of styles that it manifests.
A style is a complex deep structure determined
by a whole set of unconscious elements. It is at
this point that Blaga's philosophy of style 2 departs
from the his tory of art, morphology of culture,
and psychoanalysis that were its contemporaries.
2S ee BIaga (1935, 1936, 1937[1969], 1941,1976). About B1aga;
see also Borci1ii (1969), Eliade (1938c), Indrie~ (1975),
L. Ionescu (1968), Ivan (1975), Miclau (1976a), Stahl
(1938a, b), Todoran (1967a, 1972), Turbaceanu (1970),
S. Vultur (1972, 1974, 1975), Zamfir (1970).
 ROMANIA
For Alois Riegl, Leo Frobenius or Oswald
Spengler, culture is an independent, supraper-
sonal organism which can be presented by means
of a symbolic space. Such symbolic spaces are
the infinite space, the space of the isolated body,
the infinite tridimensional space, the vault space,
the labyrinthine way, the path within nature,
and the unlimited plane that in Spengler's view,
Antiquity, Occidental, Arabian, Egyptian,
Chinese and Russian cultures respectively sym-
bolize. This symbolic space is conceived of as a
conscious dimension that is conditioned by the
physical surroundings, as a kind of schematic
sublimation, a diagram of the landscape. In Bla-
ga's view, (a) a culture and its deep-structure
style are phenomena too complex to be accounted
for in terms of one single parameter; (b) to explain
a style one has to abandon the conscious level
and to resort to the level of the unconscious;
(c) culture is not above man; it is built up by
the spatial, temporal, axiological, orientational,
and formative categories of the human uncon-
scious; (d) one has to distinguish between the
surface, physical landscape, and the deep, uncon-
scious spatial perspective, for (d I) in one and the
same lands cape frequently coexist cultures with
distinct spatial perspectives; (d2) in different
landscapes, one often finds the same spatial per-
spective; (d3) there frequently appear incongru-
ities between the physical landscape and the
spatial perspective of a single culture.
While he uses the concept of the unconscious,
Blaga defines it in a way that is very different
from the psychoanalytic conception of Freud or
Jung. First, and most important, the uncon-
scious is conceived of in a positive sense, as a
sui generis substance (reality) and not, as is the
case in orthodox psychoanalysis, in a negative
way, by relating it to a central consciousness.
While psychoanalysis assimilates the relation
conscious/unconscious to the mythological rela-
tion cosmos/chaos, Blaga maintains that the
unconscious is more of a cosmos than conscious-
ness itself. The unconscious consists not only of
psychological but also of spiritual structures. It
is a magma of horizons, attitudes, reactions,
interpretations, internal rhythms, primary urges
for forms. Second, the relationship between the
conscious and the unconscious is not exhausted
by the sublimation process (in which the uncon-
scious contents are disguised in order to be
accepted at the conscious level). There is-asserts
419
Blaga-a second process by which the uncon-
scious penetrates directly, without a mask, into
consciousness. He proposed to call this process
"personance" (personan(ii)-a pun expressing a
resonance of the deepest levels of the person.
Personance is most notably manifest in artistic
creation.
Blaga has devoted a large portion of his work
to a detailed presentation of the unconscious cat-
egories of style in the most different cultures of
the world. Since any culture's stylistic matrix nec-
essarily combines (I) a spatial perspective, (2) a
temporal perspective, (3) an "axiological accent,"
(4) a basic orientation, and (5) a "formative
aspiration," the differences between styles are
accounted for in terms of different options at the
level of each of these major categories. Thus,
Blaga's definition of culture in a sense recalls
the distinctive-feature approach in phonology
and, more generally, in structural linguistics.
Let us now briefly look at some of the possible
choices for each of the basic unconscious cate-
gories above.
To the types of spatial perspectives already
enumerated by Riegl, Frobenius, and Spengler,
Blaga adds "geminated" (twinned) space (which
appears, for example, in Babylonian culture),
alveolar (honeycombed) space (which he con-
siders definitive for Chinese culture), the CUf-
tained space that permeates Arabian culture, the
undulating space that characterizes Romanian
culture.
With regard to the unconscious category of
time, Blaga distinguishes between three basic
temporal configurations: (I) an ascending time
that he metaphorically calls "fountain time"
(Rom. timp havuz); (2) a descending time that he
calls "waterfall time" (Rom. timp cascadii) , and
(3) a time, neither ascending nor descending, that
he calls "stream time" (Rom. timji fluviu).
Ascending time puts an accent on the future. It
is the unconscious time of Hebrew Messianic
religion and of European metaphysics (with
Hege!, 19th-century evolutionism, the idea of
progress). Descending time confers supreme value
on the past. It is, most characteristically, the
unconscious time of Gnosticism and Neoplaton-
ism, but also of the Babylonian myth of Genesis,
of part of Plato's metaphysics, of the Romantic
doctrines of Dacque, Klages, Evola, Bachofen.
Stream time values a permanent present allow-
ing equal achievements. I t is the temporal
420 SAN DA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
configuration that Blaga sees as defining most
of the modern historical conceptions that try to
account for the immanent structure of every
period of time. There are also possible mixtures
of these basic configurations, which can genera te
the cyclical vision oftime (Cuvier's, for example)
and the spiral vision of time (Goethe's, for ex am-
pIe). Nietzsche's vision of time would consist of
combining cyclical time with stream time.
What Blaga calls the "axiological accent" con-
sists of the positive or negative valuation of one's
unconscious space. Thus, for example, though
both European and Indian cultures are char-
acterized by an infinite unconscious space, Euro-
pean culture gives it an affirmative, positive,
expansive interpretation while Indian culture
gives it a negative, involutive interpretation. In
order to show this, Blaga examines in detail
European and Indian metaphysics respectively.
Now, one's orientation with respect to the spa-
tial and temporal unconscious horizons can be
one of advancing towards them, receding from
them, or neither advancing towards nor receding
from them. Blaga calls these the anabatic attitude,
katabatic attitude, and neutral attitude respectively.
European culture is anabatic, Indian and Egyp-
tian cultures are katabatic. Chinese culture is
neutral. These orientation categories are not to
be confused with the axiological categories. To
show this, Blaga uses arguments that remind one
of the commutation principle in structural lin-
guistics. Can one have a negative axiological
accent occurring together with an anabatic ori-
entation? Since the answer is yes, it appears that
the two sets of categories are independent and
can function as distinctive features.
There are, according to Blaga, three major
modes of the unconscious stylistic formative urge:
the individualizing mode, the typijjing mode, and
the elementalizing mode. German culture, artistic
personalities like Rembrandt or Shakespeare, the
metaphysics of Leibniz, and the Protestant re-
ligion all exemplify the individualizing mode.
Ancient Greek culture (i.e., Sophocles, Plato,
Praxiteles), Renaissance culture, and European
classicism exemplify the typifying mode. The
third mode, characterized by the reduction of
things to elemental universal aspects, is exem-
plified by Egyptian art, Byzantine painting, Van
Gogh's painting, Orthodox religion. It is inter-
esting that Blaga conceives of the Catholic reli-
gion as a fluid structure alternating between the
elemental, the individualizing, and the typifying
modes.
Besides these main stylistic categories, Blaga
introduces so me secondary stylistic elements into the
characterization of a culture. Such elements, are,
for example, what he calls the unconscious
"adoptive age" or "adoptive sex" of a culture.
The opposition between "minor" (ethnographic)
cultures and "major" (monumental) cultures is
not to be conceived, shows Blaga, in terms of
dimensional criteria (there are vast creations,
such as the folk epic, that appear in minor cu l-
tures.) Nor should it be seen-as cultural mor-
phology does-as successive childhood and
maturity stages of the "cultural organism." Blaga
retains, however, the metaphorical opposition
between childhood and maturity. In it he sees
not an opposition between stages situated on an
ascendent line but an opposition between au ton-
omous structures which is not to be conceived
as a value distinction. A major culture is one
rooted in the gifts and qualities of adult age; a
minor culture is rooted in the gifts and qualities
of childhood. As an autonomous structure,
"childhood" presupposes a strang imaginative
component, passivity, spontaneity, a naive cos-
mocentrism, improvisation, no sense for the per-
ennial. "Maturity," on the other hand, is
volitional, methodically active, prudent, spe-
cialized, constructive, hierarchieal, oriented
towards perenniality. In a minor culture, every
individual is conceived as a generalist, an undif-
ferentiated universality improvising according to
simple techniques but with great virtuosity. Col-
lective creations accumulate organically, space
is the visible space, time corresponds to the
organic duration of individual life. In a major
culture, the individual is conceived of as a spe-
cialized, unilateral organ of the collective body,
and creation is planned over generations; space
overflows the visible, time overflows the span of
individual life. Minor cultures are ahistoric.
Major cultures are historic cultures that function
by positively expanding space and time. On the
other hand, minor cultures are more resistant
because closer to nature. Major cultures seem
to be more exposed to catastrophe, further away
from nature. There are cases in which a minor
culture transforms itself into a major one. A minor
Egyptian culture preceded the major one. But
there are other minor cultures which have never
shown this tendency.
 ROMANIA
Two stylistic matrices can differ, according to
Blaga, on the level of one, more than one, or all
the stylistic categories; on the level of one or
more secondary stylistic elements; on both the
primary and secondary stylistic levels. There are
cases-insists Blaga-in which two cultures are
identical on the level of stylistic categories, but
different on the level of secondary stylistic fea-
tures. Thus, Blaga's philosophy of style allows
us to build as its normal continuation a theory
concerning the typology not only of cultures, but
also of distances between cultures.
Blaga's approach paves the way for a possible
genetic semiotics (Blaga spoke of a genetic sty-
listics). It may represent an invaluable point of
departure for work defining the semiotic family
resemblance (Blaga called it "parallelism")
between creations pertaining to the same semiotic
macro-system (culture). More specifically, the
rich analyses devoted by Blaga to the most var-
ied semiotic domains-from architecture to tex-
tiles and ceramics, from painting and sculpture
to religion, metaphysics, or literature, from
Chinese culture to Indian, American, German,
Italian, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish,
. Czechoslovakian, Bulgarian, Greek, Belgian,
Russian, Hungarian and other cultures-are full
of implications for comparative semiotics, a branch
of present-day world semiotics that is especially
rich in undeveloped possibilities.
Before closing this inevitably short presenta-
tion, let us briefly oudine the way in which Blaga
defines the stylistic matrix of Romanian culture,
using the above criteria. The unconscious space
of the Romanian culture is, for Blaga, an infinite
undulating space. The axiological accent is posi-
tive, but muted. Romanian culture is neither
anabatic, nor catabatic, but rather a combina-
tion of the two: its main orientation can be
approximated as an ascending-and-descending
cycle. The formal aspiration is towards elemen-
talization. There are some secondary stylistic
aspects that are important. Such is what Blaga
calls the Sophianic perspective, which, together
with the valuation of the organic (of life) is the
most important stylistic dimension of Orthodox
religion. In the Sophianic perspective, man is
the natural and ultimate target of a descending
transcendence. The Sophianic perspective is
exemplified by the architectural structure of
Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, by Byzantine
art, and, in Romania, by such central folk bal-
421
lads as Miori[a (The Litde Sheep) or Mqterul
Manole (Master ManoIe) . Other secondary
aspects of the Romanian culture are the pref-
erence for the picturesque, for detail, for orna-
ment (which is a stylistic preference spread all
over the Balkan area), geometrism, the predi-
lection for muted colors and for nuance (nuances
of color, but also psychological shades, the subde
psychological states such as dor "longing," jale
"gloom," and the untranslatable urit, which are
the main areas explored by the Romanian lyrical
folk song), the atemporal, minor folk culture as
a most characteristic achievement, etc. Blaga has
given fascinating analyses for the organic defi-
nition of "nation" (predicated on Romania's
Latin blood and speech), and of linguistic unity
in Romanian culture; of the ballads Miorila and
Me~terul Manole; of Romanian architecture; of
Romania's ubiquitous decorative arts; of the
poetry of Eminescu, Co§buc, and others.
B. Pius Servien's Scientific Aesthetics
The Romanian name of Pius Servien was Pius
~rban Coculescu. Though he began his activity
in Romania, where he published numerous stud-
ies foreshadowing his later work, the most
important part of his professionallife took place
in France (especially between 1925 and 1950).3
The basic idea advanced by Pius Servien is
the following: human language (le langage total)
is not homogenous. It contains two entirely dis-
tinct domains, two extreme, irreducible poles.
These poles are the language of science (le langage
des sciences, LS) and lyrical language (le langage
lyrique, LL).
The main property of the language of science
is that for any phrase in LS it is possible to
formulate one or a set of absolutely equivalent
phrases in LS. This results from the severely
restricted character of LS: (a) it does not include
certain words, like plaire "to like, to please," beau
"beautiful," etc.; (b) it does not include all the
meanings of words like montagne "mountain,"
itoile, "star," mer "sea," etc., but only some of
them; (c) it admits ofperfect synonymy between
words (like, for example, between est "east," and
orient "orient"), and thus regroups even the LS
3See especially Servien (1925, 1928, 1930a, 1930b, 1931, 1935,
1942, 1947, 1948, 1953, 1957); about Servien, see also Den-
susianu (1931)[1968], Marcus (1965, 1968a, 1970c, d, 1974b).
422 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
words into a smaller number of classes corre-
sponding to clearly distinct meanings: (d) it forms
its terminology by replacing the words that sig-
nify certain properties (les mots-jugements) with
"the set of operations by means of which these
properties can be recognized";4 (e) it does not
tolerate certain grammatical structures, such as
vocatives, exclamatives, optatives, and so forth;
(f) there is one and only one meaning that cor-
responds, for all its users, to every LS word and
to every LS phrase; (g) the meaning of an LS
phrase is perfectly independent from its rhythm .
or, more gene rally, from its sound structure;
(h) the number of possible LS meanings (the
system of reference for LS) is the smallest con-
ceivable infinite-there are as many LS mean-
ings as there are integers or, in other words, the
number of LS meanings is countable (denom-
brable); (i) every LS meaning is (or can bel the
object of common agreement; Ul the LS prop-
ositions can be systematically submitted to oper-
ations such as negation, paraphrasing,
translation, summarizing, the results of which
will continue to pertain to LS.
Lyricallanguage is defined in a negative way
with respect to LS. The main property of the
lyricallanguage is that it is naturally inseparable
from rhythm, that it is a rhythm-Ianguage (lan-
gage-rythme). No lyrical phrase admits of an
equivalent (neither in LL, nor in LS) and no
lyrical word admits of a synonym. LL includes
in its vocabulary lyrical words (such as Fr. plaire,
beau, esprit, causerie, Lat. decet, decorum, etc., that
Servien calls mots lyriques par nature), lyrical mean-
ings (e.g., the idiosyncratic components of the
meanings of such words as Fr. montagne, etoile,
mer; Servien calls them mots lyriques par position),
lyrical grammatical structures (such as voca-
tives, optatives, imperatives, etc.). Every lyrical
word (phrase) is polysemous and there is no pos-
sible agreement as to a particular meaning which
must be preferred to all others when interpreting
a lyrical text. The meaning of lyrical phrases
(words) is inseparable from their sound or rhythm
structure. Possible LL meanings-the referential
system of LL-are in the domain of the contin-
uous (le continu lyrique), non-countable. The LL
phrases cannot be negated, paraphrased, trans-
lated, or summarized. They can only be sub-
mitted to an operation of citation. LL maintains
'Cf. Servien (1935), pp. 144, 146.
its solidarity with the non-verbal semiotic sys-
tems, with "this mist of signs which are not
words," with "this mist of silent signs": "Lan-
guage has, therefore, a pole contiguous with
everything we do not say in words. There it con-
tains almost as much individuality as the current
of [non-verbal] signs which is refracted on it; it
is the pole of lyrical language.,,5
In Servien's view, the fundamental opposition
LL/LS replaces the traditional, and for hirn sec-
ondary opposition between verse and prose. Both
LL and LS can be expressed either in verse or
in prose. LL refers not only to poetry and to
poetic prose, but also to statues, natural and
synthetic perfumes, dance, etc. 6-to whatever is
"real" art, reallyricism, and, as such, irreducible
and rhythmic. LS does not refer to prose as such,
but to that prose that is scientific prose such as
mathematics, pKysics, etc.
Among proposition-producing activities (activ-
itis qui aboutissent ades propositions ), one can dis-
tinguish between: (1) those that use a non-mixed
language (language non-mele) and (2) those that
use a mixed language. Servien emphatically
rejects the second type: "Thus our effort origi-
nates entirely in our abhorrence of the mixed
zones of language and of those works which cor-
res pond to an unanalyzed, global, vague con-
ception of language." 7 He is agains t wha t he calls
an "unfathered promenade through the totallan-
guage."s He includes in the first group physics
and its affiliated disciplines (where material
things are the object of study and the instrument
of study is LS), mathematics (where LS is both
the object and the instrument of study), aes-
thetics and its group of sciences (where LL is
the object of study and the instrument of study
is LS), and poetry (where the only language that
is used is LL).9 He includes in the second group
'Ibid., pp. 49, 50.
6Ibid., p. 42: "Si l'on remplace, dans cet ensemble, les statues
par les textes Iyriques qui sont de meme nature; et d'autre
part les praduits de la plante ou de l'animal par les produits
synthetiques, on voit poemes, statues, parfums natureis,
parfums industrieIs, former une meme chaine, admettre une
meme methode generale d'etude."
'Ibid., p. 222.
8Ibid., p. 67.
9Ibid., p. 223: "D'une part, il y aces efforts d'organisation
du Langage lyrique et du Langage des sciences que sont,
respectivement, Ja poesie et les mathematiques; efforts ana-
logues d'organisation et de purification, aux deux pöles
opposes du langage; et la beau te la plus intense que per-
mettent les mots ne se trauve que la. D'autre part, il y a
 ROMANIA
Language Activities
Results: nonmixed language
r-----
LS
Nonlinguistic Linguistic
object object
I
PHYSICS
~LS
LL
I I
IAESTHETlcsl MATHEMATICS
PSYCHOLOGY
I
I
I
I
Figure 1
philosophy, his tory , traditional aesthetics, lit-
erary criticism, and so on.
We can schematize the position of Servien's
scientific aesthetics among the other language
activities in Figure l.
Scientific aesthetics is, for Servien, "l'obser-
vation scientifique des choix lyriques." It i~ based
on the cooperation between an Elector (Electeur)
and an 0 bserver (Observateur). Though one and
the same researcher could combine in himself
the two roles, it is important that he adopt them
at different stages of the inquiry and keep them
distinct in his mind.
The Elector is confined to LL. He is active in
the first stage of the aesthetic approach. He can
choose, among the objects that are presented to
hirn, those that he considers beautiful, non-beau-
tiful, most lyrical, etc. As for the Observer, he
functions as some kind of experimental subject
(Fr. cobaye, literally "laboratory animai"), as a
chemically reacting agent (Fr. reactif sensible), as
"a sort of litmus paper dipped into living mat-
ter," he is "the one who chooses lyric things for
reasons that cannot be expressed in scientific
terms.,,10
les efforts pour obtenir des conclusions en langage des sci-
ences, concernant les objet exterieurs a ce langage, choses
materielles, ou langage lyrique: c'est-a-dire respectivement
la physique et le groupe des sciences du meme type, l'esthe-
tique et le groupe des sciences du memc type."
IOIbid., pp. 9, 10.
423
Results: mixed language
I
LL PHILOSOPHY
I
POETRY HISTORY
MORAL
LlTE RARY CR ITICISM
I
The Observer is confined to LS. He is active
in the second stage of the aesthetic approach.
Taking for gran ted the lyrical choices of the Elec-
tor, the Observer tries to isolate a property in
LS that can account for them (and for the col-
lection of objects in which they resulted) . His
basic problem is therefore the following: given a
set of n objects that has been divided by the
Elector into two subsets, can he predict, by LS
means (by an LS characterization) the subset
to which the Elector will assign the (n + I) th
o~ject?
Let us take some examples.
Listening to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and
Parsifal, an Elector EI isolates the passages that
gave hirn the impression of representing a lyrical
theme. An Elector E2 isolates in Rousseau's La
Nouvelle Heloise the passages that gave him the
impression of special harmony. An Elector E3
picks out the "sommets lyriques" in Chateau-
briand's Atala. When faced with these choices,
the Observers 0 I, 02, and 03 respectively come
to the conclusion that the collections of objects
chosen by the Electors correspond to regular
structures that can be expressed in numbers dis-
tributed according to so me simple law. This is
the substance of what Servien called the first
general law in aesthetics: "If we transcribe any
rhythmic object by means of a numerical nota-
tion, the numbers we get will obey so me simple
law" and, further on: "When lyricism crystallizes
424 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
freely, i t crystallizes m regular sound
structures." 11
Servien distinguished among five basic
rhythms: of duration (rythme des durees) , of inten-
si ty (rythme des intensites) , of timbre (rythme des
timbres), of pitch (rythme des hauteurs) , and of num-
ber (rythmes numiriques). The first four are defined
according to the basic qualities of the sound, the
last one according to the number of "syllabIes"
occurring in a rhythmic unit.
He developed several ways for transcribing LL
rhythmic structures numerically. One is the
"representative number" (le nombre representatif) ,
that is the number composed of the number we
can obtain by counting in an LL passage from
one accented syllable to the next (but not includ-
ing the next accented syllable). Another is the
"expanded number" (te nombre developpej, that is,
the number corresponding to an LL passage in
which I marks an unaccented and 2 marks an
accented syllable.
C. Constantin Bräiloiu's Structural
Ethnomusicology
Gilbert Rouget (1973) has described in a most
pertinent way Brailoiu'sl2 essential contribution
to ethnomusicology. He wrote: "If we were
obliged to sum up its scientific spirit in a single
word, it would have to be "structuralism'." But
we would need to specify that, being a structur-
alist weil before the term gained a wide currency
and, so to speak, without knowing it-certainly
without intending it-Brailoiu did not much care
to hear the word applied to hirns elf. Making
allowance for the unequal development of the
two sciences, one might say that what Trou-
betzkoy was to linguistics, Brailoiu will prove to
have been to musicology: it is owing to the first
that we know what a phonological system is; it
"See Servien (1947), pp. 51, 52. Servien is not indulging in
a mixture of LS and LL in the citation above. He seriously
contends that analysis of these chosen passages will yield
structures as precise as those of any crystal.
"Those interested in Bdiloiu's work mayaiso consult Baud-
Bovy (1955), Comi§el (1966), Habenicht (1966),
T. Alexandru (1978), N. Rildulescu (1968), H. H. Stahl
(1970), Golopentia-Eretescu (1979b), Kahane (1966, 1979),
Mihai Pop (1979). Good bibliographies are to be found in
Schaeffner (1959) and Ulpiu Vlad (1979). Volume 20fthe
Cercetfiri de muzicologie (1970) and number I of REF 24 (1979)
have been dedicated to Constantin Bdiiloiu.
is owing to the second that we know what certain
rhythmic and tonal systems are.,,13
Viewed from a semiotic peispective, Brailoiu's
structural approach to folk music appears to
manifest two basic directions that I shall call
respectively pragmatie and syntactie. Both were
represented during each of the two main periods
in his activity: the Romanian period (1924-1943)
and the Swiss-and-French period (1943-1958).
Both can be traced in his general, descriptive,
and applied studies as weIl. Though not per-
ceived under this label, the syntactic direction
has been explored in detail by most of Brailoiu's
interpreters when dealing with what they called
his systematique or his structuratism. The pragmatic
direction, however, has not emerged due to the
fact that, in labelling some of its characteristics
fllklorie or soeiotogieal and ignoring the others,
Brailoiu's interpreters have failed to perceive:
(a) that it was an important, central component
of his ethnomusicology and not just an external
inftuence sentimentally preserved; (b) that it was
no less structural than the systematique; (c) that
it was organically linked with the search for mus-
ical systems.
Brailoiu's pragmatic reftections on ethnomu-
sicology were not, and could ll.ot have been,
framed by semiotics. He had rather in his mind,
especially at the beginning of his scholarly activ-
ity, what he described as "a new Philosophy in
the classical sense, a new science of sciences,
which embraces the totality of sciences within
its framework: sociology."14 Sociology was at that
time one of the most innovative and widespread
disciplines in Romania. This was mainly due to
Dimitrie Gusti's celebrated eampanii monografiee
(monographic campaigns) in which comprehen-
sive multidisciplinary teams staffed by the best
specialists in the country went forth to examine,
by me ans of collective research, the economic,
social, political, cultural, and religious realities
in the Romanian rural communities. Brailoiu
participated in the campaigns organized at Fundu
Moldovei (1928), Dragu§ (1929), and Runcu
(1930). Between 1928 and 1943, he surveyed 289
Romanian villages. As a result, he accumulated
a most solid corpus of ritual songs (especially
funeral and wedding songs), 15 which was to be
liCf. Rouget (1973), p. XIII.
IICf. Bdiiloiu (1931), p. I, reproduced in Bdiiloiu (1973),
p.5.
"Bdiloiu recorded 7,760 melodies (cf. Ulpiu Vlad, 1979).
 ROMANIA 425

presented and analyzed in many of Bdiloiu's "author of a variant" is-like speaking of an

ini ti al s tudies. "original variant"-an error in terms. For what
Therc are two main ways in which we can is meant by authoT, in Occidental culture, is
understand folk music, says Bdliloiu (1931). If roughly the following: a distinct individual (with
we choose to define it as that music which is not a special personality) who creates and culturally
only usedby the peasants but also createdby them, owns a separate original object and who deter-
we will try to uncover the styles musicaux ruraux mines that, in recognition of his cultural prop-
authentiques (authentie rural musical styles) and erty rights, his creation shall be maintained
the object of our quest can be called la musique unchanged by means of such conservative devices
paysanne (peasant music). If, on the other hand, as correct reading, translation, transposition,
we define it as all music that is used by peasants, interpretation, etc. And none of these conditions
regardless of its origin, we will aim at establish- is met by musical variants. Says Brailoiu (l959a):
ing the totality of melodies that are alive at a
given moment in a rural society, and the object Without the help of writing, what is ereated eould not last
of our quest can be called la vie musicale paysanne exeept through the universal agreement of those who keep
(peasant musicallife). Bdiloiu's first category I it alive, an agreement whieh is itself a eonsequence of the
uniformity of their tastes. The oral work itself exists only in
shall describe as arestricted, the second as an the memory of the person who adopts it and does not emerge
extended pragmatic approach. In the restricted in the conerete but through his/her will: their lives are inter-
approach, style and especially variation appear to mixed with eaeh other. With no writing system to stabilize,
be the main concern. In the extended approach, onee and for all, its produetion, this work is not a "made
thing" but a thing one makes and re-makes perpetually. This
the important issue is that of repertory.
means that all the individual realizations of a melodie pat-
Style is conceived by Brailoiu as a sub-prob- tern are equally [rue and weigh the same poise on the scales
lem of the general problem of primitive (rural, of judgment. This also means that the 'instinet of variation'
peasant) creativity. Rural musical creativity, is not a simple rage für variation but a necessary eonsequence
essentially collective, manifests itself through of the lack of an absolute model. If ereation is involved at
all, half of it will be ephemeral. Besides, it is divided between,
variation. Variation results from the continual [that is to say, stands midpoint between] a hypothetical
meeting, in the mind of similar, equal agents ereation and its translators [that is, those who will take up
(the peasan t m usic- makers) of authorless systems the new version] without whom it would return to
that are accepted as given and collective predilec- nothingness. 17
tions that govern their instantiation (the form
these systems will assume in any one musical In banning reconstruction and diachronie eth-
production) . Style is then a variation pattern. nomusicology, Bdiloiu (1959a) parallels in a
Emerging through variation, peasant songs are most striking way-Rouget (l973a) was the first
not to be understood as autonomous objects. They to notice it-Levi-Strauss's simultaneous
are never completely separated from their per- contention l8 that myths are equal and author-
former. They ncver survive the occasion of their less. What is interesting is that, for Bdiloiu, this
performance. One could rather conceive them as is not only thc result of theoretical reftection. He
glimpses of an abstract melodie pattern, of "a has tried, repeatedly, to experiment and report
sort of original melody, preserved only through on the automatic failure of any attempt at locat-
the faithfulness of memory, irreducible to the ing or dating a folk production. Says Brailoiu
norms of our learned papers and perpetuating, (l959a):
one might say, the primordial soul of
humankind.,,16 Limited, to begin with, to a small number of possible inven-
Variants are equal. They do not presuppose tors, the research would extend, little by little, to an ever
or follow an "initial version." The quest for a widening circle, where people neither lied nor spoke the truth
for certain. I t all came to look as though the work, as soon
"basic" variant, the effarts at "reconstructing" as it appeared, hastened to take refuge in anonymity and to
it, are not only empirically doomed to failure, recede into timelessness. However new it might be, through
but essentially wrong. Like systems, variants
cannot be imputed to an author. To refer to the 17Cf. Briiiloiu (1959a), p. 88 reproduced in Briiiloiu (1973),
p.142.
IfiCf. Brailoiu (1958), p. 17, reprodueed in Brailoiu (1973), IBBrailoiu died in 1958 and Levi-Strauss' affirmation
p. 121. appeared, in the same year, in Anthropologie structurale.
426 SANDA GOLOPENTIA.ERETESCU
one feature or another, it returned in any case to the imper·
sonal and the already known. 19
If Brailoiu's point of view on variation is car·
ried to its logical conclusion, it boils down to
something which, though he never expressed it
as such, seems to me nevertheless to be strongly
suggested. I would summarize it as follows:
1. Primitive artistic activity is not an activity
of creation in which action results in something
that did not exist before. It is one of variation,
in which action results in maintaining an object
in the same or in a similar state to the state that
preceded the action. Insofar as it basically aims
at maintaining a pre-existing object: (a) primitive
art is not projective, future-oriented, but rather
"retrojective," past-oriented; (b) it is informed
by passive, unavoidable recollection, stimulated
by an "imperative" situation, rather than by
active intentional oblivion aimed at clearing the
ground for new creation; (c) it is to be under-
stood as interpretation and reproduction rather
than as initiation and innovation; (d) it does not
presuppose an author (definite or indefinite), a
date or place of birth, all of which are relevant
specifications only in the case of an activity of
creation.
2. The "object" that is maintained through
variation is not the melody or the song as such
but the system(s) that make(s) it possible.
3. Primitive musical systems are innate.
4. Primitive musical systems are universal.
5. Primitive variation is not a strict but rather
a loose, empirical form of system-preservation.
It does not make use of writing, of explicit rules,
of what we call a formal method or a technique.
I t does not presuppose a formal knowledge of
the system to be maintained but rather an
approximate, vague, partly unconscious inter-
nalization of it. One could say that primitive
variation is an improvisational form of conservation.
6. Since the system is part of the individual's
memory-and deeply, ineradicably so--what is
in fact preserved is not the system per se but
rather the system-as-an-internal-state of lhe individ-
ual. Therefore, primitive variation is not cen-
trifugal with respect to its agent, concentrated
on an object that it aims at preserving, but rather
centripetal, directed towards an agent-and-object
IgCf. Brailoiu (1959a), p. 90, reproduced in Brailoiu (1973),
p.I44.
at the same time. One could say that variation
is an activi ty of seif-preservation.
7. This explains why variation is so wide-
spread in primitive societies. If systems are so
profound apart of the primitive self (from which
they have not yet been separated by specialized
scientific reflection) and if variation maintains
them, then variation is a vital, organic activity
for survival and spiritual health. As such it is
not optional, gratuitous, it is obligatory, essential.
It seems to me that points 1-7 above apply
equally well to another form of semiotic activity,
which mayaiso be conceived as primitive, namely
linguistic activity. Like variation, linguistic
activity is an obligatory activity of innate, uni·
versal system(s) conservation and self-preser-
vation. It would be, therefore, most interesting
and fruitful to integrate Bdliloiu's view on var-
iation with Chomsky's conception of linguistic
creativity.
Brailoiu's concept of variation could also be
usefully integrated with the Peircean trichotomy
type-loken-tone. Wh at I think is most relevant in
this respect is the fact that Bdiiloiu approaches
the opposition type-variant not in a syntactic
context, as we usually tend to do, but in a mark·
edly pragmatic one.
For reasons of space, I will not deal here
with Brailoiu's definition of repertory. Let us
turn, rather, to the syntactic aspect of his
ethnom usicology.
Brailoiu integrates the two directions of his
work that I have called pragmatic and syntactic
by treating the syntactical musical systems as
universal innate objects of variation.
Which are the syntactic properties of a mus-
ical system that we can significantly connect with
its pragmatic innateness and universality? Like
Chomsky in the case of language systems, Brai-
loiu answers: synlactic simplicity. And which are
the pragmatic properties of variation that we can
significantly connect with its having as an object
extremely simple systems? This is a question that
has never been asked before Brailoiu. And the
answer he gave was: the intensive, exhaustive
exploitation of all the syntactic resourses of the
system.
If we rephrase Brailoiu's assertions about
musical systems, what he says comes down to
the fact that they are composed of a very limited
"lexicon" that is associated with an even more
restricted "grammar." Says Brailoiu (1959a):
 ROMANIA
What analysis brings to light is less the way the elements
are arranged within a work than those elements themselves
and their changelessness; it is less the permanence of the
patterns into wh ich they are assembled than that of the units
which compose them. Whether one deals with scales, rhythms
or structures, these building blocks, when looked at closely,
reveal themselves to be determined by an intelligble prin-
ciple, from which a more or less extensive set of procedures
derives-or, if one prefers, a system. The systems can be
recognized by the "natural" character of their principles and
by the use which is made of them, by the methodical exploi-
tation of their resources. Generation by a succession of fifths
is sufficient to explain certain scales; a simple arithmetic
relations hip between durations explains a certain rhythmic
category; articulation by wh at one might call syntactic cells
rather than by equal series explains certain forms.")
The lexicon consists in a number of "musical
words," of "sounds of power." Briiiloiu describes
them as:
These locutions and elocutions, stereotyped and knowing no
homeland, derived from the elementary facts of physics, seem
to be the first half of a predestined path-preliminary vic-
tories in acoustics, so to speak. The foundations of the mate-
rially richer systems to follow, they will remain perceptible
until the day when the infiltrations of a sophisticated art will
submerge them. 21
It is by the combination of these immemorial
musical words that "new" songs are produced. 22
This is by no means a specifically musical fea-
ture. Any primitive creation is, in asense, atem-
poral, because, close to the almost "natural"
system that generates it, it is always both rela-
tively immemorial and absolutely new. Says
Brailoiu (in a passage that is also highly illu-
minating for the type-token-tone approach to
variation al ready mentioned):
Built the day before on a tradition al design, a house or a
hut is only new in its material reality, but the precise time
of its completion scarcely matters: in its spiritual reality it
is ageless. It is a variation on an architectonic type in the
same way that a song is a variation on a melodic type. 23
The relatively limited number of "musical
words," together with the rudimentary character
of their combinations, explains the convergences
and coincidences in primitive music all over the
2°Cf. Brailoiu (l959a), pp. 90-91, reproduced in Brailoiu
(1973), pp. 144-145.
21Cf. Brailoiu (1949), p. 326, reproduced in Brailoiu (1973),
p.112.
"Ibid.
"'Cf. Brailoiu (1959a), p. 89, reproduced in Brailoiu (1973),
p.143.
427
world, the universal, supranational character of
its structures, the ubiquity of certain formulas.
Brailoiu found the dibut eeltique in India, in China,
in Korea, in Russia, and in Americanjazz music.
He discovered the Chinese five-tone scale in
Scotland, Ireland, Tibet, Japan, Hungary,
Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Germany, ancient
Italy, Sardinia. He was able to show that what
Beethoven has called Sehweizerlied (Swiss mel-
ody) could be traced in French and German
music and was known in Poland under the name
of "Polish March." He pointed out that the so-
called' Bulgarian rhythm, also exists in Turkey
(where it is called aksak rhythm), Albania,
Romania, Yugoslavia, Turkmenia, Switzerland,
India, among the Basques and the Berbers,
Tuaregs, Beduins, and black Africans. And he
proved that what Bartok had called cintee lung
(long song) and considered specifically Roman-
ian also existed in Persian, Arabian, Spanish,
and Mongolian music.
D. Mircea Eliade's History of
Religions
Mircea Eliade's21- decisive contribution to the
his tory of religions appears to us semiotically
relevant at more than one level.
1. It is devoted to the study of phenomena
which are clearly semiotic in nature and thus
potentially relevant for wh at may be called
deseriptive syntagmaties or semiotie morphology.
2. It is basically concerned with the meaning
of religious phenomena and thus potentially rel-
evant for both theoretical and descriptive
semantics.
3. It includes interesting developments of the
concepts of ereativity and ereative hermeneuties that
could be fruitfully incorporated into semiotic
pragmatics.
Let us approach in turn points 1-3 above.
1. Relevance to Descriptive Syntagmatics,
or Semiotic Morphology
The object of study addressed by the historian
of religions is, from Mircea Eliade's point of
view, the experienee of the saered. The ways in which
24Those interested in Eliade's work should consult especially
Dudley (1977), Kitagawa and Long, eds. (1969), WendeIl
and Doty, eds. (1976).
428 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU

the sacred is conceived of may vary: it can be what I am tempted to caU an etymologieal modal-
imagined as power, whoUy other, ultima te real- ity of the narrative-the beginning of something
ity, absolute reality, being, eternity, the source (the origin of the world, of a mountain, of an
of life and fecundity, the divine, transhuman or island, of a vegetable or animal species, of man,
transmundane, the metacultural and trans his- of a human activity, of a social institution, etc.)
torical, etc. What is essential, for Eliade, is the due to the ereative work, the performance of an
fact that the sacred is to be understood as an action for the first time by a supematural being at
element in the structure of consciousness and a primordial time (illud tempus). In this, myth is
not as a stage in the his tory of consciousness. similar to the saga and opposed to tales (includ-
The manifestations of the sacred-the so-caUed ing fairy tales) or to dream-stories, which do not
hierophanies (with such variants as kratophanies or attribute to what they narrate a hierophanic
manifestations of power, and theophanies or man- character and do not present a "world of the
ifestations of the divine)-are, together with the beginnings" but simply "another world" (an
myths that evoke them, the rituals that re-enact alternative world).
them periodicaUy, and the symbols that prolong 3. In contrast to (fairy) tales, which narrate
and somehow "solidify" them, the basic phe- events that have not modified the human con-
nomena that the historian of religion has to col- dition, and to sagas or dream-stories, which nar-
lect, describe, and classify. They are deeply rate particular human events, myth narrates
in terconnected. events that are highly and universaUy relevant
The basic manifestation of the sacred, included for humanity. It teUs about the ways in which
in the deep structure of any myth, ritual, or humankind became mortal, divided into the
religious symbol is, from Eliade's point of view, sexes, and organized itself into societies.
the hierophany. 4. The meaning of a myth is publicly shared.
The separation between hierophanies, krato- This is not the case with the saga (in which an
phanies, and theophanies is highly subjective; it aristocratic content is aimed at a coUective aris-
varies with groups and individuals. Eliade defines tocratic audience). Nor is it true of the tale (in
hierophanies as foUows: (a) they are historic which a popular content is aimed at a collective
manifestations of the sacred; (b) they have been popular audience) or of the dream-story (in which
established in the consciousness of a group, tribe, a private content is privately understood).
or nation for a certain period of time, thus enjoy- 5. Myth is neither pessimistically nor opti-
ing a relative permanence; and (c) they are char- mistically oriented. (In speech-act terms, one
acterized by systematicity, that is, by the fact could say that myths are neutral from the point
that they presuppose a system of meanings; of view of their perlocutionary effect). This dis-
(d) one can distinguish between universal and loeal tinguishes myth from sagas (characterized by
hierophanies. Ey contrast with hierophanies, pessimistic themes) and from tales and fairy sto-
kratophanies are (a) manifestations of apower ries, which are, or at least tend to be, optimistic.
that may or may not be sacred, are 6. While it may be perceived asfabula,.fiction,
(b) characterized, by transience and are (c) not or invention among societies in which it is no longer
necessarily defined by systematicity. As far as alive, a living myth, a myth in operation, rep-
theophanies are concerned, Eliade defined them resents a consciously assumed way of thinking.
as manifestations of a god as supreme being (and This isnot the case for tales, fairy tales or dreams
not as simply the sacred); he did not comment which are intelligible only at an unconscious level.
upon their permanent/transient and systematicl 7. Myth is a true story. To the members of an
unsystematic character. There are cases in which archaic traditional society, the world as such
hierophanies are re-evaluated as theophanies. constitutes proof for the truth of the myth. If
Hierophanies are preserved in the form of myth a narrates the origin of mountain X, then
myths. The characteristic features of a myth are, the simple existence of mountain X can be
according to Eliade, the foUowing: invoked as proof for the veracity of a. In archaic
l. Myth is a special type of narrative, to be societies, myths as true stories are carefuUy kept
distinguished from other related types such as apart from the "false stories (tales, fairy tales,
sagas, tales, fairy tales, dream-stories, etc. dream-stories, etc.). Note that the truth or false-
2. It reports a hierophany by narrating-in hood of a story is always relative to a given
 ROMANIA 429
society. What appears as a true story (as a myth) able as narratives. By saying that myths repre-
for archaic society A may be perceived as a false sent exemplary models far human activities,
story (as a tale) by archaic society B or by mod- Eliade implicitly defines myths as directions for
ern society C. However, while archaic society B the performance of those activities. Which sug-
will tend to counter society A's false stories with gests to me that, while the surface structure of
some true stories (myths) of its own, modern the myth is a narrative, its deep structure is an
society C may simply deny the truth of any kind algorithm: it explains to those called to play an
of mythical story by automatically interpreting active role in those activities the way in which
it as fictional. one has to perform them. It is this algorithmic
8. Myth is a sacred story. In this, it resembles deep structure, this "mythical guidance" one
sagas, folktales, and fairy tales, and differs from could say, that is to be connected with the mag-
dreams. But while the sacred character of the ical, esoteric and initiatic character of the myth
myth is evident and explicit, the sacred character and which radically separates it from tales, fairy
of the saga, tale, or fairy tale tends to be cam- tales and dream stories; for in those we deal with
ouflaged and implicit. This is why myth, unlike narrative structures at both the surface and the
these other three genres, must be narrated in deep level.
special ways, within special situations. It has to Rituals are the re-enactment of hierophanies,
be recited, celebrated, interpreted, and reen- as preserved by myths. They are meant to con-
acted by an eider "specialist" or instructor, as nect human activities hic et nunc with their hier-
part of certain initiation rites, at a time con- ophanic etymon, with the strong time of the
ceived of as sacred (by night, in the autumn, in beginnings, with initial energies.
the winter, etc.).Myths may not be recounted in Of special interest to semioticians is Eliade's
the presence of those who are not prepared contention that the distinction between hiero-
through initiation to understand them-of phanies and symbols is a matter of degree rather
women and children, for example. The initiatic than of kind. We take it to mean that, while
scenario is common to myths and tales; Eliade hierophanies are signs that would rather corre-
does not speak about it in connection with sagas, spond to tokens, symbols always correspond to
and denies it to fairy tales or dream-stories. types. Symbols, says Eliade, enjoy a greater de-
9. Myth is an exemplary story. It offers exem- gree of permanence and prolong the process of
plary models as weIl asjustification for all rituals hierophanization at a cultural.level. Furthermare,
and all significant human activities, be they their meaning is more explicit. Symbols may be
sacred or profane: for eating, procreating, edu- either local, that is, limited to a small culture
cation, spiritual or physical healing, navigation, (group, tribe, clan) ar archetypal (in which case they
fis hing, agriculture, hunting, artistic activity, etc. have similar or identical meanings for human-
Tales, fairy tales and dreams, by contrast, do kind in general). As examples of archetypal sym-
not have an exemplary character. bols, one can take the Cosmic Tree, the axis mundi,
Myth has degenerated into legend, epic, novel. Mother Earth, the Cosmic Hierogamy, etc., to
I t survives nevertheless in superstitions, cus- which Eliade has devoted thorough studies.
toms, even detective novels. I t can also survive There is a dialectic between local and arche-
as a nostalgia giving rise to autonomous artistic, typal symbols. This consists in the fact that, while
scientific, mystic, or social values. An example every local symbol tends to approximate its
of the workings of this "mythical nostalgia" is archetype, to move towards ideal form, every
the myth of the Edenic Country which provoked archetype tends to genera te new symbols in which
the geographical discoveries of the Phoenicians to manifest itself.
and Portuguese. Another would be Kierke- Eliade has devoted a thorough analysis to the
gaard's existentialist decision to avoid marriage functions of the religious symbols. Roughly pre-
in order to remain hirnself; Eliade interprets this sen ted, these functions are as follows:
as a continuation of the myth of Achilles, who I. The junction oj orientation. Symbols have the
refrained from marriage in order to become a existential function of allowing a person to relate
hero and to attain immortality. his/her personal life (his/her situation) to the
What emerges from Eliade's definition of myth structure of the cosmos and, in so doing, to
is that, in fact, myths are only superficially defin- objectify it.
430 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU

2. The function of revelation. Symbols reveal and regeneration. The moon lives an immortal
modalities of the real that are not always directly life, for its death is never the end but a phase of
imaginable by the human mind. (One example rest and regeneration. This connection between
is the use of water symbolism to express pri- moon, death, and regeneration builds a pattern
mordial chaos). of fate that the archaic man will try to unite with
3. The ontologicalfonction. Symbols point to the by means of rituals, symbols, and myths. By
ontologically real, to the divine model or form means of symmetry, analogy, contamination, etc.,
that is implied by cosmic structures. Thus, sym- the mo on "attracts" into its symbolic web, into a'
bols, at least as they are found in archaic soci- unified, autonomous "lunar theory," an infinite
eties, are always deeply religious. variety of phenomena. Thus, for example, waters
4. The fonction rif integration. Symbols intercon- and women are commanded by the moon because
nect different levels of reality. Thus, for example, they submit to its rhythms (the rain, the tide,
the symbolism of the moon can reveal a shared the menstrual cyde) and because they are ger-
essence in lunar temporal changeableness, ter- minative. The rain connects the moon with veg-
restrial waters, women, the growth of plants, etation. While the horns of cattle are a lunar
death and resurrection, human destiny, the craft symbol because of their similarity with the new
of weaving, and so on. moon, the snail participates in lunar symbolism
5. The fonction of reconciliation. Symbols recon- because, like the moon, it appears and disap-
cile polarities, they hold together paradoxical pears, it goes in and out of its shell. Similarly,
meanings and incongruities. In this way, they the bear is lunar because it disappears during
help man to recover the undifferentiated, unfrag- the winter and appears again in the spring; the
mented, perfect being that was his at the begin- frog, because it dips into the water and comes
ning of the world. back at the surface; the snake, because it emerges
6. The fonction rif cosmicization. Religious sym- from its hole and vanishes again, or because it
bols translate human situations into cosmic terms has as many rings as there are days in a month,
and cosmic situations into human terms. They or because it sloughs and then regenerates its
reveal the continuity between the structures of skin. Weaving is lunar because it supposes
human experience and the structures of the cos- the alternation between warp and weft. The
mos, thus "opening" humankind to the world list could be extended. If we mark down its
and the world to an understanding humankind. main "secondary centers," lunar symbolism
may be expressed, says Eliade, by the set
MOON-RAIN-FERTILITY-WOMAN-
2. Relevance to Semantics SNAKE-DEATH-PERIODICAL REGEN-
Religious phenomena have meaning by virtue ERATION-WEAVING.
of their participation in what Eliade calls a By participating in the lunar symbolism, water,
symbolism. women, vegetation, snails, snakes, weaving, etc.
Symbolisms are autonomous systems of symbols become lunar. For, as Eliade shows, while sym-
that manifest in adear, total, coherent way those bolisms are logically prior to any religious phe-
meanings that hierophanies, myths or rituals tend nomenon in isolation, any element that
to manifest in a particular, local, successive participates in a symbolism is the symbolism,
mann er. incarnates the symbolic system in its totality.
Among the symbolisms that Eliade has defined This is important, for, Eliade shows, symbolisms
are lunar symbolism, solar symbolism, aquatic may sometimes be only partially manifested. That
symbolism, celestial symbolism, telluric sym- is, they may exhibit in a given culture only
bolism, vegetal symbolism, animal symbolism, some secondary centers, frequently not induding
spatial symbolism, temporal symbolism, the what we might call the generative center of the
symbolism of the search for immortality, the symbolism itself. But the center as well as the
symbolism of the ascension, and so on. whole set of secondary centers is recoverable, for
Let us take the example of lunar symbolism. on ce attracted into a symbolism, every religious
It is called lunar because the center of the sym- phenomenon will be shaped by the center of
bolism is the moon. The moon is perceived as symbolism and thus incorporate and later on
the norm of rhythms, the source of energy, life, reveal it when it is absent. As examples of partial
 ROMANIA 431

subsets manifest in different cultures in the case Two cultures as weIl as one and the same
of lunar symbolism, Eliade mentions the partial culture at different moments in time may differ
structures: SNAKE-WOMAN-FERTILITY; insofar as they are predominantly shaped either
SNAKE-RAIN-FERTILITY; WOMAN- (a) by the efforts of creators proper, (b) by the
SNAKE-MAGIC. efforts of creative hermeneuts, or (c) by the bal-
anced efforts of both categories. One can dis tin-
guish between creative cultures stricto sensu and
3. Relevance to Creative Hermeneutics hermeneutically creative ones. Thus, for exam-
and Semiotic Pragmatics pIe, Eliade shows that the Italian hermeneuts of
the Renaissance were more important than were
Eliade conceives of his way of studying the the contemporary Italian writers. 26
his tory of religion as a form of essential Creative hermeneuts are those whose media-
hermeneutics. tion permits a culture to communicate in time
According to Eliade, the historian of religions with its past forms, and in space with other cul-
practices a total and creative hermeneutics. tures. They ensure a culture's contact with
It is total inasmuch as (a) the history of reli- archaic thought and help overcome cultural
gions is called on to decipher and to explicate provincialism. I t is through creative hermeneuts,
every kind of encounter of man with the sacred, says Eliade, that a "planetization of culture," a
from prehistory to our days; (b) every symbol in new, global understanding of man, an "instinct
existence has been, at some point in its evolution for the universal" may become possible, that the
or at least in its origins, a religious symbol extend- cultural universes of non-Western people may
ing a hierophany. Says Eliade, who in this frag- not only cease to be viewed as "immature epi-
ment reminds us of Peirce's pansemiotic sodes," as "aberrations" with respect to an
understanding of the world, exemplary History of Humankind, but may at
last be recognized as equally, though difftrently, cre-
We must get used to the idea of recognizing hierophanies ative in comparison with the cultural universes
absolutely everywhere, in every area of psychologieal, eco- of Western people. Western and non-Western
nomic, spiritual, and social life; indeed, we cannot be sure
that there is anything--object, movement, psychological fac- cultures may then be made to share in a "new
tor, being, or even game--that has not at some time in humanism," thus generating what Eliade calls a
human history been somehow transformed into a "Second Renaissance."
hierophany.25 For, as Eliade shows, even if, nowadays, the
historicity and normality of so-called primitive
It is creative inasmuch as, by introducing to the peoples are no longer contested by Western cu 1-
Western mi nd the existential situations (the cre- tural parochialists, many scholars still deny them
ative moments) that resulted in the myths and (explicitly or implicitly) essential creativity. This
symbols of archaic cultures, the history-and blocks any correct understanding of archaic cul-
phenomenology--of religions can sparka renewal tures, for we evaluate and judge individuals and
of the different cultures in the world. peoples, not according to the normality of their
There are, according to Eliade, two basic types psychology, but according to their creativity.
of creative cultural agents; the creators stricto It is because of the fact that they deny them
sensu-the poets, artists, etc., who "create" cul- creativity that reductionists concentrate on the
ture, who initiate certain cultural productions- material aspects of primitive civilizations, on their
and the creative hermeneuts who renew culture, economy, social organization, tribai laws, and
inasmuch as culture consists not only of the sum the reconstruction of their history. In so doing,
total of cultural productions, but also of aseries argues Eliade, they ignore the basic fact that
of interpretations and revalorizations of its myths, these groups' "sacred history"-central to most
ideologies, symbols, etc. Eliade gives Burckhardt primitive cultures-does not passively mirror
as an example of a creative hermeneut who their psychological, sodological, economical
opened new ways to philosophy and to artistic structures, but rather embodies unpredictable,
creation. creative reactions to such structures. To study

"Cf. Eliade (1968c), p. 24. 26Cf. Eliade (1957).

432 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
those creative reactions to historical circumstan-
ces is the object of study of the "creative her-
meneutics of the archaic religions" advocated
and practiced by Eliade.
The special type of creativity that character-
izes primitive cultures manifests itself almost
exclusively on the religious plane and reaches its
highest level there. Says Eliade:
For the "primitive," human creativity is religious before any-
thing else. His ethical, institutional, and artistic creations
depend upon religious experience and thought, or are inspired
by thein. "Primitives" will not find the place that is due them
in the development of universal history, and in continuity
with other creative peoples past or present, unless we take
their "creations" seriously, exactly as we do the Old Tes-
tament, Greek tragedy, Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe."
And further on:
The leaders of the new African states may weil decide to
invite Western scientists to study and interpret their great
spiritual creations (religious systems, mythologies, folklore,
plastic arts, dances, etc.), and not, as before, peculiar and
minor aspects of their society or of their techniques. They
will likewise ask to be judged on these works, and not on
their family structure, social organizations or superstitions.
Doesn't one judge French civilization, they could add, on
the basis of its masterpieces-the cathedral of Chartres,
Racine, Pascal, and all the other manifestations of the spirit-
rather than on the basis of the opposition between the rural
and urban economies, the fluctuations of the birthrate, 19th-
century anticiericalism, the success of such and such a type
of literature, or other similar elements. Certainly, these ele-
ments do pertain to the social and cultural his tory of France,
but they are not representative of the genie jran{ais, and one
cannot even say that they illustrate it.'8
Eliade's creative hermeneutics can be an
instrument for developing what I would call a
strong semiotics. In a strong semiotics, signs would
be conceived oE. as transforms of religious sym-
bols, as "solidified," "reified" survivals of archaic
moments of existential tension, of religious cri-
sis, the imprint of which can still be detected
when one approaches them deeply and intensely
enough. Eliade has given important suggestions
for this possible semiotic enterprise. He has for-
mulated fascinating hypotheses concerning the
"ecstatic sources" of epic and lyrical poetry, the
prehistory of the dramatic play, etc. Speaking
about the epic, he wrote:
"Cf. Eliade (1957), p. 124.
'8Cf. Eliade (1957), p. 126.
It is very probable that a great number of "subjects" or of
epic motifs, as weil as many characters, ima~es and clich~s
of the epic literature are, in the last analYSIS, of ecsta~lc
origin, in the sense that they are borrowed from the ston~s
of shamans' speaking about their travels and adventures m
the superhuman worlds.
In a similar way, he formulated the hypothesis
that pre-ecstatic euphoriae, such as are still
observable in the shamanic performance, may
have represented one of the sources of universal
lyricism. Says Eliade,
Today still, poetic creation remains an act ofperfect spiritu~1
freedom. Poetry remakes and prolongs language; any poetlc
language starts by being a secret language, that is to say the
creation of a personal universe, of a world that is perfectly
closed. The purest poetic act strives at recreating language,
starting from an internal experience which, similar in this
respect to the ecstasy or the religious inspiration of the pri-
mitives, reveals the very essence of things. It is starting fro~
linguistic creations of this order, made possible by pre-ecstatlc
inspiration, that the seCret language of the ,,;ystics and th,;
traditional allegoricallanguages were crystalhzed later on.
IV. Semiotics
Among the many possible ways of speaking
about semiotics, I have again chosen to analyze
the contribution of several representative authors.
They are Tudor Vianu, who approached in a
most creative way problems of general semiotics;
Sergiu AI-George, the first to offer a synthesis
on Indian semiology, thus preparing the way for
a long-needed metasemiotic confrontation of
Occidental and Indian thought; and Solomon
Marcus, who initiated an important, productive,
and internationally recognized school of math-
ematical semiotics.
There are many other significant authors and
contributions to the field which could demon-
strate in a most convincing manner that Roman-
ian semiotics is synchronized with worldwide
semiotics. Due to lack of space I chose, however,
to simply include these authors in the References-
which form a very important part of this
chapter-and to devote the critical presentation
below to a more thorough analysis of wh at gives
Romanian semiotics its original profile.
'9Cf. Eliade (1968d), p. 397.
 ROMANIA
A. Tudor Vianu's Theory of the
Artistic Symbol
Tudor Vianu has advanccd many ideas that
are highly relevant to semiotics in his contri-
butions to the philosophy of culture, axiology,
general aesthetics, comparative literature, sty-
listics, sociology of culture, and so forth. 30 The
bulk of his work would form a perfect subject
for discussion among the pre-semiotic paradigms
we included in the first part of our presentation.
There is, however, one posthumous work,
entided "The Artistic Symbol" and published in
1966, that entides us to speak of Tudor Vianu
not within the framework of pre-semiotics but
rather in that of semiotics proper. And not an
implicit semiotics either, since Vianu hirnself
described the first part of his study as one of
general semiology. 31
Before starting a more detailed presentation
of this most interesting study, let us say that
hoth in its tide and in its development the term
symbol is used by Vianu in its generally accepted
meaning of "sign." Vianu seems to have chosen
this term in order to avoid the ambiguity sign l
(= basic, diadic or triadic semiotic structure)/
sign 2 (= the expression element in such a struc-
ture). Though he uses the word sign and symbol
interchangeably, one could say that he tends to
use the term symbol in the sense "sign l " and to
reserve the term sign for the sense "sign 2 ."
"The Artistic Symbol" was meant by Vianu
as a philosophical justification for his study of
metaphor (1957) and, in general, for his stylistic
studies. It is also strongly related to another
posthumous work, "Theses of a Philosophy of
the Artistic Work (Rom. operrf)"32 and, through
it, to the ensemble of his ideas on aesthetics and
comparative literature. Note that in translating
the tide of the latter study we have used the term
"artistic work," to render a much more general
Romanian term, namely opera (Fr. oeuvre, It.
opera). This is important to keep in mind insofar
as the English translation blocks some associa-
tions with the more general concept of human
creativity that were intended in Vianu's for-
mulation. Vianu's phenomenological approach
30For a general view on his work, see Vianu (1941, 1955,
1958a, 1966, 1968a, 1968b, 1980a) as weil as Vianu, ed.
(1968). About Vianu, cr. also Alexandrescu (1968b), Gana
(1980), Nasta (1964).
'''Cr. Vianu (l966a), p. 106.
"See Vianu (1966b).
433
to the opera was indeed coupled with a perma-
nent, deep interest in praxiological and prag-
matic questions-the work of culture, the
typology of artists viewed as cultural agents, the
relations between successive stages in the artistic
production of a work of art-that we do not have
time to cover here. A characteristic example of
this aspect of Vianu's thought is to be found in
the Preface to the second edition of his monu-
mental trcatise on aesthetics:
We shall say that the idea of art presented here is linked
with a philosophy of labor. Art appeared to us as a form of
labor, as a product of work that is aimed at transforming
matter. Once considered as labor, art appeared to us to
represent the most perfect form of it, the one in which the
effort of the worker comes to rest in the fullness of the con-
cluded and harmonious thing. Art is thus the aim of any
worthy worker, but fully and undividedly so only among the
great artists. By trying to deepen the understanding of the
artistic phenomenon in its aspect of ideological activity, of
labor, we were able to measure in a better way the extension
of the conscious and rational factors in artistic creation and
to better und erstand the role of art in the modern civilization
of labor. 33
One can find in this way of thinking an effect
of Vianu's early and fertile association with
Dimitrie Gusti's sociological work, which was
fused later on most creatively with his essentially
aesthetic and philosophical concerns.
The minimal definition of the symbol is for
Vianu that of a sign standing as substitute for
a signification. The sign is perceived, the signi-
fication is understood.
A large variety of semiotic phenomena are
brought under this rubric by the author: words
(spoken or written), cries, gestures (instinctive,
indicative, imitative, or codified, such as the pol-
ite gestures prescribed by etiquette, sign lan-
guages for the hearing-impaired, etc.),
mathematical numbers and operators, chemical
formulas and operators, medical symptoms,
pieces of legal evidence, artistic works (litcrary,
musical, sculptural, pictorial), etc.
For Tudor Vianu, who is basically a neo-Kan-
tian, thc symbol is a category, to be added to
thc Kantian categories of understanding. Much
like Renouvier, who sees in relation a general cat-
egory that would contain the others and allow
their continuous synthcsis, Vianu proposcs to
33Cf. Vianu (1959), pp. 6-7.
434 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
conceive the symbol, more precisely the linguis-
tic symbol, as a general category that informs
all the other categories of understanding:
The linguistic symbol is not only one of the categories, coor-
dinated on the same plane with the others, but rather a
general category that subsurnes all the others-because we
cannot know those others except through the mediation of
the words that substitute for them."
In conceiving cultural creations as symbolic
forms, Vianu demonstrates, Cassirer was implic-
itly admitting the categorical character of the
symbol. However, Cassirer did not give an
explicit character to this intuition, did not explore
its essential philosophical consequences, and,-
most important from Vianu's point of view,-
did not perceive the fundamental, special char-
acter of the linguistic symbol with respect to any
other type of sign. For, explains Vianu, art, sci-
ence, and myth cannot communicate except
through language and linguistics symbols, even
if sometimes science denounces the prejudices
and illusions that language favors or art fights
against the expressive inertia of the word as such.
Linguistic symbols are thus superordinated, gen-
eral symbols. Their understanding conditions the
understanding of any other cultural symbol. In
viewing science, language, myth, and art as
dosed, intellectual, parallel symbolic forms,
Vianu shows, Cassirer did not acknowledge their
essential interrelatedness, reciprocal inftuences,
dynamics, specificity, hierarchies, and relative
value.
The basic distinctions through which Vianu
achieves a general dassification of the symbols
are the following: privative/integrative; individual!
conceptual! irtdividual-conceptual; non-linguistic/ lin-
guistic; having a signification anterior to the sign/having
a signification created simultaneously with the sign; dis-
continuous/ continuous; arbitrary/natural; transitive/
reflexive; flat (plane)l deep (profound); and limited/
unlimited.
Symbols are substitutes for experiences that
are either excessively rich or excessively frag-
mentary. In the first case they will deprive the
experience of some of its traits in order to make
it possible for us to retain only that aspect of the
experience that may be relevant. These are the
symbols Vianu calls privative. In the second case,
"Cf. Vianu (1966a), p. 114.
they will allow us to catch sight of the totality
of which our experience is a part. These are the
symbols Vianu calls integrative. To illustrate this
opposition, Vianu examines mathematical,
chemical, medical, andjuridical symbols. Math-
ematical and chemical symbols are, in asense,
partial signs: they substitute respectively for
quantitative or qualitative structures while, at
the same time, masking, hiding, dissimulating
all the other aspects of things signified. Math-
ematical and chemical symbols are therefore pri-
vative. On the other hand, the medical symptom
is an integrative sign, for it substitutes for a datum
the whole complex that we call a medical con-
dition. The same is true of the judicial evidence
when it replaces a complex factual configuration.
The manipulation of the integrative symbols,
Vianu shows, is based on apresupposition of
strong systematic unity. It is insofar as medical
symptoms andjudicial indices are understood to
pertain to a unitary biological system or to an
organic factual condition that one single part of
such a unity may be held to point towards the
whole to which the part belongs.
Conceptuality is, for Vianu, the distinctive
characteristic of the linguistic symbol. While a
non-linguistic symbol is a particular perception
that signifies a particular state and in the case
of which the mind go es directly [rom sign to
signification, without ne~ding the mediation of
a concept, such mediation is obligatory for the
linguistic symbol. Every linguistic symbol is the
synthesis of a particular perception with a con-
cept. Even when I apply the term table to an
individual object that I am looking atjust now,
I do know that the term is applicable to all the
individuals from that dass, to their whole spe-
cies, to their concept.
In the initial phase of learning a language,
shows Vianu, the linguistic symbol can be the
synthesis of a perception with an individual object
and its species: it can have a triadic structure.
Later on, most often, the representation of the
individual object with which the object was first
associated or which served as its illustration-
what Th. Ribot called "the generic image"-
may be lost. This happens especially in the case
of very abstract terms such as energy, nature, vir-
tuality, right, society, etc., in which any more or
less individual representation disappears from
the linguistic synthesis (we may say semiosis).
 ROMANIA
Thus, through what may be called a process of
simplification, the linguistic symbol comes to be
the pure synthesis of a perception with a concept.
There are, from Vianu's point of view, two
basic problems that arise if we define the lin-
guistic symbol as perception plus concept.
The first problem is this. Neo-Kantian phi-
losophy rejects the conception of the sign as the
copy of apre-existent signification, as a sort of
external envelope for a ready-made concept. For
Cassirer and Croce the word elevates vague
impressions to the lasting value of a concept-
it initiates the concept. This is only partially
acceptable from Vianu's point of view. In sci-
entific language, he shows, the act of finding a
name may follow the act of conceptualization.
If we take for example chemical language, one
can say that in the table of Mendeleieff the con-
cept of each of the elements was specified by its
placement in the table, while its naming, follow-
ing its discovery in nature, often occurred long
after the formation of the concept. On the other
hand, in scientific language, words may be per-
ceived as hiding or obscuring the concept rather
than illuminating and refining it. There are cases
in which familiar terms have to be fought against
in order to start an in-depth examination of our
conceptions. Therefore, concludes Vianu, in the
linguistic synthesis between the sign and the con-
cept, the two elements may either occur simul-
taneously or, most probably in scientific language,
the concept may antedate its sign.
The second major problem raised by the con-
ceptuality of the linguistic symbol is that of the
affinity or heterogeneity between sign and con-
cept. Vianu rejects the old thesis according to
which signs developed from primitive exclama-
tions or represent the phonic imitation of
objects-as developed for example, by the Stoics
(similitudo rei cum sono verbi), or by those uphold-
ing the theory that all languages come from a
limited number of roots which are phonetic
duplicata of internal states or external objects
(from a lingua adamica). He disallows them for
the following reasons: (a) there are objects (ideas)
that cannot be represented by means of sounds;
(b) the representation of the individual objects
tends to be eliminated from the linguistic symbol
so that imitation, even when occurring, is grad-
ually lost; (c) as shown by Saus sure, with the
exception of onomatopoeias and exclamations
435
(which are not numerous and which are semi-
conventional to boot) the linguistic symbol is
arbitrary; (d) phonetic evolution may eliminate
or create onomatopoeias independently of any
intentional imitation.
However, Saussurian linguistics has mini-
mized-according to Vianu-the domain of the
onomatopoiea. He feels that a science like Mer-
kel's laletics, which deals with the psychological
signification of sounds, is still a desideratum. It
would determine the degree of phonetic sym-
bolism existing in each language; it would also
study expressive words and articulatory ges-
tures. Expressive words are those in which non-
auditive sensations or moral states are imitated
in the auditive sign and thus unified with it. In
Rom. zgronturos "rough", the tactile perception
of unevenness is brought together and expressed
through a similar auditive perception. In Rom.
zgfltfit "jerk" the phonetic perception imitates
and integrates the muscular one. Articulatory
gestures (gesticulatory sounds) are those artic-
ulate sounds that accompany an action (per-
formed or seen). Such are, for example, Rom.
ham (accompanying the act of swallowing), Rom.
hop, top (accompanying the act of jumping).
While not so large as envisioned by Wundt
(for whom the whole language is a prolongation
of the Ausdrucksbewegungen ), the domain of the
articulatory gestures is for Vianu considerably
less restricted than thought by Grammont. After
a critical examination of Fr. Muller's and Jes-
persen's contributions, Vianu concludes that
words are arbitrary to a much lesser extent than
implied by Saussure. They may sometimes be
natural symbols. Phonetic symbolism occurs not
only in onomatopoeias and exclamations and not
only at an early age. Vianu disagrees with Cas-
sirer who, though accepting a previous mimical
and analogical language, contended that in its
present state language abandons the function of
indication (Bezeichnen) and adopts the abstract
function of signification (Bedeuten). Vianu con-
siders that the linguistic development follows two
distinct paths: (1) towards the elimination of
phonetic symbolism and (2) towards its deepen-
ing and strengthening.
The class of linguistic symbols is, for Vianu,
much larger then usually recognized. The prop-
erties that Vianu considers to define the lin-
guistic symbol are the following:
436 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
1. Loose solidarity between the sign and its signifi-
cation. Weaker than the solidarity between ges-
tures or artistic creations and their significations,
the solidarity between the linguistic sign and sig-
nification is stronger, however, than the solid ar-
ity between algebraic symbols, Morse alphabet
and military signals, cartographic or library-
classification signs and their respective signifi-
cations. Without being natural, the linguistic sign
is thus for Vianu far from being arbitrary.
2. Occurrences always framed by a communicative
circuit. The linguistic symbols are particular per-
ceptions and not the objective acoustic (graphic)
qualities from which we receive these percep-
tions. Asound has to be pronounced or heard,
a form has to be traced and seen in order for
them to become symbols. Therefore one can say
that a linguistic symbol always presupposes: (a) a
perception; (b) the signification of this percep-
tion; (c) an active cause of perception, that is, a
sign-producer; (d) the consciousness, in the pro-
ducer, that his sign will be perceived as a sign;
(e) the consciousness, in the receiver, that the
sign he perceives has been produced as a sign. 35
In contradistinction to the linguistic symbol,
the non-linguistic symbol is not produced in order
to communicate and is not perceived as a com-
municative fact.
3. Transposability if the linguistic perception. Most
of the non-linguistic signs consist in specialized
perceptions (especially visual or auditory); at the
level of the linguistic symbol, however, auditory
perceptions can be replaced by visual ones and
vice-versa. More complicated, the passage from
figurative writing to alphabetic writing consists
in the intercalation of auditory symbols between
visual signs and their signification. Similar proc-
esses occur in establishing alphabets for the blind
(where auditory signs are replaced by tactile
ones), for the deaf (where the transposition occurs
at the same perceptual level, the visual letters
of the alphabet being replaced by visual ges-
tures), etc.
4. Continuity. Linguistic (natural) symbols are
continuous. To understand the meaning of a
word, to pass from its sensorial perception to its
conceptual signification, is to perceive the dif-
ferences, the oppositions that fix the place of that
"Cf. Vianu (1966a), p. 124. Note the similarity between
Vianu's presentation of the linguistic symbol and Grice's
definition of meaning.
word in its syntagmatic and paradigmatic series.
While making use of the Saussurian syntag-
matic/paradigmatic opposition, Vianu does not
accept its reduction to the opposition between in
praesentia and in absentia relations. For Vianu, the
elements in a paradigmatic series are also co-
present at a subconscious level. Furthermore,
syntagms cannot be recognized as such except
in the light of some existent paradigms. Thus,
re + read is a syntagm for us only inasmuch' as
the English language contains the paradigm
remake, reuse, rijUnd, rifresh, etc. Should these words
disappear from English, we would no longer see
reread as a syntagm. Therefore the merit of Saus-
sure is not the introduction of the opposition
syntagmatic/paradigmatic as such (which is less
absolute than he has contended) but rather the
fact that, through it, Saussure illuminated the
continuous character of the linguistic system.
Before Saussure, shows Vianu, Cournot had
also perceived the fact that language can express
the continuity of inner life due to the fact that
most words do not have one fixed, definite sig-
nification, but rather a multiplicity of vague
meanings. The relative indeterminacy of the
words is compensated for by the contexts (the
live semiotic totalities) in which they occur, by
their metaphorical use, by the creation of new
words, and-adds Vianu-by different types of
elocution (we could say, ofklcutionary activities).
5. Rejlexiveness and transitiveness (which neces-
sarily occur together in this type of sign). Vianu
connects this duality with the opposition contin-
uous/discontinuous. Language is discontinuous,
paradigmatic, in order to allow communication
for the others; it is continuous, syntagmatic, in
order to allow reflexive communication. Both
reflexive and transitive intentions are implied in
linguistic communication. If we separate them,
the linguistic system vanishes-it gives the place
to non-linguistic symptoms (as is the case in psy-
choanalysis, and, today, in what literary criti-
cism calls "symptomatic reading").
To illustrate the opposition flat (plane)/deep
(profound) Vianu ex amines two types of integra-
tive symbols: judicial evidence and medical
symptoms. In the case of judicial evidence, the
sign (for example the existence of a previously
dated manuscript with differing contents) and
its signification (the "non-existence" of the tes-
tament under attack) belong to the same (fac-
tual) level. The judical presumption is a plane,
 ROMANIA
flat symbol. The medical symptom, however, has
to be correlated with other symptoms in order
to point towards the diagnosis (the establish-
ment of a medical condition) that represents its
signification. The medical symptom is a pro-
found, deep symbol. I ts signification pertains to
a deeper level than the sign, and, due to this,
acquires a special explanatory function.
Is the linguistic symbol profound or plane?
There are, shows Vianu, plane oppositions-and-
complementations (for example those occurring
at the syntagmatic level) and deep oppositions-
and-complementations (for example those
occurring at the paradigmatic level, deep in the
subconscious of the speakers). But, says Vianu,
these oppositions are not to be confused with
semiotic substitution. And words cannot be the
sign for other words with which they are con-
nected at a plane or deep level. I am not sure
that this last assertion is true. In fact, the Saus-
surean "mots sous les mots," the paragrammes-
the existence of which was unknown during
Vianu's life-show that words may function as
signs for other, "deeper" words. The applica-
bility of Vianu's opposition would thus increase.
The same could perhaps be said about the sym-
bolic operations achieved in linguistic recon-
struction (where the depth is temporal) and in
transformational gramm ar (where the depth is
one of the consciousness).
Together with the intellectual Saussurean par-
adigms, the Freudian andJungian affective par-
adigms-to be found not only in the
psychoanalytic interview, but also, at the general
level of language, in euphemisms, proverbs, slang
terms, indirect designation, nicknaming, in short,
in any variety of allusive speech-are equally
relevant for a better understanding of the deep
symbols.
In riddles, irony, enigmas, rebuses, the deep
symbols are limited. Once we have found the
invariant, definite, deep signification our effort
stops. AriddIe such as eine treee prin sat ~i nu-l
latra eiinii?-"Who goes through the villa ge with-
out the dogs barking at him?"-will hold us until
we get its deep signification: "the wind."lt is
then closed with respect to our semiotic reflection.
If, on the other hand, we examine a poetic
image such as Rom. leaganul albastru al taeerii "the
blue swing of silence," its signification cannot
be crystallized in another sign with a fixed value.
There is alway something more for which we
437
cannot find a substitute. What is there in com-
mon between swinging, blueness, and silence?
We can postulate, but not formulate a compre-
hensive deep term. This metaphor is therefore a
deep unlimited linguistic symbol.
The concept of deep symbol was first hinted
at in psychoanalysis. Freud, however, dealt with
deep but limited symbols. Vianu shows that the
interpretation he gave to dreams resembles the
school exercises in which students are asked to
transform a poetic text into a prose paraphrase.
It was J ung's special contribution to apprehend
the unlimited and indefinite character of the deep
. symbols that occur in dreams.
By including the opposition plane/profound
and limited/unlimited among the "categories of
the sign,"-that is, by articulating them in the
context of general semiotics-Vianu refined in
a basic way the definition of the linguistic sym-
bol. In his system the linguistic symbol can con-
sist of:
a. slgn + concept, or
b. slgn + a hierarehy oJ eoneepts, or
c. sign + a postulated coneept, that cannot be
realized, or
d. sign + a supreme concept, that would sub-
ordinate all the concepts that may appear
to us and remain forever transcendent.
The oppositions discussed can be the foun-
dation of a typology of signs. They mayaIso
allow a more precise characterization of a par-
ticular type of sign or a more refined comparison
between different types of signs. We have seen
already that Vianu defines the linguistic symbols
as (a) integrative, (b) conceptual (or individual-
conceptual), (c) having a signification that is
either anterior to or created at the same time
with the sign, (d) continuous or discontinuous,
(e) both arbitrary and natural, (f) both transi-
tive and reflexive, (g) either plane or profound,
(h) either limited or unlimited. The arithmetical
symbol on the other hand receives the following
characterization: privative, conceptual, linguis-
tic, having a signfication anterior ta the sign,
discontinuous, arbitrary, transitive, deep, limited.
But the sign that stood at the core of Vianu's
explorations, the sign that determined hirn to
elaborate a general semiotics in order to be able
to approach it in a more subtle and profound
manner, is the artistic symbol. I will therefore
438 SAN DA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
try in what follows to show the way in which the
definition of the artistic symbol benefited from
and helped to refine the distinctions outlined above.
Vianu's definition of the artistic sign is a strong
definition. One could say that, insofar as strength
and normativity go together, it is a strongly nor-
mative definition. According to Vianu, an artis-
tic symbol is necessarily: integrative, individual-
conceptual, having a signification that is created
simultaneously with the sign, linguistic, contin-
uous, natural, reflexive, deep, and unlimited. I
shall briefly comment on these characteristics
and on the comparison they allow with the lin-
guistic symbol.
It is true, Vianu shows, that artistic symbols
do not retain in their representations the whole
reality, that artists frequently eliminate, accen-
tuate, stylize, dissimulate or illuminate one spe-
cific aspect of it. However, the object of such
procedures is not to hold our interest to one sin-
gle aspect out of a complex whole, but rather to
create a larger space for free association using
the artistic symbol, and thus to allow unlimited
penetration into the depths of its signification.
This is why artistic symbols are to be considered
integrative.
While the linguistic symbol, even when unlim-
ited, tends to eliminate the individual object and
to retain in its synthesis only the sign and the
concept, the representation of the individual
o bj ect is constitutive to the artis tic symbol, pre-
supposed by it. Thus, the structure of the artistic
symbol is always triadic and sometimes cven more
complicated. For, as Vianu shows, a drawing of
a person (for example) is a double symbol, a sym-
bol with two semiotic levels: 36 (a) a configuration
oflines pointing to a certain individual and (b) a
certain individual pointing to a more general
specification (such as his social, professional, his-
torical, moral type) or even to a signification so
general that it remains obscure, one that can be
guessed at but never laid out in a formula.
In Vianu's thought, a signification can be cre-
ated at the same time as the sign and realize a
potentiality existing in the reality for which the
sign is substituted. The signification is never
completely constituted before the work of the
artist but reality guides the artist and has an
essential affinity with certain significations.
35Barthes approached this problem of the level of the semiotic
systems when speaking about le dicrochage des .rystemes.
The opposition between (1) the old theses of
art as either imitation (mimesis) or idealization
(that is, art as ideal interpretation of reality, as
illumination of its hidden significations, of its
latent ideas) and (2) the neo-Kantian thesis of
art as creation (according to which the significa-
tion of art is a value that the artist introduces
into reality) seemed irreducible, says Vianu,
because idealism had access only to the notion
of deep but limited symbols. For the idealists, the
symbol was the copy of some pre-existing, firmly
established significations that could be appre-
hended by a simple act of mirroring. If signifi-
cations, however, are deep and unlimited, the
spirit can grasp them through a creation but
cannot copy them. Since unlimited symbols have
significations that, being postulated but never
completely formulated, are susceptible of a con-
tinuous formation, they allow a conciliation of the
two poin ts of view.
Artistic creations are linguistic symbols. Like
linguistic symbols, artistic creations presuppose
a communication circuit and a conceptual com-
ponent. There are, however, in Vianu's approach,
important distinctions between artistic and lin-
guistic symbols: (a) While the linguistic symbol,
as synthesis between a sign, the representation
of an individual object, and its concept, tends
to eliminate the individual object and to retain
in its unity only the sign and the concept, the
representation of the individual object never dis-
appears from the synthesis of the artistic symbol.
(b) Whilc the significa tion of the linguis tic sym-
bol appears to be beyond it, outside of it, in arealm
external to the sign we perceive, the signification
of the artistic symbol is in the sign, fused with it,
and cannot be perceived except through it.
(c) While the creative use oflanguage frequently
allows the replacement of one word by another
in given conditions, in art the solidarity sign-
signification is so strong that we cannot alter a
sign without modifying its signification.
(d) Therefore, while linguistic symbols may be
arbitrary or natural, artistic symbols are always
natural-one can say that poetry appeals to the
natural linguistic symbols: to the onomato-
poieas, alliterations, exclamations, expressive
words, articulatory gestures out of which art is
made. (e) While linguistic symbolS may be dis-
continuous, artistic symbols are always contin-
uous. An inscription out of which half has been
lost cannot be reconstructed. A torso, a detail
 ROMANIA 439

from a fresco, two verses from apoern, the open- accumulating capital intersects with other cor-
ing chords of a symphony allow us to imagine relative, subsidiary or general attributes. He is
or to recognize the whole, for the artistic whole a French bourgeois of the Restoration, a former
is immanent to each of its parts. Says Vianu: artisan with the sober habits of his dass, a sly
and ferocious individual, a rationalist imperme-
Artistic symbols are syntagms, but while in the syntagms of able to human feelings, a natural hypocrite, a
language words send to each other their reciprocal reflec- strongly instinctive type (a "tiger" as one of the
tions, without ever taking on the color of the whole, the latter
is exactly wh at happens in the case of the artistic symbol.
characters ofthe novel describes hirn), a patriar-
In the syntagms of language there is a relation among parts chal pater ]amilias. These and many other inter-
and one between parts and the whole. When we follow the secting significations make of Grandet an
linear order of somebody's speech, at each step we have only individual who is indescribably alive, and give
in a very small degree the feeling of the whole that is in the symbol an unlimited depth.
preparation. But we do have that feeling in the case of the
artistic symbol, of course not in a perfectly clear way, but 3. The artistic symbol is profoundly unlimited
enough to temper surprise by confirmation and to be able because of its ethical ambivalence, because it can
to discern the parts that fit the whole and those that don't. 37 never be made to depend on a precise moral
concept. It is inasmuch as it limits the moral
(f) While the linguistic symbol is both reflexive signification ofits characters (noble fathers, cun-
and transitive, the artistic symbol is mainly ning intriguers, innocent daughters, etc.) that
reflexive. We always connect symbols to their melodrama falls outside the realm of the artistic
producers. But, says Vianu, while we can imag- symbol.
ine an indifferent, indefinite linguistic agent, we 4. The artistic symbol is deeply unlimited
never fail to perceive the deep subjectivity of the inasmuch as it is, to a certain extent, enigmatic.
artist. This is due to the continuous character Note that for Vianu the old enigmas of ancient
of artistic symbols, which makes them better and oriental art, the riddle of the Sphynx, of the
suited to express the continuity of inner life. pyramids, of the Labyrinth, are not enigmatic;
The question Vianu repeatedly asked hirnself, they are deep but do not appear unlimited. On
both in "The Artistic Symbol" and in his studies the other hand, perpetually unanswerable ques-
devoted to metaphor or, generally, to stylistics, tions seem to subtend such characters as Shake-
is the following: what are the modalities 0] artistic speare's Hamlet, Dostoievsky's Kirilov, Emily
depth, the aspects of unlimitedness? Here is the essence Bronte's Heathdiff; they are inexhaustively
of the answer he proposed to the reader. enigmatic artistic symbols.
1. The unlimited depth of the artistic symbol It is the deeply unlimited character of the
is achieved by means of metaphors. By unifying artistic symbols that explains the need for their
impressions that intelligence usually separates, permanent interpretation and reinterpretation,
metaphors make us discern the deep, unlimited their long posterity-we may say, their eternity.
unity that subtends the diversity of things. Again, Art has, however, a dual structure for it com-
this unity can be postulated but not formulated. bines-as Vianu demonstrates-artistic unlim-
When Francis of Assisi calls the water "our sis- ited depth with aesthetic superficiality, lyrical
ter" and the fire "our brother," the reasons for impulsiveness with ordering and compositional
his bringing together such words and meanings restrictions such as gradation, alternation, con-
remain vague and obscure and the interpretation trast, summation, that overcome its immediacy.
of the metaphors can extend indefinitely. With these considerations Vianu's concerns pass
2. The artistic symbol encompasses a struc- into the domain of aesthetics proper-the field
ture of significations that, by intersecting with to which he made his principal contributions-
each other, give it wh at Vianu calls vital volume. so here our discussion must leave hirn.
If we interpret Balzac's Grandet as a symbol of
avarice, therefore as a simple allegory, we deprive B. Sergiu Al-George's View on
the symbol of its vital volume, of its artistic Indian Semiology
unlimitedness. For, shows Vianu, Grandet is a
complex structure in which the passion for Sergiu AI-George's premature death in 1982 has
interrupted an extremely important effort which
37See Vianu (1966a), p. 154. represented a new direction in metasemiotics and
440 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
general semiotics. Well known in Romania and
India, Al-George has never received in Europe
and in the United States the recognition he
deserved. Between 1957 and 1970 he published
a large number of articles in English and
French,38 but the scope and substance of his
research are best presented in a book published
in Romanian in 1976. This book, entitled Limba
ri gindire in cultura indianii (Language and Thought
in Indian Culture) carried the subtitle Introducere
zn semiologia indiana (An Introduction to Indian
Semiology) which suggests that, while initially
intended as a confrontation between Indian lin-
guistics and logic, the study became in fact a
synthesis on a special type of semiotics-Indian
semiotics. Let us examine more in detail this
emergent semiotic concern of Al-George's
research.
To define the way in which Indian culture
approach es the relationship between language
and thought, Al-George had to establish the
Indian counterparts of European logic and lin-
guistics. What he discovered, while trying to do
so, was that, (using the terms logic and linguistics
the way they are currently used in European
culture), "Indian linguistics" was a "linguistic"
semiotics and Indian logic was a "logic" semiot-
ics. This semiotic character of both linguistics
and logic was not accidental, marginal, implicit,
but essential, central, explicitly articulated. It
became thus evident that while in the European
tradition semiotics could be left out when explor-
ing the relationship between language and
thought, it was part of the discussion, and deeply
so, when studying Indian culture. Consequently
Al-George was confronted by two new problems:
(a) whether the semiotic "accents" of Indian lin-
guistics and logic had a European counterpart
and (b) whether the semiotic components of
Indian linguistics and logic could be integrated
into a synthesis according to the modern Euro-
pean format. In order to ans wer the first question
he decided to compare two Indian "disciplines"
(which I shall call linguistic semiotics and logic
semiotics) with three European ones: linguistics,
logic, and semiotics. To ans wer the second ques-
tion he decided to amalgamate into a unitary
semiotic discipline approaches that had not been
combined in Indian culture. Through this oper-
38Among which AI-George (1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970)
are to be especially mentioned.
ation Al-George contributed to the emergence of
a new discipline that could be called Indian
semiotics, and which could be developed either
inside or outside the Indian cultural tradition.
There is a further way in which Al-George
(1976) accomplishes more than its title would
seem to imply. Initially meant as a book on Indi-
anistics, Al-George's work added-as he hirns elf
notes-an important comparative dimension. It
became a systematic confrontation of the Indian
and European traditions with respect to the rela-
tionships between linguistics, logic, and semiot-
ics, and between the Indian and European
frameworks for the exploration of the sign.
I am offering here a short discussion of the
basic elements of this confrontation.
1. Indian and European logic, linguistics, and
semiotics have many elements in common:
(a) they are based upon similar linguistic struc-
tures since Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin are Indo-
European languages; (1::)) their development
started at approximately the same time since
both PäJ:rini and Plato can be considered more
or less contemporaries; (c)) the European and
Indian disciplines under consideration reached
a similar degree of development, although, as
Al-George contends, one must realize that the
Indian achievements are in many respects still
unmatched in Europe; (d) until the nineteenth
century, and even afterwards, both the European
and Indian logic-linguistics-semiotics developed
"en vase dos." No reciprocal influences were there
to complicate the comparison. This is one of the
reasons why Indian culture offers a fascinating
experience to Europeans. For, says Al-George,
in turning to India, we can realize what a logic-
linguistic-semiotic reflection would be like with-
out the foundation of Greek thought.
2. The chronology of the disciplines con-
sidered, however, is quite different in the two
traditions. In Europe, the first to evolve as an
independent discipline was logic (in its Aristo-
telian form), followed, much later, by linguistics,
and only in this century by Saussurean semiol-
ogy. In India, semiotic linguistics developed
before semiotic logic. PäJ:rini was active during
the fifth century B.C. The first text of Indian
logic was produced in the second or even third
century A.D.
3. European tradition essentially opposes
while Indian tradition continues an archaie under-
standing rifthe world, initially common to both. In
 ROMANIA
choosing to develop logic, Aristotle broke the
tradition of archaie thinking represented by Plato,
in which logos and myth were primordial. Due
to Aristotle, the science of language was edipsed
by rhetoric, by a "civic" understanding of the
world. The Aristotelian categories were essen-
tially connected with the dialectics of the agora;
one has only to remember that the Gr. kategorein
originally meant "to speak in an assembly, to
accuse, to denounce".39 This did not happen in
Indian culture, where we have a continuity with-
out hiatus, one could say a paradisiac continuity,
between the archaic understanding of the world
and its modern division into disciplines. In India,
grammar developed in dose connection with
mythico-ritual speculation, and the analysis of
language was modelIed upon ritual analysis.
PäJ!ini's grammar, which represents the first axi-
omatic system in Indian culture and therefore
the perfect homologue of the Aristotelian system,
does not oppose but brings to achievement the
uninterrupted efforts of his sixty-four predeces-
sors and the ritual reflection that was their gen-
eral frame.
4. The evolution of European logic, linguis-
tics, and semiotics followed the direction from
the most particular to the most general discipline.
European thought did not initially choose as its
subject of analysis the whole system of signs or
at least of verbal signs. Instead, with Aristotle,
it confined its first efforts to the development of
logic, that is to the analysis of one part of the
system of verbal signs only. When the discipline
of linguistics was founded it again chose to exam-
ine only apart of the total set of signs-the
verbal signs. I t was only twentieth-century
semiology which accomplished in Europe a syn-
thesis comparable with the initial Indian one.
Because of this we have in European culture
visible elements of reductionism, linguistic logi-
cism, and, one may say, semiotic "linguisticism."
As an example we could think of the logical
opposition subject/predicate. It permeated tra-
ditional grammar, was fought against by lin-
guistic structuralism, and was back in Chomskian
universalism. Only twentieth-century logical rel-
ativism, with its acceptance of a plurality of logic
systems, seemed to represent in Europe the
opposite direction of a logic that "vanishes into
linguistics." Likewise, in semiology, the Saus-
39Cf. Noica (1968).
441
surean isolation of the sign from all processes of
natural semiosis and even from referentiality
began to be challenged by Peircean semioticians
only in the last decades.
Due to the "mirade of Indian grammar,"
Indian thought appears to be characterized by
an opposite strategy, advancing from general rit-
ual semiotics to particular linguistic semiotics or
logic semiotics disciplines.
It is true that this is not an absolute opposi-
tion. One has to remember that Stoic semiology
stemmed from medical speculation and gave rise
to important grammatical developments. But this
was and remained a marginal case in Aristote-
han Europe.
5. European linguistics was, and in many
respects has remained behind Indian linguistics.
On the one hand, PäJ!ini's 3,996 ordered rules
still represent the most complete and the most
formalized up-to-date description of a language.
Because of the long linguistic tradition which
preceded PäJ!ini, he was able to reach universal
descriptive criteria. When faced with the prob-
lem of describing non-Indo-European lan-
guages, the Buddhist pilgrims, who used PäJ!ini's
grammar, attained better results than those
obtained by European missionaries who modelIed
their description of the same languages after the
grammar of Port-Royal. As an example of the
greater descriptive power of PäJ!ini's grammar,
Al-George discusses in detail the case of the
Tibetan grammar elaborated in the light of
Indian tradition by Thonmi Sambh9ta in the 7th
century A.D. In Europe, historical linguistics
preceded comparative linguistics, which, in turn,
preceded the late structural description and post-
structuralist generative grammar; in India,
PäJ!ini-who was not interested in the historical
evolution and transformation of language but
rather in the manner in which linguistic elements
substitute for an ideallinguistic form-had, from
the very beginning, what one may call a struc-
tural (and sometimes even post-structural) view
of language. Thus, he acceded to the concept of
function-by far more abstract than the concept
of morphological category which domina ted Euro-
pean linguistics until recently. He was also able
to discover the structural components of the word,
which European grammarians, continuing to
work with Greek and Latin models, did not
achieve before the 19th century when they became
acquainted with Pä~üni's commentators.
442 SAN DA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
6. As European semiotics evolved from lin-
guistics-at least in the work of Saus sure and
his followers-linguistics was and is still viewed
as a pilot semiologicial discipline, and language
is still conceived as the most important system
of signs. The semiotic centrality of language is
justified, among other reasons, by the fact that
it allows any other system of signs to be trans-
posed or translated into it. As AI-George shows,
however, this is not a property of the formal
structure of language, but rather a characteristic
of discourse, a consequence of discursiveness.
When European scholars affirm with Saussure
that both language and ritual are systems of
signs, and when, viewing language as a pilot
system, Claude Levi-Struass tries to use it as a
model for understanding myth, their direction
of thought is once more quite opposite to the
one chosen by Indian thought. For in India, lin-
guistic semiotics evolved from ritualist specula-
tion, from the hermeneutics of the mythico-ritual
texts, and ritual was viewed as the central system
of signs by means of which language could be
explained. The question is: are these equivalent
choices or is one of them better than the other?
AI-George leans toward the second alternative.
Ritual rules, he contends, are deliberately and
openly elaborated, explicit, and therefore easier
to grasp, while language rules are automatic,
subconscious, implicit, and therefore elusive. This
is why, in grounding their linguistic reflection in
ritual structure, Indian linguistics selected a more
solid point of departure than the European semi-
oticians, who grounded their ritual reflection in
language structure. Says AI-George in a passage
that sums up our foregoing discussion:
By deciphering the structures of language with the help of
mythico-ritual structures, Indian grammar proceeded in an
inverse way with respect to contemporary structuralism, and
in the end understood more about language than did struc-
turalists about myth and rite:o
7. Most of the grammatical rules formulated
by PäJ:!ini have an operational and normative
status which can be traced to the operational
and normative nature of the Vedic texts. While
the object of the ritual rule is the form of the
sacrificial act, the object of the grammatical rule
is the correct formation of the word.
Wer. AI-George (1976), p. 19.
In this, Indian linguistics again diverges from
the modern pre-transformational European lin-
guistics, where grammatical rules are given the
status of descriptive laws.
Because of the essential operational and pre-
scriptive character of its rules, Indian linguistics
has approached questions that began to be per-
ceived by Occidental specialists only with the
rise of transformational theories of language and
deontic logic. Such are the questions of rule vir-
tuality vs. rule applicability, rule incompatibility, prev-
alence 01 application of one rule over another, the
relationship between deonticity and negation, etc.
8. Because it approaches language by extrap-
olation from the exegesis of the ritual symbolic
act, Indian semiotic linguistics gives preemin-
ence to the idea of action over the ideas of substance
or essence. Morphologically, verbs are given a more
important status than nouns and all nouns are
presented as being of verbalorigin. Pär:rini's syn-
tax is a representational syntax in which verbal
expressions are analyzed by means of action cat-
egories, and not a cognitive syntax grounded in
the Aristotelian and Port-Royal duality subjectl
predicate. The main syntactic-and-semantic cat-
egories that account for the deep form of lan-
guage in Indian grammar are the so-called karakas
(functions). The karakas refer to the logical, idea-
tional relationships between object (or anything
that is conceived by analogy with an object) and
action (or anything that is conceived by analogy
with an action). There are six karakas that go in
pairs, namely: agent (kart1:) and patient (karman),
ins trumen t (karana) and loca tion (adhikarana) ,
donation (samj!adana) and ablation (apadana). The
six karakas, to which one usually adds the inciter
of the agent (hetu) , can be easily shown to cor-
respond to the main categories of the Vedic sac-
rifice discovered by Hubert and Mauss: sacrificer
and victim, sacrificial utensil and sacrificial time
and place, offering and ablation (which are the
two aspects of the magical transfer), and ins ti-
tuter of the sacrifice.
The karakas are not to be assimilated with the
traditional and vague idea of "case," for: (a) one
and the same karaka can correspond to one or
more cases; (b) the karakas are expressed by
means of verbal suffixes, while the nominal suf-
fixes, which would most resemble case inflection,
are indicated in Pär:rini's grammar by means of
ordinal numerals: "the first," "the second," ...
 ROMANIA
"the seventh"; (c) "the first," which is the closer
Indian counterpart to the European nominative,
corresponds to no karaka; therefore, while in
Europe the nominative case is associated with
the amalgamation of the ideas of agent and
patient that is achieved in the category of suhjeet,
in India "the first" corresponds to the pure expres-
sion of the sense of the nominal theme and is denied
any syntactic function.
Neither do the karakas correspond to the Fre-
ge an functions, for, while Frege analyzes a prop-
osition in terms of one function and one or more
arguments, Pa~ni conceives a proposition as
being a complex of six functions and six argu-
ments. While in European symbolic logic the
function is given the status of a variable prop-
erty, for Pa~ni the karaka is a semantic constant.
Notice that (b) and (c) above, as weil as what
was said about the distinction between the Fre-
gean concept of function and P~ni's concept
of karakas, also exclude the equation karakas =
the Fillmorean "cases."
One could say that European linguistics has
reached, only accidentally, a format of analysis
that would evoke (but not compare to) the level
of abstraction and sophistication of the analysis
in terms of karakas, in such marginal works as
those of Beauzee and Dumarsais, who refined
the notion of complement or, nowadays, in the
diverging views of Sandmann, Fillmore, Ander-
son, Theban, and a few others. Although struc-
tural linguistics has managed to weaken the
duality subject/predicate, Chomsky has reintro-
duced it and firmly rejected representational cat-
egories. This is why the attempts by Staal and
others to present the karakas in a generative per-
spective have no chan ces to suceed. Karakas can-
not be equated with "logical" subjects or objects.
From what has been said, it becomes evident
that while European linguistics and even sym-
bolic logic are still tributary to the subject/pred-
icate frame (for symbolic logic gives but another
form to the theory of predication), and therefore
to a static vision of reality, in Indian grammar
the six karakas attest to a definitely dynamic con-
ception of the real. What is more, this dyna-
mism-says Al-George-seems to be not only
more abstract but also more adequate to the
object it describes; for the European separation
of a proposition into "the entity about which
something is said" and "that which is said" does
443
not correspond to a purely formal analysis of the
expression but again to an analysis of the expres-
sion as used in discourse.
9. Pa~ni's concept of metalanguage is differ-
ent from its modern logical and linguistic coun-
terpart in Europe. While in Occidental culture
metalanguage suggests the existence not only of
language levels but of levels 01 thought as weil, for
Pal!ini (who resembles Wittgenstein in this
respect), the metalanguage does not retain the
virtues of the object language. It is the object
language which expresses thought and the eter-
nal form of objects (iikrti). The technical terms,
although referential, are without form (aniikrti)
and non-eternal (anitya). Metalanguage does not
belong to cognition, it is simply descriptive. The
technical descriptive signs are replaced by zero
at the end of the operations prescribed in order
to form a word; Indian thought compares them
to the sacrificial victim which, likewise, disap-
pears when the sacrifice had been fulfilled.
10. Indian "logic," which fuses what we call
epistemology with a study of the art of argu-
mentation, was conceived as a science 01 the sign.
This is shown in its old names hetuvidyii and hetu-
fiistra, which mean "the science of the sign" and
"the code of the sign" respectively. Logic was
that science of the sign which studies the knowl-
edge based upon rules (cf. another old name for
logic, nyayavidya "the science of the rule.").
To understand the centrality of the semiotic
concern in Indian logic one has to remember
that the six pramiinas, that is, the means for
attaining correct knowledge (one may say cog-
nitive structures), are: (l) perception; (2) reasoning
based upon sign (anumiina); (3) verbal testimony;
(4) identification through analogy; (5) presup-
posing; and (6) absence. Second only to percep-
tion,41 inferential reasoning is therefore meant as
semiotic reasoning in Indian logic.
To grasp the structure of anumiina, Indian logi-
cians usually take as an example the inference
"There is fire on the mountain for there is smoke."
It can be decomposed into five parts:
I. the initial assertion (pratijiiii) "the moun-
tain possesses fire";
41 In Buddhist epistemology even perception is conceived as
being an inferential act.
444 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
2. the ground, or reason (hetu) for (1): "because
of the fact that it possesses smoke";
3. the illustration by means of examples
(udharalJa) , w here the exam pIes can be
positive ("wherever there is smoke, there
is fire, like in the kitchen oven") or negative
(wherever therc is smoke there is fire, unlike
the surface of a lake). AI-George did not
comment upon the negative example but
I take it to mean: "there can be something
similar to smoke over the surface of a lake
but what this illustrates is the case in which
the generalization 'wherever there is smoke,
there is fire' does not hold";
4. the application (upanaya): "the same with
this"; and
5. the condusion (nigamana): "that is why it
is so."
Absorbed in comparing anumiina with the Aris-
totelian syllogism or in the effort to formalize it,
European specialists have missed its semiotic
essence. To make it evident, AI-George gives the
following reformulation of (1-5) above: 42
I'. One affirms the existence of the signified
object (fire) in a substratum (the mountain)
as a property rif the substratum.
2'. One affirms the existence of the sign
(smoke) in the same substratum as a reason
for proposition (I').
3'. One s ta tes the rule oJ the sign (nyama
"restrictive rule," aga in a term of ritu-
alistic origin) and one illustrates it with a
positive example indicating the kind of cir-
cumstances in which the rule is applicable
and a negative example indicating the kind
of circumstances in which the rule is not
applicable. In (3) the rule of the sign was
not explicitly mentioned. This shows that
for Indian thought it is the example which
is central. Notice, however, AI-George
adds, that it would be more exact to say
that in Indian logic the rule (as virtuality)
cannot be dissociated from the example
(that is, from the applicability of the rule).
4'. One affirms the agreement between prop-
ositions (I'), (2'), and the positive exam-
pIe in (3').
5'. One confirms proposition (1').
"cr. Al-George (1976), p. 43.
Thus anumana appears to represent the extrap-
olation into reality of a relation of signification.
The way in which it has been presented makes
dcar that the relation between the sign and the
signification is conceived as either virtual (in which
case Indian logicians would use the word hetu,
which seems therefore to mean "sign-reason")
or real (in which case Indian logicians would use
the word linga, which seems to mean "existential
sign"). Consequently, the terms hetu and linga,
which Occidental specialists tend to interpret as
synonyms, are in fact referring to two distinct
aspects of the sign.
Although not so dearly developed in Euro-
pcan thought, the opposition between "sign-rea-
son" and "existential sign" is not without some
evocation of the Stoic opposition between para-
synemmenon and synemmenon or the opposition
bctween infirence and implication in mathematical
logic. Notice nevertheless, says AI-George, that
while inference represents for Russell a disso-
lution of implication, in Indian thought it is, on
the contrary, a realization of the relation of
signification.
There are several elements that have to be
pointed out when comparing anumiina to Aris-
totle's syllogistic reasoning. First, while in Aris-
totle the substratum represents a secondary substance,
in Indian thought it is a primary substance and
se miosis presupposes spatio-temporal concrete-
ness. Second, the relationship between sign and
significatum is accounted for in terms of a special
concept named vyiipti. The concept of vyiipti was
dcveloped by the logician Dignaga in the fifth
or sixth century A.D. Its meaning comes dose
to that of the English word pervasion. Examples
of vyiipti are the impregnation of the sesame seed
by its oil or of sea water by salto What vyiipti is
meant to suggest when modelling the relation-
ship between sign and significatum is an asym-
metrie relation of dependency between a
dominating element (vyiipaka, where -aka is a suf-
fix with the meaning "active") and a dominated
element (vyiipya, where -ya is a suffix with the
meaning "passive"). If we go back to the fire/
smoke example, the dominating element (the
pervader) would be the fire while the dominated
element (the one that has to be pervaded) would
be the smoke. What is most interesting is that
according to vyiipti, it is the domina ted entity (the
smoke) that becomes the sign, therefore the active
"implicative" element, in anumiina. And it is the
 ROMANIA
dominating entity (the fire) that be comes the
significatum, therefore the passive, "implied"
element. Vyiipti thus refers to an objective, intel-
ligible or sensible hierarchy that revers es itself
at the semiotic level. As AI-George put it:
The relations hip between vyäpti and sign reveals to us that
the hierarchy of the categories of reason is not the hierarchy
of the objects of the universe as it reflects in our conscious-
ness, with all its degrees of abstractness, but exactly the
revers al of this hierarchy. The rational semiotic act revo-
lutionizes the real and its "abstractization. ,,43
Third, while in Aristotle and with the Stoics the
concept is conceived as being more abstract than
the sign, in Indian logic it is the sign that is the
more abstract of the two. This is why inferential
reasoning is essentially semiotic with Indians,
while it is still based upon the concept in Euro-
pean thought. Even when, as with the Stoics,
reasoning is based upon the sign, this is so because
the universaljudgment ("Man is a rational mor-
tal animal") and the relation sign/significatum
("If something is a man, then it is a rational
mortal animal") are recognized as identical, in
other words because the generality of the rule
of the sign is assimilated to the generality of the
concept. For Aristotle, signs-even in their most
rigorous modality, that of tekmerion-did not
belong to syllogism. They were confined to enthy-
meme, that is, to the rhetorical reasoning addressed
to the vulgar and having persuasion as its result,
as opposed to abstract demonstration. Signs were
an instrument for attaining existential knowledge
but essential understanding required concepts. This
way of looking at the sign is still common in
European culture. For Levi-Strauss, who follows
here Saussure, the sign is similarly "situated"
between the image and the concept.
11. Indian logic opens a perspective, still dif-
ficult for Occidental semiotics to accept (or
rather, difficult for such Saussurean semioticians
as Mounin, Spang-Hansen, etc., since the posi-
tions taken by Peirce, Greimas, and Eco are in
this respect more similar to the Indian perspec-
tive than to the European), of surmounting the
opposition between natural and artificial signs.
In the Nyaya logic, as presented above,
semiotic reasoning concerns natural semiosis. It
involves three elements-the sign (linga) , the sig-
nified object (lingin) , and the existential substra-
tum (iidhiira, adhikarana, dharmin, pak~a)-between
"Ibid., p. 53.
445
which one can define dyadic relations that are
analogous to those schematized by Ogden and
Richards. By representing the Nyaya conception
of the sign in an Ogden-Richards manner, Al-
George obtained the result shownin Figure 2. 44
One can see that in the structure of the natural
sign of Nyaya logic the substratum occupies a
position perfectly analogous to the position of
meaning (thought) in the structure of the Occi-
dental artificial (linguistic) sign.
There are, in Indian logic, several attempts
at a definition of meaning that maintain the
dialectic tension of the spatio-temporal substra-
tum. Such are the semantic doctrine of apoha
("exclusion of that which is different") due to
the same Dignaga who developed the concept of
vyiipti; Patanjali's discussion of the triad: word
(sabda)-object (artha)-meaning (pratyana); the
Buddhist theory of meaning, etc. What they all
illustrate is that meaning was perceived as men-
tal engram, form (this is how AI-George tends
to translate terms such as iikiira, iik/:ti). In a way,
Indian thought thus evokes the Greek eidos and
morphe. Like Indian logicians, Plato attributed
OGDEN-RICHARDS
thought
symbolizes refers to
symbol object
stands for
NYAYA LOGIC
substratum
negation affirmation
exclusion consecution
sign object
Figure 2
440 r almost. Cf. AI-George (1976), pp. 60-61. I have con-
densed two separate figures and have introduced in the
Nyaya part of Figure 2 the negation-exclusion and affir-
mation-consecution relations that were discussed in the
text, but not graphically presented in the triangle, by AI-
George.
446 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU

form to both genus and species. This perception the status of sign with respect to vowels-viewed
was lost with Aristotle far whom the species only as significatum); the semiotic analysis of several
possesses form, and is totally absent from the types of syntactic subordination, among which
connotative aura of the Latin word concept. Hence, the conditional imperative, the varieties of if-
one can say that in Indian logic meaning-as-form then, locative, and instrumental constructions are
belongs to a logic of the real. On the contrary, discussed at length; the semiotic interpretation
the concept-defined by means of the genus prox- of the rule by PäJ:rini (for whom the relations hip
imum and dijftrentia specifica-has developed in between the antecedent and the consequent of
European logic as an abstraction that can be any rule, be it ritual, grammatical, logical, etc.
isolated from reality and form. is a relationship between a sign-the domain of
12. Indian logic gives a strongly semiotic applicability-and a significatum-the operation
interpretation to the concept of definition. The prescribed by the rule); the semiotic analysis of
name for definition, more precisely for the defi- the subordinate clause of concession viewed as
niens part of a definition, is lak~ana, which also a sign for an exception significatum, for the fact
means "indexical sign" and "rule';, and is syn- that the "actions" expressed by the subordinate
onymous with linga "natural sign." and the principal sentence, respectively, do not
In Indian thought, definition does notconsist represent the two terms of a rule; the semiotic
in an enunciation of all the notes of the defi- analysis of PäJ:rini's axiomatic syntax; and so forth.
niendum, in an indication of the genus proximum The global image of Indian general semiotics
and dijftrentia specifica, in an exhaustive descrip- as conceived by AI-George is dominated (a) by
tion of the essence of the definiendum. The defi- a synthetic, integrative dimension; (b) by a constant
niens consists rather in the presentation of one preoccupation with illuminating the most unex-
property that belongs to the definiendum exclu- pected cases of semiotic isomorphism (between the
sively, of that part of its essence which allows the structure of the ritual, grammatical, and logical
delimitation of the definiendum from anything else. rules; between the sign, the definition, and the
Thus Indian definition is opposed to description, rule; between the structure of the syllable, of the
and has a strongly restrictive dimension; it is not compound word, of the simple or complex sen-
an act of cognition but rather of recognition, not tence, and the structure of the natural sign;
a gnoseological but a pragmatic enterprise. 45 The between the structure of natural and artificial
aim of the definition is, in Indian logic, to "sep- signs in general; between PäJ:rini's linguistic zero-
arate" words, to allow "practicing" them. (lopa), the Buddhists' philosophical zero (fiirrya),
Consequently, definition and reasoning have and the Indian mathematical zero (fiirrya), etc.;
different elements in common in Indian and in (c) by a subtle and technically refined explora-
European thought. In Indian logic the common tion of special "interdisciplinary" domains, usu-
element is the sign, in Aristotle's view it was the ally marginal or even neglected in European
demonstration of the essence, and in mathe- semiotics, such as the metasemiotic analysis of
maticallogic it is the rule. phonetics, morphology, syntax, of ritualistic exe-
There are many other problems of general gesis, etc.; (d) by a lucid metasemiotic concern.
semiotics raised by Indian linguists, philoso- It is mostly what I would call a semiotics 01 the
phers, and logicians, which do not have a coun- norm,46 a deontic, essentially prescriptive general
terpart in European semiotics. Among the most semiotics, in this opposed to the European semiot-
important, briefty, are the following: the semiotic ics (which would rather exemplify a semiotics 01
interpretation of zero (topa) as suspended manifes- the state/7 of the object, an essentially descriptive
tation, as essentially substitutive and analogical general semiotics). It is an operational semiotics, as
in PäJ:rini (who identifies the relationship between opposed to the rather cognitive serniotics of the
the substitute and the substituted form with the European tradition.
relationship between the natural sign and its sig- What AI-George advocates is that, by assim-
nificatum); the semiotic analysis of the syllable ilating the rich tradition of Indian semiotics,
in Indian phonetics (where consonants are given European semioticians can further a growth of

"Here AI-George expands a view that has been expressed ··Cf. Golopentia-Eretescu (1980b).
earlier by M. Biardeau. 47Ibid.
 ROMANIA
their discipline as spectacular as that experi-
enced by European linguistics after its first con-
tact with Indian linguistics at the beginning of
the nineteenth century. Says AI-George: "Indian
semiotics remains an unexplored area. Even
Indian logic-which u tterly declares itself a "sci-
ence of the sign" (hetuvidya)-has not yet been
approached und er its semiotic aspect, all schol-
ars being busy with delimiting it with respect to
our own logic, or simply with formalizing it.
Contemporary Western semiotics, split by an-
tagonistic opinions and lost in intricacies which
lower the philosophical prestige of the sign, could
be reinvigorated-if not as vastly as linguistics
once was-by the knowledge of Indian semiot-
ics. This deadlock could thus be coped with by
discarding Western cultural subjectivity and a
certain limited horizon, and by establishing a
cultural intercourse with another part of the
world where the same problems have been other-
wise approached and solved-in a more astute
and more longly meditated way-perhaps."48
C. Solomon Marcus's Mathematical
Poetics and Formal Semiotics
Solomon Marcus's scientific activity to date
can be roughly divided into three main periods:
(a) a first period, lasting unti11967, in which his
main subject of interest was represented by the
algebraic structures of language and his efforts
were directed towards developing the discipline
of mathematical linguistics; this was the period in
which he published such widely circulated and
largely translated works as Grammatici -li automate
finite (Grammars and Finite Automata, 1964),
Lingvistica matematica (Mathematical Linguis-
tics, 1966), Algebraic Linguistics: Analytical Models
(1967), Introduction matMmatique a
la linguistique
structurale (1967), and, in cooperation with
Edmond Nicolau and Sorin Stati, Introducere zn
lingvistica matematica (An Introduction to Math-
ematical Linguistics, 1966); (b) a second period,
from 1967 to 1977, when he concentrated upon
formulating mathematical models that could
deepen the analysis of poetry and drama, thus
founding and developing a most refined and
acclaimed discipline of mathematical poetics; the
central works of this period were Poetica mate-
matica (Mathematical Poetics, 1970), together
4"CE. AI-George (1965), p. 209.
447
with the collective works Poetics and Mathematics
(published in Poetics, 10, 1974), and The Formal
Approach to Drama (published in Poeties 6, 1977),
for which he was an editor and a co-author; (c) a
third period of "semiotic expansion," starting
around 1975, in which Marcus successively or
simultaneously oriented his work towards a lin-
guistico-mathematical approach to folklore,
medicine, genetics, architecture, international
relations, translation, learning processes, etc., and
succeeded in delineating a consistent outline of
a still-to-come mathematieal semioties or, as he often
put it, formal semiotics. The characteristic works
of this period are Semiotieafolclorului (The Semiot-
ics of Folklore), 1975) and Semne despre semne (Signs
about Signs, 1979).
These periods are not strictly delimited. In
Marcus's work a preceding period is never ended
when a new one begins, and a new interest does
not exclude collateral explorations that already
prepare, test, and manifest the period to follow.
Thus, mathematical linguistics continues to
occupy an important place in his research during
the third period, as proven by the publication-
together with numerous articles on the subject-
of the collective volume Metode distributionale alge-
briee zn lingvistiea (Algebraic Distributional Meth-
ods in Linguistics), which he edited in 1977. His
interest in mathematical poetics showed up
already before 1967, in his first articles about
Pius Servien. As a linguistico-mathematical
approach to folklore texts, his book on folklore
semiotics can also be considered to represent a
contribu tion to the field of mathematical poetics.
Marcus never abandons a problem or a disci-
pline he has tackled: he expands its analysis,
recommends it for study, returns to it to follow
its development, tenaciously exploring back and
forth through his course of thought.
While the first period was mainly one of sol-
itary work, an implicit but strong dialogical
dimension was already present at the beginning
of the second period, when Marcus's book on
mathematical poetics generously described and
commented upon his students' research (Lucia
Vaina, Liana Schwartz, Mihai Dinu, etc.). In
the last part of the second period and in the third
period the dialogue with his students is not only
presented but exultantly incorporated as such
into the structure of his most representative
works. Marcus now recedes, or one may say
advances, towards the role of editor and co-
448 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU

author, of instigator to research and evaluator, Marcus expanded the ten or so oppositions
of coordinator with respect to a most formidable between lyrical and scientific language in Ser-
and devoted team of former students, followers, vien to an exuberant list of fifty-two oppositions
and colleagues. Thus, to give only so me of many (1974b). Some of these oppositions seem to be
possible examples, Mihai Dinu, Tatiana Mih- of a syntactic nature (Ex.: essentially long lyrical
nea, Mihai Nasta, Irina Grosu, Corina Grosu, contexts/ essentially short scientific contexts; musical
Daniela Gabrielescu, lolanda Lalu, and Mar- pervasion of the poetic language/ absence 01 musical
iana Steriadi-Bogdan were his collaborators for structures in mathematical language; essentially
the volume on the formal approach to drama; syntagmatic lyrical structures/essentially paradig-
Tudor Balanescu, Sorin Ciubotaru, Mihai Dinu, matic scientific structures; lyrical nonconcordance/
Mihaela Dumitru, Stanca Fotino, Corina Grosu, scientific concordance between the paradigmatic
Gheorghe Paun, Adriana Polith, Ion Radoi, and the syntagmatic distance, etc.). Most of them,
and Adrian Rogoz were his partners for the however, are semantic oppositions (Ex.: contin-
Romanian version of the volume on folklore uous lyrical significa tion/ discrete ma thema tical
semiotics, etc. This amounts to saying that signification; organic solidarity of poetic signifi-
although Marcus is still involved in a most cre- cation with its expression/relative independence of
ative and prolific activity, he has already insured mathematical signification from expression; var-
a strong succession by carefully raising up an iability of poetic signification with different
effective Romanian school of mathematical moments in time and different persons!immuta-
poetics and semiotics. bility of math~matical signification in time and
I will restrict this presentation to the discus- space; lack of concordance between the cardinal
sion of Marcus's activity during the second and number of the set of lyrical phrases and the car-
third period of his work. This does not imply dinal number of the set of lyrical significations/
that his linguistico-mathematical research is presence of such concordance in the case of
irrelevant for semiotics. As a matter of fact, Mar- mathematical phrases and mathematical signi-
cus is the classical type of European semiotician, fications; essentially connotative poetic language/
for whom language is the central system of signs essentially denotative scientific language, etc.).
and linguistics the pilot science. Since, however, There are also a number of pragmatic as weIl
mathematical linguistics has already detached as some general-often vague--Dppositions, such
itself as an independent, compact, and strongly as: reflexiveness of the poetic activity/transitivity of
formalized subject of study, I would rather dis- the scientific activity; essentially natural poetic
cuss here two domains in which Solomon Mar- language/essentially artificial scientific language;
cus's rigorous and imaginative interventions are opa city of the poetic sign/transparence of the math-
still most strongly needed, and often, still in the emati,cal sign; essentially untranslatable poetic lan-
making. guage/indefinitely translatable scientific language;
essen tially creative lyrical language/ essen tially
routine scientific language; singular poetic lan-
1. Poetry and Science guage/ general scientific language; personal poetic
stereotypes/general scientific stereotypes; essentially
The main idea of Marcus's mathematical iniffable poetic language/essentially explicable sci-
poetics takes its point of departure from Pius entific language; poetic charm/scientific lucidity;
Servien: poetry cannot be usefully described by a-logical poetic language based upon suggestion/
comparing it with ordinary language, for ordi- logical scientific language; unpredictable poetic lan-
nary language is much more complex and dif- guage/predictable scientific language, etc.
ficult to formalize than poetic language; it can, These dichotomies represent the point of
instead, be fruitfully opposed to science. In departure for constructing the mathematical
defining as clearly as possible the irreducible model of the opposition between poetic and sci-
opposition between an idealized poetic language and entific language. The model proposed by Marcus
an idealized scientific language, specialists in poetics (1970a) basically consists of a set of twenty-five
can attain to a clearer understanding of the propositions in which deeper qualifications are
uniqueness of poetry and an easier formalization introduced: index 01 synonymy (homonymy) 01 a lan-
of its study. guage, rythmical length of a phrase, language with
 ROMANIA
rhythmical structure, rythmical diameter 01 a phrase (or
a language), structure of valorization associated with a
lyricallanguage, index 01 accessibility of a phrase, finite
(infinite) accessibility 01 a language, distance between
the significations associated with a phrase x by a person
n, index 01 receptivity of aperson, and so forth.
To suggest the flavor of Marcus's model, I
shall take two examples.
The first will be Proposition 15, which reads:
"The set of significations that are expressed in
a lyrical language is of the power of the contin-
uum."49 In order to be able to distinguish between
the infinite number of significations of a lyrical
phrase, Marcus introduces at this point a structure
of valuation: if a person n has grasped at a moment
t the phrase x with signification s, then this phrase
will be inserted in n's biography and will haunt
hirn until the end of his life (Condition 13);
moreover, it will suffer a continuous metamor-
phosis during the span of n's life (Condition 14).
This is how Marcus' model accounts for what
he calls the "miracle of grasping a lyrical phrase."
Note that scientific language does not have a
valuation structure.
The second example will be represented by
Proposition 16, according to which: "Given a
lyrical language that has a valuation structure,
every set I(n, x) that is not void is of the power
of the continuum."so In Marcus's view, this
proposition means that in grasping a lyrical
phrase a person will grasp an infinite continuum 01
significations, that is a number of significations
larger than the set of all significations that could
be expressed in all scientific languages (where
the set of expressible significations is numera-
ble). Note, however-he adds-that each of the
lyrical phrases contains an infinite ambiguity (its
homonymy index being equal with infinite), while
in a scientific language ambiguity is suppressed.
What the two examples are meant to show is
that, in modelling the opposition between poetic
and scientific language, Marcus offers an
extremely strong, almost initiatic, if not religious
interpretation to the reading of poetry. This
returns us to Eliade's strong interpretation of lit-
erature I was discussing before. From Marcus's
point of view the reader of a poem appears to
submit to a decisive ritual, while the reader of
a scientific text is basically treated as an easy-
igcr. Marcus (1970a), pp. 128-129.
50Ibid., pp. 132-133.
449
going consumer. Thus, the model seems to incor-
porate a way of distinguishing between poetry
readers and science readers, which, though inter-
esting, cannot be fully endorsed. For, going back
to the condi tion (15) previously men tioned, I do
not think that a scientific phrase could not insert
equally well in the biography of aperson, even
as far as its expression is concerned, if it happens
to strike that person in a relevant manner and
to start an important train of thought. Our bio-
graphies are as rational as they are emotional
and, what is more-as Grigore Moisil liked to
stress in his lectures-the passage from one level
to the other is continuous and unnoticeable. Fur-
thermore, I believe that every scientific phrase,
if retained, will also tend to suffer a continuous
metamorphosis. One may reply however that,
while in the case of scientific phrases the fight
is against such metamorphosis, to keep them
straight and clearcut, in the case of lyrical
phrases, our inner biography submits them
remorselessly to incessant modifications.
What I am saying does not imply that Mar-
cus's vision, as expressed in his model, is lacking
in either beauty or stimulation. I t is avision
which suggests a closer, less opaque connection,
and one more easily accepted by the subject,
between poetry and our inner being. Poetry would
thus appear to penetrate directly and easily into
our life; science, instead, always kept at a dis-
tance, would rather help us elude our immediate
biography for a while. Thus, Marcus's model
implies among other things a basic difference
between making a poem "work" for one's life,
and choosing not to do so with a scientific text.
The questions I would ask are "Why?" and "Is
it right?" But these are semiotic questions of
another type than those approached here.
Marcus added to the simultaneous, contras-
tive, and negative definitions of poetic and sci-
entific language separate positive descriptions for
each of them.
The supreme form of scientific language is,
according to Marcus, mathematical language.
To understand its structure, Marcus undertook
the analysis of several mathematical texts writ-
ten in Romanian by Gh. Vranceanu, Miron
Nicolescu, Grigore Moisil, and Ion Barbu. In
reading such texts, he wrote, one is confronted
with a heterogeneous structure. On the one hand,
they are written in Romanian, therefore making
use, although in an idiosyncratic mann er, of this
450 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
naturallanguage. On the other hand, they appeal
to many artificial symbols and notations that can
occur in mathematical texts independently of the
natural language in which the intuitive, com-
menting part of the text was basically written.
The grammatical structure of "mathematical
Romanian" is relatively simple. Sentences are
shorter than in ordinary language. Subordinate
and principal sentences are monotonously con-
nected by such words as dadi ... atunci; deoareee
... avem; rezulta ca ... , etc. Grammatical cate-
gories such as-for verbs-second person, plu-
perfect, simple perfect, future in the past,
imperative, etc. are almost unrepresented.
Abbreviations are used which although similar
to the ones found in ordinary language, are not
attested in it (Ex.: 0 fnehisa "a dosed" for 0 mul-
time fnehisa "a dosed set"; 0 desehisa "an open"
for 0 multime desehisa "an open set"). Verbs appear
mostly in the indicative (present, compound per-
fect, and future) and in subjunctive. The voices
most characteristically used are active, imper-
sonal reflexive, and passive. The average length
of the word tends to be greater than in a literary
text.
It is at the semantic level that Marcus's anal-
ysis becomes most interesting. From the point
of view of their meaning, there are-he says-
three types of "mathematical words" (1) words
which exist in ordinary language and have, in
the mathematical text, the same meaning they
have in ordinary language (Ex.: most of the prep-
ositions, adverbs, conjunctions, etc.); (2) words
that have different meanings in ordinary lan-
guage and in mathematicallanguage (Ex.: Rom.
transcendent, peifixta, ftontiera, filtru, ordonata, rational,
sita, eonexiune, inel, ideal, etc.); (3) words which
do not exist in ordinary language (Ex.: Rom.
meromorj1i, monogena, etc.). Most of the words in
dass (2) are what Marcus calls mathematieal met-
aphors. By comparing them with the linguistic
and poetic metaphors, Marcus arrived at the
following conclusions. (a) Like linguistic meta-
phors, mathematical metaphors belong to the
(mathematical) language in its totality and not to
the idiolect of a specific author. Therefore, "while
poetic metaphor is reflexive and singular, ful-
filling an expressive function, mathematical met-
aphor is transitive and general, fulfilling a
communicative function."S! (b) Like linguistic
51 Ibid., p. 94.
metaphors, mathematical metaphors are deno-
tative, their meaning being controlled by rigorous
definitions. This again opposes mathematical
metaphors to poetic metaphors where a conno-
tative metaphorical term stands in firm and
clearcut opposition (is it always so?) to a deno-
tative term which it serves to replace. (c) Like
linguistic metaphor-more or less, I would say-
mathematical metaphors are transparent, thus
opposed to the poetic opaque metaphors.
(d) Unlike linguistic metaphors, however, math-
ematical metaphors have an essentially hetero-
geneous, mixed character, since they are based on
an analogy between mathematical significations
and ordinary significations. Therefore, in Mar-
cus's view, linguistic metaphor is an internal met-
aphor (internal to ordinary language) whereas
mathematical metaphor is an external metaphor
(external to both ordinary and mathematical
language). From this point ofview, Marcus con-
tends, mathematical metaphors resemble poetic
metaphors, which are heterogeneous, and exter-
nal as well, since the poetic transfer occurs
between an ordinary signification and a poetic
signification. However, the heterogeneous char-
acter of the poetic metaphor is less apparent than
the heterogeneous character of the mathematical
metaphor.
Most interestingly, Marcus did not limit his
approach to lexical metaphors in the mathe-
matical language. He also studied wh at he calls
graphie metaphors, such as the symbols "-" and
" X" as used in set theory (w hieh represen ts a
metaphorical extension of their use in connec-
tion with numbers); the symbol "d" used in the
notation of integrals (and representing a meta-
phoric extension of the same symbol used to
mark the differential); the symbols "0" (void
set), "f" (integral), "u" (set reunion), and "n"
(set intersection) which represent semi-metaphor-
ical" extensions-for they also partially deform
them-of the symbols "0" (zero), "s" (sum),
''V'' (logical disjunction), and "1\" (logical con-
junction), respectively.
By means of metaphors, Marcus condudes,
mathematicians take a distance [rom notions in
a similar way to the poet's taking a metaphorical
distance from objects.
While in Marcus (1970a), and in many of the
articles that are connected with his activity in
the domain of mathematical poetics, Solo mon
Marcus defined the form of scientific language
 ROMANIA 451

not per se, but as a term of reference for the introduced concepts such as the measure of the
analysis of the poetic language, in Marcus homogeneity (heterogeneity) of two semantic categories,
(l979a) he gave an ample independent definition reducible (irreducible) semantic categories, the semantic
of scientific language completed with several new distance between ca tego ries, the semantic degree of a
and important notes. These are: (a) scientific syntagm, etc. He developed mathematical models
language is, like poetic language, a language of for synaesthesia, as weH as for the rather unknown
discovery; (b) it has a high syllogistic density, a poetic figures based on syntactic dislocation. As
conciseness that is its main heuristic quality; far as poetic sound-structure is concerned, he
(c) paradoxically, because of its infinite synon- gave most interesting probabilistic and infor-
ymy,52 it is scientific language and not the poetic mational analyses of poetic sounds, rhythms, of
one which is the essential field of stylistic choices; entropy, and informational energy in Eminescu's
(d) if one takes into consideration its artificial poems, etc.
and natural components, one can distinguish One of the most original aspects of Marcus's
between eight types of translation for any sci- approach to poetic language is the introduction
entific text; (e) scientific language is polydimen- of binary codes and graph theory in the com-
sional, as opposed to naturallanguage, which is parative estimation of the degree of structural
linear; (f) scientific language is domina ted by the similarity between two or more texts. The types
referential function (which may sometimes coin- of texts Marcus subjected to this analysis were
cide with the metalinguistic function); either (a) variants of the same poem (for exam-
(g) paradoxically again, artificial languages used ple the four variants of the poem Mai am un singur
in science tend to become "very natural" when dor by Mihai Eminescu, which has been studied
their pragmatics get older;53 (h) scientific lan- by Liana Schwartz), or (b) translations into one
guage is more figurative than the poetic one for language X of a language Y poem (for example
mathematical metaphors are a condition for gen- t~e Romanian translations of Baudelaire's poem
eralization, abstractization, and mathematical A une passante, as executed by Philippide, Dau§,
discovery while modern poetry most often does Caraion, and Bascovici, which had been studied
without poetic metaphors (here, I wonder by Lucia Vaina). The parameters used in the
whether Marcus uses the term metaphor in the analysis of each li ne of the poem were: (a) word
same way for science and poetry); (i) scientific order; (b) prosody; (c) syn tactic categories;
language also abounds in poetic metonymy (Ex.: (d) lexical choices; and (e) semantic categories.
the use of an element for its equivalence class, As a result of the analysis Marcus developed a
finite approximations of infinite processes, "log- methodology allowing for the establishment of
ical" metonymies, etc.); U) this essential figur- the filiation relationships in a set of variants, or
ative nature of scientific language could be of the hierarchy in a set of translations of the
explained by the semiotic tendency to project same original text. This methodology was, in nuce,
structural features of natural languages into what he was going to need in the third period
human artificial languages; (k) scientific lan- of his activity, when he subjected to semiotic
guage includes both motivated signs (indices and analysis the domain par excellence of variation-
icons corresponding respectively to its meto- folk literature.
nymic and metaphoric figures) and unmotivated As we have shown, Marcus's mathematical
signs (symbols) that mostly result from the poetics includes and presupposes a strong com-
quantitative accumulation of the first. ponent devoted to the definition of scientific lan-
In presenting poetic language, Solomon Mar- guage. There is another, most important
cus gave important analyses of its figures and component in it, namelY the analysis of dramatic
sound-structure. The figure he described in most language, which I will not present he re because
detail was, again, metaphor. In order to deepen of space limitations. In bringing together math-
the semantic analysis of metaphor, Marcus ematical models for theater, science, and poetry,
Marcus's poetics becomes indeed a most inter-
esting attempt at a global semiotic approach to
52Marcus had already formulated this observation in 1970a.
What is new is the status ofjirst paradox of scientific lan-
the most diversified functions of language, at a
guage which he gave to this observation. formal analysis and classification of texts, at a
"Cr. Marcus (1979c), p. 36. functional semiotics.
452 SANDA GOLOPENTIA·ERETESCU
2. Marcus's Semiotics of Folklore
Marcus's efforts in developing a semiotics of
folklore are oriented in the following three direc-
tions: (a) a formal approach to folk narrativity;
(b) a formal approach to repetitive, routine structures
in fllkore; and (c) a formal approach to the proc-
ess of variation.
All these efforts are "fed" so to say by the
typological work al ready achieved by Romanian
folkorists such as Fochi, Amzulescu, Barlea,
Stroescu, M. Pop, and the like.
The deep relevance of Marcus's semiotics of
folklore is due to the fact that folk poetry does
not appear to represent a poetic language in the
sense of Marcus (1970). Neither do folk variants
have functions similar to the variants of a literary
poem.
There are many ideas with which Marcus is
experimenting at this point. Among the most
interesting, I would like to mention the following
two: (a) the idea according to which variants
represent the overt manifestation of a process of
paradigmatic prolongation that is covert in the case
of literature proper; (b) the idea that-unlike in
literature proper-where a variant is represen-
tative due to substantial criteria, in folk-literature
it would be more relevant to define a represen-
tative variant in a relational manner. The most
typical folk variant is that variant which is most
similar to all the other variants.
Thus, according to (a), Marcus again gives us
a strong model of wh at is usually called folk-
literature circulation. It would consist, if I con-
tinue his thought correctly, in the fact that, once
created, a folkloric text t composed by x is read
as t l , t 2 , •• t n by XI, X 2 , •• X n , who in turn transmit
their readings to XI', X 2',"X n ', and so on, in a
gigantic reading machine in which nobody ever
goes back to the "original text," in which reread-
ing as such is totally unknown.
v. General Coverage
In preparing the References attached to this
presentation I have tried to cover all the sub-
disciplines and areas of study that are charac-
teristic for Romanian semiotics. I have also
included pre-semiotic and implictly semiotic
approaches. I have tried to give the reader as
objective an image as possible by taking into
consideration contributions from all the impor-
tant research groups in the country, namely those
in Bucure§ti, Cluj, Timi§oara, and Ia§i.
It is therefore possible, by simply consulting
the References, to attain to a general represen-
tation of the history, problematics, and scope of
the semiotic studies in Romania.
VI. References
Abbreviations
AAR: Analele Academiei Romane.
ACIL X: Actes du XC Congres international des linguistes. Bucarest,
28 aoiit-2 septembre 1967. (Publie sur la recommanda-
tion du Conseil international de la philosophie et des sci-
ences humaines, avec le concours financier de I'UNESCO.)
Redacteur en chef: A. Graur. Bucharest: EA, I (1969),2-
4 (1970).
ACILFR XII: Actele celui de al XII-lea Gongres international de
linguistiea ji filologie romanica. (Publicat la recomandarea
Consiliului international de filozofie §i §tiinte um anis te cu
concursul financiar al UNESCO.) Redactor responsabil:
Alexandru Rosetti.) Bucharest: EA, I (1970),2 (1971).
A UB: Analele Uniuersita{ii Bueure}ti. Seria §tiinte sociale. Fi-
lologie. Bucharest, 1954-.
AUE: Ibid. Seria Esteticii.
AUF: Ibid. Seria Filozofie.
AUI: Analeie ftiinfifiee ale Universitafii "Al. 1. Cuza" din la}i
(serie noua) Seqiunea III. Stiinte sociale. e. Lingvisticii.
Jassy, 1957-.
AUT: Analele Universitatii din Timijoara. Seria §tiinte filologice.
Timi§oara, 1963-.
AUTF: Ibid. Seria Filozofie.
BMSSM: Bulletin matMmatique de la Sociiti des Seienees matM-
matiques de la R.S.R. (Bucharest, 1957-).
CL: Cereetari de lingvistica. (Academia Republicii Socialiste
Romania. Filiala Cluj. Institutul de lingvisticii. 1956-).
CLTA: Cakiers de linguistique tMorique et appliquie (since
volume 12: Revue roumaine de linguistique-Cakiers.) Bucha-
rest, EA, 1962-).
CME: Caietele Mikai Emineseu. Studii, articole, documente,
iconografie §i bibliografie prezentate de Marin Bucur.
Bucharest: Eminescu, 1972-.
CREL: Cakiers roumains d'itudes littiraires. Revue trimestrielle
de critique, d'esthetique et d'histoire litteraire. (Bucharest:
Univers, 1972-).
Crit. lect.: Critica ji actullecturii. Sibiu: Comitetul judelean de
cultura §i educalie socialista, revista Transilvania, Aso-
cialia scriitorilor, 1980.
CS: Miclau (1977d).
DVS: De la Varlaam la Sadoveanu. Studii despre limba §i stilul
scriitorilor. Bucharest: ESPLA, 1956.
EA: Editura Academiei Republicii Populare Romane; Edi-
tura Academiei Republicii Socialiste Romania.
EDP: Editura didacticii §i pedagogicii.
EER: Editura enciclopedica romana.
ELU: Editura pentru literatura universalä.
EM: Editura muzicala.
 ROMANIA
EP: Editura politic!i.
EPL: Editura pentru literatura.
ES: Editura ~tiintifica.
ESE: Editura ~tiintifica ~i enciclopedic!i.
ESPLA: Editura de stat pentru literatura ~i arta.
FD: Foneticali dialeetologie. (Volumes 1-3: Academia Repub-
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F'L: Folclor literar. Universitatea din Timi~oara, 1967-.
FRLA: Fundatiile Regale pentru literatura ~i arta.
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ICSR: Institutul de cercetari sociale al Romaniei.
IMMSS: Informaticali modele matematice in Jtiinlele sociale.
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ISR: Institutul Social Roman.
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LR: Limba romana. Bucharest: EA, 1952-.
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472 SANDA GOLOPENTIA-ERETESCU
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 CHAPTER21
Semiotics in Spain
Cristina Gonzatez
I. Semiotics and Literature
A. Introduction
After the traditional-and traditionalist-schol-
ars hip of Marcelino Menendez Pelayo (1856-
1912), Spanish criticism of the 20th century
begins with Ram6n Menendez Pidal (1869-
1968), director of the Royal Academy and foun-
der of both the Center for Historical Studies and
the school whose medium of expression is the
Revista de Filologia Espaiiola. In his treatment of
literary works, Menendez Pidal employs his tor-
ical as well as philological and linguistic meth-
ods. And it is in this, precisely, that his originality
lies: in his practice of analyzing the linguistic
components of the work as well as the historical
background of the author and his creation.
Damaso Alonso, dis ci pie of Menendez Pidal,
went one step beyond his master and founded
the Spanish school of stylistics, with adherents
such as Carlos Bousoiio, Emilio Alarcos Llorach,
Fernando Lazaro Carreter, Manuel Alvar, etc.
These critics are characterized by their cautious
application of structuralist theories to linguistic
This chapter was translated from the Spanish by Karen
Taylor.
Cristina Gonzalez • Department of Foreign Languages,
Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, U.S.A. 47907.
473
and literary analysis. In Poesia Espaiiola. Ensayo
de Mitodos y Limites Estilisticos, l Damaso Alonso
adds nuances to Saussure's definition of the sign
as the union of a concept and an acoustical image,
or of a signified and a signifier. According to
Alonso, whereas the signifier consists of the sound
and the acoustical image, the signified is the mes-
sage, which may or may not correspond to var-
ious concepts. In this, Alonso coincides with
modern revisions of Saussure's ideas. Alonso's
followers treat this and other problems, espe-
cially that of poetic language. Indeed, poetic lan-
guage is the subject of Carlos Bousoiio's Teoria
de la Expresion Poitica, 2 of Emilio Alarcos Llor-
ach's Ensayos y Estudios Literarios,3 of Fernando
Lazaro Carreter's Estudios de Poitica. La Obra en
SZ4 and of Manuel Alvar's Vision en Claridad. Estu-
dios sobre <CCtintico. ,,5 Other critics who study this
matter are Jose Antonio Martinez and Gregorio
Salvador, followers respectively of Alarcos Llor-
ach and Lazaro Carreter. All of these scholars
IDämaso Alonso, Poesia Espaiiola. Ensayo de Mftodos y Limites
Estilisticos (Madrid: Gredos, 1950).
2Carlos Bousoiio, Teoria de /a Expresion Poftica (Madrid: Gre-
dos, 1952). •
'Emilio Alarcos Llorach, Ensayosy Estudios Literarios (Madrid:
Jucar, 1976).
4Fernando Läzaro Carreter, Estudios de Poitica. La Ohra en Si
(Madrid: Taurus, 1976).
5Manuel Alvar, Vision en Claridad. Estudios Sohre "Cantico"
(Madrid: Gredos, 1976).
474 CRISTINA GONZALEZ
lean more or less towards structuralism. Those
who come dosest to semiotics, although in dif-
ferent ways, are Liizaro Carreter and Alvar. In
Estudios de Poitica, Lazaro Carreter does not limit
hirns elf to one author. Rather, he speaks of lit-
erature in general from a semiotic point of view.
Manuel Alvar, who resorts to semiotics in Vision
en Claridad, analyzes the literary production of a
single poet, Jorge Guilh~n.
Semiotics appeared in Spain at the beginning
of the 1970s, in the wake of structuralism, which
had been introduced and assimilated shortly
before. As had been the case with structuralism,
semiotics was applied principally in literary crit-
icism, a field in which it stirred up controversy.
All this occurred during the final years of Fran-
co's dictatorship, when all that had been static
in Spain for more~"than thirty years began to
change rapidly, induding textual exegesis. In the
decade between 1965 and 1975, this became, in
turn, sociological, psychological, structuralist and
semiotic, tendencies which currently coexist.
Semiotic commentary was initiated in Spain by
Antonio Prieto, Candido Perez Gallego, Marfa
del Carmen Bobes and Alicia YIlera. Whereas
Bobes and YIlera limit themselves to explaining
the theory, Prieto and Perez GaIlego apply it in
literary analysis. These authors were the first in
Spain to employ the latest European and Amer-
ican critical approaches, which took root in their
country in 1975, the year in which the longest
and maturest books appeared. Since 1975, there
has been a steady stream of semiotic works-
products, if not of formal schools, then at least
of identifiable groups associated with universi-
ties and publishing houses. The most outstand-
ing are those of Madrid, Oviedo, Valencia,
Malaga and Zaragoza.
B. The Madrid Group
In addition to Fernando Lazaro Carreter and
Manuel Alvar, mentioned above, other critics in
this heterogeneous group are Antonio Prieto, Pilar
Palomo, Jose Maria Diez Borque, Luciano Gar-
da Lorenzo, J orge U rrutia, Francisco Rodriguez
Adrados, Miguel Angel Garrido Gallardo, Fran-
cisco Abad Nebot, etc.
One of the first cultivators of semiotics in Spain
was Antonio Prieto, professor of Spanish liter-
ature at the U niversity of Madrid, critic, novelist
and director of the coIlection Ensayos Planeta. He
was one of the first to resort to it in his teaching
as weIl as in his books, especiaIly in Ensayo Semio-
16gico de Sistemas Literarios6 and Morfologia de la
Novela. 7
Ensayo Semiologico de Sistemas Literarios is a col-
lection of essays on a wide variety of themes.
What all of the essays have in common is the
critical methodology used, a combination of
semiotic technique and poetic intuition. This
substantial book is characterized by a density of
insights and ideas. According to Prieto, the lit-
erary work, as a system of signification, comes
into being when a level of expression is joined
to a level of content. The coexistence of these
levels is what causes a text to have both a den-
otative and a connotative layer. SemioticaIly, the
communication system that is a literary creation
manifests itself by means of signs, symbols, and
symptoms. Of these, the symptom, produced
involuntarily by the emittor, is the one that best
lends itself to interpretation. Prieto thinks that
signs, symbols, and symptoms can be defined
according to a system of opposition: denotation/
connotation and voluntary/involuntary. Because
of the attention now being paid to symptoms, it
can be said that criticism has rediscovered the
author. This does not me an that scholars are
engaging on ce again in old-fashioned biograph-
ical criticism. However, they are interested in
the influence of the personal characteristics of
the writer on semiological structures. In some
ways, the author's symptoms as explained by
Prieto are similar to the characteristics ofWayne
Booth's implicit author. According to Prieto,
symptomatic complexes which are repeated con-
stitute a syndrome. Recurring syndromes deter-
mine literary genres or forms which, in turn, are
symptoms of something. For example, the pas-
toral novel is a symptom of the Renaissance and
the picaresque novel of the Baroque. Applying
these theories, Prieto treats in an interesting
mann er such matters as the Proven~al sestina in
the Spanish pastoral novel; Lazarillo, Guzman and
the Buscon as, respectively, symbol, sign, and
symptom; mythical fusion in Garcilaso and Cer-
vantes; the meaning of a sonnet by Lope, etc.
Morfologia de la Novela contains more theory
and less application than Ensayo Semio16gico de
6Antonio Prieto, Ensayo SemiolOgico de Sistemas Literarios (Bar-
celona: Planeta, 1972).
7 Antonio Prieto, MorfoLogia de La NoveLa (Barcelona: Planeta,
1975).
 SPAIN
Sistemas Literarios. Therefore, it is clearer and more
coherent, thoughjust as packed with provocative
ideas. In this book, Prieto concentrates first on
the emittor. From this perspective, he defines
the novel as a systematic unity that is produced
by the opposition between an. objective structure
(society) and a subjective one (the emittor). In
this sense, Prieto coincides with Goldman, who
says that the novel must be simultaneously a
biography and a social chronicle. Prieto concen-
trates next on the receiver. From this point of
view, he characterizes the literary work as a com-
munication or signal that an emittor sends to a
receiver. The communication or signal causes a
·different re action in each receiver. This distinc-
tion depends upon the background of the receiver
which, in turn, depends on the opposition
between an objective structure (society) and a
subjective one (the receiver). Therefore, one could
say that the structure of the reception of a lit-
erary work is at the same time a biography and
a social chronicle of the receivers. Applying these
theories, Prieto studies the novels of the Ren-
aissance: Greek novels collected by theoreti-
cians; novels of chivalry, represented by Amadis;
and sentimental and pastoral novels, repre-
sen ted by I talian and Spanish works such as
Fiammetta, the Arcadia, and Garcel de Amor, EI Siervo
Libre de Amor, the Diana and the Diana Enamorada.
In the fourth chapter, Prieto analyzes the Dis-
ciplina Glericalis, Sendebar and the Gonde Lucanor.
He feels that when the medieval structure of
these works (consisting of astring of stories) is
combined with the epistolary form of the Ren-
aissance, the structure and form of Lazarillo are
born.
In general, Pilar Palomo follows the theories
of Antonio Prieto, although occasionally she
departs from them. Of her many studies, the one
that interests us most here is La Novela Gortesana
(Forma y Estructura) ,8 because of its semiotic ori-
entation. Like Prieto, Palomo applies her critical
model to several works simultaneously. In this
case, she makes a comparative study of the short
novels in Los Gigarrales de Toledo and Deleytar
Aprovechando, of Tirso de Molina. However, as
we have seen, her technique does not always
resemble that of Prieto. The principal difference
has to do with the concept of form. Palomo,
"Pilar Palomo, La Novela Cortesana (Formay Estructura) (Bar-
celona: Planeta, 1975).
475
following Wittgenstein, Ingarden, Unamuno,
etc., understands form as the result of a con-
scious and voluntary choice of a pre-established
system, which the author accepts in order to
communicate his message. For Palomo, the
search for the structure is the search for the orig-
inal system through an examination of the forms
that are derived from it. In the Moifölogia de la
Novela, Prieto studies the Disciplina Glericalis, Sen-
debar and EI Gonde Lucanor. He feels that this
medieval structure of astring of stories, when
combined with the Renaissance epistolary form,
gives rise to the structure of the form of Lazarillo.
According to Palomo, wh at happens is that a
new message appears, one that alters the system
in a different way than the former message, and
produces a,..new form.
Jose Maria Diez Borque, Luciano Garcia Lor-
enzo, Jorge Urrutia and Francisco Rodriguez
Adrados also belong to the Madrid group. All of
them have written a variety of studies with a
semiotic orientation and they are co-authors of
Semiologia deI Teatro,9 the first book on this theme
produced in Spain. This works brings together
aseries of articles written especially for this pub-
lication by critics of different nationalities: the
Russian Zholkovskii, the Hungarian Szekfü, the
Belgian Helbo, the Italians Segre and Eco, the
Argentinian Castagnino, and the Spaniards
Candido Perez Gallego, Pilar Palomo, Francisco
Rodriguez Adrados, Jorge Urrutia, Luciano
Garcia Lorenzo, and Jose Maria Diez Borque.
The latter two are the editors. The book is the-
oretical, treating the application of semiotics to
the study of theater, as well as practical, with
analyses of specific plays and movies by Eisen-
stein, Jancs6, Beckett, Montherlant, Buenaven-
tura, Unamuno, G6mez de la Serna, and Buero
Vallejo. This is the first book produced in Spain
that tries to define theater from a semiotic point
of view. According to Diez Borque, a theatrical
performance is composed of both a linguistic and
a scenic text, intimately related to each other but
separable when analyzed. Diez Borque believes
that whereas the study of the linguistic text cor-
res ponds tQ the semiotics of non-theatrical lit-
erature, the study of the scenic text is within the
province of semiotics of the theater. The signs
of the scenic text may be divided into three
gJose Mafia Diez Borque and Luciano Garcia Lorenzo eds.,
Semiologfa dei Teatro (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975).
476 CRISTINA GONZALEZ
groups: objective realities shown by actors, scen-
ery, etc.; objective realities presented indirectly
by language and complemented by visual signs;
and objective realities that are brought to the
stage only through the intermediary of language.
According to Garcia Lorenzo, theatrical pro-
ductions are composed of a plurality of codes
that offer information to the receiver. This infor-
mation comes from both linguistic and scenic
signs. The study of scenic signs is the object of
semiotics of the theater. Urrutia differs from
Garcia Lorenzo on this matter. For Urrutia, the
function of the semiotic critic of theater is to
comment not only on scenic signs, but also on
linguistic ones, since they are what make it pos-
sible for the production to be performed, that is
to say, they are what make it theatrj.cal.
Miguel Angel Garrido Gallardo, author of
Introducci6n a la Teoria de la Literatura,1O also belongs
to the Madrid group. His book divulges the con-
clusions, or rather, the hypotheses, of a project
concerning literary theory undertaken by the
team that Garrido Gallardo hirnself directs in
the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cien-
tificas of Madrid. This is a schematic work of
synthesis, whose fundamental theme is language
and literature. According to Garrido Gallardo,
literary language is based on connotations derived
from several sources. One of these sources is
substance of expression (onomatopoeia). Another
is the form of expression (the author's practice
of placing the elements he wishes to emphasize
in positions in sentences and lines of poetry where
they will be most perceptible). Two other sources
are substance of the content (tropos) and form
of the content (apostrophe, prosopopoeia, etc.).
According to Garrido Gallardo, the literary func-
tion of language has its roots in a special codi-
fication on the part of the emittor. The emittor
produces a sort of intensified message that
imposes a precise decodification on the decodi-
fier, obligating hirn to explore the message itself
and not to be satisfied with only its reference.
Another member of the Madrid group is Fran-
cisco Abad Nebot, author of EI Signo Literario. 11
This book consists of various independent essays
written as a response to certain readings or for
concrete professional occasions. It is composed
IOMiguei Angel Garrido GaJlardo, Introduccion a la Teoria de
la Literatura (Madrid: S.G.E.L., 1975).
"Francisco Abad Nebot, EI Signo Literario (Madrid: Edaf,
1977).
in the style of the remarks and replies of Amer-
ican journals. It owes its remarkable unity to
three fundamental ideas that form its backbone:
the his tory of linguistic thought as a progressive
falsification of paradigms, language as the for-
mal precipitate of cultural factors, and the for-
mal nature of different semiotic products,
especially language and literature. Hence the tide
Culturay Formas Filol6gicas, that Abad Nebot had
originally considered but which he later dis-
carded, replacing it with EI Signo Literario.
According to Abad Nebot, whereas naturallan-
guage denotes the world, literary language
denotes only itself, while connoting the world.
Literary language superposes connotation upon
denotation. Since it does not have to denote the
world, literary language becomes a closed system
of signs. It escapes from what is permitted by
the system and connotes the world.
C. The Oviedo Group
Maria del Carmen Bobes, Joaquina Canoa
Galiana, Alberto Alvarez Sanagustin, Rafael
Nlinez Ramos, Antonio Gil Hernandez and
Maria Dolores Rajoy aB belong to this rather
homogeneous group.
Maria deI Carmen Bobes, professor of literary
criticism in the University of Oviedo, has fol-
lowed a course that has gone from philosophy
to linguistics, from linguistics to semiotics, and
from semiotics to semiotic criticism. Indeed, she
has helped introduce semiotic criticism into Spain
with her books La Semi6tica como Teoria Lingüis-
tica,12 Critica Semiol6gica,13 Gramatica de CCCantico"
(Analisis Semio16gico/ 4 Gramatica Textual de ccBelar-
mino y Apolonio, ,,15 and Comentario de Textos
Literarios. 16
La Semi6tica como Teoria Lingüistica is an intro-
duction to semiotics. In this book, Bobes speaks
first of the concept and the his tory of semiotics.
She goes on to comment on the division of
semiotics into three parts: syntactic, semantic,
'2Marfa del Carmen Bobes, La Semiotica corno Teoria Lingüistica
(Madrid: Gredos, 1973).
"Maria del Carmen Bobes, ed., Critica SemioLOgica (Santiago
de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela,
1974).
14Maria del Carmen Bobes, Gramdtica de "Cdntico" (Andlisis
SemioLOgico) (Barcelona: Planeta, 1975).
15Maria del Carmen Bobes, Gramdtica Textual de "Belarmino
y Apolonio" (Barcelona: Planeta, 1977).
'6Marfa del Carmen Bobes, Comentario de Textos Literarios
(Madrid: Planeta, 1978).
 SPAIN
and pragmatic. She then describes the theories
of the School of Oxford and the Circle of Vienna,
paying special attention to Charles Morris and
Rudolf Carnap. She notes that the works Foun-
dations tif the Theory 01 Signs and Foundations tif Logie
and Mathematies (Chicago, 1938 and 1939, respec-
tively) are based on the synthesis of the prag-
matic and empirical tendencies of Anglo-Saxon
philosophy and the positivistic hypotheses and
methods of linguistic analysis of the Circle of
Vienna. After this, Bobes discusses semantics
and its principal currents: linguistic, behaviorist,
and philosophical or semiotic. She explains and
comments on semantics in detail, finis hing her
book with an interesting treatment of the prob-
lem of metalanguages. Their study, she says, is
the object of semiotic semantics.
Critiea SemiolOgiea is an application of semiotics
to criticism. This book is composed of four parts.
The first, by Bobes, is of a theoretical nature.
The others, by three members of her group, apply
theory to individual texts. In the first part, enti-
tled "La Critica Literaria Semiologica," Bobes
presents the historical foundations of the semiotic
method. Basically, there are three: one critical,
one linguistic and one philosophical. She refers
to Russian formalism, structuralist linguistics,
and semiotics. According to Bobes, the semiotic
method has been elaborated on the basis of the
contributions of Propp, Jakobson, Barthes,
Chomsky, Carnap, Morris, etc. Charles Morris
divulged the principal ideas of semiotics and
proposed to study the systems of signs on three
levels: the syntactic (the relation of the signs
among themselves), the semantic (the relation
of the signs to their signifieds), and the prag-
matic (the relation of the signs to the emittors
and to the receivers). Like Morris, Bobes pro-
poses to initiate the analysis of a work with the
identification of these levels. She begins with the
syntactic level: the distribution of the functions
in the work. She continues with the semantic
level: the determination of the signifieds of the
work. And she finishes with the pragmatic level,
the determination of the relation of the work to
the author and the reader.
Gramatiea de "Cantieo" (Analisis Semiol6gieo) is
the application of the theories explained in Cri-
tiea Semiol6giea. In this book, Bobes analyzes Can-
tieo by J orge Guillen, according to the methods
previously set forth. On the syntactic level, she
studies the distribution, form, and function of
the elements that compose the text of Cantieo.
477
On the semantic level she studies the signified,
paying special attention to the semantic trans-
formations of the poetic language and the struc-
turing of the semantic fields of the poems of
Guillen. On the pragmatic level, she studies the
relation of the work to the author and to the
readers, using as a basis textual clues concerning
the referential, expressive, and appellative func-
tions. According to Bobes, the distinguishing of
the three levels-syntactic, semantic and
pragmatic-is conventional. It is the result not
of adesire to separate the parts but rather to
focus attention on the parts as integrated into a
totality.
Gramatiea Textual de "Belarmino y Apolonio" is
Bobes' most mature contribution to semiotic
criticism. Accorcting to Bobes, the plot of Ramon
Perez de Ayala's Belarmino y Apolonio consists of
three subplots in three different degrees of trans-
formation and expansion. The study of these
three subplots or vers ions is what constitutes the
syntax of the story. Bobes feels that the relation
between the three versions could be schematized
thus: the version of Augustias: fundamental facts.
The version of Pedro: fundamental facts + vision
from within in order to justify a li ne of conduct.
Version of the author: functional facts + objec-
tive explanation + message. The functional facts
of the plot upon which the three subplots or
vers ions are based are very simple. They consist
of three units: love between the young people,
familial opposition because of previous antago-
nisrn, and separation. To these could be added
a fourth unit or denouement, which takes place
at the end of the three versions: the reunion of
Augustias and Pedro thanks to the intervention
of the author. The semantics includes everything
that shapes the meaning of the work. Bobes
affirms that all the elements of Belarmino y Apo-
lonio are developed on the basis of four funda-
mental significative axes: the opposing ideology
of the parents of the protagonists, the lack of the
minimum of economic means necessary to start
an independent life, submission to protectors,
and total lack of will. The pragmatics includes
all of the clues and elements of the work which
refer directly or indirectly to the author, the
reader, or to cultural systems exterior to the work.
Since it is impossible to study in depth all of the
cultural systems related to the novel, Bobes con-
centrates on one: politics. She finds a very inter-
esting parallel between the signified or message
of Belarmino y Apolonio and that of Politiea y Toros.
478 CRISTINA GONZA.LEZ
In that book, Ayala speaks of the total lack of
will of the Spanish people, which has destroyed
its ability to decide for itself and permits a pater-
nalistic relations hip with the sources of power.
Comentario de Textos Literarios is a collection of
articles written in the past few years. The articles
contain semiotic commentary on literary texts.
According to Bobes, there is no general model
that satisfactorily explains all of the texts. Rather,
all of the texts are variants of a hypothetical
general model that has never been totally elab-
orated. Some texts lend themselves better than
others to the study of specific parts of the model
as well as of specific aspects of the method. In
all eight articles, Bobes raises various theoretical
problems and resolves them by means of analysis
of texts. In the first article, entitled "AnaJisis
Formalista de Textos Leoneses," Bobes limits
herself to identifying functions and sequences.
In the second, entitled "Sintaxis N arrativa en
Aigunos Ensiemplos de EI Conde Lucanor," she
confirms the autonomy of the syntactic, seman-
tic and pragmatic levels. In the third, entitled
"Sintaxis Narrativa y Valor Semantico en el
Exemplo XXVII de EI Conde Lucanor," she dem-
onstrates the methodological and ontological
independence of the syntactic, semantic, and
pragmatic levels. In the fourth, entitled "Nor-
malizaci6n de un Texto Literario: Las Babas de!
Diabio de J. Cortazar," faced with the impossi-
bility of identifying the functions and sequences
of the text, she normalizes it. In the fifth, entitled
"Retablo de la Avaricia, la Lujuria y la Muerte. Anril-
isis Simico, " she confirms the inftuence of literary
genre in the transformation of the story into dis-
course. In the sixth, entitled "Sistema Lingüis-
tico y Sistema Literario in Ligazdn," she
demonstrates the functions' independence of the
structure as well as the structure's independence
of the characters. In the seventh, entitled "Uni-
dad Semica deI Poema A un Olmo Seco, de
A. Machado," she analyzes the semantic devices
of unification. And in the eighth, entitled "Pro-
cedimientos de Unificaci6n en Muerte a 10 Lejos,"
she studies the linguistic methods of unification.
Other members of the Oviedo group are Joa-
quina Canoa Galiana, Alberto Alvarez Sana-
gustin, Rafael Ntinez Ramos, Antonio Gil
Hernandez and Maria Dolores Rajoy, students
of Bobes and authors with her of Critica Semio-
16gica. This book is divided into four parts. The
first, by Bobes, is theoretical. The others, by
members of her group, contain application of
the theory. Three texts are analyzed, one lyric
("Analisis Semiol6gico de Cuatro Sonetos de
G6ngora," by Rafael Ntinez Ramos), one dra-
matic ("Analisis Semiol6gico de la Estructura de
una Obra Dramatica: Cara de plata," by Joaquina
Canoa Galiana), and another narrative ("Inma-
nencia y Manifestaci6n en la Historia Universal de
Infamia" by Alberto Alvarez Sanagustin). Because
of its timeliness and clarity, the book was very
successful and sold out rapidly. This was the
reason for publishing a second edition in 1977.
However, the second edition is really a new book.
Although it retains its four initial parts, there
are additions, deletions, andexpansions of var-
ious chapters. New members of Bobes' group as
well as critics or those of similar inclinations all
contribute. Thus, in the part dedicated to the
analysis of narrative texts, the following new
chapters appear: "Configuraci6n piscursiva de
Historia de Macacos," by Alberto Alvarez Sana-
gustin; "La Obra Literaria corno Integraci6n
Dinamica: Cinco Horas con Mario, of Delibes," by
Antonio Gil Hernandez, and "Historia y Dis-
curso Literario en Prometeo", by Maria Dolores
Rajoy Feijoo. In the part dedicated to the anal-
ysis of dramatic texts, the chapter "Analisis
Semiol6gico de la Estructura de una Obra Dra-
matica: Cara de Plata" by Joaquina Canoa Gal-
iana has been replaced by "Los Terminos de
Animales en Las Comedias Brirbaras," by Joaquina
Canoa. In the part dedicated to the analysis of
lyric texts there are two new chapters: "Ejes
Semanticos en EI Rayo que no Cesa," by Rafael
Ntinez Ramos, and "Aspectos de una Gramatica
Semi6tica de la Poesia," by Jose Romera Cas-
tillo. The part dedicated to theory has been con-
siderably amplified. The outstanding charac-
teristic of the book is the desire of all the con-
tributors to diminish the distance between the-
ory and its application to the analysis of texts.
I t is a true manual of semiotic textual
commentary.
D. The Valencia Group
Some members ofthis homogeneous group are
Jenaro Talens, Juan Oleza, Jose Romera Cas-
tillo, Antonio Tordera Saez, and Vicente Her-
nandez Esteve.
Jenaro Talens, professor of Spanish literature
at the University of Valencia and author of both
fiction and criticism, is one of the founders of
 SPAIN
the Valencia group. Among his books, the fol-
lowing are the most interesting to us because of
their semiotic focus: El Espacio y las Mascaras.
Introduccion a la Lectura de Cernuda,17 El Texto Plu-
ral. Sobre el Fragmentarismo Romantico: Una Lectura
Simb6lica de Espronceda, 18 Novela Picaresca y Practica
de la Transgresion,19 and La Escritura como Teatral-
idad. Acerca de Juan Ruiz, Santillana, Cervantes y el
Marco Narrativo en la Novela Corta Castellana del
Siglo XVIII. 20
El Espacio y las Mascaras. Introduccion a la Lectura
de Cernuda is a long analysis of the work of Cer-
nuda. In this book, Talens speaks of what J an
Mukarovsky calls the semantic gesture, which is
the unitary and unifying organization of the
components of the work. He also comments on
what Felix Vodicka labels the ordering principle,
which organizes the components of the work in
such a way that its esthetic function is fulfilled.
Talens distinguishes between system and struc-
ture. By system he understands the literary text
considered as a complex of signs related in a
certain manner. By structure he means the his-
tori ca I appropriation of the system, the trans-
formation of a complex of trans-historic signs
into a complex of historical ones, that is to say,
significant within a specific historical occasion.
Basing hirnself on this difference, Talens distin-
guishes between ordering principle and semantic
gesture, which he relates respectively to system
and structure. Talens believes that in the literary
work there is an ordering principle and as many
semantic gestures as historical realizations. For
Talens, the literary work may be interpreted on
two levels: on that of the ordering principle and
on that of the semantic gestures.
El Texto Plural. Sobre el Fragmentarismo Roman-
tico: Una Lectura Simb6lica de Espronceda is abrief
analysis of the work of Espronceda. One of Tal-
ens' principal ideas in this book is that the unfin-
ished poems of Espronceda stimulate the
imagination of the reader. Talens feels that
Espronceda understands literary discourse as
17Jenaro Talens, EI Espacio y las Mascaras. Introduccion a la
Leetura de Cernuda (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1975).
18Jenaro Talens, EI Texto Plural. Sohre el Fragmentarismo Roman-
tico: Una Lectura SimbOlica de Espronceda (Valencia: U niver-
sidad de Valencia, 1975).
19J enaro Talens, Novela Picaresca y Practica de la Transgresion
(Madrid: Jucar, 1975).
20Jenaro TaJens, La Escritura como Teatralidad. Acerca de Juan
Ruiz, Santillana, Cervantes y el Marco Narrativo en la Novela
Corta Castellana del Siglo XVII (Valencia: U niversidad de
Valencia, 1977).
479
action, as a way of intervening in society. In this
sense Talens defines the writing of Espronceda
as a plural text. He explains that the textuality
exceeds the limits of the literary text and consists
of a process of production within areal, social-
ized context.
Novela Picaresca y Practica de la Transgresion is a
collection of studies concerning various Castilian
novels. Paying special attention to the relation
of the emittor to the message, Talens compares
the Buscon of Quevedo to the Guzman of Aleman
and the anonymous Lazarillo, and finds that
whereas in the Lazarillo and the Guzman the fic-
titious is offered as real, in the Buscon the ficti-
tious is revealed as fictitious. As a contrast, in
Estebanillo Gonzalez, the real is presented as real.
According to Talens, Estebanillo Gonzalez suc-
ceeds in explaining what the Buscon does not:
that if Lazarillo and Guzman were able to function
as fictitiously true autobiographies, it was because
the difference between fiction and reality within
the literary dis course is a rhetorical difference.
In his collection of essays, La Escritura como
Teatralidad. Acerca de Juan Ruiz, Santillana, Cer-
vantes y el Marco Narrativo en la Novela Corta Cas-
tellana del Siglo XVII, Talens pays special attention
to the relation of the receiver to the message. He
studies the Libro de Buen Amor of Ruiz, The Nov-
elas Ejemplares of Cervantes, the Novelas a Marcia
Leonarda of Lope, the Cigarrales de Toledo of Tirso,
the Novelas Amorosas y Ejemplares of Zayas, and
the Navidades en Madrid of Carvajal. He notes that
Ruiz makes the receiver participate in the work;
Cervantes separates the reality (the frame), from
the literature (the narrations); and Lope, Tirso,
Zayas, and Carvajal confuse reality and litera-
ture. This latter phenomenon makes the receiv-
er's participation in the theatricality of literature
unreal and alienated, which explains the failure
of the works.
Juan Oleza, professor of Spanish literature at
the University ofValencia, is one of the founders
of the Valencia group. Among his numerous
books, works that are especially notable for their
semiotic focus are Sincronza y Diacronza: La Dialic-
tica del Discurso Poetico 21 and La Novela del Siglo
XIX: DeI Parto a la Crisis de una Ideologza. 22
Sincronza y Diacronza: La Dialictica del Discurso
Poetico is abrief study of the Poema de Mzo eid
21J uan Oleza, Sincronia y Diacronia: La Dialictica dei Discurso
Poetico (Valencia: Prometeo, 1975).
22J uan Oleza, La Novela dei Siglo XIX: Dei Pa rIo a la Crisis de
una !deologia (Valencia: Bello, 1976).
480 CRISTINA GONZALEZ

preceded by a long theoretical introduction in disenchanted with democracy, the Spaniards still
which Oleza reftects upon literary his tory. Oleza believe in its possibilities. This is the reason why
explains and comments upon the theories of the Spanish naturalism is idealistic rather than
Czechoslovakian structuralists. He pays special materialistic.
attention to Mukarovsky, who established the Jose Romera Castillo, now professor at the
basis of the relation between synchrony and National University of Correspondence Educa-
diachrony, and to Vodicka, who elaborated a tion of Madrid, was professor at the University
structural methodology of literary his tory. Oleza of Valencia where, together with Talens and
lingers over the concept of the "semantic ges- Oleza, he formed the Valencia group, of which
ture" in the unitary and unifying organization he is the principal chronicler. His most impor-
of the components of the work: It is the organ- tant work is EI Comentario de Textos Semiol6gico. 23
izing principle itself, which, at the same time EI Comentario de Textos Semiol6gico is an intro-
that it shows us the specificity of the work, duction to semiotic criticism. It has three parts.
explains to us its historicity. The "dominant In the first, Romera Castillo summarizes the his-
characteristic" is the fundamental trait extracted tory of semiotic criticism, concluding with a sec-
from the study and comparison of the semantic tion on its use in Spain today. In the second, he
gestures of the various works of an epoch. explains the methodology to be employed in
According to Oleza, the semantic gesture and semiotic commentary on texts. Following the
the dominant characteristic constitute the meth- paradigm proposed by Morris and T odorov, he
odology of literary his tory as it is conceived by distinguishes three levels in textual analysis: the
Czech structuralism. The Czechs think that morphosyntactic, the semantic, and the rhetor-
without the historical consideration there can be ical. In the morphosyntactic level he includes
no reftection on literature, a theory with which the functional categories, that is, functions and
Oleza coincides fully. actions. He says that on the semantic level there
La Novela de! Siglo XIX: deI Parto a la Crisis de are formal and substantial categories, that is, the
una Ideologia is a long study of the novels of Perez symbolic, the social and the dialectic. When
Gald6s, Pardo Bazan, "Clarin" , etc. It is pre- dealing with the rhetorical level he studies the
ceded by abrief theoretical introduction, in which formal categories, differentiating between times,
Oleza discusses the novel of the 19th century. aspects, and modes. In the third part Romera
He thinks that this kind of novel reftects in its Castillo applies this methodology to the com-
structure a situation of confrontation between mentary of a concrete text: Tiempo de Silencio of
the individual, oriented towards traditional val- Luis Martln-Santos. He reaches the conclusion
ues, and society, oriented towards values of that all the layers that compose the text of the
change. The realistic novel concentrates on the novel contribute to the formation of the final
analysis of the individual who confronts society unitary meaning. This resides neither in the story
and represents the high point of individualism. nor in the discourse, but rather in the story-in-
In the naturalistic novel the emphasis is on the discourse.
analysis of the society that produces the indi- One of the youngest and most promising
vidual. I t represents the crisis of individualism. semiotic critics in Spain is Antonio Tordera Saez,
After naturalism, impressionism, symbolism, professor at the University of Valencia. In addi-
surrealism, cubism, and all the other "isms" only tion to his doctoral thesis, concerning semiotics
serve to deepen the crisis of individualism and of the theater, he is the author of Hacia una Semi-
liberal capitalism, opening up the way to neo- 6tica Pragmatica. 24
capitalism and socialism. In Spain, realism is Hacia una Semi6tica Pragmatica was the first
derived from the novel of ideas. Both tradition- account of Peirce's work to appear in Spain.
alists and liberals write realistic novels. Although Tordera's brief but substantial study treats crit-
their ideas differ, their techniques are the same. ically the principal philosophical-semiotic ideas
On the other hand, only liberals create natur-
alistic narratives, since traditionalists condemn
this style. Because Spanish culture is so different
23J ose Romera Castillo, EI Comentario de Textos Semiologieo
(Madrid: S.G.E.L., 1977).
from French, naturalism in Spain does not follow 21Antonio Tordera Siez, Hacia una Semiotica Pragmdtica. EI
the French formula. Whereas the French were Signo en Ch. S. Peiree (Valencia: Fernando Torres, 1978).
 SPAIN 481
of this scholar. Tordera uses as his point of E. The Malaga Group
departure the conviction that if one isolates .it
Antonio Garcia Berrio and Agustin Vera Lujan
from the general philosophical framework m
are two important members of this small and
which it was produced, the semiotics of Peirce
homogeneous group. .
seems much more obscure and chaotic than it
Antonio Garcia Berrio, professor at the Um-
really iso The Spanish critic divides the book i.nto
versity of Malaga, is the author of various ~oo~s
two parts and studies the philosophy of Pe1rce
on literary theory. Especially noteworthy lS Szg-
in the first and his semiotics in the second.
nificado Actual del Formalismo RUSO. 26 • •
According to Tordera Saez, Peirce's prag~a~ism Significado Actual del Formalismo Ruso lS pnmar-
initiates contemporary reftection on the slgmfied
ily theoretical. Garcia Berri? explains t~e doc-
in terms of use, society, and context for two rea-
trine of the Russian formahsts concernmg the
sons. The first is that it emphasizes the impor-
problems of poetic language and the literary. work
tance of interpreting concepts in accordance with
as sign. He emphasizes the inte~nal evolutlOn of
the procedures associated with them. The seco~d
the post-Stalinist Marxist es~hetl~. He says that
is that it pays special attention to the context.m
this evolution has taken a duectlOn that allows
which concepts appear, and to the complexlty
scholars to speculate about the possibility.of a
of the practice their use implies. Tordera Saez
peaceful collaboration between the c:1t1cal-
notes that Marx thought it necessary to elabo-
methodological assumptions of the formahsts and
rate a his tory of the formation of the productive
the philosophical-aesthetic~l principl.es of current
instruments of social man, understanding by
Marxism. For Garcia BerrlO, formahsm and con-
them not only the ones that create instr,:me,:ts
tentism as absolute positions are equally unac-
of material realities, but also those that glVe nse
ceptable for explaining the essence, mec~anics,
to instruments of communicative realities. Saez
and function of artistic phenomena. GarCla Ber-
demonstrates that Peirce's iconicity and, in gen- , rio is a partisan of compromise between the two
eral his concept of the sign, established the foun-
viewpoints, that is, of eclecticism. .
dations for an empirical semiotics as an
Agustin Vera Lujan, professor at the Umver-
alternative to an epistemological assumption of
sity of Malaga, is the aut,hor of Andlisis Semio-
idealistic and subjective nature, which charac- ,· deuer
logzco (CM tes de Perro. ,,'27
terizes the majority of current semiotic systems. In Andlisis Semiol6gico de (CMuertes de Perro," Vera
Another member of the Valencia group is
Lujan applies semiological theories to the study
Vicente Hernandez Esteve, author of "Teoria y
of the story and discourse of Muertes de Perro of
Tecnica del Analisis Filmico," included in the
Francisco Ayala. This critic says that Ayala's
collection of essays Elementos para una Semi6tica
work, like all literary works, is made up of a
del Texto Artistico. 25 In the prologue, the authors
primary system of signification, which is deftect~d
say that their object in this book is to elaborate
from its original purpose in order to be used m
some theoretical proposals that could accou.nt
a very special manner. .. . .
for both literary language in particular and art1s-
Said in another way, the novehstlc slgmfied
tic language in general. This plan is based on
always has a connotation achieved through the
the author's conviction that there is a language
conversion of an elemental sign-the story of a
common to all artistic manifestations. Faced with
series of events-into a signifier with a new sig-
the impossibility of analyzing all forms of art,
nificative: the human desire to choose a side, to
these scholars concentrate on literature and
establish a certain attitude with respect to the world.
theater. Thus, the book consists of a study of
Talens on poetic analysis, another by Romera
Castillo on narrative analysis, and another by F. The Zaragoza Group
Tordera Saez on theatrical analysis, plus the
al ready mentioned essay by Hernandez Esteve. Candido Perez Gallego and Alicia Yllera
To this must be added a very lucid prologue by belong to this small and heterogeneous group.
Talens, who is the coordinator of the book.
26 Antonio Garcia Berrio, Significado Actual det Formalismo Ruso
(Barcelona: Planeta, 1973).
"Jenaro Talens, ed., Elementos para una Semi6tica deI Texto 27 Agustfn Vera Lujän, Andlisis Semioltfgico de "Muertes de Perro"

Artistico (Madrid: Cätedra, 1978). (Madrid: Planeta, 1977).

482 CRISTINA GONZALEZ

Candido Perez Gallego, professor at the Uni- more or less structuralist and semiotic. There is,
versity of Zaragoza, is the author of various books for example, Dario Villanueva, professor at the
of literary criticism. One of the most outstanding University of Santiago de Compostela and author
is MoifOnovelistica (Hacia una Sociologia del Hecho of Estructuray Tiempo Reducido en la Novela. 30 There
Novelistico).28 is also Gonzalo Diaz Migoyo, professor at the
In the very dense MoifOnovelistica (Hacia una University of Texas, Austin, and author of
Sociologia del Hecho Novelistico) , Perez Gallego ana- Estructura de la Novela. Anatomia del "Busc6n."31
lyzes various novels; paying special attention to
the relation of the novel to society. Speaking of H. Conclusion
the narrative "fence" that separates what has
been turned into a novel from what could be In general, it can be said that semiotic criti-
turned into one, Perez Gallego says that litera- cism in Spain is limited to the universities and
ture is one of the possible forms of communi- groups already mentioned. These groups are not
cation between these two realities. The attempt homogeneous, that is to say, they are not schools,
to elaborate a sociology of the act of writing a except perhaps in the case of Oviedo and Val-
novel implies, on the one hand, the diffusion of encia. Because it consists of a professor and some
novelized forms into daily life and, on the other, of her students, the Oviedo group is the most
the projection of the social into the narrative homogeneous and coherent of all. The members
enclosure. In both cases, there is a comparable of this group apply the theories of Morris and
state of either diffusion or projection. Gallego is of American semiotics to the analysis of literary
speaking of a reciprocal process in which one texts. The Valencia group is somewhat less
situation mimics the other. Literature is trans- homogeneous and coherent than that of Oviedo
formed into a social act and the social act is because it consists not of a professor and her
transformed into literature. students, but rather of a number of critics with
Alicia Yllera, professor at the University of similar tendencies. These critics combine and
Zaragoza, is the author of a theoretical book apply semiotics and Marxism to the analysis of
entitled Estilistica, Poitica y Semi6tica Literaria. 29 literary texts. The Malaga, Zaragoza, and Mad-
In the very schematic Estilistica, Poitica y Semi- rid groups are more heterogeneous and inco-
6tica Literaria, Yllera synthesizes the most recent herent. Since it is so large, the Madrid group can
currents of literary criticism. She defines liter- be divided into various subgroups. Prieto and
ature as a linguistic message (transmitted by Palomo belong to the one that has been greatly
either the spoken or the written word). This mes- inftuenced by the Italians; Diez Borque and Gar-
sage is a form of gratuitous communication, as da Lorenzo follow the French critics; and finally,
opposed to the kind of communication which is Garrido Gallardo and Abad Nebot form a
essentially pragmatic, directed towards some def- subgroup because they are very concerned with
inite goal. It is also intemporal. (In day-to-day linguistics. In general, it can be said that in Spain
language the message is adapted to a single sit- there is no original semiotic criticism as there is
uation, whereas the literary message is outside in Italy, France, Russia, the U. S., etc. Rather,
of any situation). The primary function of lit- there are critics who, so me more, others less skil-
erary language is aesthetic. This gratuitousness fully, synthesize and assimilate theories imported
and this aesthetic character can originate with from other countries, applying them to the anal-
the author, but the reader can attribute it to a ysis of Spanish literature. The originality of
work conceived with another purpose. Spanish semiotics comes from the process of
assimilation. The Spaniards combine semiotic
theory with linguistic, sociological, and psycho-
G. Other Authors logical theories, and apply these theories to the
In addition to the groups already mentioned, practice of literary analysis. Thus it can be said
there are some isolated individuals, in Spain and that Spanish semiotics consists more of adap-
abroad, who produce literary criticism that is tation than of creation. Theory is invoked in the

2·Candido Perez Gallego, Moifimovelistica (Hacia una Sociologia 30Dario Villanueva, Estructura y Tiempo Reducido en la Novela
del Hecho Novelistico) (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1973). (Valencia: Bello, 1977).
29 Alicia Yllera, Estilistica, Poltica y Semirftica Literaria (Madrid: 31Gonzalo Diaz-Migoyo, Estructura de la Novela. Anatomia de
Alianza, 1974). "EI Buscrfn" (Madrid: Fundamentos, 1978).
 SPAIN
estimation of concrete texts. It is not contem-
plated for its own sake.
11. Semiotics and Mass
Communication Media
A. Introduction
Up to this point, I have limited myself to
speaking of literary semiotics, which is virtually
the only semiotics existing in Spain. There is
almost no semiotics of fine arts, theater, archi-
tecture, or music. There is a small amount con-
cerning verbal and non-verbal communication,
but not much. There are rather more studies
treating mass communication media. Roman
Gubern, Miguel de Moragas Spa, Mariano
Cebrian Herreros, Luis Ntiiiez Ladeveze, etc.,
have published essays about mass communica-
tion media, especially movies, television, radio,
the press, and advertising. There are two groups
that pay special attention to the semiotics of
mass-media communication: that of Barcelona
and that of Madrid. This is not surprising, con-
sidering that the instruments of production and
control of these media are located in the two
largest Spanish cities.
B. The Barcelona Group
Chronologically the fIrst, this group is asso-
ciated with the University of Barcelona. Roman
Gubern and Miguel de Moragas Spa are impor-
tant members.
Roman Gubern, professor of cinematography,
formerly at California Institute of Technology
and the University of Southern California and
now at the University of Barcelona, is one of the
first scholars in Spain to write about mass com-
munication media. He has published numerous
treatments of this theme, some of which are
important to us here because of their semiotic
emphasis. These are El Lenguaje de los Comics,32
Mensajes Iconicos en la Cultura de Masas,33 his most
organic and complete book, and Comunicacion y
Cultura de Masas,34 a collection of articles written
32Roman Gubern, EI Lenguaje de los Comics (Barcelona: Pen-
insula, 1972).
3:'Roman Gubern, Mensajes Ict5nicos en la Cultura de Masas (Bar-
celona: Lumen, 1974).
"Roman Gubern, Comunicacion y Cultura de Masas (Barcelona:
Peninsula, 1977).
483
in the last years of Franco and in the first years
after Franco's death. In it he defends freedom
of expression and explains the foundations of a
democratic theory of communication.
Mensajes Iconicos en la Cultura de Masas is the
result of the author's work at MIT, under the
auspices of a scholarship from the Fundaci6n
Juan March. As Gubern hirns elf says, his object
in this book is to analyze the birth and evolution
of the iconic structures in mass culture. Because
a scientific approach to the phenomena of mass
communication must be interdisciplinary, he
takes into account the linguistic, psychological,
and sociological aspect of the process. Using the
techniques of various disciplines, in particular
those of semiotics, Gubern perceptively analyzes
the comics, photonovels, photographs, television
programs, and especially movies. He explains
and comments on the social effects of mass co m-
munication media, which, according to hirn, are
fewer than what has been claimed. This is one
of the earliest and also one of the most substan-
tial books published in Spain on these themes.
Miguel de Moragas Spa, professor of Infor-
mation Sciences at the University of Barcelona,
where he has carried out various functions, is
the critic primarily responsible for introducing
the semiotics of mass communication media into
Spain. On this theme he has published such
studies as "Analisis Semiol6gico de la
Publicidad"35 and "La Comunicaci6n de Masas
y la Semiologfa. ,,36 Likewise, he has edited Sociol-
ogfa de la Comunicacion de Masas,37 in which he
analyzes the political propaganda of the years
after Franco, and has written another work,
Semiotica y Comunicacion de Masas,38 in which he
concentrates on commercials and radio shows.
The latter book is his fundamental work and one
of the most important on this subject.
In Semiotica y Comunicacion de Masas, the first
edition ofwhich was published in 1976, Moragas
re-elaborates and amplifies his doctoral thesis.
According to what he hirnself says in the intro-
duction, between 1976 and 1980, in the scientific
35Miguel de Moragas Spa, "Analisis Semiol6gico de Ja Pub-
Iicidad," Comunicacion, 21, No. 9 (1973).
36Miguel de Moragas Spa, "La Comunicaci6n de Masas y
la Semiologia," Revista Espaiiala de la Opinion Publica, 34
(1973).
:17 Miguel de Moragas Spa, Socialogfa de la Comunicacion de Masas
(Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 1979).
38Miguel de Moragas Spa, Semiotica y Comunicacion de Masas,
2nd ed. (Barcelona: Peninsula, 1980).
484 CRISTINA GONZALEZ
evolution of semiotics as well as in the politics,
economics, and sociallife of Spain, a lot of things
have happened that have obligated hirn to revise
and expand the book. The principal difference
between the first and second editions is the fact
that the author has become convinced that mass
communication cannot be understood in isola-
tion from cultural phenomena, any more than
cultural phenomena cannot be understood in iso-
lation from mass communication. Moragas Spa
studies semiotics within the framework of com-
munication sciences, in which, according to hirn,
it has had almost no repercussions. Next he
explains and comments on the methods of con-
tent analysis, which he applies brilliantly in a
discussion of mass culture, especially of radio.
This is the most recent and most complete book
published in Spain on these themes.
C. The Madrid Group
This group, the second in chronological order,
is associated with the University of Madrid.
Mariano Cebrian Herreros and Luis Nunez Lad-
eveze are prominent members.
Mariano Cebrian Herreros, professor of infor-
mation sciences at the University of Madrid, is
the author of various studies about mass com-
munication media. One of his most outstanding
works is Introduccion al Lenguaje de la Television:
Una Perspectiva Semiotica. 39
Introduccion al Lenguaje de la Television: Una Per-
spectiva Semiotica is an analysis of television lan-
guage in relation to other languages, such as that
of cinematography, from which it differs owing
to its direct and programmed nature. This is a
very clear and coherent study of the semiotic
codes of television.
Luis Nunez Ladeveze, professor of informa-
tion sciences at the University of Madrid, has
written various studies on mass communication
media. Perhaps the most significant is Lenguaje
39Mariano Cebrian Herreros, Introduecion al Lenguaje de la Tele-
vision. Una Perspectiva Semiotiea (Madrid: Piramide, 1978).
y Comunicacion. Para una Teoria de la Redaccion
P eriodistica. 40
Lenguaje y Comunicacion. Para una Teoria de la
Redaccion Periodistica is a discussion of journalistic
language in relation to everyday language, from
which it differs because of its functionality. This
is a very lucid and coherent study of linguistic
journalistic codes.
D. Other Authors
In addition to these four scholars, there are
others, like Pedro Sempere, author of Los Muros
deI Postfranquismo,41 and Sylvie and Gerard I. Marti,
authors of Los Diseursos de la Calle. 42 Although
not numerous, there are more studies on the
semiotics of mass communication media than on
other themes for the simple reason that mass
communication media are analyzed with interest
in countries which are at the point of leaving,
or have just left, astate of underdevelopment or
dictatorship, as is the case in Spain.
E. Conclusion
In conclusion, semiotics in Spain is cultivated
in two principal areas: literature and the mass
communication media. On these two themes
there are a variety of studies, the methodologies
of which run the gamut from partial to. total
semiotic orientation. The majority of the schol-
ars are eclectic in their techniques. These go
from the unveiling of the text's meaning to the
unveiling of the mechanisms by which the text's
meaning is produced. We are speaking, then, of
an incipient semiotics that has not yet achieved
all the results that it can and should achieve,
above all in fields like architecture, music, med-
icine, biology, etc., the semiotic exploitation of
which still remains to be carried out.
4°Luis N unez Ladeveze, Lenguaje y Gomunicacion. Para una Teo-
ria de la Redaceion Periodistica (Madrid: Piramide, 1977).
41 Pedro Sempere, Los Muros dei Post-Franquismo (Madrid: Cas-
tellote, 1977).
"Sylvie and Gerard L Marti, Los Diseursos de la Galle. Semiol-
ogia de una Gampaiia Electoral (Barcelona: Iberica, 1978).
 CHAPTER 22
Semiotics in Sweden
Per Erik Ljung
I. Tbe Predicament of Semiotics in
Sweden
Semiotics as a field of research in Swederi is
remarkable neither for diversity nor depth, nor
does it have a his tory proper. I t has no institu-
tional basis as a discipline in its own right.
Semiotics exists as a number of isolated efforts
within separate scholarly disciplines and as a
number of unrelated contributions by poets,
critics, and journalists. This picture of a sparse
and haphazard semiotic activity may seem sur-
prising to those fa miliar with the work accom-
plished by the outstanding linguist Bertil
Malmberg, who has introduced a wide Swedish
audience to semiotics and has occupied himself
with the problem of signs in a number of inter-
nationaHy renowned studies; it may also surprise
those who know that many of the classical texts
of the structuralist and semiotic traditions are
available in adequate Swedish translations:
Saussure, Jakobson, Propp, Levi-Strauss, Fou-
cault, Eco, Lotman, Barthes, Metz, Mukarovsky
were aH trans la ted and introduced during the
1970s. One's surprise is not diminished by learn-
ing of the opportunities for inspiration on a per-
This chapter was translated from the Swedish by Lars-Häkan
Svensson.
Per Erik Ljung • Institut far Nardisk Filologi, University
of Copenhagen, 2300, Copenhagen, Denmark.
485
sonallevel which have existed. As is weH known,
Roman Jakobson spent time in Sweden at the
beginning of the 1940s, and Michel Foucault,
who taught French at Uppsala University for
some years in the mid-'50s, has stated in an inter-
view that he derived some of his ideas about
modern man as determined within a net of
impersonal and unsurveyable discourses from his
stay in Sweden (cf. BLM [Bonniers Litterära Maga-
sin), 11 [1968J, p. 203 ff.).
The fact that semiotics broadly speaking has
no institutiona1 basis means (1) that no institute
has a semiotic research program or gives priority
to research carried out within the field of semiot-
ics, (2) that no interdisciplinary projects focus-
ing special attention on semiotic topics have been
initiated, and (3) that the efforts made are iso-
lated and out of touch with one another. As a
result, new presentations of the basics of semiot-
ics, starting from scratch, are being made aH the
time in literary studies, sociology, and art history.
The reasons why it has been so difficult for
semiotics to gain a foothold in Swedish research
are of course complex, but a few hypotheses may
be ventured. To begin with, the prevailing tra-
ditions of the humanities and the social sciences
have had a repressive effect. For a long time
linguistics meant a diachronie study of Scandi-
navian languages. WeH into the 1960s scholars
with structuralist leanings found it difficult to
stand their ground in such subjects as "Nordic
486 PER ERIK LJUNG
languages" and "Swedish," in contradistinction
to what was the case in Denmark. In 1946, the
Danish linguist Paul Diderichsen formulated the
difference as a criticism of Swedish scholars at
the Nordic scholars' conference in Copenhagen
by saying that
considered in its entirety, Nordic philology as practised by
the last generation of scholars shows but few traces of the
thoughts which have occupied the majority of European
linguists since the publication of Saussure's GOUTS de linguis-
tique genirale (1916). Although there is a growing tendency
throughout the world to concentrate the discussion on the
question how a purely structural description of language
properly should be conducted, the central phalanx of Nordic
philologists have not yet made up their minds whether it is
possible and desirable to study language from a synchronie
as weil as a genetic point of view. (Acta Philologica Scandinavica,
19 [1947-50], p. 68, quoted by Josefsson, 1978, p. III f.)
Once established, linguistics proper, which
developed out of phonetics, has not been able to
break its isolation as a scholarly discipline, at
least not in the sense that it could present semiot-
ics as a fruitful starting-point for other subjects.
Literary scholars and sociologists, to mention
only two categories, have had to find their own
way to the structuralist and semiotic tradition.
Literary scholars, on the other hand, have worked
in isolation from linguistics and have not-apart
from a spell of stylistic studies influenced by
Croce-been able to avail themselves of impul-
ses deriving from linguistic studies (here I am
referring in particular to theoretical questions
and not taking into account the great volume of
work in stylistics carried out by Nordic philol-
ogists as well as literary scholars). This absence
of contacts has also been cemented by the fact
that literary and linguistic studies have been
divided among different departments: on the one
hand, we have Scandinavian Languages, and on the
other, Literature, another point on which condi-
tions in Sweden differ from those in Denmark.
The earlier denomination of the subject, "lit-
teraturhistoria," provides an intimation of the
nature of the dominant tradition: the historical
study of single Oeuvres and writers has constituted
the focus of attention, and there has been a par-
ticular emphasis on biographical and compar-
ative approaches. In an essay on this tradition,
Tomas Forser even seems to see this historical
and accumulative positivism as a veritable par-
adigm, "One holy and catholic church," which
rejects all new trends, whether of a lebensphilo-
sophisch, Marxist, or structuralist brand. When
the name of the subject was changed to littera-
turvetenskap in the mid-'60s, there was no inten-
tion that the "scholarliness" referred to should
be derived from structuralism. The criticism lev-
elled at wh at was felt to be vague and unscho-
larly came from historically biased scholars (who
emphasized the need for critical evaluation of
sources, etc.) and from literary scholars who drew
their inspiration from empirical sociology,
(emphasizing the need for quantitative meas-
urement, positive verification, and so on). Sim-
ilarly, it ought to be possible to identify
characteristics within the traditions of other sub-
jects which have retarded the reception of
semiotic ideas: ethnology, with its emphasis on
a historical and national study, sociology, with
its empirical bias in the postwar era, philosophy,
where an analytical approach on the Anglo-Saxon
model has predominated (which is not to say
that there has been a complete absence of pub-
lished works discussing semiotically relevant
questions; see for example Hermeren, 1969). At
the risk of too gross a generalization one might
assert that for a long time there was but limited
interest in fundamental problems of a theoretical
nature within the humanities and the social sci-
ences (cf. Aspelin, 1975; Forset, 1978; Liedman,
1978). When such an interest in theoretical ques-
tions was articulated by younger scholars, in the
context of a wider debate from the mid-'70s
onwards, the scene grew slightly confused and
divided. The theoretical efforts which were made
belong, as I have mentioned, within different
disciplines maintaining no c~ntact with each
other, and opportunities to discuss things in depth
have been few and far between. The preparatory
work done for an interdisciplinary study on the
theme Communication-Transmission 01 Ir!formation
at the new University of Linköping may be said
to form a monument to perplexity. The study's
participants, representing the subjects of data
processing, psychology, linguistics, literature, and
art his tory use, in their preparatory papers, frag-
ments of the most disparate kinds of theories,
and it seems almost impossible to uni te the dif-
ferent interests within a semiotic framework,
something which one would ass urne to be the
natural thing to do: In spite of the fact that
semiotics-as we shall see-in fact had been
introduced into Sweden and has an interdisci-
plinary framework to offer the humanities, this
 SWEDEN
tradition was not even mentioned in arecent
departmental investigation of the future of the
humanities in Sweden (Forskningens framtid.
Forskning och flrskarutbildning i högskolan, Statens
offtentiga utredningar, No. 29 [1981]). It is this
disparate and hazardous situation, with its large
turnover of theoretical efforts, which makes it a
bit difficult to offer a picture of semiotics in Swe-
den today. It is a picture which cannot be com-
plete and it is above all a picture of the Swedish
reception of semiotics-rather than of semiotic
productivity in the true sense of the word.
Yet another circumstance is worth mention-
ing, apart from the disparity of scholarly tra-
ditions. Once semiotics (and other theoretical
efforts) had been introduced and made familiar
in the early '70s, difficulties arose out of the
circumstances of Swedish educational policy.
One effect of university reform in the late '60s
and early '70s was that the undergraduate courses
offered had to be taken in a shorter period than
had been the case earlier; as a result the courses
themselves had to be abridged, even though the
material studied(not least because of new inter-
est in the theoretical foundations of each subject)
had in a way been expanded. Another result was
that the universities have feIt obliged to limit the
amount of theoretical study: it is there, but it
has to be pursued und er strictly determined,
"efficient" circumstances. These factors, along
with the scant resources available for research,
have made it difficult to create an atmosphere
conducive to advanced research in which semiotic
projects, for example, might be initiated. Instead,
the authorities have chosen to support various
kinds of commissioned research, which also hap-
pens to include the humanities, in so far as they
are considered "relevant" to society at large; in
practice this means that one sees research from
within a very short-term perspective, and this in
turn constitutes another obstacle to the devel-
opment of theory and basic research.
Semiotics was introduced into Sweden chiefty
through the personal agency of two scholars, the
linguist Bertil Malmberg and the literary scholar
Kurt Aspelin. In what follows I shall give a pres-
entation of some of their works, and then in a
more cursory way touch upon some contribu-
tions which have been made in related disci-
plines. I will not consider the possible connections
which may exist within fields such as zoology,
systems theory, and da ta processing. It is appro-
487
priate, however, that I should first discuss briefty
how a more general consciousness of the struc-
turalist and semiotic traditions took shape out-
side the universities.
11. Structuralism and
Semiotics Outside the
Universities
In a discussion of the situation of Swedish
literary studies (in Tidskrifl flr litteraturvetenskap
[TFL] , No. 1, 1971/72, pp. 6-9.) Kurt Aspelin
talks about the "critical counter-movement"
against the narrowly empirical Anglo-Saxon sci-
entific tradition which has dominated subjects
such as philosophy and sociology, and how this
counter-movement has been able to express itself
in reviews such as Häften flr kritiska studier and
Sociologisk flrskning. He also demands that liter-
ary studies link up with the international debate
on the theory of science, with the attempts to
deepen the historical dimension, and with the
"semiological-linguistic efforts to insert litera-
ture into a transformational scheme of analysis."
Aspelin made such an attempt hirns elf in Textens
dimensioner (1975). In the discussion referred to
above he is content to mention those activities
which so far occurred only outside "the regular
academic contexts of the subject," in the so-called
critical seminars and the radical reviews. This
indicates the framework within which events have
taken place: it was in extramural contexts,
including the "Scandinavian Summer Univer-
sity," that a general consciousness of the exist-
ence of structuralism and semiotics was created.
"Our critical discussion is being intellectual-
ized," the writer and critic Lars Gustafsson wrote
in BLM (1964, nr 7, p. 564). That is exactly what
was happening. In 1966 Per Olof Enqvist edited
an anthology entitled Sextiotalskritik, in which he
frankly declared that literary criticism never "has
played such an important role as du ring the first
half of the '60s," and was able to present a num-
ber of contributions from younger authors and
critics which showed that a new European intel-
lectual scene was materializing, in which struc-
turalism (both in the form of scholarly efforts
and as a more vaguelY understood attitude toward
life) was extremely vital, and where Marxism
was soon to experience its great renaissance. In
488 PER ERIK LJUNG
1966, a translation of Roland Barthes' "Ecri-
vains et ecrivants," from his Essais critiques, which
had appeared the same year, was published in
BLM. During the following years a number of
introductions to and translations from the works
of the exiled Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz
who claimed to have been "a structuralist befor~
everyone else," and Michel Foucault were pub-
-lished in BLM and Komma, a review which began
to appear at that time. It was not chiefly the
scholarly results which seemed fascinating;
rather, one found in the writings of the French
structuralists an expression of insights and atti-
tudes which were taking shape in the political
and intellectual context of the late '60s. A kind
of semiotic sensibility emerged which was able
to provide the criticism of ideology, as formu-
lated for example by Göran Palm in Indoktriner-
ingen i Sverige, with additional weapons. Concepts
which made it possible to see through apparently
neutral symbolic contexts were developed, as weIl
as new critical instruments which could be used
in the aesthetic discussion. In an article pub-
lished in BLM in 1967, Lars Gustafsson described
the appeal which was perceived in Barthes's Le
degri zero de I' icriture, then recently translated.
We are faced, he wrote, with " ... the obser-
vation that the poet, even in his most 'personal'
moments, is dependent on an impersonal, lin-
guistic situation, which, in the final analysis, is
beyond his control. ... What is meritorious in
Barthes's writings is that he shows that the per-
sonal "literary" language is to a very great extent
determined by a socially and historically con-
ditioned role."] This was the way structuralism
was received, in an increasingly political situa-
tion where the critical, "revelational" potential
of a semiotic-structuralist approach came to be
looked upon as the ingredient of central impor-
tance (hence, one may assurne, the relative lack
of interest on the part of the established aca-
demic institutions). "Who Uses Us?" is the title,
typical of those years, of such an introductory
article in BLM. .lan Stolpe writes about how
Levi-Strauss had employed ideas derived from
Troubetskoy's phonological theories in his anal-
yses of myths:
It is the emphasis on the im personal character, the autonomy
o~ our manifestations which, at least on a first reading, con-
stJtutes the strang appeal of Levi-Strauss' writings. The anal-
ysis of myths does not have, and cannot have as its aim to
lLars Gustafsson, "Kommentar," BLM, 6 (1967),404.
show how men think in myths, he says somewhere; our only
claim is to show how myths think in men. Or as another scholar
has put it: "Who uses us? What are the cipher messages
which we exchange with one another all the time without
being aware of it ourselves, like the telegraphers who trans-
mit secret cipher telegrams to one another without ever
understanding what the combinations of letters contained
in them actually mean. Tbe consequences of sucb experi-
ences can hardly be guessed at."2
The poets too-as is proper-articulated this
new sensibility, often with explicit references to
the theoretical discussion. The poet and critic
Björn Häkanson included in his volume of poetry
Kärlek i Vita Huset (Love in the White House)
(1967) a sequence of "Exits", introduced by the
motto "He who says nothing, will hirns elf be
formulated: / Power speaks through his shut
mouth." Upon this follows a number of poems
such as "The President's Lips Move," "The Peo-
ple's Lips Move," "The Humanist's Lips Move,"
and, finally, "The Structuralist's Lips Move."
This poem is by no means an isolated exam-
pIe. There have been a number of Swedish poems
published during the last decades which reveal
not only an intcrest in language in general but
an interest of a theoretical nature in semiotic
questions. An important foundation for the poetry
which reflects on 1anguage was laid by the poet
and critic Göran Printz-Päh1son, who, in his vol-
urne of essays Solen i spegeln (The Sun in the
Mirror) (1958), drew attention to what he called
a critica1 or "metapoetic" tradition in modern
poetry. This approach should be seen as a fourth
category a10ngside of expressionist, imagist, and
surrealist poetics: "The idea of poetry as a crit-
icism of or comment on its own creation or its
own medium. Sphere of interest: language.
Background: the semantic interest of our time.
Function: the creation of better relations with
reality through an increased consciousness about
the problem of linguistic communication" (p. 27).
One of his poems bears the title "Broenda1":
Raining no langer. (Water like a mirrar).
The words are all bright in your mouth.
White light on the wet pavement. Language a mirrar
Or another way of breathing outside your mouth?
We are speaking and the wards are all white.
The wind speaks to the rain and the rain to the sea
And the wind is blowing, though just a bit.
Do you think language is anything like the sea?
'BLM,3 (1967), p. 201.
 SWEDEN 489
The rain is wholly adequate and one can see transforme toutes structures!
That the wind is precise. Words rain into the sea C'est pourquoi l'enfant que peut-etre nous attendons
And words are drowning. doit apprendre une
We gather here in groups. In the blowing langue entierement nouvelle
Wind words whistle pure and tender: a cause de la realite
The sea forgets what everyone cannot remember 3 qui est en train de naitre 4

"The structuralist's lips move" ... yet an orig- In a long essay in BLM for 1967, "Efter Babels
inal poet like Göran Sonnevi could make use of torn: om lingvistikens filosofi" ("After the Tower
Chomsky and the notion that linguistic creativity of Babel: On the Philosophy of Linguistics"),
is infinite: an anthropological wonder in a strictly reprinted in Slutna världar äppen rymd (Closed
structured world. In one of his poems, "For, Worlds Open Space) (1971), Printz-Pahlson dis-
among others, Noam Chomsky," he wrote cusses Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics and
Katz's Philosophy of Language, juxtaposing them
Que peuvent with Foucault's Les Mots et les choses. What fas-
entreprendre les structures de I'amour contre cinates Printz-Pahlson is, in Chomsky's case, the
les structures blanches, opposees,
qui aujourd'hui
attempt to question the established "classic"
soutiennent le monde? brand of structuralism by going back to a ration-
Il y a maintenant trois jours que nous etions alist and mentalist tradition and, in Foucault's
ensemble, sans proteetion case, the more general history-of-ideas analysis,
I'un de l'autre
in search of humanism's "archaeology," its
Les cellules a I'interieur de ton corps se sont peut-etre
multipliees invention of "man" as an ideological entity.
selon leurs structures Together these efforts point to a possible and
particulieres ? extensive knowledge about language, a knowl-
Elles sont encore forme pure, sans realite ! edge which can be obtained from new, open, and
Dans leurs genes
se trouve aussi
unexpected angles of vision. Printz-Pahlson's
la faculte du langage essay is unusual by Swedish standards because
Combien de temps avant que quelqu'un of its breadth and daring interdisciplinary out-
commence a pader look. Although in its own way typical of its time,
la langue de I'amour ?
it is an isolated phenomenon in the cultural mil-
Lorsque je pose l'oreille sur ton ventre
j'entends les cellules murrnurer, ieu of the late '60s. Before long the increasingly
presque imperceptiblement, political character of the cultural debate became
derriere le bruit des boyaux, le battement the most obvious phenomenon: it is Marcuse and
du sang Althusser rather than Levi-Strauss and Barthes
Les structures presentes, blanches, silencieuses
se trouvent aussi dans ton corps
who strike the observer's eye.
Le langage attend However, matters must not be oversimplified.
de pouvoir jaillir de ta vie A form of semiotic consciousness took root in
de changer le monde the radical movement. Culture was discussed in
Combien de temps encore ?
terms of communication. This concept implied pri-
Des genes blanes, depourvus de langage
donnent au monde maintenant sa forme! marily a sociological perspective, but it also cre-
Il faut que la langue ated a demand for analyses oJ performances and
de I'amour possible maintenant parle analyses of the stage (rather than analyses of
par les armes ! dramatic texts), where the theatre was con-
Ceux qui meurent deux fois plus vi te que nous
ne peuvent attendre
cerned, and for concepts that could be used to
des mois, des annees, un nouveau langage analyze pictures in media and advertisements.
Sans proteetion And on the outskirts of the university institutions
contre les structures des bombes blanches leurs (not least in the so-called Scandinavian Summer
paroles accusent
U niversi ty), efforts to grasp the new theories
le sans-Iangage
avec un amour qui continued. Here, for example, a substantial
introduction (to which but scant attention has
3Resan mellan poesi ach poesi (1955) (The Journey between been paid) was written, which contains a survey
Poetry and Poetry); quoted from Contemporary Swedish Poetry,
trans. John Matthias and Göran Printz-Pählson (London: "Gch nut (1967); quoted from Göran Sonnevi, Et maintenant!
Anvil Press, 1980). trans. by NoeJ Simmoneau (Honfleur: P.]. Oswald, 1970).
490 PER ERIK LJUNG

of the different semiotic traditions, clarifying dis- poeia" are, we are told towards the end of the
tinctions between various concepts, as well as an Mallarme analysis, "fiction accounted for as such,
intimation of the criticism of certain allegedly homotopy, semantic interpenetration." Such an
metaphysical ingredients in Saussure's concep- art has its definite intellectual and ideological
tion of signs which has since been proffered by raison d'itre:
Derrida. This pamphlet, Carl G. Liungman's
Semiotik, strukturalism, semiologi, was published by To choose transparence as one's ideal means directing all
"Fria Akademin" in 1971. one's attention to the signified, as if there existed no sign.
Before leaving these extramural contexts, I Transparence makes us forget the signifier, the speaker
becomes invisible. Look at the moon, not at the finger point-
would like to mention two lines of investigation, ing at it, the agents of transparence tell us~th~se represen-
which have taken shape in a somewhat different tatives of the dictatorship of concepts over thmgs. But m
ideological and theoretical conjuncture. The first whose interest is this transparence, in whose interest is the
is that of the poet and Greek scholar J esper Sven- fact that the speaker conceals his material presence in the
bro who in his doctoral dissertation La Parole et world and takes up a transcendental position? In my opinion
it is only hierarchical order wh ich can profit from this "obli-
le ~arbre.' Aux origines de la poetique grecque (1976), teration of the subject," since the illusory transparence which
as well as in his essays and poems, concerns results from it makes a dialogue on equal terms impossible.
hirnself with fundamental semiotic problems, if
by this term one understands problems con- The theme is varied explicitly and implicitly in
nected with the forms of social existence of signs, Svenbro's poems: one of these, published in Ele-
and the production of signs. In his dissertation ment till en kosmologi (1979), is entitled "Kritik av
he examines how these fundamental conditions den rena representationen" ("A Critique of Pure
of literary communication and literary creation Represen ta tion"). The same s tarting-poin t is also
changed during the material and ideological responsible for his statement, in the introduction
upheavals that took place in Greece during the to his volume of translations of the poems of
transition from an oral to a literate culture. These Francis Ponge, Ur tingens synpunkt (1976), that
upheavals can be studied in detail as shifts within Ponge's work is one of the "most useful oeuvres"
the semantic fields emanating from key concepts of our time. 5
such as poetic creation, poet, text, comprehension. A similar affirmation of the materiality of art
Svenbro's study is not conducted with the help is to be found in the increasingly sophisticated
of a terminology of a semiotic kind, but is never- aesthetics elaborated in the review Kris in recent
theless concerned with fundamental semiotic years. This means that implicit criticism-partly
problems (and would be unthinkable, I believe, in contra yen tion of previous s tructuralis t/
in the absence of the structuralist tradition; the semiotic sensibility-is levelled both at the tend-
dependence on French theoreticians such as ency to "expose" the ideological content of art,
Bourdieu, Vernant, and Todorov is also obvious). and at unpremeditated attitudes. It also means
In his essay "Mimopoeia. Anteckningar kring that the review explicitly allies itself with "dif-
ett imaginärt tärningskast" (Mimopoeia. Notes ficult" modernist art and "difficult" theories,
on an Imaginary Throw of the Dice) published which, to use Derrida's words, are rejected or
in Tärningskastet, 6 (1980), Sven bro analyzes suppressed, und er the labels "unreadable" or
Marcel Marceau's pantomime "The Dice- "extreme degree of difficulty," because they ren-
Player," Francis Ponge's apparently descriptive der established methods pointless. Another result of
prose poem "L'Huitre" (The Oyster), and Mal- t'his is that there has been a renewed interest in
larme's "Eventail," in search of what Maria Corti French thought after years of German domi-
(1978) 'has called a "hypersign," an artistic cre- nation of intellectual debate in Sweden. Kris
ation which gesturally, materially, manages to has provided excellent introductions to and new
represent its own problematics. Svenbro is also translations of texts by thinkers such as Fou-
looking for the pleasure "derived from the sud- cault Blanchot Lacan and Derrida. There have
den insight into the absurdity of description: we also 'been pres'entatio~s of odd thinkers such
have yielded to the temptation of allowing our-
selves be fooled, but only in order to arrive at 5See also Tärningskastet, 9 (1981), where Printz-Pählson in
an insight into the presence of the linguistic means an interview comments upon the Swedish meta-poetic tra-
of expression." The characteristics of "mimo- dition and Svenbro analyzes a poem by Printz-Pählson.
 SWEDEN
as Rene Girard, Harold Bloom, and Anthony
Wilden (whose System and Structure comprises lin-
guistic, psychoanalytic, and cybernetic ideas).
The theoretical work has to an eminent degree
been fruitful for the group's own activities, as
can be seen from essays on Shakespeare,
Nietzsehe, Beckett, ~odern painting, and "the
nature of classical ballet." The essay on ballet,
written by Horace Engdahl (in a special issue
on dance for J uly 1979), was published soon after
an issue on Derrida and bears traces of his for-
mulation of the problem of the concept of sign.
The essay deals specifically with the question of
the semiotic character of dance, with the oppo-
sition between the direcdy expressive, mimetic
and "ludie" character of bodily movements, and
the ambition of the classical art of dancing to
establish a systematic denotative language. There
is a need for giving dance a minimum of coding,
of "indefinite linguisticity," in order to make it
human and give it an objective character; we
are, after all, in an objective world of social rela-
tions, things, and language. On the other hand,
it is possible that the other reality-corporeality,
sensuality not yet socialized-becomes visible
when, as Engdahl puts it, "movement and ges-
tures are removed from their natural human
world, are isolated by me ans of an aura of
unreality, are given hard, shining contours of
exaggeration, completion, classical beauty. Only
then do we hear through the strong din of con-
sciousness the voices from this other reality out-
side the luminous rays of the Word."
III. Bertil Malmberg
The one decisive contribution to the dissem-
ination of knowledge about linguistic structur-
alism and semiotics in general has been made
by the linguist Bertil Malmberg. Familiar at an
early stage with structuralism as practiced by
Saussure, Hjelmslev, Troubetskoy, and Jakob-
son, he has stimulated public interest in this sub-
ject through lectures and textbooks, and in his
capacity as a phonetician and theoretician he
has taken an active partoin the international dis-
cussion concerning the linguistic sign. He has
provided the Swedish public with a general
introduction to semiotics in Teckenlära (The Sci-
ence of Signs) (1973), which is the only lingu-
istically oriented presentation of the subject that
491
exists in Swedish, apart from Bengt Sigurd's
collection of essays Sprak i arbete (Language at
Work). In addition, Malmberg has made a sig-
nificant organizational contribution as regards
the international development of semiotics as a
discipline, through his membership on the Exec-
utive Committee of the International Associa-
tion for Semiotic Studies.
Malmberg's early contacts with structuralism
resulted above all in so me articles and studies
in French phonology in the early '40s, but later
also in a number of reviews of more general
theoretical interest in which he discussed prob-
lems concerning the concepts langue and parole
and the linguistic sign (see Liniuistique generale et
romane, 1973, in which Malmberg has collected
several of his most important studies). A keen
observer of the his tory of ideas, Malmberg is
also a valuable source of information about his
Swedish predecessors in the field of linguistic
thought. Thus in a study dated 1945 he discusses
the concept kollektivsprak (collective language),
emphasizing that in fact there are very few peo-
pIe in a linguistic community who are capable
of making use of the full spectrum of meanings
offered by a given linguistic system. In this con-
nection he also refers to Hans Larsson, a Swedish
philosopher, who argued against Bergson's con-
cept of intuition-or rather to Antoine Meillet's
use of Larsson's book, the French tide of which
is La Logique de la poesie (1919). Meillet expressed
hirns elf in the spirit of Larsson when, in his
review, he wrote: "Car c'est dans la poesie que
se manifestent de la maniere plus complete les
resources de la langue; et il n'y a bonne poesie
que la Oll la langue est amenee a re nd re tout ce
qu'elle peut exprimer."6 In Malmberg's Signes et
symboles (1977) one finds a seetion on the Swedish
Semitist Esaias Tegner and his ideas about the
dialectics between language and thought (for-
mulated in Sprakets makt över tanken (The Power
of Language over Thought) (1880). In Tegner's
historical study Malmberg discovers several sug-
gestions, especially where etymology and pho-
netics are concerned, which are relevant to the
modern discussion of the arbitrariness of the sign.
Another Swedish predecessor, Adolf Noreen,
6Antoine Meillet, review of Hans Larsson, La Logique de La
poesie (Paris, 1919). In Bulletin de La Sociite de linguislique de
Paris, 22 (1920), 177, quoted in Malmberg, "Systeme et
methode: trois etudes de linguistique generale," Linguistique
geniraLe el romane, p. 31.
492 PER ERIK LJUNG
occupies a recognized position in the history of
semiotics through his "science of meanings,"
presented in the fifth volume of Värt spräk (Our
Language) (1903-1923) and entitled semologi
(semology) (cf. Signes et symboles, p. 127 f.; con-
cerning N oreen, see also Nya vägar inom spräk-
Jorskningen). In several different connections
Malmberg refers to the French scholar Pierre
N aert, who worked in Sweden and Finland, and
his clarifying distinctions in "Arbitraire et neces-
saire en linguistique" (Studia Linguistica, No. 1,
1947, pp. 5-10.
Malmberg's concern with the historical per-
spective is also predominant in Nya vägar inom
spräkJorskningen. En orientering i modern lingvistik
(1959, and severallater editions) which has been
translated into a number of languages. For gen-
erations of Swedish students of linguistics, this
volume was the first contact with the structur-
alist tradition, containing as it does clarifying
discussions of structuralism in its European and
American guises, Hjelmslev's glossematics, and
the phonological theories of the Prague schooI.
However, it cannot be said to cast light on struc-
turalism in the wider sense of the term, as an
activity where insights gained from linguistics
are applied to other communicative form.s: Levi-
Strauss is mentioned en passant; the Russlan and
Czech contributions to a literary structuralist
study are neglected. The section on sem.a~tics
has not been expanded in subsequent editIOns,
despite the discussion of the concept of sign,
towards a general semiotics. The philosophical
discussion of the problematics of meaning is
touched upon (Peirce, Morris, Richards), it is
true but scholars such as Barthes and Greimas
are ~ot even mentioned in the edition of 1970.
Thus in a number of studies Malmberg has
discuss~d the linguistic sign and the degree and
kind of its arbitrariness. This is not the place to
try to indicate the positions taken by Malmbe:g
and what kinds of evidence he has proffered m
defense of the moderate attitude he has espoused
and defined in a formulaic way in his article "De
Ferdinand de Saussure a Roman Jakobson-
l'arbitraire du signe et la substance phonique du
langage":
L'arbitraire du signe et la motivation du signe ne s'excluent
donc pas. C'est entre ces deux poles que se realisent le lan-
gage du genre humain, et c' est ces deux poles auss! que, par
consequent, doivent se developper les activites scientifique
du linguiste et du phoneticien. 7
This is the program which forms the basis of
Malmberg's work. He has cast new light.on sev-
eral dimensions of the discussion of the slgn and
has been able to show how arbitrariness is mod-
ified by a number of factors of a phonetic,
expressive, syntactic, and etymological nature.
Some of Malmberg's less theoretical works are
also relevant from a semiotic point of view, such
as his Spräket och människan (Language and Man)
(1964) and Det spanska Amerika i spräkets spegel
(Spanish America in the Mirror of Language)
(1966), with their emphasis on a human com-
munication perspective.
During the years around 1970 Malmberg wrote
a number of articles for Swedish news papers such
as Svenska Dagbladet and Sydsvenska Dagbladet, and
delivered a number of lectures, in which he pre-
sented modern theories about language in a pop-
ular format, throwing light on the ways in which
linguistics paves the way for analyses of.other
forms of communication. In this connectIOn he
introduced the work of strucluralists such as
Propp, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, and Greimas. For
the Swedish edition of Saussure's Gours he wrote
an illuminating introduction (1970). Some of
these articles and lectures werc collected in the
volume I spräkets tecken (Under the Sign of Lan-
guage) (1972) under headings such as "Spräk
och tecken" (Language and Sign), "Spritksym-
boler och symbolsprak" (Linguistic Symbols and
Symbolic Languages), "Gär det att översätta?"
(Is Translation Possible?), and "Semiotik och
Semiologi." In the last of these articles Maln:-
berg writes that when problems of c?~m.um­
cation and signs are discussed in other dlsclplmes,
from ethnology to zoology, linguistics leads the
way (even though he is able to refer to one exam-
pIe where this does not apply, Carl-Hern:a?
Hjortsjö's anatomical study Man '5 Face and Mlm~c
Language [1970]). It is this self-evider:t empha.sls
on linguistics which characterizes his extensive
introduction Teckenlära. En introduktion till tecknens
och symbolernas problematik (The Scie~ce of Si?ns.
An Introduction to the Problematlcs of Signs
and Symbols). Apart from clarifying historically
oriented distinctions between concepts and pro-
viding a survey of the linguisticdiscussion of the
7 Linguistique generale et romane, p. 163.
 SWEDEN
arbitrary sign, Teckenlära also contains sections
which go beyond the level of the single sentence:
"De stora tecknen" (The Big Signs), "Estetiska
system och ideologiska symboler," "Vetenska-
pliga och mytiska modeller. Metaspräk" (Sci-
entific and Mythical Models. Metalanguages)
but it also deals with subjects such as "Icke
spräkliga system och grafiska tecken" (N on-
Linguistic Systems and Graphic Signs), "De
sociala beteendekoderna" (The Social Codes of
Behavior), and "De handikappades tecken" (The
Signs of the Handicapped). Some of the theo-
retical definitions in Teckenlära recur in Signes et
symboles. Les bases du langage humain (1977), where
Malmberg also res um es and summarizes some of
his earlier research. It is above all the historical
dimension which is deepened. Malmberg dis-
cusses how the debate on the sign has been car-
ried on by philosophers and linguists from
antiquity up to 1975; naturally, not all theore-
ticians are examined in full detail (among those
to whom Malmberg pays fairly little attention
are Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Valery).
Signes et symboles involves a terminological co m-
plication which has caused at least one review er
to lodge a protest (Henri Frei in his review artide
in Semiotica, 31, Nos. 1/2,1980,157-164). Malm-
berg put forward his terminological proposal
already in his report to the First Congress of
Semiotics in Milan in 1974. The sign, he asserts,
is often defined as something which stands for
something else, aliquid stat pro aliquo. This defi-
nition suggests that this other thing exists as a
dass or an individual. The "signs" of chemistry
or algebra are of such a nature. But, says Malm-
berg, such a unit is a symbol. In the symbol there
is identity between the content of the sign, or
signifie, and the referee. The expression of the
symbol is global and indivisible; often there is
isomorphism between the expression and the
content-referee. This is in contrast to the lin-
guistic sign, such as it has been defined by Saus-
sure. The thesis of the arbitrary character of the
sign refers to two relations, the relation of the
sign to its referee and the relation between sig-
nijiant and signijii. This, as weil as the double
articulation of the linguistic sign, makes it con-
venient to sort out the linguistic sign as a cate-
gory of its own. Saussure's signe should be
detached from a usage where signe in practice
stands for signijiant. Instead Malmberg suggests
493
that symbol should be introduced as the most
important concept. Saussure's sign becomes a
subsection of the dass of symbols. Another
solution-to create a new concept for the doubly
articulated arbitrary sign-is rejected with a ref-
erence to the tradition initiated by Saussure. 8
The argument is resumed in Malmberg's review
of "The Tell-Tale Sign: A Survey of Semiotics
(Semiotica," 17, No. 2, 1976, pp. 153-163) where
Malmberg protests against too-concrete associ-
ations concerning that which the sign, in the
sense attributed to it by Saussure, is said to con-
vey in the communication. An example is pro-
vided by the concept "literature" as analyzed by
Todorov. What "literature" refers to can only
be analyzed at a second level: one must examine
what texts are considered to be literary within
a given ideological system. The sign "literature"
becomes meaningful only in relation to other
signs; it has no definite denotation. Semiotics
should be understood as a social "symbolics."
Yet when this terminology is presented on a large
scale in Signes et symboles it strikes us as prob-
lematic. Malmberg has responded to the ambi-
guity of the concept signe which in semiotic
discussions partly connotes all signs (where
something stands for something else), partly the
linguistic sign as understood by Saussure. His
solution is to introduce the concept of symbol.
But the ambiguity of the concept signe will then
be replaced by a similar ambiguity of the concept
symbol, which connotes on the one hand alt sym-
bols (previously known as signes) , and on the
other, symbols in the meaning ascribed to them
by Malmberg hirnself (chemical symbols and so
on). His suggestion also suffers, as he hirnself
admits, from the weakness of opposing an es tab-
lished use of signe which has been developed out-
side linguistics and according to which signe is
the same as signijiant. "Une telle terminologie est
probablement acceptable dans beaucoup de
branches de la semiotique. En linguistique elle
ne l'est pas" (Signes et symboles, p. 26).
It is also possible that in his capacity as lin-
guist Malmberg has been critical of (or com-
paratively uninterested in) the shift in emphasis
from theory oJ codes to a theory oJ sign production,
""Signe et symbole: probleme terminologique et conceptuel,"
in A Semiotic Landscape, eds. S. Chatman et al., (The Hague:
Mouton, 1979).
494 PER ERIK LJUNG
which took pi ace in French semiotics during the
1970s, and thus from l'inonce to le sujet de l'inon-
ciation, a development which perforce must go
beyond the framework of linguistics. Kristeva's
contribution is intimated in Signes et symboles, but
her attempts to connect the theories of a signi-
fying practice with psychoanalytical theories are
not mentioned. In his review of The Tel!- Tale Sign
Malmberg appears to question the relevance of
psychoanalytical theories and to believe that the
forms of discourse which Kristeva wants to
introduce into semiotic studies, "aleatory forms
of discourse which have no empirical status,"
are in part subject to the same logical laws as
other formsof communicative behavior, in part
available to analysis of a classic structuralist kind,
where the sense can be analyzed in the same way
as the expression. The same comparative lack
of interest in questioning fundamental structur-
alist ideas can be discerned in a review article
of a volume of interviews with Derrida, Positions
(1972) (Semiotica, 11, No. 2, 1974, 189-198). Here
Malmberg concentrates on what he considers to
be an exaggerated interpretation of Saussure and
does not present Derrida's actual ideas. When
Malmberg, in the spirit of Saussure and Hjelms-
lev, insists on the formal character of language
("le texte parle, le texte ecrit et le texte realise
en lettres gestuels ou en alphabet Braille reste
le meme texte"), he appears to confirm precisely
that suppression of the material side of writing,
its character of production, with which Derrida
is concerned.
However, these are peripheral notes written
by a nonlinguist in the margin of an oeuvre of
gigantic proportions. The real extent of the
inspiration which other scholars have derived
from Malmberg's activities can be perceived from
a special issue of Studia Linguistica (1978:1-11):
Sign and Sound. Studies presented to Bertit Malmberg
on the occasion ofhis sixty-fiflh birthday, 22 Aprit1978.
The contributions, the editor Bengt Sigurd writes,
concern "the basic linguistic problems which have
always been the focus of Bertil Malmberg's
interest, in particular the problems of the lin-
guistic sign." Here I must restrict myself to men-
tioning those Swedish contributions which are
of direct relevance to semiotics. One finds
(1) reports on research on various types of sign
language (Brita Bergman, "On Motivated Signs
in the Swedish Sign Language," that is to say,
the various types of "chiremes" which can be
perceived in the sign language of the deaf; Hans
Karlgren, "On the Arbitrariness of Shorthand
Signs"), (2) theoretical contributions such as
Tore Jansson's "Saussure and Chomsky on the
Goals and Methods of Linguistics" and Thore
Petterson's "The Linguistic Sign and the Doc-
trine of Reification," and (3) linguistic studies
on the arbitrariness of language at different lev-
els-Stig Eliasson, "Directionality in Lexical
Signs and Grammars: Remarks on the Emer-
gence of a Theoretical Concept," Bengt Sigurd,
"Arbitrariness, Frequency, and Abbreviation,"
Velta Ruke-Dravina, " 'Säf, säf, susa, vag, vag,
sla': Problems of Onomatopoeia," and Nils Erik
Enkvist & Hans Nordström, "On Textual
Aspects of Intonation in Finland-Swedish News-
casts." Enkvist's name mayaiso serve as a
reminder of the text linguistics which is devel-
oping within the Text Linguistics Research
Group at Abo, Finland and of Enkvist's own
introductory work Stilforskning och stilteori (1974).
In some respects inspired by Malmberg but
on the whole critical of much of established lin-
guistics, Göran Sonesson tries to lay the theo-
retical foundations of a semiologically oriented
linguistics in Tecken och handling. Pran sprakhand-
lingen til! handlingens sprak (1978). To this end he
surveys a large number offields such as linguistic
pragmatics, sociolinguistics, speech-act analysis,
and so on,where he finds that the social aspect
of language assurnes the character of something
added. In order to reach beyond this, Sonesson
thinks, it is necessary to attempt to develop a
theory of action, to turn to phenomenology, to
a wider theory of the "natural" world. The book
also contains references to relevant Swedish phil-
osophical studies on performatives and speech
acts.
IV. Kurt Aspelin
The most energetic and ambitious contribu-
tion to the introduction of semiotics in Sweden,
apart from that of Malmberg, is that of the lit-
erary scholar Kurt Aspelin, who died in 1977.
It is a central aspect of the introduction of new
perspectives within the humanities to which he
devoted hirnself on a large scale from the early
'70s onwards by editing anthologies of central
texts selected from various traditions and by his
own polemical contribution, Textens dimensioner
 SWEDEN 495

(1975). In addition, as a co-editor of the "Kon- in a milieu such as the Swedish, where academic
trakurs" series, he has helped introduce other scholars have opposed new ideas for so long, the
texts where his own name does not appear new scholarly ideas will be exploited by the
directly, as for example Yuri Lotman's Den poe- journalistic-essayistic production of culture .. "If,
tiska texten (1974) and Filmens semiotik och film- in such a case, there is no background of senous
estetiska frrlgor (1977). The first of these volu~es fundamental research, the danger of the ideo-
was Marxistiska litteraturanalyser (1970) WhlCh logical expositions of fashionable structuralism
contains several of the classic texts, but also mod- becomes doubly imminent."g
ern contributions by theoreticians such as Wal-
ter Benjamin and Karel Koslk. The next volume
Textens dimensioner, with the subtitle Problem och
published was Form och struktur. Texter till en meto-
perspektiv i litteraturstudiet, can be seen as a l.ong
dologisk tradition inom litteraturvetenskapen (1971),
recapitulation of, and comment on, t~e v~nous
which Aspelin edited together with Bengt A.
text anthologies, but also as a contnbutIOn to
Lundberg and which offered a wide spectrum of
the current debate, a plaidoyer for the transfor-
t~xts from the structuralist-semiotic tradition,
mation of the study of literature into a scholarly
ranging from Shklovsky to Eco and Lotman.
activity, with many critical surveys and ~nti­
Together with Lundberg he also ed~ted a ~ele:­
mations of Aspelin's attitudes to the vanous
tion of RomanJakobson's texts, Poetzk och lzngvzs-
alternatives. The program moves towards a syn-
tik (1974) and-after Textens dimensioner-a
thesis in which a Marxist view of historical
volume entitled Tecken och tydning. Till konsternas
change is combined with a semiotic approa~h to
semiotik (1976), which contains texts dealing wi.th
the forms of existence of literature and wlth a
the semiotics offilm, painting, mime, and mUSlC.
hermeneutically inspired view of the problems
Semiotic texts are also to be found in Teaterarbete.
concerning understanding. It is a complex pro-
Texter fir teori och praxis (1977), which also com-
gram and an attempt to sum up the book is
prises texts written by actors and directors ~nd
bound to result in breathtaking meta-levels.
explicitly aims at active intervention in theatncal
From his sketch of the linguistically inspired
life. The theories must be made useful!
research on literature, from the Russian formal-
The ambition of the last volume may be con-
ists up to more recent attempts in the s~irit of
sidered characteristic of Aspelin's project. It was
Chomsky to reconstruct a theory of poetlc lan-
important for hirn to establish a connect.ion ,;ith
guage, one can guess what Aspelin's own stand-
and intervene in the current cultural situatIOn.
point was by noting his definition of the ~oncept
When he first published the translation of Rom~n
of structure: "an autonomous, self-regulatmg sys-
Jakobson's "On Realism in Art" from 1921 (m
tem whose elements as to function, position, and
Tidskrifl fir litteraturvetenskap, No. 1, 1971/72,
sen;e are determined by a nu mb er of mutually
pp. 27-28) Aspelin wrote "for Roman Jakobson
dependent, immanent re~ations, w.hich to?et~er
on his seventy-fifth birthday, October 10, 1971":
provide a model abstractIOn of a glven obJectIve
"Although it was written fifty years .ago: 'On
reality" (p. 52). Such a concentrated
Realism in Art' can be read as a contnbutIOn to
formulation-which in this case concerns the
the present aesthetic debate in Sweden-perhaps
scholarly concept-intimates some of the lesso~s
as a comment on the debate about realism in
which Aspelin wants to bring to light from thlS
Ord och Bild and Konstrevy." Thus Aspelin could
tradition: the formalists' discovery of an "auton-
and wanted to refer to the popular interest in
omous" literary language, with a literariness all
theoretical questions, in structuralism and Marx-
its own but also-later-their problematization
ism which had been articulated in the late '60s.
of this :'autonomy"; how the literary "series" is
As ~ historian of ideas he was also able, in his
related to other "series" (or how the literary sys-
introductions, to provide subtle accounts of ~he
tem is related to other systems); the Prague
fruitful interchange between art and theory Whl~h
structuralists' emphasis on the functional unity
took place in early Russian formalism .and m
of works of art; the Soviet semioticians' theories
Prague structuralism. At the same time ~e
of the character of the work of art as a "model"
insisted on the importance of scholarly work m
the situation of "creative chaos" in which we
find ourselves. I t is to be feared, he wrote, that 9 Textens dimensioner, p. 41.
496 PER ERIK LJUNG

of reality. This mimetic dimension, the relation (p. 67). Aspelin views with the same skepticism
of the work of art to objective reality, is impor- (see for example p. 98) certain "scientistic" exag-
tant to Aspelin. Thus, he is also capable of point- gerations in the attempts of the French narra-
ing out a "concealed opposition" in ]akobson's tologists to find generalizing patterns in different
theory about poetic language. ]akobson writes, types of stories. As for the rest, Aspelin provides
in "What is Poetry?" (1933): "What is the point a survey of the most important attempts made
of this? Why must one emphasize that the sign in various methodological traditions to create
does not fuse with the object?-Because along models and theories applicable to larger textual
with the immediate consciousness of the identity contexts and to cultural processes at large, in the
between the sign and the object (A is Al) there section entitled "Efforts at a Text Semiotics."
is an equally necessarily immediate conscious- The section goes from Shklovsky through Bakhtin
ness that the identity is not there (A is not Al); to Levi-Strauss, then from a section on narra-
this antinomy is inevitable, for without contra- tology as a fundamental literary science, to a
diction there is no mobility in the concepts, no concluding discussion, "From Semantics lio
mobility in the signs, the connection between Semiotics," where among other things text lin-
concept and sign becomes automatic, the action guistics, Kristeva's (in Aspelin's view too spec-
is checked, the consciousness of reality dies away" ulative) comprehensive contributions, and the
(quoted in Textens dimensioner, p. 59 f.). In such thoroughgoing Soviet semiotics (with Lotman as
a formulation there is, apart from the idea of the its principal figure), are touched upon, as are
autonomy of the sign, a connection with Shklov- the activities carried on in Semiotica. Naturally
sky's theory of the play between automatization there is no room to discuss all these things in
and Vetfremdung in art, and thus the artistic sign detail here. What Aspelin is getting at is the
assumes a very special relation to reality, it can possibility of a synthesis and he ac counts for his
be understood as a specific means of a new way impressions with an inspiring enthusiasm, and
of experiencing reality. "Only a clearer con- in the majority of cases with loyalty. The general
sciousness of the sociological implications of the semiotic text theory is, he writes, of course not
entire problem can make it explicit ... ," Aspe- yet constituted, and subject to lively controver-
lin writes (p. 60), and finds contributions towards sies: "It has not been able to elude the proble-
such a deepened view of the poetic function in matic to which I have already drawn attention
Mukarovsky and later in Lotman. Prague struc- several times: the yuestions concerning "scien-
turalism takes a central position in the devel- tism" versus "hermeneutics," formalist text
opment of theory. "Here poetics is given a basis autonomy versus socio-historical situation, and
of sociological determinations and is brought into so on. It represents, one might say, the very limit
contact with a semiotic analysis of the human of the most ambitious efforts" (p. 105).
creation of symbols and signs; here it is placed In order to render more concrete the nature
in a dynamic relation with the social totality and of the contexts which Aspelin wants to establish
the historical development" (p. 51). I shall finally state the contents of the transla-
As to the question of poetic language Aspelin tions mentioned previously. In Form och struktur
refers to three main movements in modern lin- there are texts by the Russian formalists Shklov-
guistic theory. Apart from the Prague school, he sky, Eichenbaum, Tynyanov. A second section
points to Hjelmslev's glossematics and Chom- indicates how this school developed in Prague:
sky's generative grammar. The efforts made to Tynyanov/]akobson's "Problems in Literary
create an "empirical" poetics by theoreticians Studies and the Study of Language," which could
such as Bierwisch and Samuel Levin are viewed be read 'in a short-lived review, Novy Lif, in 1928
with a certain amount of skepticism (and it seems (and was first published by Aspelin in the social-
reasonable to assume that Aspelin takes this ist review Zenit in 1967), and two texts by Muka-
position in his capacity of both literary scholar rovsky, "Structuralism in Aesthetics and in
and radical cultural theoretician): "As is the case Literary Scholarship" and "Poetic Designation
in general in the historical sciences (as opposed and the Aesthetic Function of Language." Y et
to the natural sciences but also to linguistics), a third section contains texts dating from the
the adequate formulation appears to be the fol- '60s and '70s from various mefhodological tra-
lowing, as far as literary science is concerned: ditions: ] akobson/Levi-Strauss, Levin, Bier-
'the more general, the more lacking in content' " wisch, Dolozel, Todorov, Eco, Barthes, Chvatik,
 SWEDEN
Lotman. Tecken och tydning. Till konsternas semiotik
goes beyond the literary field. It begins with
Jakobson's clarifying article "Language in Rela-
tion to Other Systems of Communication," con-
tains texts by Mukarovsky and Lotman on
comprehensive questions concerning art and
semiotics along with a discussion on literature,
semiotics, and Marxism between Kristeva,
Christine Glucksmann and Jean Peytard, and
finally offers a selection of semiotic essays on
various sign systems: Isaak and Olga Revzin on
"A Semiotic Experiment on the Stage," Barthes
on "The Rhetoric of the Picture," Louis Marin
on "The Basis of a Semiology of Painting,"
Claude Bremond on "The Gesture in Comic-
Books," Jindrich Honzl on "The Mobility of the
Theatrical Sign," Georges Mounin on "The
Present-Day Mime," Christian Metz/Raymond
Bellour on "Conversation on the Semiology of
Film," Paul Bouissac on "The Acrobatic Per-
formance: An Element in the Semiotics ofCircus
Art," and Nicolas Ruwet, "Some Notes on the
Role of Repetition in Musical Syntax."
Teaterarbete. Texter flr teori och praxis (Theatre
Work. Texts for Theory and Practice) owes its
tide to a theoretical volume on theater by the
Berliner Ensemble which suggests the double aim
of the book: "to contribute to an increased
understanding of the theatrical means by point-
ing out new models of analysis to those interested
in theater, to students of theater, and to those
employed in the theater," and to emphasize the
progressive realist theater tradition whose most
important figure is Brecht. This aim has resuIted
in an original collocation of texts: Aspelin him-
self contributes a fundamental article "On the
Semiotics of the Theatrical Event" and makes
Petr Bogatyrev's "The Sign of the Theatre"
(1937) and Jerzy Ziomek's "The Actor in the
Sign System" stand out as other important cor-
nerstones of the reftection on the semiotics of
theater which he wants to initiate. Theoretical
elements are also to be found in the other con-
tributions which deal with the tensions in the
approach es adopted by Meyerhold, Stanislav-
sky, and Brecht. The volume also contains anal-
yses and interviews on current Swedish efforts.
Aspelin talks in his own article about the theat-
rical event in conscious contrast to drama analysis.
It is this event which can be profitably described
in terms derived from the science of
communication-and Aspelin comes up with
497
some useful concepts in this connection. The
starting-point is that "in a theatrical event all
the elements of the unity become meaningful
parts of a specifically aesthetic sign system"
(p. 44). All the elements of the theater can be
semanticized in different contexts, all are what
Lotman calls "creative of secondary models." In
its entirety the total theater sign-in the theat-
rical event-is hierarchically constructed and
provided with a dominant. Aspelin wants to
res urne these--and other-semiotic concepts, but
is skeptical of the attempts to establish a general
"grammar" for the "language" of the theatre
(Aspelin's typical example is Metz's Langage et
cinema with its attempt to impose at any cost a
linguistic concept on recalci trant material):
"What the sign systems in the arts have in com-
mon is that they do not possess the stability of
ordinary language as a system of notation col-
lectively agreed upon. Those who speak the same
language do not, by that token, share the same
standards of "artistic competence." The most
strictlycoded art system is semiotically speaking
"open," has room for improvisation, innovation,
originality, and exclusivity, in a way which qual-
itatively distinguishes it from a primary model-
creating structure such as language" (p. 59).
V. Literature, Theater, Film,
Art, Music, Mass Media:
Scattered Efforts
A. Literature
The important introductions of Malmberg and
Aspelin and the translations of the texts by
Jakobson, Barthes, Lotman, and others have by
no means resulted in the acceptance of struc-
turalism and semiotics into the humanities in
Sweden. Literary scholars have remained scept-
ical, basing their argument on two lines of rea-
soning, one of a terminological kind (it has been
considered "unnecessary" to borrow concepts
from "other" disciplines in order to describe well-
known phenomena), the other one founded on
principle (it has been feIt that semiotics is anti-
"humanist"). The former line of reasoning can
be studied above all in a number of articles by
Peter Hallberg (see Samlaren, 1975, Tidskriflfor
litteraturvetenskap, 3, Nos. 5-6, 1973/74, 272-278;
4, No. 1, 1975,56-61; 9, No. 4, 1980, 196-198).
The latter attitude is defended with great energy
498 PER ERIK LJUNG

in Erland Lagerroth's Litteraturvetenskapen vid en and language as meaning, "world." The renais-
korsväg (Literary Studies at the Crossroads) sance scholar Claes Schaar, starting from the
(1980) whose starting-point is a very eclectic debate concerning the analysis of "Les Chats,"
reading of survey volumes by J ameson, Scholes, but also from Kristeva and Bakhtin, discusses
Culler, Hawkes, Fowler, and Fokkema/Kuhne- how allusions can break up linear sequences,
Ibsch. The main ideas presented here are that presuppose intertextuality, and establish a poly-
structuralism and semiotics are too influenced phonic text and with it the possibility of various
by linguistics, that they therefore overlook both levels of understanding, in "Linear Sequence,
the temporal dimension of literary works and Spatial Structure, Complex Sign, and Vertical
their "meaning," and that this tradition is Context System" (Poetics, 7, No. 4, 1978, 377-
"scientistic." Nevertheless, Lagerroth manages 388).10
to find formulations in MukarovskY's discussion
of the structure as process which stands hirn in
A semiotic approach is obviously natural for
good stead as regards the "dialectic" and "final"
literary studies which are intended to comprise
literary research which he wants to embark on.
the whole context of communication. When Kurt
In such formulations concerning the dynamic
Johannesson examines "Bellman och ceremon-
character of literary works Lagerroth finds con- ierna" (published in Tio flrskare om Bellman, 1977),
tacts with structuralism; however, he appears to
he can point out that the epoch itselfis semiotically
be quite uninterested in those aspects of Muka-
oriented: "It is also possible to find in the jur-
rovskY's work which point towards semiology
isprudential and political literature of the period,
and sociology (cf. what was said above about in the textbooks on social behavior and Ceremoniel-
Aspelin and Mukarovsky), as well as in the con-
Wissenschaft, in theological and liturgical works,
crete study of how meaning is produced (see, for and in the writings of the great thinkers of the
example, the discussion of language and meaning, Enlightenment a view of ceremonies and public
p. 151).
life which is the result of a good deal more thought
In spite of this opposition there are many
than our own age devotes to these questions. In
examples of connections with the structuralist- the works enumerated it is emphasized that cer-
semiotic tradition. First some contributions to emonies are signa artificialia, artificial and arbi-
the poetics of Roman J akobson should be men-
trary signs which possess different meaning or
tioned. Anita Boström Kruckenberg's disserta-
significatus during different epochs and in differ-
tion Roman Jakobsons poetik. Studier i dess teori och ent societies-the terminology itself brings to
praktik (1979) is a loyal exposition which also
mind modern semiotics, and reminds us that this
comprises Jakobson's phonological theories and
discipline has derived important impulses from
a survey of the discussion of Jakobson's and Levi- the attempts of Locke, Wolff, Leibniz, and other
Strauss' analysis of "Les Chats." Anders Ols-
18th-century theoreticians to establish a general
son's "Mötet mellan fenomenologi och struktur-
theory of signs" (p. 98). Working along these
alism: Edmund Husserl, Roman Jakobson och
lines J ohannesson ingeniously analyzes how the
poesins natur" (The Encounter between Phen-
18th-century Swedish troubadour complies with
omenology and Structuralism: Edmund Husserl,
and departs from the ceremonial codes of the
Roman Jakobson, and the Nature of Poetry)
period. Bellman's oral poetry is also studied by
printed in Tidskrift JOr litteraturvetenskap, 7, No. 4, Lars Lönnroth in Den dubbla scenen. Muntlig diktn-
1978, 200-225, is more argumentative and con-
ing fran Eddan till ABBA (1978), which incl.u.des
cerned with a historical perspective. Using Elmar as varied phenomena as folk songs, pohtlcal
Holenstein's Roman Jakobsons phänomenologischer chansons, recital of modernist poetry and the
Strukturalismus and Linguistik Semiotik Hermeneutik
pop texts of the musical group ABBA. Lönn-
as his starting-point, he discusses how Roman roth's method is partly to study the various forms
J akobson and certain phenomeno1ogically ori- of Öffintlichkeit in which the texts "take place,"
ented French thematic critics seem to arrive at
quite different methodologies although they start
from the same philosophical set of ideas. How- IOSee also Claes Schaar, "Vertical Context Systems," in Style
and Text. Studies Presented to Nils Erik Enkvist (Stockholm:
ever, as Olsson points out, nothing prevents these Spräkfcirlaget, 1975), and his Introduction to Marino and
two approach es from complementing and stim- Crashaw, Sospetto d'Herode. A Commentary (Lund: Gleerup,
ulating one another, language as product, form 1971).
 SWEDEN
partly to establish eight different categories of
communication: text/genre, scene of appear-
ance, medium/channel, sender/actor, receiver,
code, universe, mediated conflict (the last cat-
egory also suggests a connection with the kind
of ideology-critique text analysis which, under
the influence of Levi-Strauss and Greimas, has
developed in Denmark, where Lönnroth has been
teaching). Arne Melberg, in his study Realitet och
utopi. Utkast till en dialektiskforstl1else av litteraturens
roll i det borgerliga samhällets genombrott (1978), is
interested in literat ure in its total context of com-
munication; he intimates a semiotic perspective
in his discussion on "Literature as Interaction
and Socialization" but chiefly makes use of con-
cepts borrowed from different traditions (Adorno,
Ricoeur, Iser) in his attempt theoretically to
deepen the Marxist analysis of literature's mode
of existence.
In the analysis of single texts or oeuvres there
are other examples of connections being made
with structuralist and semiotic theories (even
though this connection is at tim es primarily of
a terminological kind). Birgitta Holm, in a proj-
ect about the importance of women writers to
the development of the novel, (Fredrika Bremer
och den borgerliga romanens fldelse, 1981) has ana-
lyzed the 19th-century writer Fredrika Bremer's
"Famillen H***," deriving inspiration from
Barthes's S/Z for her description of how dif-
ferent voices, "codes," are interwoven. In
a-theoretically speaking~similar way, 01a
Holmgren distinguishes in Kärlek och ära. En studie
i Ivar Lo-Johanssons Ml1na-romaner (Love and Hon-
our. A Study in Ivar Lo-Johansson's "Mana"
Novels) (1978) between the story of the novel
(ricit) and the different "discourses" established
in the text of the novel, a realistic one and a
romantic one. The signs of subjectivity, traces
in the text, such as conventionalizing, are dis-
cussed with a reference to Ricoeur's concept of
discourse. The expression of subjectivity, as it
appears even in an apparently descriptive text,
is analyzed in my own study Vilhelm Ekelund och
den problematiska flrfottarrollen (Vilhelm Ekelund
and the Problematic Role of the Author) (1980),
mainly in accordance with Benveniste's discus-
sion of the functions of pronouns. A concern of
a thematic kind underlies the models of content
analysis, in the mann er of Greimas's Semantique
Structurale, used by Nils Schwartz in Hamlet i klas-
skampen: En ideologi-kritisk studie i Eyvind Johnsons
20-talsromaner (Hamlet in the Class Struggle: An
499
Ideology-Critique Study in Eyvond Johnson's
Novels From the 1920s) (1979). In what she her-
self calls a study of the motif "Literature as Unity
and System" in literary theory from Schlegel to
Jauss, Louise Vinge discusses among other things
the parallels that have been drawn between lan-
gue-parole and literature as system-single works by
. among others Tynyanov/Jakobson, Guillen and
Robert Weimann ("Ganzheit, System und Kon-
tinuität. Eine U ebersicht über einige Theorien
zum Zusammenhang der Literatur," in Elemente
der Literatur. Beiträge zur Sto.ff-, Motiv- und The-
menforschung. Elisabeth Frenzel zum 65. Geburtstag,
vol. 11, pp. 1-17, Stuttgart 1980).
B. Theater
In the same year as Aspelin's Teaterarbete
appeared (1977) Ulla-Britta Lagerroth in a sur-
vey of current research in Samlaren called for
semiotically oriented theatre research. In spite
of certain reservations she acknowledged the
value of the results attained by Äke Pettersson
in a semiotic analysis of the sign functions of
scenery, costumes and revue ballets in his dis-
sertation En klassisk komedi i revyform. En studie över
Karl Gerhards revykomedi Oss greker emellan (1976)
(A Classical Comedy in Revue Form. A Study
of Karl Gerhard's Revue Comedy "Between Us
Greeks"). She herself has developed the strategy
for research on scenic art which she calls for in
her book Regi i möte med drama och samhälle: Pär
Lindberg tolkar Pär Lagerkvist (1978) (A Director's
Encounter with Drama and Society: Pär Lind-
berg In terprets Pär Lagerkvist). This strategy
comprises several steps. An analysis of drama
texts, whose key concepts are "dramatic process"
and "theatrical universe," leads up to a study of
the "communicative competence" of the drama,
its possibilities of being put on the stage. The
analysis of the staging and the story of the stag-
ing become a privileged field with respect to the
study of the multiplicity of the theatrical signs
and "transformability"; the next step will be a
study of the social staging of the drama-how
does the director interpret the drama in ideo-
logical terms, does the theatre manage to establish
a connection with contemporary ideological and
social processes? A semiotic perspective is also
to be found in Lars Kleberg's Teatem som handling.
Sovjetisk avantgardeestetik 1917-27 (Theatre as
Action. Soviet Avant-Garde Aesthetics, 1917-
1927) (1980). Kleberg very ingeniously discusses
500 PER ERIK LJUNG
the attempts to disrupt the tradition al relation-
ship between scene and audience (and between
theatre and reality) made by Meyerhold, Eisen-
stein, and Tretyakov. The Slavicist Kleberg is a
contributor to Aspelin's Teaterarbete and has writ-
ten the introduction of the translation of Lot-
man's Den poetiska texten. Without a semiotic
terminology, but with results which are relevant
from a semiotic point of view, Egil Törnqvist
has studied Bergman och Strindberg. Spöksonaten-
drama och iscensättning (Bergman and Strindberg.
The Ghost Sonata-Drama and Staging) (1973).
Törnqvist has also studied the introductory
sequence of Strindberg's Dödsdansen (The Dance
of Death), and in a study of the dialogue struc-
ture of the same drama Freddie Rokem wants
to deepen this analysis by making use of the
speech-act analysis elaborated by Austin and
Searle ("Dödsdansens första tur-en repris med
variationer," Tidskrift fir litteraturvetenskap, 9, No. 1
1981,37-43).
C. Film
Where film studies are concerned the situation
during the 1970s has been both chaotic and
promising. There has been no wealth of awe-
inspiring traditions to hamper new initiatives:
the student of film has enjoyed relative freedom
and has been able to explore theories and meth-
odological departures. At the same time it has
been difficult to find one's way amidst the wealth
of theoretical and analyücal essays from the
Continent (where Marxist and semiotic ideas
have been interwoven) and from Eastern Europe
(where an orthodox Marxist view has been com-
bined with semiotics and information theory).
The basic task has been to introduce and select
from the rich material. The starting-point of
many new research workers has been a radical
view of society: the task of examining film as
part of the culture industry was a very inviting
one, as was that of trying to uncover certain
more or less hidden ideological patterns in the
films. When Dag Nordmark wrote his study Bild-
sprakets betydelser. Ett bidrag titt filmteorins historia
(1976) he emphasized the importance of theo-
retical concepts to the research work being done
on the language of film and the meanings con-
veyed by it, partly in order to play down the too
one-sided interest in the economic and political
circumstances connected with filmmaking. His
discussion of the his tory of film theory includes
the attempts made during the 1970s to interpret
the content of, for example, westerns with the
help of categories borrowed from the myth anal-
ysis of Levi-Strauss, the structural semantics of
Greimas, and Metz's attempts to establish a nar-
ratology of film. Nordmark also engages in a
pedagogical discussion of semiotic concepts,
reviewing how these can be understood in con-
nection with the language of film. In the same
year (1976) Olle Sjögren published the anthol-
ogy Filmens ledbilder: Marxistiska filmanalyser. In
his preface he expressed skepticism as to what
he felt to be a formalistic discipline too concerned
with terms in the structuralist attempts made by
Metz and in Screen, the English film review. As
a counterexample Sjögren published an analysis
of Marked Woman by the American film critic
Charles W. Eckerts; although Eckerts too uses
structuralism as a starting-point, he manages,
according to Sjögren, to go beyond pure classi-
fication and perceive the deeper emotional and
ideological aspects of the film. In his introduc-
tion Sjögren gives an informed account of East-
ern European attempts touni te aspects of
communication theory and sociology in film
research. He returns to this problem in his intro-
duction to Yuri Lotman's Filmens semiotik ochfilm-
estetiskaJragor (1977), where he also provides some
of the background of the film analyses of 1920s
Russian formalism. Jan Olsson (who by the way
introduced semiology in the film magazine Chap-
lin in 1977) has collected a number of contri-
butions in his anthology Filmteori: Filmanalyser
(1981), in which the structuralist-semiotic per-
spective may be said to dominate. This is true
both of that part of the book which deals with
the relation of film and reality and of that part
which is concerned with analysis. The first of
these contains Eisenstein's classic "Den filma-
tiska principen och ideogrammet" (The Filmatic
Principle and the Ideogram) and Metz's "Beträf-
fande verklighetsintrycket inom filmen" (On the
Impression of Realism in Film); the second con-
tains analyses which have derived their inspi-
ration from different quarters; Metz works with
linguistic models, Alan Williams' analysis of Fritz
Lang's Metropolis uses Greimas's structural
semantics as its point of departure, Will Wright's
typology of westerns is inspired by Propp's study
of fairy tales, the collective analysis of the Cahiers
du Cinema team of John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln
 SWEDEN
starts from the auteur theory but includes ideas
inspired by psychoanalysis, Marxism, and
semiotics.
D. Pictorial Art and Architecture
The most striking result of the semiotic inter-
est of the 1ate '60s and early '70s is probably to
be found in the analysis rif images. That is to say,
not in art his tory (although the basics of semiot-
ics are taught there as weIl) but in art criticism,
and above all in the pedagogics of art. Radical
forces among the art teachers enforced a change
in the course of study offered in comprehensive
schools, so that the aim of drawing was rede-
fined: the purpose was now to stimulate not only
the pupils' desire to express themselves in pic-
tures and to develop their creativity, but also
their ability to interpret pictures and understand
their functions in different contexts. To this end
the art teachers need to be trained in new items,
and for a number of years there were lively dis-
cussions concerning a strategy for analysis which
could comprise pictures of the most different
kinds; one of the most important aims was to
create some kind of consciousness of the func-
tions of pictures in the media and in advertise-
ments. Teachers at the Art Teachers' Training
College in Stockholm have also written and edited
a number of books which include analyses of
both a theoretical and practical kind: Bildanalys
(1973), Bild ochform (1974), Kreativitet och med-
vetenhet (1975), Bilderbok (1976) Bild och myt (1976).
The starting-point is the attempt to place the
pictures sociologically in their historical and
social context, combined with an effort to inter-
pret them semiotically; inspiration has been
derived in particular from Barthes's early writ-
ings. The theories are applied practically by
means of a "polarizing" teaching which opposes
different kinds of images, or images and "real-
ity." The most original results obtained by this
method are found in Bild och myt: Ett konstpeda-
gogiskt projekt in which the teachers themselves
have provided a visual representation of a news
picture.
The idea that an ideological, connotative lan-
guage absorbs an allegedly neutral, denotative
one while concealing its character of productive
sign can sometimes seem to be to roughly rep-
resented in these educational contexts, but gains
its strength from the practical analysis. It was
501
not only the pictures employed by media and
advertisements which invited analysis. A num-
ber of Swedish artists had been directing their
attention to the visual myths and codes which
are so obvious in modern urbanized communi-
ties. Once more art was becoming representa-
tional; Douglas Feuk writes in the catalogue Neuer
Realismus aus Schweden (1975): "The obtrusive
milieu of the big cities, advertisements, signs,
packages were reproduced with a refreshing lack
of hesitation." Although the result was not
American pop art, one thing had become very
clear, Feuk continues: "the insight that the artist
uses language and myths in his work, not so me
nameless reality but a 'knowledge' which even
before it is employed by the artist is fraught with
meaning." In painting and in art criticism the
semiotic approach can reach beyond merely
"disclosing" ambition. What is exciting about
the paintings of the new realists, Feuk writes, is
that "they seldom point to one thing as an alter-
native to something else, they don't emphasize
the 'un-nature' of myth at the cost of some other
'more natural' reality. They represent the very
contradiction between these without reducing it."
In academic contexts, in art history and in
architecture, semiotics seems to have been incor-
porated only tentatively into the arsenal of con-
cepts, particularly in the analysis of milieus. Sven
Sandström discusses how aesthetic norms take
shape in everyday public milieus in Teori om este-
tisk synupplevelse (1979) but the perspective is of
a socio-psychological rather than a semiotic
nature. In his dictionary Terminologi fir en utökad
miljöanalys (1979) Ramon Wahlin however pro-
poses a rigorous adaptation of semiotic and lin-
guistic concepts as a means of analyzing milieus
and architecture. Sven Hesselgren, architect and
professor of architecture, has developed a system
of his own, based on perception and Gestalt psy-
chology, in The Language rif A rchitecture (1969) and
Man's Perception rif Man-Made Environment (1975).
E. Music
Semiotics has found a more permanent basis
in musicology than in any other academic dis-
cipline in Sweden. When Ingemar Bengtsson's
Musikvetenskap: En översikt appeared in 1973, it
attracted attention outside the boundaries of
musicology proper (cf. the review in Tidskrift fir
litteraturvetenskap, 3, No. 3, 1973/74, 185-188), for
502 PER ERIK LJUNG
it presented what many people had been waiting
for, namely a humanist alternative firmly based
in a theory of science where semiotics was made
the basis of a study of musical communication
and where hermeneutic reflections replace the
scientific claim to verification. In Philip Tagg's
magnificent dissertation KOJAK-50 Seconds of
Television Music. Towards the Anarysis of Affict in
Popular Music, presented to the Institute of Musi-
cology in Gothenburg in 1979, a connection is
made with Bengtsson's model of musical com-
munication. In his book Tagg conducts a dis-
cussion of the place of semiotics in a wider
sociological and historical context and proposes
musicological modifications of fundamental
semiotic concepts. The method of analyzing
The Kojak Theme consists-to quote Tagg's
abstract-in three levels of musical perception:
(I) "musematic," (2) "paradigmatic," and
(3) "syntagmatic."
The first two of these three levels are referential and extra-
generic. U sing conceptual lools such as "musematic corre-
spondence," "paradigmatic museme compounds," etc. and
the analytical methods of "interobjective comparison" and
"hypothetical falsification," correspondence can be estab-
lished between items of musical code in an analysis object
(here the Kojak Theme) and the extramusical designates of
similar items of musical code in other musical works in rel-
evant genres or with relevant sociomusical functions. The
third level of perception ("syntagmatic") requires conge-
neric, intramusical analysis. Using models borrowed from
Chomskian linguistics and the his tory of art, verbal inter-
pretation of musical phrases is attempted, whereafter the
total musical and visual message of the piece is analyzed,
using models of "centripetal" and "centrifugal" processuality.
F. Sociology of Science, Sociology of
Mass Communication
In sociology, finally, semiotics may be said to
have provided inspiration in two contexts (apart
from the fact that language and communication
are nowadays considered to constitute the foun-
dation of all social behavior, as for example in
a book such as Joachim Israel's Sociologi (1973).
The first of these two contexts concerns the the-
ory of science. Structuralism and semiotics have
been introduced into the discussions concerning
different scientific paradigms since the la te '60s.
Joachim Israel wrote an introduction to the
translation of Piaget's Strukturalismen (1972), the
ingenious Johan Asplund wrote a critical Inled-
ning till strukturalismen (Introduction to Structur-
alism) (1973) in which he paid special attention
to Levi-Strauss's analysis of myths and in which
he hirnself tried to discern relevant mythical
structures in Ibsen's comedy En folkefiende (An
Enemy of the People). 11 In a frequently con-
sulted volume entitled Sociologiska teorier (5th ed.,
1972) there is a section on "Strukturalism: Frän
Mauss till Levi-Strauss," written by Bo Anders-
son. Margareta Bertilsson makes a contribution
to the discussion of theory of science with her
dissertation Towards a Social Reconstruction of Sci-
ence Theory. Peirce's Theory of Inquiry, and Beyond
(1978): she sees Peirce as a predecessor of Kuhn's
sociology-of-science outlook at the same time as
she finds methodological views in Peirce which
call Popper to mind.
The second context in which semiotics has
played a prominent role is of course mass-
communication sociology. The semiotic per-
spective can be found here in the form of com-
munication models and general theories, but
appears to have been developed to a surprisingly
small extent. The reason for this would seem to
lie in the great success which quantitative studies
have enjoyed in the post-war period, and partly-
as Olof Hulten and Lennart Weibull point out
in a survey of recent research-"that research
has been initiated by administrative organs whose
primary aim has been to use this research as a
means of producing empirical material which
can serve as a basis for political decisions."12
This has meant that the analysis of the content
of mass media has been concentrated on ques-
tions such as objectivity and the political color-
ing of news items. However, one can discern a
possible shift of interest from investigations con-
cerning the behavior of receivers to questions of
communication potential. In a study written at
the instigation of "Delegationen für längsikts-
motiverad forskning" mass media researchers in
conjunction with the linguist Bengt Sigurd have
attempted to point to the possibilities of such
research; the aim has been to clarify the condi-
tions of social communication which can help to
develop the individual's personality at the same
time as it creates new expressions for repressed
parts of the population. Whether this research
11 See also Tord Olsson, Livi-Strauss och totemismens teoretiker
(Lund, 1972), a dissertation presented to the Institute of
History of Religions.
120lof Hulten and Lennart Weibull, "Masskommunikations-
forskning i Sverige," in NORDICOM-InJormation, (Göte-
borg: Statsvetenskap1iga institutionen, 1980), p. 12
 SWEDEN
comprises, let us say, semiotically oriented qual-
itative analyses of media content remains to be
seen; cf. Anne-Marie Thunberg, Kjell Nowak,
Kar! Erik Rosengren, and Bengt Sigurd, Sam-
verkansspiralen: Människan i informations- och kom-
munikationssamhället (1978).
This is a suitable point to interrupt what is
threatening to turn into a mere catalogue; per-
haps it is also appropriate to modify the state-
ment made at the outset of this survey that
semiotics possesses neither diversity nor depth
in Sweden. It has undeniably left manifest traces.
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 CHAPTER23
Semiotics in Switzerland
Members of the Centre de Recherehes
Semiologiques, Universite de Neuchätel
As a small multilingual country Switzerland
stands at the interseetion of various semiotic
trends and fields. Consequently, its own interests
in semiotics partly reftect the cultural inftuences
of the surrounding countries. It is precisely
because of this linguistic situation, however, that
the Swiss have always been aware of the reality
of language, and on this matter Ferdinand de
Saussure is their most famous representative.
In the universities of Switzerland many active
groups are working on original projects with dif-
ferent semiotic practices and goals. These have
been divided below into tftree main categories.
As the only Centre de Recherehes Simiologiques, our
own group has been in charge of the gathering,
organization, translation, and presentation of the
following reports, which remain the intellectual
property of their authors.
I. Semiotic Analysis of Verbal
Communication
A. Discourse and Natural Logic
The researches of the Centre de Recherehes
Semiologiques at the University of Neuchatel
deal with discourse as it functions in concrete
This chapter was translated [rom the French by Joelle Koh-
ler-Chesny.
Members of the Centre de Recherehes Semiolo-
giques • Universit€ de Neuchatel, CH-2000, Neuchätel,
Switzerland.
505
verbal communication. They aim at the elabo-
ration of a "naturallogic" which would account
for the mann er in which the production of var-
ious discourses is regulated: (for m.ethodological
reasons it has been decided to concentrate on
texts in French: written academic texts, everyday
conversations, school works, and parts of text-
books or newspapers).
It seems relevant to ask wh at discourses as
different as a love letter, an essay on physics, a
political discourse, an advertisement, a sermon,
or a fairy tale have in common. Even in con-
sidering solely texts that anyone would recognize
as argumentative, one must admit that neither
their aspect, their themes, nor the situations in
which they are produced endow them with any
kind of homogeneity. Therefore, the problem is
to define levels of wide enough generality, but
still capable of describing the specificity of each
type of discourse.
In this perspective naturallogic is not a study
of naturallanguage and its logical universals (as
it is for Lakoff), hut it deals with the operational
structures (in Piaget's sense) of a non-specialized
reasoning. Thus, natural logic does not apply
exclusively to the content of a discourse or to
the structure of formal reasoning, but chiefty to
the procedures adopted hy a discourse in order
to produce some meaning out of meanings. This
is not a normative, hut definitely a descriptive
point of view, and one which because of the
practical impossihility of covering the whole
506 CENT RE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHATEL
scope of discursive activities, needs some coor-
dination with other fields (psychology, sociology,
linguistics, his tory, etc.). Each time a speaker
gets involved in communication he creates for a
listener, with specific intentions, a "micro-
universe. " This construct is called schematiza-
tion, a notion including both the idea of result
and tha t of activi ty. The essen tial task of na tural
logic will be to define logico-discursive opera-
tions, and to describe the systems they form in
the schematization that utilizes them.
The basic claims of this research are the
following:
(I) A discourse always develops against a socio-cul-
tural background (le priconstruit).-Unlike the sym-
bols of formal languages (meaningless by
definition), discursive units still function even
conventionally as indices: they are extracts of
the social and historical reality to which they
belong. In a given situation some signs mean,
some do not. As a sign, the name of an object
inserted into a discourse brings forth a set of
properties of this object and a set of its possible
relations to other objects, and this for one speaker
at a specific moment.
(2) Natural logic is irreducible to mathematical logic,
but is compatible with it.- The irreducibleness rests
totallyon the divergence between sp.eech and
calculation: (a) speaking is a social activity; words
are always uttered Jor a hearer, even an imagi-
nary one, as in silent speech; there are no signs
if there are no socially organized individuals;
(b) a calculation can be executed by a machine,
but it cannot be said that the machine calculates
Jor somebody.
Natural logic does not bring out meaning,
though it does work on meaning; it has been
conceived for the description of the rules which
enable a schematization to proceed, in the same
sense that formal logic enables one to proceed
from one true proposition to another true prop-
osition without stating the truth-value of each
separate proposition. The ways of solving the
problem are therefore analogous: as with math-
ematical logic, "rules of use" need to be for-
mulated. However the solutions will differ, since
in natural logic the objects are not empty, and
both the operations and the meaning will have
to be taken into account. In other words, rules
for and and or, and the like, will never be identical
to those in mathematical logic.
(3) A single logical operation can be expressed by
difftrent discursive Jorms.- This claim forbids any
apriori identification of logical universals with
basic linguistic elements. Language-utterance
forms are to be taken only as indices of logical
operations. Therefore, dealing with and does not
consist in determining a logical sense and a set
of formal properties associated to a symbol, but
it implies adescription of the verbal me ans used
in a discourse to actualize one üf the operations
of logico-discursive thought, für example here
concomitance.
(4) A schematization is qn active construction oj a
micro-universe.-A discourse is not a static orga-
nization of objects predetermined by a set of
axioms, but, to the contrary, it generates its own
objects while proceeding. The properties of dis-
cursive objects vary throughout a discourse. Fur-
thermore, the premises of the reasoning are not
necessarily made explicit. The disposition of the
elements, the way of saying things, the way of
not saying things, are among the many aspects
that a natural logic must treat.
The current researches of the Centre are based
on the observation of a large number of different
types of dis course, and the first task has been to
make a list of sets of logico-discursive operations
for the schematization. These operations stand
at a very general level since they are inherent in
all possible schematizations. N evertheless, when
involved in different discourses, they combine
themselves at a second level, tha t of procedures,
for example analogy, example, explanation, jus-
tification, contradiction, and so on, and among
them the different sorts of inferences tradition-
ally studied by formal logic.
Such procedures are necessarily based on ele-
mentary operations; but as we want to talk of
"logic" it was necessary for us to go one step
further into the study of variüus types of rea-
soning. In natural languages inferences imply
more than formal logical links: they refer to the
shared knowledge of the participants. Since in
human sciences the consensus on entities and
methods is not as strict as in natural sciences-
hence the importance of polemics-they offer
another appropriate and stable field of investi-
gation where the basic operations and pro ce-
dures are at work in the more complex pattern
of scientific argumentations. This new research
will focus on two problems: first, the description
 SWITZERLAND
of the rationality specific to these discourses (in
opposition to the formalism of "hard" sciences),
then the elaboration of an axiomatization of these
descriptions of natural reasonings, and their
processing.
A second research perspective at the Centre
de Recherches Semiologiques has yielded spe-
cialized studies on argumentative practices and
the sociology of language. Research assistants
Marianne Ebel and Pierre Fiala are focusing on
political speeches, and they have given special
attention to xenophobic discourses which devel-
oped strongly and spread throughout the Swiss
population during the course of sevcral cam-
paigns against foreign workers (initiatives contre
L'emprise de La main-d'oeuvre itrangere). For more
than fifteen years the question of immigration
has been a permanent and national concern
(Ueberfremdung); it gave way to collective reac-
tions and contradictory discourses. Simple terms
like emprise itrangere or xenophobia summed up
a whole set of economic, political, and ideolog-
ical problems which the bourgeois themselves
called "Helvetic uneasiness." These expressions
are not solely the product of political parties:
they pervaded all social classes, all institutions
(press, school, church); everyone produced and
exchanged such discourses at one time or another.
The goal of Ebel and Fiala is to describe the
confrontation of the various discourses gener-
ated cither by collective speakers, for example
political parties, trade unions, professional orga-
nizations, government representatives, mass
media, or by individual speakers, such as areader
writing to the daily news paper. Their study has
concentrated on the three press campaigns of
1970, 1974, and 1977, and they have been able
to explain how each time the bourgeois press
fought against those referenda, how in 1970,
together with the government and the employ-
ers, it built on an argumentation against the
necessity of hiring foreign workers, and how seven
years later it concealed the fact that in the mean-
time, taking advantage of the economic reces-
sion, they had dismissed more than 300,000
foreign workers and had made them return to
their native countries.
During that period, numerous letters were sent
by readers to their news papers and were pub-
lished. Some passionately argued for a decrease
in thc number of foreign workers; others, to the
507
contrary, would polemically oppose these on
moral, economic, or political grounds. Antici-
pating all accusations a woman wrote "I am not
a xenophobe!" and stated further in her letter,
"There are too many of those foreigners," Ebel
and Fiala analyze such situations of communi-
cation; they show how in various polemical sit-
uations some discourses admit their own
xenophobia or try 10 hide it, agree with it or
condemn it.
This study is based on the theoretical and
methodological conceptionsof Mikhall Bakhtine
(Voloshinov) and Jean Pierre Faye.! In his
attempt to elaborate a materialistic theory of
language, Bakhtine stressed the fact that the
functioning and evolution of languages can only
be studied in concrete verbal communication (not
in some abstract system of linguistic forms in
every individual's psyche). Therefore language
analyses must take into account: (a) an analysis
of the concrete conditions in which the forms
and types of verbal interaction occur; (b) an
analysis of the utterance markers bound to the
verbal interaction in which they appear; (c) a
systematic analysis of linguistic forms.
As to J. P. Faye, he brought out in his book
on totalitarian languages a fundamental relation
between language and economics as such. Ebel
and Fiala have observed this relation in a com-
parative analysis of various political speeches.
Taking into considcration the economic condi-
tions from the "boom" of the seventies to the
recession, they studicd how the different speeches
on immigration made by political and syndical
organizations underwent ascries of transfor-
mations throughout that period.
GRIZE, Jean-Blaise. Born in 1922. Full Professor of Logic
at the University of Neuchatel. Director of the Centre de
Recherches Semiologiques, Neuchatel. Adjunct Professor of
Logic at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris, France. President of the University of Neu-
chatel, Switzerland, 1974-1978. Recent publications:
"Logique et organisation du discours. " In lvfodetes logiques
et niveaux d'analyse linguistique. Eds. J. David & R. Martin.
Paris: Klincksieck, 1976, pp. 95-99.
"Discours, connaissance et actions." Dialectica, 31, No. 1-
2 (1977), 129-39.
'J. P. Faye, Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison/l'iconomie
narrative (Paris: Hermann, 1972); M. Bakhtine, Le Marxisme
et la philosophie du langage. Essai d'application de la mithode sociol-
ogique en linguistique (1929; French translation, Paris: Minuit,
1977).
508 CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHA.TEL
"Logique et discours." In Grammars and Descriptions. Eds.
T. A. Van Dijk and J. Petöfi. Berlin and New York: W. de
Gruyter, 1977, pp. 105-31.
"Schematisation, representations et images." In Actes du
Golloque du Gentre de Recherches Linguistiques et Semiologiques de
Lyon. Lyon: Presses Universitaires, 1978, pp. 45-52.
(with G. Pieraut-Le Bonniec), "Un aspect de la logique
naturelle. La contradiction dans le discours." Bulletin de psy-
chologie, 32 (1979), 655-64.
"Le discours analogique." Representation des connaissances et
raisonnement dans les sciences de l'homme. Rocquencourt: Institut
national de recherehes en informatique et en automatique,
1979, pp. 428-39.
"Pour aborder I'etude des structures du discours quoti-
dien." Langue Fran(aise, 50 (May 1981), 7-19.
De la logique a l'argumentation. Geneve: Droz, 1982.
(with G. Pieraut-Le Bonniec), La contradiction. Essai sur les
operations de la pensee. Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
1983.
Pub1ications of the Centre de Recherehes Semiologiques
(including articles written by J .-B. Grize and his
collaborators) :
Pre-Publications
Travaux du Gentre de Recherches Semiologiques, 1 to 49 (Neu-
chiitel: Universite, 1970-1985).
Gollected A rtides
"Recherehes sur le discours et I'argumentation." Revue
Europeenne des Sciences Sociales, 12, No. 32 (1974), 200 p.
"Discours, savoir, histoire. Materiaux pour une recherche."
Revue Europeenne des Sciences Sociales, 17, No. 45 (1979), 180 p.
"L'explication. Approche semiologique." Revue Europeenne
des Sciences Sociales, 19, No. 56 (1981), 171 p.
Personal Publications
Marie-J eanne Borel. Discours de la logique et logique du disco urs .
Essai sur le probleme du sujet dans le langage. Lausanne: L' Age
d'Homme, 1978,262 p.
"Theorie logique et analyse du discours." Studia Philoso-
phica, 37 (1977), 9-31.
"L'Idee de logique naturelle." Revue de TMologie et de Phi-
losophie, IIl (1979),343-351.
"L'Explication dans I'argumentation. Approche semio-
logique." Langue Fran(aise, 50 (May, 1981),20-38.
Marianne Ebe! and Pierre Fiala. "La situation d'enoncia-
tion dans les pratiques argumentatives." Langue Fran(aise, 50
(May, 1981),53-73.
Sous le consensus, la xenophobie. Paroles, arguments, contextes
(1961-1981). Lausanne: Institut de Science politique, 1983.
Joelle Kohler-Chesny. "Aspects des discours explicatifs."
In Logique, argumentation et conversation. Actes du Golloque de
linguistique et pragmatique, Fribourg 1981. Sciences pour la
communication, No. 5. Berne: Peter Lang, 1983, pp. 61-77.
Denis Mieville. "Nature des exemples en mathematiques."
Techniques d'instruction, 2 (1979), 5-10.
"Apprentissage et deve!oppement. Une contribution pos-
sible de la schematisation." Apprentissage et developpement, I,
No. 2, (1981),39--42.
Un developpement des systemes logiques de Stanislaw Lefniewski.
PrototMtique-Ontologie-Mereologie. Berne: Peter Lang, 1984.
Gollective Books
Marie-Jeanne Bore!, Jean-Blaise Grize, and Denis Mie-
ville. Essai de logique naturelle. Sciences pour la communica-
tion, No. 4. Berne: Peter Lang, 1982.
Jean-Blaise Grize, ed. Semiologie du raisonnement. Sciences
pour la communication, No. 9. Berne: Peter Lang, 1984.
Gollaborators 1976-1985: Denis Apotheloz, Marie-Jeanne BoreI,
Marianne Ebe!, James Gasser, Jodle Kohler-chesny, Aldo
Licitra, Denis Mieville, Catherine Pequegnat, Christiane
Tripet.
B. Artificial Intelligence
Michael Rosner js interested in the general
problem of computer modelling of naturallan-
guage, with special reference to conversational
English. Conversation is a dynamic phenome-
non in which no utterance can be considered in
isolation, and therefore any program capable of
conversing must be equipped to use the neces-
sary knowledge about the dynamics of conver-
sation. His research is an attempt to answer the
following question: what sort of knowledge is
required and how can it be represented? A pre-
liminary answer to this question was formulated
in terms of conversational tactics-short recipes
for achieving well-defined objectives in conver-
sation. Examples of such tactics would be:
To get someone to do X (polite!y), say
"Could you do X?"
To gain the attention of astranger, say
"Excuse me!"
After the collecting of such tactics, the next
task is to give criteria for their use. Some of these
are clearly of a lexical nature (e.g. insertion of
the word please) whereas others derive from rather
more delicate social or pragmatic conventions,
for example,
To avoid answering a question directly, claim that a higher
authority forbids you to do so.
 SWITZERLAND 509

Lexical tactics are not limited to the use of single a response. The limits of this state of the con-
words. In transcribed conversations, punctua- versation are as yet unknown, though it could
tion plays a very important role: consider the definitely be said to inc1ude:
difference between:

"oh," and "oh?" • Assertions about the relationships between

participants, for example who is in author-
Thcy can also occur as phrases of varying degrees ity, who has the initiative, who is speaking,
of complexity, for example, the level of intimacy, and so forth.
• Assertions about participants' goals. Knowl-
"Shut up!" edge 01' these seems to be essential for the
"You don't know (proposition) do you?" production of certain social actions, for
example, requesting, ordering, thanking,
A central idea is that words, punctuation, and apologizing, warning, and so forth.
patterns all share the function of communicating • Assertions about the current topic of
facts. Therefore they appear in the same phrasal conversation.
lexicon (a concept already proposed by linguists
like Bollinger and Becker). This is a source of All of these connect with the conversational tac-
hypotheses-tentative assertions about the state tics mentioned above.
of the conversation occurring whenever a lexical Rosner's research has also focused on the rep-
item matches an input utterance (or some part resentation 01' the static knowledge of the pro-
of it). By tentative is meant "capable of being gram. Some 01' this is, of course, implicitly
revoked," for there is no reason for the set of contained in the lexicon, but the rest can be
hypotheses produccd to be consistent. In fact, broadly characterized as the basis for common-
the basic strategy of the program is to seek out sense reasoning about: (I) An underlying domain
contradictions by exploiting consistency rela- of discourse; (2) Action and the representation
tions between hypotheses. of change; (3) Time and temporal concepts.
If procedures for such an exploitation are to
be expressed homogeneously, it is necessary for ROSNER, Michael. Born in 1950. Research Assistant at the
the language used to be as independent as pos- Institut Da1le Molle pour 1es Etudes Semantiques et Cog-
sible of the kind 01' information conveyed by a nitives, Geneva, Switzerland. Pub1ications:
hypothesis. It should be planned for the pro- "ULLY: A Pro gram for Understanding Conversations"
duction of patterns of inference, and have a (in collaboration with P. J. Hayes). Proeeedings of the Assoei-
ation jOr Artificial Intelligenee and Simulation of Behavior, Edin-
semantic theory capable of expressing clearly the burgh 1976, pp. 137-147.
ontological commitments of the program. First- "What's in a Socia1 Action for U?" Proeeedings of the Asso-
order predicate calculus meets these criteria ciationjOr Artificial Intelligenee and Simulation Behavior, Hamburg
(though it is not necessarily intended as an 1978, pp. 283-292.
"Case in Linguistics and Cognitive Science" (with the
im plemen ta tion language). collaboration of H. Somers). University of East Anglia Papers
Lexical information is equally applicable to in Linguisties, 13 (1980), 1-29.
both the understanding and the generation of "Conversational Taeties and Strategie Goals." In Proeeed-
utterances, so that ideally its representation ings of the Workshop on Models of Dialogue, Linköping, Sweden,
should look in both directions. An assertional 1981.
framework facilitates this. It should be stressed,
however, that most of the work done has con-
C. Semantics
centrated on understanding rather than
generation. For Georges Lüdi, researches on meaning
Hypotheses treat the information about the evolved from the linguistic semantics of the
state of the conversation defined in an open- European structural tradition (Baldinger, Cos-
ended way, that part of knowledge of the pro- eriu, Greimas, Pottier, et al.), and now convcrge
gram which changes from utterance to utterance, with the larger approach of discourse semiotics
and which is relevant for the appropriateness 01' within the framework of the theory 01' models.
510 CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHATEL
His basic hypo thesis is that our linguistic com-
petence includes a lexical component consisting,
among other things, in a lexicon, defined as a
systematic hierarchical inventory of hypotheses
about meaning, wh ich is relatively stable for all
lexical units. According to componential anal-
ysis, these lexical meanings could be decom-
posed into semes, that is, semantic features. Their
hierarchical organization, based on relations of
conjunction and disjunction, is represented by a
tree-diagram, and it corresponds to the semic
structure of each lexical unit. Combinatory rules
working on contextual semes, semantic valency,
case frames, etc., would thus rule discourse
isotopy.
Lüdi ca me to the conclusion that a lexicon is
not an apriori scientific object, but that it
approaches reality only as part of a model
accounting for the faculty of any speaker/hearer
to assign some meaning to a text. From now on,
his research will be centered around three
hypotheses:
1. Meaning is achieved by way of instructions
(referential, combinatory, conative, etc.) con-
veyed by lexical meanings, and which lose their
ambiguity through their process of actualization
(in Charles Bally's sense of the word).
2. Hypotheses on meaning are acquired, con-
trolled, and corrected according to a calculation
of the modifications occurring by the very fact
of their use.
3. Linguistic knowledge, especially lexical
knowledge, is not autonomous, but to the con-
trary is embedded in the knowledge of interac-
tion, or even better, in the model of reality
adopted by a whole linguistic community. Hence
the necessity of a clear dis tinction between
semantic knowledge and encyclopedic knowl-
edge, on the one hand, and between operations
in the linguistic component and operations in
the rhetorical component (in O. Ducrot's sense
of rhitorique) , on the other hand.
Metaphor appeared to be the most appropri-
ate matter for Lüdi to work on. First he tried to
define the notion of "interpretable deviance"
(ecart metaphorique) in relation to the operation of
amalgamation realized at the linguistic level itself.
At the same time, he rejected the idea of a pre-
existent tertium commune, and replaced it by the
concept of "analogy ins truction" (instruction
d'analogie). In agreement with recent studies he
considered that the interpretable deviance
already operates simultaneously on both lin-
guistic and non-linguistic levels. As to the notion
of "analogy instruction", though it still needs
more explicitness, one can say that it is not a
shortened comparison, but an original process
by which to favor, and attribute to the repre-
sen ta tion of the com pared 0 bj ect (le compare) , one
or several features of the speaker's personal rep-
resentation of the comparing object (le compar-
ant), even if the features do not necessarily belong
to the global semic content of the comparing
sign, or to the socio-encyclopedic knowledge of
the denoted comparing object.
Another field that shows this precarious bal-
ance between linguistic competence (especially
in its lexical component), and aspects of com-
municative competence is the language of pub-
licity. Lüdi first became acquainted with it
through a study he made on the Argentine
vocabulary of fashion. He notieed at that time
that several semantic rules (particularly the main
one accounting for the fact that semes are chosen
for their distinctive functions) are disturbed by
the eo-reference of the image and of the caption.
This observation has led to some considerations
still to be developed on the relation between words
and images in the process of assigning meaning
to any advertising "text", i.e. image plus lin-
guistic signs.
LÜDI, Georges. Born in 1943. Full Professor of Linguistics
at the U niversity of Basel, Switzerland. His principal research
interests are in semantics and metaphor. Ph.D. thesis on Die
Metaphor als Funktion der Aktualisierung (Bern: Francke Verlag,
1973). Assistant Professor in French Lillguistics at the Uni-
versity of Zürich (inaugural dissertation on "Valency,
Semantic Case and Contextual Features in 16th-Century
French and Spanish"); lecturer in French and Spanish lin-
guistics at the Universities of Zürich and Bern and at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Techno10gy of Zürich (1977-79).
Curren! mailing address: Engelgasse 106, 4052 Bille, Switzerland.
D. Pragmatics
Speech-act theory, from Austin and Searle to
the linguists working on utterance, has been
essentially based on the study of isolated speech
acts conveyed by made-up examples. It has
yielded interesting hypotheses, espeeiallyon the
relation between the strueture of an utterance-
token and the illocu tionary force i t actualizes (as
studied by Cole and Morgan). However, it shows
severe limitations sinee it leaves aside a field of
the utmost importanee for the production of
 SWITZERLAND
speech acts, and one that has been very little
studied up to now: the structure of conversation.
With reference to the works of Goffman and
of Sacks, and using dialogues recorded in a book-
store and a travel agency, Eddy Roulet has set
up a four-Ievel model: "interaction," "exchange,"
"move" (intervention), and "speech act."
In a conversation held in a bookstore one
afternoon, for example, the interaction is what
is delimited by the verbal relation between two
speakers, here a customer and the bookseller. An
interaction is generally composed of several
exchanges constitutive of the interaction, for
example, welcoming, information request, sell-
ing, book ordering, leave-taking, with bounda-
ries corresponding to the breaking and resettling
of the balance of the interaction between par-
ticipants. An exchange usually includes two or
three moves paraphrasable with aperformative
verb, and to which Roulet attributes illocution-
ary functions that were traditionally attached
only to speech acts; an exchange may consist of
three moves such as information request, answer,
acknowledgement. The first move, which rules
the structure of the exchange, is called "main
move" (intervention directrice d'echange). These three
moves have different illocutionary functions:
opening for the first one, opening and reactive
for the second one, reactive for the third one.
Whenever a move consists in a single speech
act, an information request for instance, this act
is gene rally supported by other subordinate
speech acts that set it, prepare it, and prevent
possible objections:
J'ai perdu mon horaire, tu peux m'indiquer I'heure du dernier
train?
Tu peux m'indiquer I'heure du dernier train, car je ne oeux
pas le manquer?
Bien que lu sois presse, tu peux m'indiquer l'heure du dernier
train?
Beside the illocutionary value of information
or agreement, subordinate acts have in relation
to the main act of the move (e.g. here an infor-
mation request) a function that is called, after
Aston, "interactive."2
In this general frame Roulet and his team have
developed a first study of the different types of
illocutionary act markers in contemporary
'G. Aston, "Comprehending Value: Aspects of the Structure
of Argumentative Discourse." Sludi llaliani di Linguislica Teo-
riea ed Applicala, 6 (1977), 465-509.
511
French. The denominative markers (performa-
tive verb) express the opening and/or reactive
illocutionary value of a speech act (je demande,je
riponds,je remercie); the indicative markers deter-
mine in a univocal and non-explicit manner the
illocutionary or the interactive value of the act
(certes, for agreement; puisque, for justification),
and the potential markers (chiefly sequences with
modal verbs, j'aimerais, pouvez-vous) which express
mainly, but non-necessarily, a certain illocution-
ary value. The team is working more specifically
on the indicative markers of illocutionary and
interactive speech acts because these have not
been systematically described for French, except
in O. Ducrot's studies on some argumentative
connectives.
I t is also noticeable that in the occurrences of
speech acts some forms appear with the function
of weakening the menace an act represents for
the hearer's face: Lakoff calls these forms
"hedges." Roulet and his assistants are making
up an inventory ofhedges (attenuateurs) for French.
In addition to markers of illocutionary and
interactive acts and hedges, the recorded con-
versations contain forms like aLors, or bon! Their
function is situated more at the conversational
than at the speech-act level; they indicate the
passage from one exchange to the following one,
for instance. Therefore, a first description of these
French markers of conversational structuration
(marqueurs de structuration de La conversation) has been
usefully undertaken.
The research also deals with the selection and
formulation of rules of composition liable to
determine the interpretation o[ speech acts
according to the co-text, and of rules of sequences
for possible combinations of moves within the
exchange, and of acts within the move. Ulti-
mately, J acques Moeschler, Roulet's assistant,
will present in his thesis the first systematic
description for French of the speech act of refu-
tation in conversation.
ROULET, Eddy. Born in 1939. Full Professor of French
Linguistics at [he University of Geneva, Switzerland. Head
of a research team working on pragmatics. Editor of the
Cahiers de Linguisliquefranfaise (Geneva). Main publications:
"Interactional Markers in Dialogue." Applied Linguislics 1/
3 (1980), 224-33.
"Modalite et illocution-pouvoir et devoir dans les actes
de permission et de requete." Communicalions, 32 (1980),216-
39.
Eddy Roulet, A. Auschlin, J. Moeschler, C. Rubattel, N.
de Spengler, and A. Zenone. "Actes de langage et structure
512 CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHATEL
de la conversation." Cahiers de Linguistiquefranraise, (Geneva)
I (1980).
Jacques Moeschler, Dire et contredire. Pragmatique de la nega-
tion et de rifutation dans la conversation. Sciences pour la com-
munication, No. 2 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1982) p. 228
Current mailing address: Tattes 4A, 1222 Vesenaz, Switzerland
11. Semiotic Analysis of Visual
and Verbal Arts
A. Semiotics of Publicity
j.P. Keller's interest is focused on the concep-
tion of images, mostly within two fields: contem-
porary art and mass culture. He is less concerned
with the content of images than with the trans-
formations arising when an image does not refer
primarily to reality, but to itself as the image of
an image. Thus two cases occur: one ofinclusion,
i.e., when an image is located inside another
image; the other of duplication (series), i.e., when
an image is confronted with itself as in self-
reference.
In this perspective the American Pop Art of
the early sixties proves to be extremely revealing.
It is a fact that figurative artists like Roy Lich-
tenstein, Andy Warhol, and T. Wesselman have
departed from the traditional process of image-
making: They used and rearranged ready-made
images selected from advertisements, comic
strips, etc., giving them a status of "meta-image."
Photorealism (hypeTTialisme) uses the same devices:
instead of concealing the reference, the artist
strongly emphasizes it (however, this does not
hinder the possibility of at the same time looking
at a picture far what it represents).
In arecent study j.P. Keller has been able to
develop similar considerations about Coca-Cola
objects and symbols when they are cut off from
their utilitarian function (i.e., advertising) and
turned into collection pieces, or taken as parodic
objects. In both cases, symbol and object func-
tion as a parody of themselves, and in this respect
they belong to a metalanguage.
This problem of the reftecting and questioning
of an image by itself is at the care of Keller's
new studies of bourgeois culture and mass
culture.
KELLER, Jean-Pierre. Born in 1939. Ph.D. in sociology.
Assistant Professor at the U niversity of Geneva; teacher at
the Ecole Superieure d' Arts Visuels, Geneva; Professor at
the University of Lausanne, Switzerlahd (course in the
"Sociologie de I'image"). Main publications:
"Aesthetic Perception in Everyday Life." Diogenes, 100
(1977), 7-25.
"La Societe de consommation au stade de la conscience
de soi. Contribution a l'analyse iconographique publici-
taire." Revue Suisse de Sociologie, I (1978),83-100.
Pop Art et evidence du quotidien. Lausanne: L' Age d'Homme,
1979.
La Galaxie Coca-Cola. Geneva: Editions Noir, 1980.
Current mailing address: 25 Boulevard de la Cluse, 1205 Geneve,
Switzerland.
B. Semiotics of Cinema
The research es of Fran<;ois Albera concern
chiefty three fields, all related to the cinema.
1. Cinema Theory
This theory was initiated by presemiotic stud-
ies coming out of: (a) the developing theory of
literature (viz. Tynyanov, Eichenbaum, Shklov-
sky, etc., all Russian formalists of the twenties);
(b) the larger scope of the formal analysis of
various signifying practices (pratiques signifiantes) ,
(viz. Eisenstein, whose written works offer sev-
eral operational concepts for the interpretation
of literary texts, paintings, and motion pictures,
concepts such as "cutting," "global image"
[obraz] , etc.); or (c) critiques on some specific
film technics, viz. Kuleshov and Shub.
This set of theoretical books covers the whole
question of the relation between verbal, iconic,
and non-verbal codes which are articulated in
the multi-code techniques offilmmaking. There-
fore, we are confronted with the general concep-
tion of language as a universal code, or with
mare local problems such as transcoding and
in tertextuali ty.
2. Cinema History and Theory
In this field researches deal with some texts
particularly convenient for text analysis. The lat-
ter consist of individual approaches using a cer-
tain number of the results of the semiotics of
cinema (code analysis, grande syntagmatique of
narration), and of narrative analysis, and not in
an application of models; (the strongest models,
 SWITZERLAND
like that of Greimas, do not take into account
the specificity of the substance of the expres-
sion). The goal here is to point out some char-
acteristic features of these texts that are indicative
of formal changes in the historical evolution of
filmmaking through a synchronic analysis instead
of referring to evolutionist and historicist models
usually in favor.
In a new study of D. W. Griffith, for example,
once the intertext has been defined as both "con-
tingent" (aliatoire) and "structural," as Riffaterre
puts it, Albera traces the distinctive features of
the work: spatial organization code (compartimen-
tage) and narration code (syntagmes alternis), or
more specifically speaking, all the means of frag-
mentation (framing, lights, etc.), and so forth.
This global approach should eventually produce
a description of Griffith's language.
3. Semiotics of Images
This work aims at the distinction between the
iconic level (representation, recognition, desig-
nation), that is, image as a sign, and the pictorial
level, such as the conjunction of a signifying
practice and its materials (the iconic level being
relatively indifferent to the specificity of the sub-
s tance of the expression). This opposition is not
to be reduced to the judicious but nonetheless
insufficient one of denotation/connotation. Fur-
thermore, in recent studies this opposition is
changing: the use of ready-made objects, or of
so me spatial apparatus (even for landscape)
supersedes the syntagmatic mode ofreading (i.e.
the articulation of these different objects or signs),
and favors a productive type of reading in which
a sign becomes "mental" (in Duchamp's sense).
ALBERA, Fran<;ois. Born in 1948. Assistant Professor at the
University of Lyon-li, France; teacher of history/theory of
cinema and semiotics of images at the Ecole Superieure d' Arts
Visuels, Geneva. Main publications:
"Notes sur I'esthetique d'Eisenstein," Travaux du Centre de
Recherche, Linguistiques et Semiologiques. Lyon, 1973, pp. 79-
8!.
"Les Intertitres dans le cinema muet," Dialectiques, 9 (1975),
23-36.
"Propositions theoriques pour I'etablissement d'une peda-
gogie de I'analyse des films." Publications du Departement
de l'Instruction Publique de Geneve (1976).
"Godard et la video." In Jean-Luc Godard. Munieh: Hanser
Verlag, 1979.
"Introduction et appareil critique de S.M. Eisenstein." In
Cinematisme. Bruxelles: Ed. Complexe, 1980.
513
Current mailing address: 27, rue de Lyon, 1201 Geneve,
Switzerland.
C. Semiotics of Drama
Drama establishes various relations between
signs belonging to different systems of signifi-
cation. Patrice Thompson focuses on this aspect
of drama, and also on the way these relations
are dramatized in order to create "action."
These relations between systems of signs as
weIl as their dramatization vary according to
different aesthetic schools, and these very changes
are meaningful to the analyst because they reveal
some properties that might not be of any interest
if considered in their original social and aesthetic
background.
The first step consisted in defining units called
cellules dramatiques enclosing several types of com-
plex relations such as visual signs, gestures and
words: these elements constitute the basic alpha-
bet for complex "clauses" expressing either a
stable or a mobile meaning (alternative
"either ... or ... ").
One should not, however, be misled by the
analogy with the grammatical clause, since on
the one hand the constituting morphemes of the
cellules dramatiques belong either to conventional
or to free semiotic fields, at least in Western
civilization (only Oriental drama seems to have
tied everything up with conventions), and, on
the other hand, considered within a single sys-
tem, signs are endowed with a relative autonomy
that allows anaphoric relations from one "clause"
to the next.
This means that play-writing functions on the
principle of at least a duality of patterning (also
cf. Martinet' s double articulation). The first level
organizes the relations: (a) in a compensating
way, i.e. the duality occurs through gestures or
visual signs if the linguistic level fails to convey
it; (b) in an anaphoric way, so that the semiotic
elements, kept apart, in their respective semiotic
fields, are used later in the play with either the
same meaning or a new one. The second level
is a more complex one to study: by means of
pervasion (la contamination), it tends to disorgan-
ize both the system in which signs are isotopic,
and the efforts made on the first level to set new
rules of production of meaning between distinct
isotopes. Thus new, unstable signifying relations
514 CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHATEL

are created with a contingent aspect which can La Religion de Berijamin Gonstant. Les pouvoirs de l'image. Pisa:
be interpreted on a third level, a symbolic one Pacini Editore, 1978,624 p.
Mme. de Charriere, "Contes et Nouvelles," Oeuvres com-
this time, etc. We can see that as soon as sign pletes, vols. 8 and 9. Eds. P. Thompson and Denis Wood.
isotopes are brought together, as is the case in Amsterdam: Van Oorschot, 1980-81.
drama, they undergo two opposite tensions:
(a) one is an attempt to integrate an the semiotic
systems into one: this is the option of the theo- 111. Semiotic Analysis of
ricians of drama, either by means of reduction, Literature
or more ambitiously by totalization; (b) the other
one, which makes drama what it is, manages
A. Literature and Meaning
unexpected encounters between signs belonging
to different semiotic isotopes which, if they could The research team headed by J acques Geni-
be isolated, would prove meaningful for the nasca in Zurich is centered less on the elabo-
understanding of the nature of these semiotic ration of a theory of signs than on a theorization
isotopes and their relations (more than would of the conditions of production and understand-
all the efforts made by the theoreticians to impose ing of meaning. Even though the institutional
a unity from outside and even if such a unity framework determines the materials to be dealt
were the end-product of the analysis of the var- with, that is, French literary texts, the point of
ious processes of sense-making). view is part of a general perspective, that of
Only the first of these two tensions has been discourse analysis (F. Thürlemann is presently
studied at length. What they display, however, focusing on a proj ect of semiotique planaire).
is definitely different. The first one shows so me Within the empirical method chosen, the anal-
points of resistance, as well as some points of ysis of actual texts still appears as a sound basis
convenience for the bringing together of heter- for the evaluation of theoretical constructs.
ogeneous signs, and it pI aces drama within the Jacques Geninasca is attempting to define ana-
reach of an overall master-view. The second one lytical procedures for the elaboration of descrip-
is more directly experimental, in that it shows tive models accounting for different types of
how the very imperfections of human sign- meaning production in the text-occurrences
systems create networks that escape any attempt selected .. On this particular point our position
at integration, and this drifting apart will even- differs greatly from the one adopted by French
tually have to be observed. poeticiens like Todorov or Genette.
It is obvious that within a semiotic perspective The general purpose of this research consists
drama is only one of the fields available to work in the elaboration of a theory of dis course in
on, but it is a meaningful one since it has always which discourse would be considered as an
been the ground for a confrontation between dif- achieved and finite utterance-uni t with struc-
ferent systems of signs, and it has always empir- tures different from and independent of those of
ically actualized its effects. Since other fields the sentence.
would provide new viewpoints, Thompson has In the course of this study on literary texts
been also interested in the cinema. Both its his- the figurative component of this type of dis-
tory and the artefact of its optical perspectives course came up in the analysis. Hence, the team
seem to analyze a set of problems on the relation tried to define the way figures in natural semiot-
between sign systems in a way that avoids the ics (Greimas's semiotique du monde naturel) are
contingency and the crossing of networks of embodied and reinterpreted through a verbal
significations. language.
The project is to set appropriate conditions for
THOMPSON, Patriee. Born in 1924. Full Professor ofFreneh a dictionary of figures specific to a writer, a
Literature at the University of NeuehateI, Switzerland. He school, or adefinite period of literary history.
is presently working on his next publieation, "Perspeetive The results of such a work, once incorporated
sur le texte theatral." Previous publications: in a general theory of discourse structures, should
Deux chapitres de l'esprit des religions de Benjamin Gonstant,
Universite de Neuchatel. Reeueil de Travaux publies par la provide adequate data for a comparative
Faculte des Lettres, fase. 33. (Neuehatel and Geneva: .Faeulte approach to texts and for a renewal of the whole
des lettres et Librairie Droz, 1970), 256 p. conception of "motives" and "themes."
 SWITZERLAND
And eventually all these diverse studies will
have to reintroduce a diachronic dimension m
order to complement their results.
GENINASCA, Jacques. Born in 1930. Full professor of His-
tory of Contemporary French Literature at the University
of Zurich, Switzerland. Representative for Switzerland on
the Revue Romane; member of the Bureau de l'Association
Internationale de Semiotique (AIS/lASS); member of the
Conseil Scientifique de l'Unite de Recherche Linguistique
No. 7: "Analyse du Discours," de l'Institut de Langue Fran-
<;aise (CNRS, France). Main publications:
Analyse structurale des "Chimeres" de Nerval. Neuchatel: La
Baconniere, 1971.
"Decoupage conventionnel et signification." In Essais de
semiotique poitique. Ed. A.J. Greimas. Paris: Larousse, 1971,
pp. 45-62.
Les Chimeres de Nerval, discours critique el discours poetique.
Paris: Larousse, 1973.
"Proces, discours et code dans l'analyse du recit." In Intomo
al "Codice". Atti del III Convegno della Associazione Italiana
di Studi Semiotici (AISS), Pavia, 26-27 settembre 1975.
Florence, "La Nuova Italia," 1976, pp. 26-36.
"Les figures de la perception et du voyage d~ns Parfum
exotique et leurs representations semantiques." Etudes Bau-
delairiennes, 8. Neuchatel: La Baconniere, 1976, pp. 119-146.
"Approche du niveau figuratif; Analyse de quelques figu-
res dans un conte de Maupassant." Le Bulletin, 2-3 (1978),
5-20.
"To Fish/to Preach, Narrative and Metaphor." In The
Enlrevernes Group, Signs and Parabols, with a study by
J. Geninasca and a postface by A. J. Greimas. Pittsburg: The
Pickwick Press, 1978.
"Interpreter, persuader, transformer, L'essai sur le don de
Marcel Mauss." In Introduction ii I'analyse du discours en scienees
soäales, Eds. A.J. Greimas and E. Landowski. Paris: Ha-
chette, 1979.
"Avoir du sens vs avoir un sens, dans une perspective
discursive." In Actes du Premier Congres de l'Association Inter-
nationale de Semiolique, Milan, 2-6 June 1974 The Hague:
Mouton, 1979, pp. 648-649.
"Forme fixe et forme discursive dans quelques sonnets de
Baudelaire." Cahiers de l'Assoeialion Internationale des Etudes
Franr;aises, 32 (1968), 123-139.
B. Semiotics of Sacred Texts
In keeping with his religious and linguistic
background, Father E. J. Bucher is very much
concerned with the various aspects of utterance
in sacred texts and in different religions. In this
matter, semiotic processes are many and refined,
and therefore considerations on a semiotics of
religions should provide data for a general
semiotics, and theology as well will benefit from
such a semiotic approach.
His main interest is with the nature of knowl-
edge. The question of a knowledge of religious
essence has been discussed at length by analytic
515
philosophers who unsuccessfully attempted to
define the truth-value of isolated and specific
assertions; this is especially the case in American
and English analyses. In opposition to this point
of view, Father Bucher tried to identify and
describe elementary textual patterns used as bases
or fields in religious statements. As expected,
narration patterns, and not only mythic ones,
are meaningful: the cognitive effects of religious
assertions can be achieved and understood only
through their relation to the narrative in which
they are involved.
U nlike the sciences, this truth matter in reli-
gion is actually aiming at practical efficiency.
However, truth conditions are not to be com-
pletely set aside, but the search for truth is slightly
shifting to the des ire of providing the pious man
with a model for his behavior and actions. On
this issue, it appears that a semantics and prag-
matics of text patterns and text production are
of the utmost importance: hence, a particular
interest for the results of Textlinguistik and
Texttheorie.
Father Bucher is presently working on Blaise
Pascal's notion of "heart" and "knowledge
acquired through the he art. " According to Pas-
cal, the heart is the location of all religious
knowledge. Father Bucher's purpose is to deter-
mine wh ether there exists any verbal way of con-
veying this kind of "knowledge from the heart,"
and if so, what structure it would display: at this
point, it seems that it would consist in a specific
narration pattern.
BUCHER, Ephrem-Joseph (Father). Born in 1944. He stud-
ied theology and entered the Capuchin Order (1965-1970).
Later he studied philosophy, with special interest in the
analytical sciences oflanguage, at Heidelberg and Constance
(W. Germany). He received his Ph.D. in 1978 with a thesis
on the cognitive content of religious discourses: "Der kog-
nitive Gehalt religiöser Rede." He now teaches general phi-
losophy and the sciences of religion at the Gymnasium of
Appenzell, Switzerland. Main publications:
Narrations religieuses et connaissanee religieuse. Bonn, 1978.
Wiltgenstein et la eonnaissance religieuse. Bonn, 1978.
Current mailing address: Kap-Kloster, Hauptgasse 49, 9050
Appenzell, Switzerland.
C. Literature and Sociology
1. Semiotics of Greek Texts
The question of the relation between mythol-
ogy or literature and the world they refer to is
bound to the question of how sociological and
516 CENTRE DE RECHERCHES SEMIOLOGIQUES, NEUCHATEL
psychological information is involved and
expressed throughout the conception of a text.
Since these two aspects of reality are inherent
to any artistic production, and because of the
tremendous gap that stretches between our mod-
ern civilization and the Hellenic one, ancient
texts are the sole access to such a remote reality.
Except for iconographical data, semiotic struc-
tures of written works can be brought into light
only through a comparison with other texts which
in their turn must undergo semiotic analysis.
These considerations led Claude Calame to
set up a threefold semiotic approach to Greek
texts. Calame's first two studies consisted in an
analysis of the narrative aspects of syntax and
semantics in one of the texts of Homer. The use
of surface dis course structures made it possible
for hirn to reconstruct the semantic base struc-
ture of the narration and to define the values
involved in the course of its dramatic progres-
sion. To Greimas's carre semiotique he preferred
Blanches hexagone, which proved to be a more
adequate model for the description of the oppo-
sition and complementarity in the Greek rep-
resentation of the three stages of the world,
eventually coordinated in the text, i.e., Golden
Age, Civilization, Barbarism. This was also a
me ans of avoiding the logical binarism of our
society increasingly ruled by computers. In his
third study, the same method was applied to the
comparison of several heterogeneous versions of
the same story collected from different historical
and geographical areas. This contrastive anal-
ysis was especially weIl suited for the selection
of syntactic as weIl as semantic narration ele-
ments woven into the basic structure of the nar-
rative, and which actually reftect the ideological
context in which they were produced.
Another set of researches took into account
the aspects of utterance with a particular empha-
sis on the relation between the conditions of text
production and occurrences of utterance markers.
Textbooks are a typical example of this subtle
identification of "you" with "I" which betrays
the institutional authority operating in the text
itself and inftuencing the reader's mind. The same
consideration regarding I -occurrences is rele-
vant for the understanding of utterance in the
most ancient Greek texts: located between the
end of the oral and the start of the written tra-
dition, they display the important effects of such
a cultural transformation upon utterance. Pro-
gressively the I-occurrence as a mere linguistic
figuration of a Muse changed to an I-occurrence
as the actual creator of the poem with a growing
awareness of the existence of a situation of
communication.
The last dimension is a matter for the historian
of religions: the link between texts and prag-
matics is also present in the relation between
myths and rituals. Two preparatory studies have
dealt with a parallel between myths and rites.
The first one compares the narrative structures
of myths with the description of rites in historical
texts. It shows how sequences of ritual somatic
actions as weIl as sequences of mythical narra-
tive actions can be transferred to a completely
different narration. The second study analyzes
the complex structure of a Balinese ritual and
the relation between its different levels of man-
ifestation. The purpose was to describe the impact
of socio-economic changes on the structures of
the rite (for instance, occurrences of trade fea-
tures inside the rite itself in a touristic economy
system): the de-semanticization tha t results from
it is patent in the degeneration of numerous rites
into a meaningless folklore.
Both specific studies will lead to a wider con-
ception of the logic of Greek tri bai initiation rites
in relation to the semio-narrative structures of
the myths which rule them.
CALAME, Claude. Born in 1943. Professor at the University
of Lausanne, Switzerland. Publications:
"Mythe grec et structures narratives: le mythe des Cyclopes
dans l'Odyssee." In 11 Mito Greco. Rome, 1977, pp. 371-392.
"L'Univers cyclopeen de l'Odyssee entre le carre et I'hexa-
gone logiques." Ziva Antika, 27 (1977), 315-322.
"La Legende du Cyclope dans le folklore europeen ~t extra-
europeen: Un jeu de transformations narratives." Etudes de
Lettres, 3, No. 10 (1977), 45-79.
"Aspects semiotiques de trois manuels scolaires." Bulletin
GILA, 32 (1980),80-98.
"Entre oralite et ecriture: enonciation et enonce dans la
poesie grecque archalque." Semiotica, 43 (1983), 245-273.
"Discours mythique et discours historique dans trois textes
de Pausanias." Degris, 17 (1979), cl-30.
"Une Danse sacree balinaise entre deux referents cultu-
reis." Religioni e Giviltii, 3: Ed. Angelo Breiich. Bari: Dedalo,
1982, pp. 71-85.
"Le Discours mythique." In Semiotique. L'Ecole de Paris.
Ed. J.-C. Coquet. Paris: Hachette, 1982, pp. 85-102.
"Le Processus symbolique." Documents de Travail du Gentra
Internazionale de Semiotica e di Linguislica (U rbino), 128-129
(1983), pp. 1-34.
"L'Espace dans le mythe, I'espace dans le rite." Degres,
35-36 (1983), f1-16.
"Enonciation: veracite ou convention litteraire? L'Inspi-
ration des Muses dans la Theogonie." Actes Semiotiques (GRSL
Paris), 55, No. 34 (1982), 1-24.
 SWITZERLAND
Gurrent mailing address: 18 chemin de Chandieu, 1006 Lau-
sanne, Switzerland
2. Semiotics of Utterance Markers in
Polish and Russian Literature
The researches of Thomas Lahusen deal with
what historians and sociologists call "the social
imagery" (l'imaginaire social); the methods are
those of sociolinguistics and semiotics. He starts
with a quantitative study of the specific linguistic
farms of the "relation to the other" (allocution-
ary paradigms and co-occurring forms) system-
atically collected from Polish and Russian novels,
short stories, autobiographies, and other written
sources of the nineteenth century. Throughout
this study, the specific symbols of this relation-
ship appear to form a remarkably coherent
semiotic system, and the analysis of the system
itself leads to the deduction of symbolic social
structures: these are not only an account of strik-
ing correlations with what we already know of
the social his tory of these countries, but are a
key to the recognition and interpretation of the
social imagery of the period. They provide us
indeed with an extremely accurate description
of a society "staged" by its mediators; they reveal
the existence of a process that seems to escape
the writer's control and brings us information
on certain transformations occurring in the co 1-
lective consciousness.
The study presents also some theoretical prob-
lems: the results obtained set out the absence of
discrete allocutionary structures of the dicho-
tomous type, like tu/vous. If there is definitely
evidence of the existence of two poles, i.e. a rela-
tion of reciprocity/solidarity and a relation of
non-reciprocity/domination, this bipolarization
is representative of only part of the interaction,
and is the symbol solely of a polarized social
relationship, for example: aristocrat/household
servant, bourgeois/workman, etc. Furthermore,
it is the expression of a rigid and still strongly
feudal society. Between these two poles we find
a third type of relations hip referred to as "unde-
cidedness" (indicision) , in comparison with the
two others, a true intermediate state between
domination and solidarity. Significantly, it
517
applies to middle social groups (petit bourgeois, for
instance), whose precarious status is symbolized
by an unstable "social self," or, what amounts
to the same thing, to a euphemization of the
objective "dominance relationships." In terms
of the collectivity, this "ambiguity" is the sign
of so ci al mobility, and of great changes tied to
the beginning of the industrial revolution in
Po land and Russia. When they express polarized
relationships, the allocutionary farms belong to
the well-structured central part of the language
(pronoun paradigm); the relation of "undecid-
edness" is expressed through less structured lin-
guistic means: subde and euphemistic use of
family name, first name, nickname, tide, kinship
terms, and such.
Lahusen came to the conclusion that any spe-
cific semiotic structure refers to its practice, and
that naturallanguage is not based on a structural
dichotomy consisting of discrete units, but, to
the contrary, displays a fundamentally variable
structure with unstable limits fixed by a praxis
equally variable through time and history.
These researches are under way through a
comparative analysis of the "image of the other"
in Polish and Russian literature (and other
sources ) serving as sociological and historical
data.
LAHUSEN, Thomas. Born in 1945. Assistant Professor in
th~ Department of Slavic Languages, University of Lau-
sanne, Switzerland. Main publications:
"Allocution et societe dans un roman polonais du XIXe
siede. Essai de semiologie historique." Wiener Slawistischer
Almanach, 3 (1979) 167-195.
"Przewaga, rownowaga a eufemizm : trzy rodzaje stosun-
kow wobec 'innego'. Proba semiotyki." Przeglad SotJologiczny,
33 (1981), 103-126. .
Autour de I '''homme nouveau ", allocution et societe en Russie au
XIXe siecle (Essai de semiologie de la source litteraire). Vienna:
Wiener Slawistischer Almanach (Sonderband 9, Literarische
Reihe), 1982, p. 336.
"Vers une theorie semiologique du privilege culturel." In
Semiotics Unfolding. Proceedings of the Second Gongress qf the Inter-
national Associationfor Semiotic Studies, Vienna, July 1979. Ed.
T. Borbe. Berlin : Mouton, vol. I, p. 549-556.
Thomas Lahusen, Xin-min Ma, and Yuan Yao. "Voici le
balai de I'empereur. Structure floue et enseignement de la
langue seconde. Apropos d'une analyse phonologique con-
trastive du chinois et du franc;:ais." La Linguistique, 20, No. I
(1984) 41-55.
Gurrent mailing address: 9, Grange-Falquet, 1224 Chene-
Bougeries, Switzerland.
 CHAPTER24
Semiotics in the United States
Roherta Kevelson
I. History of Semiotics in the
United States
A. The Domain of Semiotics:
Its Areas of Inquiry
A his tory of semiotics in the United States or
elsewhere is not the same kind of his tory as that
of other academic disciplines. For example, in
the social sciences, e.g., anthropology, political
science, economics, social psychology,jurisprud-
ence, linguistics, each of these disciplined areas.
The material and information contained in this chapter was
complete and correct to the best of my knowledge at the
time it was written, 1980. Because semiotics is a rapidly
growing field much of the vital intellectual activity which
has taken pI ace in semiotic inquiry since 1980 could not have
been precisely predicted then. The author regrets any omis-
sions and changes which are not included here; such textual
alterations would entail a rewriting of whole sections of the
chapter and is not advised. References and reports on semiotic
centers, symposia and institutes are as accurate as possible
with respect to the time of the writing of this chapter. Where
possible, within editorial constraints, updated information
has been added; for example, change in editors hip and direc-
tors hip is indicated parenthetically; the establishment of new
centers such as the Program for Semiotic Research in Law,
Government, and Economics is no ted in context. A supple-
ment to information offered here is anticipated in the near
future.-Au.
Roberta Kevelson • Department of Philosophy; Director,
Program for Semiotic Research in Law, Government, and
Economics, Pennsylvania State University, Reading, Penn-
sylvania, U.S.A. 19608.
519
of inquiry can be mapped as a field with certain
acknowledged provinces or conceptual universes
of discourse. Such basic concepts for economics
are supply and demand, exchange, distribution, the mar-
ket, the dollar, capital, etc. Anthropology recog-
nizes culture, kinship patterns, nonhuman as well as
all human organizationsfor acculturation, and in gen-
eral investigates all the areas common to the
larger domain of social science. J urisprudence
maps out the relations hip between theory and
practice oflaw, and speculates on the reciprocity
between legal systems and other value systems
in society, including customary interpersonal
behavior, which is not legally encoded. Political
science uses the umbrella concept of government
and its subtopical divisions such as legislation,
administration, authority, power, representation, treaty,
confiict (cf. Ross, 1957: p. 81). The complex notion,
or conceptual sign, of the social contract cuts across
these nation-state-like boundaries as an ideology
which is in-forming, based on a continuous dia-
logue between legitimized, or official, and non-
official social structures. In the broadest sense
semiotics represents this dialogue.
Neither is a history of semiotics analogous to
histories of the natural and physical sciences,
i.e., where the once discrete areas of physics,
chemistry, biology, neurology, etc., overlap today
and share with each other and with certain of
the social sciences-e.g., psychology, zoology,
phenomenology, linguistics-specific theoretical
concerns and even aspects of methodology, the
520 ROBERTA KEVELSON
hard sciences, in general, have traditionally
respected investigatory limitations and these self-
imposed boundaries permit a continuity of clas-
sification and organization of knowledge within
habitual, quasi-permanent frames of inquiry.
Vet, as Max Fisch correctly observes (1978a:
p. 59), "the foundations of the theory of signs
were the foundations of the sciences."
Briefly, in all fields other than semiotics, there
are specifiable basic concepts or universes of dis-
course which define the discipline. However,
semiotics is that metadiscipline which inquires
into all processes of inquiry. As Peirce conceived
it, semiotics is the method of methods (ms. 594
[ca. 1893], mss. 155-657 [1910], ms. 311 [1903],
mS.449 [1903]; cf Morris, 1932; Kevelson 1986).
Semiotics officially became defined as that
method of inquiry which intends to account for
an "patterned communication in an modalities,"
as Mead expressed it in 1962 at the Conference
on Paralinguistics and Kinesics at Indiana U ni-
versity (cf Sebeok, 1976: pp. 51-52; Baer, 1980:
p.348).
N evertheless, an historical account of semiot-
ics in the United States should distinguish
between the way "sign" is used in semiotics and
the various ways this word occurs in nearly all
the traditional disciplines. Further, since 1962,
we can say with Sebeok that the basic universes
of semiotic discourse are anthroposemiotics, ::;oose-
miotics, and endosemiotics (1976, p. 3).
Anthroposemiotics ... the totality of man's species-specific
signalling systems, was the first domain concretely envisaged context of his "transfiguring" logic of relations
and delineated, under the designation semiotic. For most
investigators, from 1960 ... both notions still remain syn-
onymous. The second domain, zoosemiotics, which encom-
passes the study of animal communication in the broadest
sense, was named and comprehensively outlined only in 1963.
It would now seem more accurate to consider anthropose-
miotics and zoosemiotics, separately and conjointly, as two
principle divisions of semiotics, having in common certain
essential features but differing especially as to the funda-
mental and pervasive role that language plays in the former
in contradistinction to the latter. A third domain, endose-
miotics ... studies cybernetic systems within the body ... in discourse, nonhumans, landscapes, etc. Such
this field, the genetic code plays a role comparable to that
of the verbal code in anthroposemiotic affairs ... (but) ...
the coding and transmission of information of differences
outside the body is very different from the coding and trans-
mission inside.
Since this writing, in 1976, important advances these main universes of semiotic discourse-
have been made in the development of an three anthroposemiotics, zoosemiotics, endosemiot-
major areas.
It is in many ways misleading to speak of a
"semiotics of art," or a "semiotics of turn-taking
in conversation," or a "semiotics of games and
play," or of any of the "semiotics of ... " topics
which commonly appear as titles in reports of
semiotic investigations across the enormous
spectrum of systematic communication between
persons, social institutions, non-humans, and
biological macro- and micro-organizations, on
both verbal and non-verbal levels, any more than
one would consider medical pathology to be sub-
divided into pathologies of the heart, of the lungs,
of the liver, etc. For purposes of convenience in
analysis the "topics" and "commonplaces" of
art, gesture, reference, deformation, and so on,
are useful, but the danger of confusing the model
with actuality, or the process of semiotic rela-
tionships and functions with structures ideally
isolated for investigation, inheres in the concept
of structuralism itself In the immediate history
of semiotics in the United States the aims and
methods of semiotics and structuralism have been
too often confused rather than appropriately dis-
tinguished, i.e., structuralism implies the inves-
tigation of sign-relationships within an ideally
circumscribed whole, whereas in semiotics the
idea of the "whoie" is nothing but a general sign
in relationship with its individual constituent
parts-coordinate sign-relationships-or, in
Peirce's sense, a continuous Interpretant sign
which evolves to more complex, more meaning-
ful structure through the very process of semiosis.
Peirce's "continuous predicate" explained in the
points up this important distinction (cf CP 3.638,
639,640; Kevelson, 198Ia).
The constraints of Sebeok's suggested major
semiotic areas of inquiry, or subdisciplines, would
tend to check the tendency to call attention to
semiotics 01 art, discourse, landscapes, etc. and
instead would encourage investigators to empha-
size why and how the basic process of semiosis
va ries in response to its contextual frame, in art,
emphasis would provide the "empirical para-
digms" which are considered to be lacking in
re cent semiotic inquiry (cf Pearson, 1979).
Generally, the history of semiotics in the
United States recapitulates the development of
ics-and traces the evolution of a distinctly
 UNITED STA TES
semiotic method of inquiry as conceptualized
according to the explicit writings of Charles S.
Peirce. It attempts to sketch the major inftuences
on Peirce's thought, and to show how this central
theory of semiotics is manifest in analyses of
semiosis in a wide variety of modes, such as art,
human and animal culture systems and struc-
tures, endocrine, respiratory, digestive, chemical
and other biological cybernetic systems, legal
discourse and practice, trade and barter systems,
perceptual, cognitive, motivational processes as
viewed from psychological and philosophical
perspectives, culture-specific natural language
systems with respective "types" of discourse,
systems of logics, notational systems of all kinds
including graphs, maps, lexicons, mathematics,
machine-to-machine and machine-to-person
exchange, etc.
B. Locke's Dual Thrust in Modern
Semiotics: The Essay and the Two
Treatises on Government
With great admiration, Peirce writes that
"Locke's grand word was substantially this: 'Men
must think for themselves, and genuine thought
is an act of perception. Men must see out of
their own eyes, and it will not do to smother
individual thought-the only thought there really
is-beneath the weight of general propositions,
laid down as innate and infallible, but really only
traditional-oppressive and unwholesome heri-
tages from a barbarous and stupid past' " (from
The Nation, 9.25.1890:1975, p. 93).
As Caslett (1960, p. 79) speculates, perhaps
the reason Locke did not want it known that the
Essay and the Treatises were by the same author
was that he must have known how difficult it
would be to reconcile what appear to be oppos-
ing doctrines. I suggest that the key to this rec-
onciliation lies in the implied relations hip
between the making and interpreting of signs on
the one hand, and Locke's concept of freedom
on the other.
The creative aspects of the semiotic process
are emphasized by Chauncy Wright, an esteemed
colleague and friend of Charles Peirce. The free-
dom from fixed rule inherent in sign interpre-
tation is a major theme in the prolific writings
of Francis Lieber, a contemporary of Peirce's-
an associate of Benjamin Peirce, of Peirce's
521
brother Jem, and a good friend of Thomas Ser-
geant Perry who wrote and edited The Lift and
Letters 01 Francis Lieber (1882) mentioned in ms.
L344 of the C. S. Peirce correspondence. Max
Fisch writes that although there is no mention
of Lieber among Peirce's writings he is quite sure
that Peirce was well acquainted with hirn (per-
sonal correspondence, 3.24.81).
Wright's direct inftuence on C. S. Peirce is
weH known (cf. Fisch and Anderson, 1939,
pp. 421n., 426-434; Madden, 1972, pp. 48-52;
Savan, 1977, pp. 79-195; C. S. Peirce, 1871
reprinted 1975, p.45; Wright, 1871, reprinted
1975, pp. 43, 44; 1873, reprinted 1878, pp. 205-
266). In his "Evolution of Self-Consciousness"
Wright says that
Many of our knowledges andjudgments from experience in
practical matters are not so reduced, or sought to be reduced,
to explicit principles, or have not a theoretical form, since
the major premises, or general principles, of our judgments
are not consciously generalized by us in farms of speech ....
We are often led by being conscious of a sign of anything
to believe in the existence of the thing itself, either past,
present, or prospective, without having any distinct or gen-
eral apprehension of the sign under the general character of
a sign .... Language, strictly so called, which some ... ani-
mals also have, or signs purposeLy used for communication, is
not only required for scientific knowledge, but a second step
of generalization is needed, and is made through reflection,
by which this use of a sign is itself made an object of atten-
tion, and the sign is recognized in its general relation to what
it signifies, and to what it has signified in the past, and will
signify in the future.
Peirce had a profound respect for Wright as
a man of science-a scholar who was able to
synthesize the various perspectives of medicine,
botany, zoology, law, and philosophy, as well as
psychology, but who shared with Peirce the fate
of an academic anomaly.
Thus in the Uni ted States, immediately ante-
cedent to Peirce's formulation of his doctrine of
signs, both Wright and Peirce had reacted against
the Cartesian cogito, and against the empiricist
view that an idea was a "copy" of reality.
Approaching the problem of innate knowledge
from another perspective and for other purposes,
Lieber, like Locke, denies that moral principles
are innate, and insists, as Locke does, that
because rules are the results of reasoning, of
various kinds of argument, and because they
require proof, they cannot be innate. Rather,
Lieber argues that new principles are evolved
through a process of reasoning by signs, and by
522 ROBERTA KEVELSON
so interpreting the resultant signs, or rules, that
they become new, in the context of new
circumstances.
But the inclination toward the making of new
principles, together with the need that most
human beings have to attribute their actions to
so me value-conserving moral rule, establishes a
fundamental relationship. The relationship of the
free individual in society is the relations hip of
right, and this right may be considered a basic
social sign which must be continually reinter-
preted. J ust as every individual is a free agent,
or actor, every other individual makes the same
claim to freedom of action. Any relationship
among individuals is based on the belief that the
freedom of each may not contradict the freedom
of any other. In this sense the social relations hip
is a free act, mutually agreed to. The social rela-
tionship is interpreted in every sign which
expresses reciprocal freedom. As signs (or
expressions ) of freedom in relation, moral rules,
like rules of law, are inventions; but they are not
artificial constructions imposed from without
upon human will, they are developmental inven-
tions, in the sense that an invention in tradition al
rhetoric is the introduction of a topic of general,
shared interest (cf. Lieber [1874] 1911, pp. 40-
46, 322-326).
Lieber was profoundly influenced by the poet
Schiller, especially in his distrust of dogma and
defence of liberty. To Lieber, law has always a
civic character; it is the result of new social
developments, manifest in signs invented to rep-
resent increasingly more complex free social rela-
tionships. Peirce's understanding of the science
of values derives, also, from Schiller's aesthetics,
and is inseparable from his concept of musement,
or pure play. In Peirce's semiotics, as in Lieber's
libertarian views, ethics is subordinate to aes-
thetics, i.e., to value-judgments and moral rules
(cf. Peirce, mss. G-1863-2; CSP-FCSS; Wilkin-
son and Willoughby, 1967; Kevelson, 1981h).
In 1898 Peirce writes, "The very first and most
fundamental element that we have to assume is
a Freedom, or Chance, or Spontaneity, by virtue
of which the general, vague nothing-in-particular-
ness that preceded the chaos took a thousand
definite qualities" (CP 6.200).
With Peirce, as with Lieber, the impuls ion to
communication-to the creating of edifices,
works of art, costumes appropriate to different
occasions, etc.-is the process of differentiation
of signs together with the need and desire to
construct sign-systems that override, through
common assent, those boundaries which would
isolate individuals. Persons are only persons in
society. Signs are communicative links between
social beings. Whereas Peirce focused mainly on
the theoretical, speculative aspects of semiotics,
Lieber from the start turned his attention to the
consequences of aesthetically motivated behav-
ior in politics and ethics. According to Lieber,
Signs, in this most comprehensive sense, would include all
manifestations of the inward man, and extend as weil to the
deeds performed by an individual, inasmuch as they enable
us to und erstand his plans and motives, as to those signs
used for the sole purpose of expressing so me ideas; in other
words, the term would include all marks, intentional or unin-
tentional, by which one individual may und erstand the mind
or the whole disposition or another, as weil as those which
express a single idea or emotion. (1893: p. 14)
Lieber denies any single absolutely true mean-
ing to verbal signs. Rather, there are meanings
which are true in specific contexts. The law,
which is a system of verbally based signs, must
always require interpretation. "'Using signs'
does not only signify the origination of their com-
bination in a given case, but also the declared
or weIl understood adoption or sanction of them,
wherever there are several parties, who endeavor
to express their ideas by the same combination
of signs" (1839: p. 19).
Globally, semiotics assumes that information
and value evolve, not through the authoritative
style and structure of monologue, but through
dialogic interaction, through shifts of authority
between speaker and listener-through Self and
Self in inner dialogue, according to Peirce.
Peirce's Methodology-synonymous with the
terms Methodeutic and Speculative Rhetoric-
is the account of the process whereby ideas as
signs grow and develop into new meanings in
more complex sign-relationships (mss. 645, p. 19;
754: p. 8; 311: p.ll-16; 449, p. 55; ms. 632; ms.
594; CSP-FCR 9.17.92; CSP-FCSS 5.12.05; CP
2.105; 3.454; Eisele, 1976: 4.56, No. 14; Kevel-
son, 1986).
Characteristic of semiotics in the United States
is the belief that freedom of inquiry is truncated
and restrained whenever extra-scientific dogma
is permitted to govern the methodological proc-
ess as weIl as the conclusions of scientific inquiry.
Such dogma is not always explicit. It may be
 UNITED STATES 523
implied in the style of inquiry. For example, interest of comfort and exchange ... (but) ...
Peirce speaks of the rhetoric of scientific com- for knowledge to fulfill its high er mission, to sat-
munications (ms. 776). isfy our ideal needs for a view of the world which
The scientific "style" has become increasingly shall give unity to our scattered experience."
elite and preferred since the rise of the scientific Among the distinguished Europeans who would
community in the 16th century. The tendency participate in this congress were Bergson, Bind-
to infuse scientific inquiry with moral justifica- ing, Ebbinghaus, Lipps,Janet, and Dessoir; rep-
tion is as strong today as it was at the time of resenting the United States wereJames Baldwin,
Copernicus, who was persuaded by Cicero's John Dewey, WilliamJames, Josiah Royce, and
rhetoric that the sun is more noble than the earth, others-all of whom were well known to Peirce
and that immobility is more noble than motion. and in some cases his disciples in semiotics and
Kepler, too, was gratified to discover that pla- pragmatics-with a total of 500 addresses sched-
netary orbits are elliptical, because he believed uled. The purpose of the congress was to syn-
that the ellipse is the most basic and most simple thesize the sciences, to unify them in their goals.
of natural curves. Kepler's delight was insepar- Social psychologists, sociologists, jurists, physi-
able from his perception that "Nature was living cians, engineers, theologians, historians, econo-
up to Plato's idea of her!" (cf. Ross 1957, p. 11). mists, naturalists, philologists-every variety of
Similarly, Thomas Kuhn has shown how so many academic experience was to be represented. As
of the leading principles of scientific inquiry are Münsterberg remarks, the 500 addresses, and
metaphorical-the assimilation of one sign of the 200 audiences will not bring about the ulti-
value from a "given" universe of discourse into mate, desired unity of the sciences; for this, he
another universe of discourse, where it is rein- says, demands the "gigantic thought of a single
terpreted without ever completely losing its ini- genius" (1904, p. 3). Peirce was invited to par-
tial, referential source (cf. Kevelson, 1977 c; Pettit, ticipate but could not afford the trip to St. Louis.
1975). He offered to send two papers: "On Logic: Clas-
Peirce shows that this overlapping of uni- sification and nomenclature for triadic relations"
verses of discourse are occasions for the emer- and "On Methodology: Pragmatism as the
gen ce of new ideas, or new judgment-signs. He methodeutic of metaphysics: Oudine of the proof
shows this graphically, in the discussion of his of it. Definition. General character of its tend-
Existential Graphs which he compares with encies. Precautions to be observed in its employ-
moving pictures of the process of thought, and ment." (Max Fisch says that Münsterberg's
especially with respect to the Gamma and Delta invitation to Peirce is in ms. L 308, dated July
modal graphs which he envisioned but never 12, 1904; Peirce's reply among Münsterberg's
completed (ms. 500, pp. 2, 10, 11; CP 4.578; ms. Papers is Ms. Acc 2031, July 19, 1904, in the
298 dr. 2, p. 11; ms. 293:36; CP 4.37; Kevelson, Boston Public Library; see also Fisch, 1981,
1981b; Roberts, 1973; Zeman, 1968). p. 296, notes 3, 9.). Peirce reviewed the Pro-
ceedings for The Nation, about a year after he had
presented his semina1 thought on the Existential
C. The Movies
Graphs as moving pictures of the process of
"Whenever a new scientific journal appears, thought (ms. 500). In this review, "Congress of
we are accustomed to take it as a sign that some- Arts and Sciences, Universal Exposition, St.
where in the scholarly universe a new branching Louis, 1904" (1905), Peirce writes that 1ittle of
off has begun, a scientific specialty has under- new value was presented, and "the e1ders" were
gone a new bifurcation." Thus Hugo Münster- "tried and found wanting .... The old tune is
berg writes on page one, number one, volume still running in their heads; they will harp on the
one, of the Journal rif Philosophy, January 1904, one old string. The man who in silen ce and
on the advent of the International Congress of obscurity has been creating some strange, beau-
Arts and Science-the first of its kind in the tiful, and illuminating conception is the man from
world, Münsterberg says, prophesying that the whom we desire to hear" (The Nation, 1906,
time has come when the world will no longer pp. 475-76, reprinted 1979, pp. 269-71).
look "toward science ... with adesire for tech- The goals of that first international congress
nical prescriptions and new inventions in the on the arts and sciences have been revived in
524 ROBERTA KEVELSON
modern semiotics. But less than two years after
Peirce's death, the host and organizer of that
first congress, Hugo Münsterberg, published a
study of the cognitive process as a sign-creating
and sign-communicating sequence which par-
allels that of then new art of cinematic film. This
book, Photoplay (1916), had the ironie fate of being
ignored today by the very semioticians who not
only correctly show the relation between film
and semiosis, but have gone so far as to equate
semiotics with moving pictures (e.g., Henderson,
1980: pp. 109-223). Henderson's chapter, "Film
Semiotics as Semiotics," like the whole of his
quite brilliant study, says nothing about Peirce,
and nothing about Münsterberg, whose Photoplay
recapitulates Peirce's semiotics in significant
ways.
Peirce's experimental work in photometry, in
astronomy, and in "imaginaries" in mathemat-
ical graphs, are all brought to bear on the motion
picture representation of the process of thought.
The use of the holograph in experimental film
today, together with the Fourier transform type
of holograph in psychosemiotics and semiotic
studies of cognition (Pribram, 1971, 1980) point
up the richness of Peirce's metaphor.
Apart from this single area in which Mün-
ster berg and Peirce were in accord, their views
were diametrically opposed, especially on the
topic of "eternal values." Münsterberg idealis-
tically countered pragmatic concepts, and main-
tained that fundamentallaws of truth and beauty
were universal and everlasting. Science has its
limits, he believed, and is unable to account for
these values "by analyzing social phenomena and
bringing them into axiological connections,"
pragmatism, in its turn, calls such an idealism
naively confident in something called truth, but
lacking in understanding of that which truth-
signs represent.
What semiotics does, in Peirce's theory, is to
permit one to talk knowledgeably about non-
existents, and about non-truths in a systematic
fashion.
The history of the sign in the United States
is a recurring conflict between two ways in which
the concept of the sign is understood; this con-
flict is especially evident in the literature on
semiosis in film. For example, one approach to
film is comparable to the documentary, edited
in the camera; this approach understands the
filmic image as a reproduction of the world
viewed. The other approach, which approxi-
mates the Peircean concept of sign processes,
understands the moving picture as recreation of
actuality, proceeding from phenomenal percep-
tion to cognition to judgment in response to each
and every frame of a film-strip, or stage of an
evolving interpretant, or idea (e.g., mss. 296,
298, 905).
D. The Semiotic Mission:
Burden or Boon?
Sebeok reminds us of semiotics' "distinctive
burden" (1978). He says it is the "holistic force"
of semiotics which marks this burden. In 1935
Charles Morris regarded semiotics as the unifi-
cation of the sciences; its function is to make all
of scientific inquiry a cohesive event; but the
term "function," he reminds us, cannot be easily
defined and is used in various ways by various
people with respect to various specific contexts.
"The term, 'function' has a variety of meanings-
there are functionalists and functionalists. The
factors common to these meanings are perhaps
the connotations of process activity, and rela-
tion ... " (1932, p. 275). Morris suggests that
the semiotic function is the binding, informing
force of scientific activity.
This view further suggests that although semi-
oticians may fruitfully investigate sign processes
in all manner of communicative systems, its
major challenge is to account for the mode of
inquiry specific to the special disciplines. In other
words, semiotics would account for and describe
the various kinds of scientific discourse; to do so
would require identifying the leading principles
of each mode of inquiry, or "argument," which
would involve analyses of ruling scientific met-
aphors, and would also lead into the study of
the art of scientific discovery (cf. Gore, 1878,
1882; Kevelson, 1980d: Caws, 1959, 1969). At
the time of this writing Max Fisch is researching
the possibility that for Peirce there was a "sci-
ence of discovery."
In passing we note that a metaphor is a judg-
ment or interpretant of an object sign of rela-
tionship. According to Peirce every judgment is
a sign of a prior judgment (cf. Sa van, 1976; Kev-
elson, 1981b; Peirce, 1868, pp. 140-157). Thus
each time a metaphor is interpreted, or under-
stood, it evolves its significance. For example,
the 17th-century metaphor, nature as machine,
 UNITED STATES
continues to evolve, so that in terms of 20th-
century technology we speak of natural man as
a computer.
This relationship is implied in behavioral sci-
ence, in artificial intelligence and information
theory, and in linguistics. Fortunately the con-
fusion of man and machine has resulted in val-
uable contributions to semiotics from these areas,
e.g., Cherry (1966); MacKay (1961); Shannon
and Weaver (1949); Jakobson (1971), and others.
It is this same metaphor which, when turned
around or inverted, leads to the question, are
machines capable of producing signs, i.e., can
machines think? It is expected that the ability
to construct machines which model human
thought will lead to a better understanding of
the process by which signs are evolved; the logic
of questions and answers shows promise in this
direction. Peirce, as we know, constructed such
a logic machine (1883).
E. Chance as First; Law as Second;
Habit, or Value-Judgment as Third
Peirce says that the great "modern logic is the
'doctrine of chances' or 'calculus of probabil-
ity' " (ms. 776, p. 13). The modern concept of
chance begins with Cardano and Pascal. Much
of the recent work in modern semiotics focuses
on sign transactions in play-in games of chance,
in sport, in game theory, in conflict interaction-
and similarly, on the whole range of the comic,
from the grotesque, the witty, the parody, the
burlesque, the ironic, and the broadside, to the
joke and riddle.
Peirce's doctrine of chances stresses the inde-
terminacy of the world, and the open-ended
process of sign-communication. The dynamic
aspect of semiosis is implicit also in Rene Thom's
"catastrophe" theory. The role of structuralist
thought (following Saussure) in semiotics in the
United States has been mentioned, and will be
talked about further. It should be no ted here that
structuralism as derived from Levi-Strauss,
Saussure, Bloomfield, and much ofPrague struc-
tural linguistics, not only reduces (as Sebeok
suggests) the possible scope of semiotics, but is
based on principles which differ in fundamental
ways from those which inform semiotics. In
Sebeok's words, "The perception of deep struc-
ture and its convincing delineation require crea-
tivity and bold inventiveness of a substantially
525
higher order [than structuralism in the Saus-
surian sense-R.K.]-in short, the authority of
a Peirce, a von U exküll, a Rene Thom" (1978b,
p. viii). We are concerned in this chapter with
Peirce's global influence on modern semiotics,
but specifically with his leaders hip position on
the American scene.
Accidents, randomness, and chance in Peirce's
theory do not refer to actual happenstance, but
to chance happening within any given process
of analysis. In this sense the element of Chance
is permitted by the investigator to interact with
some pre-established sign-representation of an
ordered system. The Real, in Peirce's view, is
always a sign of what we believe to be Real, and
in this understanding is not synonymous with
the Actual which refers to all which exists exper-
ientially out there in the phenomenal world, and
which always exceeds our ability to know it in
its totality; evolving signs of the real approxi-
mate actuality ever more fully but never com-
pletely. The end of doubt, according to Peirce,
is the end of all genuine inquiry.
Doubt is the re action of rational inquiry which
follows the feeling of surprise which attends the
perception of something new and unexpected;
surprise in semiotic inquiry is comparable to dis-
equilibrium which accompanies transitions from
one level of being and knowing to new stages in
development. Disease, a negative kind of imbal-
ance, has been referred to as bad communication
(cf. Watzlawick, 1976). Similarly, disbelief, i.e.,
doubt, is a disruptive or "noise" in the customary
communicative channel. But new belief is not
the restoration of old beliefs in the way that a
sense of balance coincides with the restoration
ofhealth; rather, a new beliefis a new judgment,
or new sign, which assimilates both the infor-
mation conveyed by doubt and the information
of what was formerly believed to be given-as-
true.
The notion of disease as a conflict within the
body, and of health as a body in harmony with
itself, is a powerful metaphor, and has led to the
correlation between the individual person and
the social order expressed by the Lockean term,
the "body politic." Thus the history of semiotics
indicates direction toward at least one of its
immediate goals, namely to account for proc-
esses of intersystemic communication whereby
signs which refer to the natural world are inter-
preted as signs representing legal, political, and
526 ROBERTA KEVELSON
other social systems. For example, although it is
often remarked that the term law is ambiguous,
how it is ambiguous remains unclear.
Understanding a sign such as law to be mul-
tifunctional rather than ambiguous introduces a
working notion of possibility into semiotic anal-
ysis. The concept of the possible plays a signif-
icant role in Peirce's thought, and he considers
it on many levels. For example, in a letter to
WilliamJames (1905, p. 9; ms. 300:9) with ref-
erence to modalities, Peirce writes,
The distinction between the Indefinite, the Singular, and the
General is obviously only another application of the dis-
tinction between the Potential, the Actual, and the Neces-
sary. By Potential, I mean the Possible in the sense in which
the Possible is not a mere negation of Necessity, nor a mere
ignorance, but is a germinal mode of being .... A potential
occurrence is a Past one, an actual occurrence is a Present
one, a necessary occurrence is a Future one.
EIsewhere, also akin to the art of scientific dis-
covery, Peirce says that "imaginary observation
is the most essential part of reasoning" (CP
4.355).
Thus it is an openness or expectation of the
possible which is essential to free inquiry in
semiosis. This opeimess is based on the assump-
tion that all questions are problems, as the Ques-
tiones were problematic and interpretable in the
Codex of the early law schools in Bologna and
Milan in the 12th and 13th centuries (Bermann,
1977). This assumes also that scientific defini-
tions are questions not yet resolved into habit or
fixed belief, and which one uses as if they were
true statements (cf. Caws, 1959). Semiotics pre-
sumes there are no completely closed codes of
norms in any vital system; all codes are incom-
plete to the extent that they are predominantly
iconic signs, or subjects for questioning.
Traditionally, the underlying feeling of every
community is that its laws are established to
represent the laws of nature, that a legal system
is a sign of the ideal natural order. Every culture
is at least founded on the belief that it represents
a high er order. Legal codes have long been
regarded as "mirrors" of society, and thus, in
Peirce's sense, as Final Interpretants of an initial
Immediate Interpretant or sign of revealed order.
In this relation, the person is a mediating,
dynamic Interpretant Sign between two systems
of rules. The communication between biological,
legal, and theological systems is continuous, so
that we find each system evolving as an inter-
pretant of the others.
Just as it is common today to speak of the
body politic, it has also been traditionally
assumed that the physical body of the person is
a sign which interprets the legal and political
state. For example, as early as the 6th century
B.C. Alcmaeon of Croton understands health as
the body in balance. "This state of equilibrium
was called isonomia in Greek, and also meant
equality of political rights. So Alcmaeon wrote
of disease as imbalance, or domination of one
of the qualities, and called it monoarchy" (Ross,
1957, p. 113).
In the 20th century the cell has been described
as the basic unit of life, as an individual in the
whole, free state of the body (cf. Temkin, 1949).
The semiotics of communication in the neuro-
logical system is discussed by Pinsker and Willis,
Jr. (1980) with reference to lawful referents of
order and disorder. One of the earliest inquirers
into comparative systems of legal order and dis-
order was the famous American jurist, Wigmore,
who proposed in his monumental study of legal
cultures that we regard not only the verbal stat-
utes and codes as significant functions of each
culture's legal system, but also "let us recall to
the eye the edifices in which various peoples of
various cultures dispensed law and justice
(whether temples, palaces, tents, courthouses, or
city-gates); their principal men rif law, (whether
kings, priests, legislators,judges,jurists, or advo-
cates); and their chief types of legal records
(whether codes, statutes, deeds, contracts, trea-
tises, or judicial decision)." Wigmore did not
refer to himself as a semiotician but he prepares
the way for studies today on semiosis in legal
cultures (1928, p.6; cf. Friedman, 1975; Kev-
elson, 1981d, 1981e, 1981f).
From quite another point of view Kenneth
Boulding speaks of public signs as habits of
shared common life. Although he calls his sci-
ence of signs "eiconics" rather than semiotics,
Boulding should nevertheless be mentioned as
part of the immediate history of modern semiot-
ics in the United States. "A public image," he
writes, "is a product of a universe of discourse,
that is, a process of sharing messages and expe-
rience. The shared messages which build up from
the public image come both from nature and
from other men" (1956, p. 132). He names as
the key figures practicing this new science the
 UNITED STATES
economists F. W. Hayek and G. Katona. He
considers George Mead to be the "first eiconist"
in social psychology, although he says that Mead
"does not perceive ... the breadth and general-
ity of the concept in the non-human universe"
(1956, pp. 150-51).
Boulding correcdy observes that anthropol-
ogy, formerly concerned with only observable
behavior, has turned its attention to "eiconics"
and values, together with the relativity of value-
systems. Schroedinger, he says, has initiated
"eiconistic" insights "on the relation of entropy
to life." Boulding also mentions Bertalanffy for
his attention to signs and their meanings in "open
systems theory," and refers to Ager's work "on
the relation of perception to behavior in lower
organisms." In Boulding's opinion, psychoanal-
ysis is the most "eiconic" of the official dis ci-
plines. But it has not been the official disciplines
which have shaped his own thought; rather, his
ideas in political science have been strongly
influenced by the forerunners of a "science of
signs, such as Shannon and Weaver's ... "
(which he calls the bible of information theory),
Chester Barnard's theory of signs in organiza-
tions, and Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics.
A quarter of a century ago, but only a few
years prior to the 1962 conference in Indiana,
Boulding recognized the need for the new dis-
cipline of signs, and observed that "eiconics ...
is clearly one of those many-parented disci-
plines" which share the common fortune of being
extra-disciplinary.
I t cannot be stressed too often that although
there are many studies which discuss signs and
structures of signs, not all of these studies are
part of semiotics.
F. Semiotics: Foundations and
Frontiers in the United States
I t is im portan t to differen tia te between
semiotics based largely on Peirce's doctrine of
signs, and studies of signs which derive from very
different conceptual bases. Not even all Peirce
scholars regard their research as semiotic
research. On the other hand, there are dis tin-
guished scholars who contrast symbols with
signals-the former descriptive of cultural value
and the latter prescriptive ofbehavior-in a way
which is conceptually at odds with Peirce's the-
ory. Peirce stressed that not only symbols, but
527
all kinds of signs and sign-processes, should be
looked at from the perspective of modern science
(CP 3.556, 560).
He says that "the man who makes researches
into the reference of symbols to their objects will
be forced to make original studies into all
branches of the general theory of signs; and so
I should certainly give the logic-book that I am
writing the tide "Iogic, considered as Semeiotic"
(1908, LW, reprinted in Hardwick, 1977, p. 80).
Peirce had come to this understanding as early
as 1867 (CP 1.545-559). Here, in this 1908 letter,
he says that all his studies have been permeated
with the "subject of semeiotic" (in Hardwick,
1977: p. 85).
In the following year Peirce writes on the
expanded logic of semiotic (3.14.09). Here he
specifies the function, not only of symbolic rela-
tions, but also of iconic and indexical sign rela-
tions (in Hardwick, 1977, p. 111).
Esposito traces Peirce's interest in semiotics
to his dissatisfaction with Kant's concept of rep-
resentation (1979, pp. 19-24). Esposito assurnes
that semiotics has philosophic implications because
Peirce understood philosophy as a system of signs
to be a representation of a mode of viewing. If
"any object of consciousness is considered a
sign ... that sign itself may be seen as a new
sign-namely, in the language of the early cat-
egories, as a copy of itself. Semiotic, then, could
be as reflective as part of the domain it studies,
consciousness itself" (ibid.). Esposito's use of the
words "reflection" and "copy" obscure rather
than clarify the fact that representations are not
resemblances, but interpretations. Correctly,
Esposito points out one of the main reasons for
Peirce's rejection of Kant: the inability in Kant's
system to provide representation for non-
existents.
Yet Peirce's indebtedness to Kant is profound,
as it is to Whately, Schiller, Locke, and not least,
to the Stoics, from whom the notion of the social
contract evolved, and from whom Peirce devel-
oped his understanding of hypothetical reason-
ing, or Abduction. Among his contemporaries,
all contributors, indirectly, to semiotics in the
United States, Wright, James, Lieber, St. John
Green, and J ustice Holmes are foremost.
Max Fisch has called my attention to the
neglected contributions of Alexander Bryan
Johnson, whose work on signs and language pre-
dates Peirce's by a few decades. Fisch says (in
528 ROBERTA KEVELSON
correspondence) that "no account of semiotics
in the United States is complete without mention
of Alexander Bryan J ohnson (1786-1867)."
Johnson is referred to as the "broker philoso-
pher" who stressed that we err in interpreting
verbal signs through other verbal signs, and that
we should interpret verbal signification through
processes which involve all the sensory systems;
wh at he proposes is a kind of synaesthetic
approach to interpreting signification in natural
language.
"We can arrange words into such propositions
as we please, but the sensible realities to which
words refer, and which alone give words a sen-
sible signification, are not affected by our phra-
seology. To these realities as revealed by our
senses, we must refer for the signification of lan-
guage" (Lecture VII, A Treatise on Language 1836,
edited by David Rynin 1947, on page 124 ff.,
with The Philosophy rif Human Knowledge, 1836; see
also Todd and Blackwell, 1967).
Johnson says we must continually verify our
formal inferential conclusions by testing the
validity of our argument against our actual expe-
rience. I t is our sensed experience which leads
to specific inquiry, and the consequences of our
reasoning which effect further sensed experience.
In his pragmatic understanding of signs in lan-
guage Johnson anticipates Peirce's pragmati-
cism. Johnson notes that "Every word is a general
term, and applies to a multitude rif diverse existenees"
(1947: 114).
I will conclude this section on the his tory of
semiotics in the Uni ted States by calling atten-
tion to Peirce's inftuence on contemporary
semiotic research, particularly on the developing
thought of the major spokesmen of this new sci-
ence of signs in the U .S.: Charles Morris, Roman
Jakobson, Max Fisch, and Thomas Sebeok.
Morris was deeply concerned with the relation
between signs and actual behavior. He says that
While legal discourse is primarily designative, its aim makes
its designative status different from that of scientific or fictive
discourse. It designates the ways a given community has
committed itself to act if the members of that community
behave in certain ways ... the laws which are so laid down,
and which the dis course states, designate commitments, and
are neither fictive nor scientific. Not fictive, because a com-
mitment is something actual and not imaginative; not sci-
entific, because the law states how a community is committed
to act und er certain circumstances and not how it will act.
(1946, pp. 130, 131)
The fictive aspect of semiotics will be dis-
cussed in a later section of this survey.
Sebeok has made use of the convenient met-
aphor of the semiotic "tripod" which refers, on
aglobai scale, to Peirce, Saussure, and the tra-
ditional medical concept of symptomatic signs.
In this country he speaks of a Locke-Morris-
Peirce tradition of Semiotics. I have regarded
Peiree as thefoundation of semiotic thought in this
country, and view Morris, Jakobson, Fisch, and
Sebeok as piers, supportive of new fron tiers in
semiotics.
To Morris we are deeply indebted for his work
on the behavioral and psychological aspects of
semiotics, and also for equating semiotics with
a society of open selves. To Jakobson we owe
gratitude for his tireless explorations of the rela-
tion between linguistics and semiotics, and for
bringing back into the study of naturallanguage
concern with ordinary language communication
and with poetics, concerns especially character-
istic of the Prague Linguistic Circle. To Fisch
we owe the opportunity of finally coming to know
Peirce as he himself might have wished to be
known, and through Peirce, of gaining access to
Fisch's vast erudition on all aspects of American
thought. To Sebeok, whose overview of semiotics
includes all special areas of this field that are
emergent or may possibly emerge, we are
indebted for his sorcerer's skill in making semiot-
ics an actual and visible phenomenon-for his
creating something in the world of experience
which is a culture in itself to be inquired into,
as a semiotics of semiotics.
11. Semiotic Fields and
Practices
A. General Semiotic Theory and
Methodology
Although it is litde more than a half century
since such discipline-specific departments as
psychology, linguistics, anthropology, compar-
ative literature, areal studies of all kinds, and
others acquired autonomous status in colleges
and universities in the United States, one would
imagine from Wray Herbert's introduction to his
recent article on the burgeoningof semiotics that
 UNITED ST A TES
the organization of higher education into dis-
crete disciplines was, if not a time-honored tra-
dition, certainly a firmly entrenched mode of
teaching which presumably corresponds with the
actual process of human learning. Herbert says,
"While American higher education is confront-
ing an era of dedine, one field, semiotics, is
showing unlikely signs of vigor" (1981). The vigor
is not unlikely, but timely. As a synthesizing
discipline, it emerges as significant resistance to
academic professionalism, with its tendency to
distinguish special interests not only by discipline-
specific methodologies but also by the use of
special terminological codes. How the student
successfully translates and interprets these codes,
or sign-systems, is a phenomenon in the process
of learning, appropriate to semiotic inquiry.
It is precisely this kind of process which Peirce
expected his Semiotic Methodology to be able
to describe and account for. It is no wonder that
students in colleges and universities throughout
the country are drawn to what they correctly
perceive as the interdisciplinary nature of
semiotics.
It is unfortunate indeed that, as Mr. Herbert
has observed, some "humanists" have perceived
semiotics as a "threat, an 'imperialist disci-
pline.' " The apprehension is neither appropri-
ate nor realistically grounded. Semiotics merely
res tores to the university its sense of being a
"community of enquirers" in Peirce's words, in
contrast to the individuating development of dis-
crete academic departments. The initial and
widespread attraction of semiotics to students
and faculty, even prior to study and application
of Semiotic Methodology, is the emphasis
semiotic theory places on the dialogic structure
of communication which, unlike the Socratic
dialogue, requires the participants in the com-
municative event to share equally in the pro-
duction and creation of new, significant
information.
Semiotics draws on the same sources as other,
traditional disciplines for its data, but the ways
in which it looks at these data, and the reasons
why, directly relate to its specific goals, which
are not shared with other disciplines. While it
holds its content in common with other modes
of inquiry, a relationship of method unifies the
many and diverse separate areas of semiotic
inquiry. These separate areas correspond to what
529
have, broadly speaking, been called semiotics of
culture, of film, of art, of law, of genetic encod-
ing, of animal communication, of economics, of
text-analysis, of architecture-in fact, of nearly
as many modes of semiosis as have been rec-
ognized and bracketed off for dose examination.
In this section of semiotics in the United States,
discussion of theory and method will refer pri-
marily to Peirce's concepts. The enrichment and
major contribution from other sources, such as
the Prague Linguistic Circle and structuralism,
will also be discussed. The assumption here is
not that there are two distinct schools of semiot-
ics in this country-one Peircean and the other
Saussurean-but rather that Saussurean struc-
turalism has interacted with Peircean semiotics
intimately and to their mutual benefit, except
where homophonous terminology has resulted in
confusion rather than clarification. As Herbert
correctly reports, "the two branches of the field
developed in isolation from each other." The
"field," however, is not, as he suggests, semiot-
ics, but the fields of inquiry into signs and sign-
structures. Herbert goes on to say that "Both
theoretical branches thrive in the American
academy today, yet their differences are difficult,
if not impossible to reconcile."
This perceived need for reconciliation will be,
felt as unnecessary when one realizes that struc-
turalism and semiotics share few epistemological
presuppositions, and that American semiotics,
since Peirce, should be placed squarely on its
pragmatic foundations. Perhaps the major dis-
tinction between structuralist and semiotic anal-
yses of sign relations in communication of all
kinds is that the former circumscribes and
describes static relationships, or states, while the
latter attempts to account for dynamic relation-
ships as events or processes in which change and
transition are qualitative values rather than
quantitatively measurable motions (cf. Capek,
1979) .
Semiotic method is an integral part of semiotic
theory; it is not an application of theoretical con-
cepts to selected data as with the procedure of
sociological analysis, nor, as in linguistic anal-
ysis, may it choose between a number of
approaches to data, e.g., according to the struc-
turalism of a Pike, a Nida, or a Bloomfield, or
the transformational analyses associated with
Chomsky. While transformational analyses have
530 ROBERTA KEVELSON
been widely adapted to social science research,
this adaptation has only superficially changed
the basic theoretical assumptions of these sci-
ences and modified the special categories which
designate specific areas for social science inquiry.
The divisions of Peirce's semiotic epistemol-
ogy, on the other hand, correspond to stages in
methodological procedure. For example the first
division, phenomenology, is concerned with the
process by which a perception is abstracted from
the whole experiential perception, and viewed
first as a Quality, then as a Fact, and lastly as
a Sign or Representation. At each of these
"frames" there are subordinate levels of phe-
nomenological analysis. The second division is
called the Normative Sciences, which is subdi-
vided into an expanded, "transfiguring" Logic-
Peirce's pragmatic logic of relatives which
includes Speculative Grammar, Critic or what
is usually understood as analytic logic, and
Methodeutic (synonymous with Methodology
and Speculative Rhetoric), Ethics, and Aesthet-
ics, or the science of Value. The subdivision
referred to as Critic in the Grand Logic is further
divided into three modes of argument, or rea-
soning: Abductive, Deductive, and Inductive;
Abduction systematically produces a working
hypothesis, of which the major premise is the
Sign or representation carried over from phe-
nomenological to logical analysis. It is not the
sign, as grammatical subject or logical type,
which is invented by the process of abductive
reasoning; rather, it is that which is hypothesized
in relation to the sign, and it is this hypothetical
relationship which constitutes the aspect of sci-
entific discovery. Mathematics and the physical
sciences continually refer to this initial hypoth-
esis as a hunch, or guess, or intuition. Peirce
provides a non-intuitive, i.e., non-psychological
way of systematically producing a working or
explanatory hypothesis, which is then subject to
validation through deductive reasoning, and then
further subject to probable inductive testing
which ultimately must be corroborated by the
world of actual experience. It is important to
note that in order for something to be focused
on phenomenologically, the investigator must
perceive it as something of value; therefore, the
semiotic process of analysis is not a linear pro-
gression from the phenomenal to the normative
to the metaphysical aspects of the semiosis in
question, but involves a complex, cross-referential
investigation. The model for a semiotic meth-
odology would not be a two-dimensional dia-
gram, but rather, a multidimensional, or
hyperstereographie model (cf. Brisson, 1976). A
two-dimensiona1 model, like a ftat map of a geo-
graphical area, is a rudimentary sign of Peirce's
methodology, but suitable for rudimentary pur-
poses such as showing syntagmatic, contiguous
relationships. A more evolved interpretant of
semiotic methodology might be compared to a
Mercator projection. A still more meaningful
model of semiotic methodology would be mul-
tidimensional, presenting the coordinate func-
tions of time, space, material, and motion as a
dynamic event.
Peirce was strongly inftuenced in his thinking
by map-making, and particularly by Gauss
(1845); but he says that if we want to consider
a map as an imaging or Representation of a proc-
ess of sign-communication, then the Gaussian
term Abbildung should not be translated into
English as "map-projection," because the term
connotes a mode of representation which is not
merely a geometricallinear projection. Imaging-
not to be confused with the notion of the pictorial
image-corresponds with the complex process
of actual perceptual viewing, which is carried
through internal dialogue into cognition and
judgment, and therefore implies correlative
processes of memory and recall.
Peirce was troubled by the possible problem
of an infinite regress in using semiotic method-
ology to account for and to describe semiotic
methodology. He says, for example,
If a map of the entire globe was made on a sufficiently large
scale, and out of doors, the map itself would be shown upon
the map; and upon that image would be seen the map of
the map; and so on, indefinitely. If the map were to cover
the entire globe, it would be an image of nothing but itself,
where each point would be imaged by same other point,
itself imaged by a third, etc. But a map of the heavens does
not show the map itself at all. A mercator's projection shows
the entire globe (except the poles) over and over again in
endlessly recurring strips. Many maps, if they were co m-
pleted, would show two or more different places on the earth
at each point of the map (or at any rate on apart of it), like
one map drawn upon another. Such is obviously the case
with a rectilinear projection of the entire sphere, excepting
only the stereographic. These two peculiarities may coexist
in the same map." (CP 3.609)
But as Peirce was to discover, even the ster-
eographic, or what we commonly call a 3-D
model, is inadequate to describe modalities in
 UNITED STATES
discourse; for this a hypergraphic model is called
for (cr. Kevelson, 1981 b).
The third major division of Peirce's semiotics,
the division of metaphysics, is concerned with
Being, Existence, and Reality, and consists of
the categories Chance, Continuity, and Evolu-
tion. It should be no ted that Peirce nowhere
explicitly extends Semeiotic beyond the logical
sciences, e.g., "logic is conceived as semeiotic,"
is the way he entitles the expanded classification
of the sciences in 1904 (NEM, 1976,4:189-191
at 185), as Max Fisch points out (in correspon-
dence). Yet we know that Peirce's logic rests on,
or develops from, his Phenomenology, and sup-
ports Ethics and Aesthetics of the Normative Sci-
ences which, in turn, prepare for his Metaphysical
analyses; perhaps it is not too broad an inter-
pretation of Peirce's semiotics to include, as Fisch
suggests (in correspondence, 4.25.81) a semiotics
in phenomenology, ethics, aesthetics, mathe-
matics, the practical sciences, and the sciences
ofreview. Although Peirce's own writings do not
explicitly support this broad extension of semiotic
inquiry, there is some justification for doing so
when we realize that in his later writings he sees
logic as a result of mathematics, of phenomen-
ology, and ethics, which he suggests should, and
indeed do, play "a part in semeiotics"; (see CSP-
CAS 7.25.04; also S 104 ISP, p. 36. See also
Townsend, 1935, on semiotics as the link between
Peirce' s logic and his aesthetics).
Except in a simp1istic way the entire process
of semiotic methodology cannot be described
here; but even in this manner it is clearly distinct
from the structuralists' approach to sign-
relationships.
Mr. Herbert's designation of Peircean semi-
oticians as "purist" implies that some semioti-
cians are less pure. In the few remarks above I
wanted only to stress that this is not the case,
but rather, that not all investigators of signs are
semioticians or regard themselves as such. For
descriptions of structuralism in the United States,
see W. Steiner (1976); P. Garvin (1977); Vachek
(1966); Saussure (1916); the DeGeorges (1972);
Culler (1973, 1976); Jameson (1972); Pettit
(1975); Matejka and Titunik (1976); Robey
(1973); Mackey and Donato (1970).
If the domain of general semiotics is to inves-
tigate all patterns of sign-communication in all
modalities, it seeks to investigate, then, trans-
actions of meaning. At all levels, a transaction
531
is a give-and-take, an "if ... then" situation, or,
in other words, a question/response dia10gue.
According to Peirce, "... a question is a
rational contrivance, or device, and in order to
understand any rational contrivance, experience
shows that the best way is to begin by consider-
ing what circumstances of need prompted the
contrivance, and then upon what general prin-
ciple its action is designed to fill that need" (CP
3.515). Thus, first the relations hip between a
question and its object is iconic, in that it asks
what situation, feeling, or problem presents itself
as a phenomenon. It is indexical at the next
stage, in that it asks how this situation, feeling,
problem is as it appears and not otherwise, and
third1y, it is symbolic because it represents an
habitual mode of action, or investigation, to be
taken. A course of action, a method of inquiry,
an approach to problemsolving, are habitua1
responses, and are judgments which lead to the
question "What next?"
While individual inquiry is finite, inquiry into
problems of a continuous nature, such as expe-
rience itself, are only possibly finite in some
remote but conceivable future. "Inquiry comes
to an end only when there is no more doubt and
when human know1edge is comp1ete," Peirce says
(cf. Hamblin, 1958; Leonard, 1959; Harrah, 1961;
Hiz, 1978; C.I. Lewis, 1929; Rescher, 1966; Kev-
elson, 1977b, 1980a).
We begin with what we know in order to find
out something about that which we do not know
(CP 5.365). This is the major thesis of the func-
tionallinguists of the Prague school, who main-
tain, with Peirce, that information accumulates
as the discourse evolves, in what has been called
a "communicative dynamisrn."
The relations hip of new information to old, of
Theme to Theme, of Comment to Topic, are all
part of tradition al rhetoric, as we recall. It is
Specu1ative Rhetoric, or semiotic Methodology,
which inquires into the nature of this evolving
relationship. Thus semiotic Methodo10gy is "the
logica1 study of the theory of inquiry," and its
main concern is with "methods of solving prob-
lems" (CP 2.105-8). We understand that the
"logic" Peirce speaks of is the extended 10gic,
which includes deductive reasoning, but is not
reduced to it. First of all wh at is required is a
theory, or doctrine, of how discovery actually
proceeds. This doctrine is imp1icit in Peirce's
doctrine of signs. Secondly, what is needed is a
532 ROBERTA KEVELSON
method for discovering methods. "In order to
cover every possibility, this should be founded
on a general doctrine of methods of attaining
purposes, in general; and this, in turn, should
spring from a still more general doctrine of the
nature of teleological action" (CP 2.105-108;
Bird, 1959).
Peirce stresses that a reason is different from
an explanation: a reason breaks down a subject
into multiple predications of that subject, in rela-
tionships of equivalence signs. But an explana-
tion, according to Peirce, is an interpretation, or
replacement of a complex predicate with a more
simple, more generally known equivalence. Laws,
in particular, require explanation, not reasons
(cf. The Monist, 1893; M. Fisch's comment refers
also to CP 2.716 and 690). Experimentation
"appeals" to reason, but reason is "strictly
experimentation." The relationship between
reason and experimentation requires the intro-
duction of something experientially new.
In reviewing the essential principles of semiotic
theory and method, it is important that the prag-
matic level of Peirce's Grand Logic be under-
stood as the determining level of communication.
Bochenski refers to the three dimensions of all
signs, or levels of relationship: the syntactic,
which links word-signs to one another in a sen-
tence; the semantic, which relates 'significance'
or relationship of words in discourse; and the
pragmatic, which relates the specific utterance
to a specific sender-receiver interaction in a spe-
cific situation or context (1965, pp. 33, 34).
Bochenski acknowledges the Peircean premise
that "any non-trivial verification must be inter-
subjective, i.e., accessible to several investiga-
tors" (1965, p. 56), and thus dialogic. Bochenski
points up the controversy entailed in "speaking
the unspeakable" and in referring to that which
is not or cannot be actually known. We men-
tioned the role of theimaginary in semiotics ear-
lier; it is comparable to J akobson's "zero sign,"
which signifies the introduction of a new para-
digm (cf. Jakobson in Hamp et al., 1966, pp. 109-
15, reprinted from 1939; Kevelson, 1979; Sebeok,
1976; Peirce, CP 3:554, 556, 558, 559, 560).
Philosophical truths, as we know, are not
always subject to empirical verification, but rest,
as Reichenbach points out, upon shared com-
mon assumptions and upon habits of judgments
which take the form, in logical analysis, of prop-
ositions. For example, the "truth-statement" alt
men are mortal is actually contingent on our def-
initions of the terms "men" and "rnortal", but
if "men" as a sign were to be redefined, and
"rnortal" were to be redefined-in an "argument
by dissociation" (Perelman and Olbrechts-
Tyteca, 1969)-the relationship of equivalence
in the proposition would not hold. The propo-
sition is not verifiable as an empirical fact (cf.
Reichenbach, 1948). To stretch the point, we
have seen in recent years that death is not nec-
essarily a fact, but a legal decision; mortality has
always been as much a question of metaphysics
as of physics. Thus the proposition, alt men are
mortal is true in some universes of discourse and
untrue in others.
The question of the relativity of death leads
to the problem of accounting for colloquiallan-
guage. According to Bochenski's view of semiotic
methodology, it is universality which character-
izes colloquial or ordinary language. This uni-
versality points up the "semantic antinomies"
that are apart of every naturallanguage, and
which prevent analysis by traditionallogical rea-
soning. Such antinomies are paradoxes, idioms,
etc., and "These antinomies seem to provide a
proof that every language which is universal ...
and for which the normal laws of logic hold,
must be inconsistent ... the very possibility of a
consistent use oJ the expression 'true sentence' which is
in harmony with the laws oJ logic and the spirit oJ
everyday language seems to be very questionable, and
consequently the same doubt attaches to the possibility
oJ constructing a correct definition of this expression"
(1965, p. 64).
The problem of the paradox concerned Peirce,
and he wrote extensivelyon it. He also was famil-
iar with Lewis Carroll's nonsense verse and log-
ical paradox, and indirectly refers to Carroll in
his criticism of Comte's use of the word "meta-
physics", which he calls nonsense. Propositions
must indicate what they are signs of, and the
object of a proposition must be part of our expe-
rience on some level (CP 7.203).
Bochenski finds that the principal investiga-
tors of systematic semiotic method, following the
metamathematics of Hilbert and Frege, are Tar-
ski (1935) and Carnap (1937), but surprisingly
he falls entirely to mention Peirce. In his dis-
cussion of the term semiotic, he says that the word,
like the general "classification of this branch of
learning," derives from Charles Morris's Foun-
dation oJ the Theory oJ Signs (1938).
 UNITED STATES 533

Let us look next then at Charles Morris's con- says that his understanding of semiotics differs
siderable contributions to semiotics in the United in fundamental ways from Peirce's:
States and elsewhere. Morris's concern with
semiotics is evident as early as 1924 in "The Peirce always connects processes of mediation, sign-processes,
Concept of the Symbol" Uournal 0] Philosophy, 1, and mental process. This means that he would not accept
2, pp. 253-262; 281-291). In Six Theories 0] Mind any behavioral psychology which attempted to reduce
behavior to two-term relations between stimuli and response.
he refers to Nietzsche's concept of fiction, which
is a tool required less for 'knowing' than for
'schematizing,' i.e., for interpreting illusory or This is quite true. A dyadic relation, to Peirce,
fictive concepts of the self-in-the-becoming- merely sets out a reason; but a triadic relation
process, as if the self were an existent 'state' of implies an explanation, in the sense given earlier,
Being (p. 279). Peirce, similarly, understands the and therefore involves sign-interpretation, and
fictive sign of the self as a sign of Being. The is thus the basic structure for semiosis. This over-
traditional concept of the existential copula is simplifies Peirce's very careful and full distinc-
transformed in his logic of relations. Thus, when tion between dyadic and triadic relations.
semiotics refers to sign-functions it clearly is not Further, as experimental biology and recent
referring to different categories of 'things'-each studies of intern al information processing show,
with appropriate sign 'properties'-but rather, semiosis at all levels must be considered triadic,
it refers to sign-functions which designate coor- and not the one-to-one stimulus/response inter-
dinate relationships in dynamic, ongoing events. action (cf. Pinsker and Willis, Jr., 1980; Sebeok,
These events are networks of shifting relations. 1978; Laborit, 1974). Morris, however, proposed
Unlike the Aristotelian "character" with its a restriction of Peirce's more encompassing def-
inition of sign-function to include only those
attributive properties, the sign, in modern
semiotics, does not have sign-properties, although semiotic processes which he says show "the fac-
too frequently through misunderstanding of gen- tor of mediation is an interpretant" (1946,
eral semiotic theory signs are described in terms p.288).
Whereas in Peirce, the term Interpretant refers
of their properties or characteristics.
In 1939, in Foundations 0] a Theory 0] Signs, Mor- to a sign-relationship and not to the attitude of
ris explicitly refines the notion of sign-function an interpreter, Morris says that "The disposition
in an interpreter to respond, because of the sign,
as equivalent to sign-behavior, and thereupon
establishes a behavioral approach to studies of by response-sequences of some behavior-family"
sign interaction and sign interpretation-to all is an interpretant (1946, p. 17).
The differences in theory and method between
designative as well as all prescriptive sign functions.
U nfortunately this further complicates rather Morris and Peirce are by no means trivial, and
than clarifies the ambiguity of the term method- require thoughtful working through. Their
ology, especially with respect to dis course anal- agreement, however, on fundamental aspects of
semiosis in other regards must be noted:
ysis and in particular to the prototype of ordinary
argument in legal discourse (Kevelson, 1980;
The American pragmatists have been concerned mainly with
Toulmin, 1958). a study of signs within human behavior. This behavioral
In 1947 Morris extends his terms; he calls a orientation of Semiotic, the central motive in the pragmatic
"particular physical event" a "sign-vehicle" and movement, was initiated by Charles Peirce. (Morris, 1946,
"a set of similar sign-vehicles which for a given p. 287; cf. Zeman, 1981, pp. 3-24)
interpreter have the same significata" is a "sign-
family" (pp. 17-31, at p.20). Morris's intro- Even more emphatically than Morris, Fisch
duction of new terms, and distinctions between observes that if pragmatism "leaves a lasting
symbols and signals, and his disregarding of the legacy to philosophy, it will be when the general
Peircean icon-index-symbol distinctions of sign theory of signs has been intensively developed,
functions, have tended to confuse the problem and it will be because the pragmatic rule is found
of semiotic terminology. While he clearly to be a necessary part of that general theory"
acknowledges Peirce as the "heir of the whole (1977, pp. 103, 105).
historical philosophical analysis of signs," in In his review of the text in which Fisch's
Signs, Language, and Behavior (1946, p. 287) he observation occurs, Paul N agy also cites Fisch's
534 ROBERTA KEVELSON
prediction that aIthough we do not yet have "an
adequate account of Peirce's pragmatism within
the framework of a general theory of signs,"
pragmatism can be justified only within such a
framework. Nagy finds Fisch's remark "star-
ding" and "dramatic" and he suggests that Fisch,
hirns elf, will be responsible for much of this
achievement-a prophecy in the process of real-
ization, as is well known, I might add (cf. Nagy,
1979, pp. iOO-101).
There is complete accord in the United States,
among all the major semiotic scholars, with Mor-
ris's observation in The International Encyclopedia
01 Unified Science that semiotics is the fulcrum of
all the sciences (1938). Here Morris says that
"Semiotic ... is both a science among the sci-
ences and an instrument to the sciences." Sebeok
discusses the semiotic mandate in The Sign and
its Masters (1978b), where he says that the phys-
ical and biological sciences are also to be inte-
grated within this concept of unified science. The
significance of semiotics "lies in the fact that it
is a step in the unification of science, since it
supplies the foundations for any special science
of signs, such as linguistics, logic, mathematics,
rhetoric ... and aesthetics" (1978, p. 65).
Morris's later remarks on semiotics as a unify-
ing science, from "The Science öf Man and U ni-
fied Science" (1956), and his Varieties of Human
Value (1956), anticipate the first official Ameri-
can Congress on Semiotics, in Bloomington, 1962,
by only four years. Two years after this Con-
gress, Morris's Signification and Significance: Studies
in the Relation 01 Signs and Values appears (1964),
stressing the relation between value-formation and
appropriate social conduct as a sign process. Here
he closely approximates Peirce's understanding
of the subordinate role of ethics to aesthetics.
Morris says that the word-sign value is one of
the "Great Words," it implies a variety of mean-
ings and relationships. Of the three main aspects
of this term, he says that the first has to do with
preferential "tendencies or dispositions" which
rank one object as greater or better than another
(p. 10) and the second has to do with condi-
tioned and often involuntary preference such as
addictive demand of a drug even where the addict
knows it is preferable to be free of the addiction.
The belief that freedom from addictive habit, or
"operative value," is what Morris calls the third
preference, or "conceived value."
A conceived value is not a preference for some-
thing actual, but rather, for a "symbolically indi-
cated object," e.g., the object of a wish, a fantasy,
or in Peirce's sense, a possible. Morris's later writ-
ings are especially important, less for their rejec-
tion of certain principles of Peirce's theory than
for their attempt to apply this theory to actual
behavior. But the transition from theory to prac-
tice, without an explicit formulation of semiotic
Methodology as conceived by Peirce, has terided
to confuse the speculative sense of the term with
ac tu al methodological procedure in real-life sit-
uations. Admittedly, Peirce's principal concern
was with the former sense of Methodology, which
he feit had to be thoroughly worked out before
it could be tested in the semiotic laboratory, as
it were.
Where Peirce proposed that the following order
of reasoning should prevail-abductive, deduc-
tive, inductive-what has often happened in
modern semiotic research is that inductive inquiry
has initiated analyses of semiotic patterns of
communication.
It might be fairly pointed out that Peirce's
pragmatism-"pragmaticism"-is based on his
assumption that science begins first by describ-
ing, and not prescribing; thus, what has been
identified as the prescriptive or deontic aspect
of legal codes and other normative systems,
actually refers to the second, and not the first
stage of analysis. This first stage, characterized
by questions, as remarked above, is erotetic (i.e.,
interrogatory) in structure (Kevelson, 1980,
1981b, 1981a, 1981c; cf. Savan, 1979, pp. 62-
65).
Morris (1956a) says that it is Dewey's rather
than Peirce's lead he follows in suggesting that
"axiology might be regarded as the science of
preferential behavior. Since a study of such
behavior would of course include the way it
affects and is affected by signs, this characteri-
zation ofaxiology embraces the study of pref-
erences (prizings, selection-reactions), appraisals
(evaluations, judgments of value), and their
interrelationships" (p. 421). Before an "empir-
ical study of appraisals" can be made, asolid
theory of signs must be developed, he says (cf.
Lewis, 1947; Kent, 1976; Hocutt, 1962; Zeman,
1977; Hausman, 1979; Kevelson, 1981c, 1981d).
The behavioral aspect of Peirce's semiotics is
widely affirmed. For example, Burks, at the 1979
 UNITED STATES
International Conference on the Semiotics of Art,
says that Peirce's "man is a sign" should be
stretched so as to mean that "man as a sign user
is a sign processor" (TCSPS, 1980, pp. 279-82,
at 284).
Modern physics has taken a direction today
which is motivated by the understanding that
changes in value, of the observer, govern per-
ceived changes in behavior, of the observed, at
macro- as well as at micro-levels of behavior.
Some of the most recent advances in
information-processing of chemico-neurological
systems are based on semiotic models. Semiosis,
at the level of the cell, is also described in M. A.
Miles' study of cellular information-processing:
With the advent of techniques of recording the activity of
individual neurons in the brain of the awake animal came
the hope that we could begin to decode neuronal discharge
patterns and uncover the information-processing operations
at the cellular and systems levels which ultimately underlie
normal behavior. (1980, pp. 313-330, at 313)
These vanguard studies emphasize, in Capek's
sense, the relation of the discovery of new phe-
nomena to the development of new signs, i.e.,
new reality. Among the important areas of
research which stress this sign-relationship are
those which focus on the relation between "mind-
altering" drugs and subsequent genetically-
inherited behavior patterns (cf. Broadhurt,
1978).
In the anticipation of such areas of semiotic
research, Roman Jakobson insisted, in his Main
Trends in the Science 01 Language (1970), that "when
we say that language or any other sign system
serves as a medium of communication, we must
at the same time be cautious of any restrictive
conception of communicative means and ends."
J akobson reminds us that semiosis, as conceived
by Peirce and as it continues to be understood,
is based on the notion of interpersonal dialogue.
Even inner speech-Peirce's internal dialogue in
his methodology-in which one's past, present,
and future selves are related in a continuum of
ideQtity, a kind of friction, is dialogic (cf. CP
4.16; 5. 421; 2.334). All levels of communication,
according to Jakobson, imply "the preexistence
oflanguage." HereJakobson is specifically refer-
ring to the major systems of social communi-
cation, i.e., "exchange of messages, exchange of
commodities (namely goods and services), and
535
exchange of women (or, perhaps in a more gen-
eralizing formulation, exchange of mates)" (1970,
p. 33). In stating that all kinds of communica-
tion are manifest in verbal and/or semiotic "per-
formances," Jakobson calls attention to the play/
game/drama of semiosis.
In the chapter, "Linguistics and Natural Sci-
ences" (1970: p. 60), J akobson prophesies that
The prospective development of such inter-disciplinary 'neu-
rolinguistic' research into aphasie and psychotic speech will
undoubtedly open new vistas for a comprehensive study of
the brain and its functions as weil as for the science of lan-
guage and other semiotic systems. (cf. Pribram, 1971; Len-
neberg and Lenneberg, 1975; Shands, 1971; Sebeok, on Von
Uexkull, 1978b, pp. 187-207)
From aglobai and diachronie perspective,
Jakobson traces the development of semiotics,
and emphasizes again Peirce's role as a prime
mover in this new discipline (1975).
In this, perhaps more than in any other mod-
ern discipline, the person-to-person exchange has
played a vital role in shaping modern semiotics.
This is especially true of my own experience, as
a student of Winner and Jakobson, in my asso-
ciation with Sebeok and Fisch, and in acutely
feeling the ftesh-and-blood "fallibility" of Peirce
through the genius of his writing. Morris, espe-
cially in The Open Self, epitomizes the freely
inquiring person in relation with a community
of enquirers. Sebeok writes about his own expe-
rience in meeting and learning from J akobson
(in The Sign and Its Masters, pp. 221-230).
The special colloquia and conferences on
semiotic subjects throughout these past two dec-
ades exemplify, in their atmosphere of open and
generous interchange of ideas on the theory and
practice of semiotics in the Uni ted States, the
distinctive features of intersubjectivity which
characterize this discipline. This is true of the
organization as a whole and of its special units,
e.g., the Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism,
directed by Kenneth Ketner at Texas Tech Uni-
versity. This Institute was founded by Ketner
and Charles Hardwick in 1971 and includes
"scholars with various academic affiliations who
have a common interest in promoting the und er-
standing of Peirce's work ... " (Peirce Studies, I,
1979, p. iv). The Institute, like the various cen-
ters for semiotic research and study, grounds
theory and practice in a time and a place as
536 ROBERTA KEVELSON
communities, and thus as complex signs, on the
one hand, and consequences of semiotic method,
affecting the experiential world as new facts pro-
duced self-consciously and with intention, on the
other. I will have more to say on the work of
such centers in a later section.
Max Fisch co-authors the lead article of Peirce
Studies with Kenneth Ketner and Christian Kloe-
sei, "The New Tools of Peirce Scholarship"
(1979: pp. 1-18); this paper indicates the
impressive resources now available for serious
research into Peirce's semiotic theory and meth-
odology. Other papers by the members of the
Institute, published in that volume, discuss both
special and broad aspects of Peirce's semiotics,
e.g., Ransdell on iconicity; Oehler on cognition,
Brock on Peirce's logic of vagueness; Pfeifer on
theological implications; Esposito on the origins
of Peirce's theory of signs; Eiseie on mathemat-
ics, the history of science, and Peirce's contri-
butions; Hardwick on Peirce's 'guess at the
riddle'; and Dozoretz on the real, the fictitious,
and the undoubtable. These are all major con-
cepts in semiotic theory, and point up the need
for widespread research into Peirce's semiotic
methodology, litde of which has so far become
a central focus of theoretical discussions (cf.
Kevelson, 1979, 1981b, 1981c). Fisch's new edi-
tion of Peirce's writings, of which the first two
volumes of a projected twenty are now available,
will make accessible important material on both
theory and method. In preparation also is a biog-
raphy of Peirce and his father Benjamin, by Fisch,
which will describe the historical context which
provides the background for the semiotics of the
twentieth century.
For example, Peirce's theory of logical con-
sequences was catalytic in transforming the
twentieth century concepts of law, as in Geny's
theory of legal consequences which derives from
Peirce's writings, and which has come to be asso-
ciated, both in continental and in American legal
systems, through Oliver Wendell Holmes and
J erome Frank, with "legal realism" (cf. Kevel-
son, 1981d, 1981e, 1981f; Fisch, 1942; Holmes,
1881, 1952; Dewey, 1916; Hayek, 1973; Lancas-
ter, 1958).
In "Peirce as Catalyst in Modern Legal Sci-
ence: Consequences," Peirce's 1903 letter to Lady
Welby is recalled, in which he speaks of three
levels of verbal signs. The first has to do with
utilitarian communication, that which we co m-
monly understand when we share what we know
with others and receive what others know and
express to uso The second level of meaningful
signs has to do with responsible exchange of
knowledge, i.e., the conduct ofbehavior signified
by the mode of communication. The third, high-
est level of meaning subsurnes responsibility,
intention, and commitment, and is concerned
with the "consequences of the message." Peirce
says that "Besides the consequences to which
the person who accepts a word knowingly com-
mits hirnself to, there is a vast ocean of unfore-
seen consequences which the acceptance of the
word is destined to bring about, not conse-
quences of knowing but perhaps revolutions of
society" (CP 8.176).
The inseparability of method and theory in
semiotics is made exp1icit by Peirce's under-
standing of methodology-speculative rhetoric
or methodeutic-which, as the highest part of
his extended 10gic, "... teaches the general
principles which ought to guide an inquiry"
(Ba1dwin, 1902, s.v. "Logic").
An area of investigation which will prove to
be invaluab1e for semiotic theory, and which is
a current concern of Fisch's, has to do with the
logic of discovery. As many have remarked, Max
Fisch, indeed, is the "Socrates" of Peirce's
philosophy.
As pointed out earlier, the Socratic dia10gue
is distinguished from the semiotic process in so me
basic ways. For examp1e, it is controversial as
to whether the goal of se miosis is to get at the
truth (cf. Ransdell, 1977), or whether it aims to
account for the deve10pment of meaning which
is neither true nor untrue, but rather plausible
or implausib1e; fiction, myth, paradoxes, all fig-
ures of speech and strategic tactics of non-verbal
semiosis involve a "willing suspension of dis be-
lief" and the understanding, in Peirce's sense,
that all judgments are provisional "truths" or
beliefs.
In every serious semiotician's library must be
a dog-eared copy of Umberto Eco's A Theory 01
Semiotics (1976). Eco introduces his study by say-
ing that "Semiotics is concerned with everything
that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything
which can be taken as significantly substituting
for something else. This 'something else' does
not necessarily have to exist or actually be some-
where at the moment when a sign is standing in
for it. Thus, semiotics is in principle the discipline
 UNI TED ST A TES
studying everything which can be used in order to lie"
(p. 7).
According to Peirce, an idea or thought, a
judgment, which is at bottom a feeling, is a rela-
tionship of sign-functions; such signs are not
copies of reality, as the Humean empiricists
believed, but are representations of a belief which
is understood to be real, i.e., areal sign.
The lie is often a stabilizing force in society,
e.g., the "legalism" in open legal systems (cf.
Friedman, 1975; Shklar, 1964; Vaihinger, 1924;
Bentham, in Ogden 1959; Kevelson, 1980c on
Peirce's musement and pure p1ay, on Peirce's
aesthetics and Schiller's Spiel-trieb 1981b). Sebeok,
in "Notes on Lying and Prevarication," says that
prevarication is seen as a pattern of semiosis prevalent among
living creatures (plants and animals, including man in his
nonverbal behavior). The underlying mechanism may be
exclusively under genetic contral (e.g., in mimicry), or be,
as in the high er animals, increasingly subject to willful reg-
ulation .... Lying is a category of prevarication criterial of
language; its semiotic attributes, however, still remain very
imperfectly understood. (1976, p. 147)
Riddling is a tradition al form of deliberate
confusion, i.e., the overlapping or juxtaposition
of two or more frames of reference from which
emerges an imaginable, novel relation, or the
creation of a new sign. Peirce's concern with the
riddle is centered on his concern with the prob-
lem of causation (cf. CP 4.355; Nagel, 1934; Kev-
elson, 1981 b).
The riddle as apart of speech play has been
variously studied from the perspectives of folk-
lore, anthropology, and linguistics, as weH as
according to the approach of modern semiotics,
e.g., by Sutton-Smith (1976); Kirschenblatt-
Gimblett (ed., 1976), and Kevelson (1979).
Associated with systematic lying is the whole
range of stylistics and texts, studies of masks,
rituals, games, and the enormous literature deal-
ing with aspects of artistic deformation or "mak-
ing strange." From medical and psychosemiotic
perspectives, the problem of non-truth is asso-
ciated with phobias, neuroses, anxieties, hypo-
chondria, referred pain, and the countless ways
biological systems misread or misinterpret exter-
na1 signals, such as the direction of increased
brightness to the hypothalamus which in response
releases certain hormones that communicate, for
examp1e, adesire for alcohol and/or other mind-
altering substances. In the latter, the intern al
537
communication process involves such bad com-
munication as misremembered messages, met-
abolic confusion, and "strings" of a continuous
predication of an initial "lie." Film is certainly
a form of visual deception; the correlation of
legal codes with "mirrors" of society is deceptive
in the sense that film and photography abstract
from and thus simulate resemb1ance.
As Nelson Goodman observes, "Nothing is
intrinsically a representation; status as represen-
tation is relative to symbol systems. A picture
in one system may be a description in another;
and wh ether a denoting symbol is representa-
tional depends not upon whether it resembles
what it denotes but upon its own relationships
to other symbols in a given system ... a symbol
may be a representation even if it connotes noth-
ing at all" (1976, p. 226).
B. History and Historiography of
Semiotics
There are very few specialists in the his tory
of semiotics, and fewer whose interest in the his-
tory and historiography o[ semiotics is confined
to its deve10pment in the United States. On the
other hand nearly every important study focus-
ing on observed semiosis, as every study dealing
with selected aspects of semiotic theory, wh ether
written by Americans or others, is prefaced with
some introductory remarks on the historical
background of semiotics, touching on its origi-
nation in Stoic thought, its revitalization inJohn
Locke's work, and its major exposition in the
19th and 20th centuries by Charles Sanders
Peirce. The his tory of semiotics, investigated by
Americans, forms the first part of this section of
my report; the second part reviews work done
and in progress which is specifically related to
the historica1 development of semiotics in the
United States.
General historical overviews are found in
Sebeok, 1978b (pp. 61-84) and 1976 (pp. 150-
155). Morris recapitulated semiotic his tory first
in 1938, in Foundations, and more briefty in 1946,
in Signs, Language, and Behavior. The concise, va1-
uable account of semiotic his tory, which points
to the co-ming1ing of semiotic and structuralist
perspectives, is RomanJakobson's Coup d'oeil sur
le development de la semiotique (1975).
Special historiographical work has been done
by Dee1y (e.g., "Two Approaches to Language:
538 ROBERTA KEVELSON

Philosophical and Historical Reflections on the Perhaps the major difference between the two
Point of Departure of Jean Poinsot's Semiotic," approaches to semiosis is that Peirce's semiotic
1974, pp. 856-907). Another special study is structure implies an open-ended, moving,
Luigi Romeo's "Heraclitus and the Foundations dynamic system, whereas the Saussurean sign-
of Semiotics" (1976: pp. 73-90). In outline, structure suggests that a system of signs may be
Umberto Eco's forthcoming multi-volume edi- examined as if it were a slice of the whole, even
tion of semiotic his tory was distributed in 1979, when that slice includes contextual reference.
at the Second Congress of the International Structuralism following Saussure presumes
Association of Semiotic Studies held in Vienna. observable closed systems as models of experi-
In many of the historical reviews available in ence. Semiotics following Peirce presumes
this country, semiotics and structuralism are dis- "motion-picture systems" of sign-events, or
cussed as though they were synonymous. For processes, which are not observable and yet are
example, Herbert (1981) speaks of Saussurean factual in the sense that they represent a sign-
(structuralist) semiology and Peircean semiotics relationships in actual communication. That
as though they were actually two semiotic tradi- which a sign represents, in Peirce, is another
tions in the Uni ted States. sign. In the sense that the physical, phenomenal
But structuralism represents a quite separate world is knowable, it is knowable only through
tradition. In a short historical anthology of the mediating function of signs.
structuralism, F. and R. De George include The collection of papers in Sound, Sign, and
excerpts from the writings of Marx, Freud, Saus- Meaning (edited by Matejka, 1976) is largely a
sure, J akobson and Tynyanov, Levi-Strauss, historical review of Prague structuralism, and of
Foucault, and Lacan, prefacing this collection theories of signs which are associated with and
with the following explanation: " 'Structuralism' derived from the Prague group. For example,
is a term used to refer to a variety of different Mukarovsk-y's theories of structure and sign-
kinds of endeavors, all more or less interrelated. relationships are recounted by Winner (pp. 433-
Each of the writers is in some sense a pioneer 455; Wellek reviews the contributions of
in his field who has forged a new approach to Mathesius, one of the founders of the Prague
his area, genera ted a considerable stir therein, Linguistic Circle, and P. Steiner discusses the
and drawn a considerable following" (1972). conceptual basis of "Prague Structuralism"
In another anthology, Robey's Structuralism (pp. 351-385).
(1973), it is said that From its inception the Prague Linguistic Cir-
cle understood structuralism to be interdiscipli-
Structuralism has its formal beginnings in the Theses pre- nary in its scope, uniting the hard sciences, the
sen ted collectively by the members of the Prague Linguistic social sciences, and the arts (cf. Matejka and
Circle ... in 1929 .... Under the influence of Saussure and
the Russian linguist Baudoin de Courtenay ... the Theses Titunik, 1976). Cassirer and Piaget, influenced
proposed language as a functional system to be understood by these early structuralist ideas, were two of
in the light of its aim, that of communication. the greats in modern thought who brought into
their own special research emphasis on signs and
The Prague structuralist approach stresses the sign-systems; however, the distinction they make
"laws of solidarity," and "reciprocal relations" between signs and symbols is fundamentally dif-
of facts-as-signs as opposed to their state in iso- ferent from and indeed at odds with Peircean
lation. Basic to the Prague structuralist approach concepts of the multifunctional aspects of sign-
is Troubetskoy's belief that the scientific disci- relationships in the icon, the index, and the
plines can no longer accept "the principles of symbol.
atomism" but must speak of structures of rela- Some of the differences between structuralist
tionship; in this new concept the notion of the and semiotic concepts are discussed in Kevelson
individual is inadequate, and what is needed is (1977b), P. Steiner (1977), Sebeok (1978b), and
a "wider focus on universalism" (from La Phon- implicitly by Baer (1975) and Shands (1970), in
ologie actuelle, Troubetskoy, 1933). the related contexts of psychotherapy and
Although there are important similarities with psychoanalysis.
Peirce's thought here, there are major differ- The problem of distinguishing these two
ences wh ich have not yet been worked through. approaches to sign analysis is compounded by
 UNITED STA TES 539
the fact that many of the exciting studies and material in this collection is an invaluable doc-
conferences on structuralism in the United States ument for tracing the complex network of writers
in the 1960s and 1970s served as reference texts and their works which Peirce mentions in either
for a large number of scholars who were attempt- explicit or implicit references to his doctrine of
ing to find theoretical frameworks for their grow- slgns.
ing interest in sign processes. For example, the The numerous studies of pragmatism in the
proceedings of the 1966 Conference on Struc- United States have not, as a whole, been his-
turalism at J ohns Hopkins U niversity appeared torical studies of semiotics as a special and dis-
in 1970, edited by Mackey and Donato, as The tinct discipline, and will not be reviewed here.
Languages 01 Criticism and the Sciences rif Man: The Publications and bibliographical material will be
Structuralist Controversy. IncIuded in this collection discussed in the last seetion of this report.
are papers by Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan,
and others whose theoretical underpinnings
derive from Saussure and other structuralist C. Semiotic Analysis of
thought, but not at all from Peirce. Eco's major Special Topics
study, A Theory rif Semiotics, did not appear until
1976, the same year that Sebeok's Contributions In a special issue of Semiotica, in 1980, Thomas
was distributed. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok edited a four-
The first half of the 1970s lacked a body of part index to publications that appeared in the
literature sufficient to point up the differences journal between 1969 and 1979; this indexical
between structural and semiotic theory, although review of volumes 1-25 was subdivided by
J akobson makes these important distinctions in authors, writers reviewed, key articles, and key
his Main Trends of 1973. The two major series concepts. While not all the authors are from the
edited by Sebeok, Approaches to Semiotics and Stud- United States, or if from the United States, are
ies in Semiotics, were not distributed until after writing about semiotics in the United States, it
1975. is fair to ass urne that the distribution of topics
The his tory of semiotics in the United States written about from an American perspective
is explicitly centered on Peirce, and on the foun- would generally cover the full range of semiotics
dations of his thought. Some of the contributing interests. This is only speculation on my part;
background is referred to in the first section of an actual frequency count of topics selected by
the report. The principal historian of American and about Americans only might show a signif-
semiotics is Max Fisch, through the meticulous icantly different curve. Still, the index is useful
research of the Peirce Edition Project and through here.
his previous studies of Peirce and of the prag- There are approximately 450 key concepts
matic aspects of semiotic theory, e.g., in Moore identified by the editors. On the one hand, their
and Robin (1964); Fisch and Anderson (1939); judicious decision to itemize so many key con-
"Peirce's Place in American Thought" (1977); cepts tends to obscure the more general concepts
"Peirce's General Theory of Signs" (1978a); and which would subsurne many of these individual
"The New Tools ... " with Ketner and Kloesel listings. On the other hand, there is no good
(1979). reason not to proliferate the number of possible
In this first volume of Peirce Studies Esposito key concepts. The very process of defining them
writes on the foundations of Peirce's thought, results in a greater richness and complexity for
and Eisele shows the relation between Peirce's semiotic inquiry as a whole-a process which is
semiotics, mathematics, and the general context described as an "argument by dissociation" in
of the his tory of science (pp. 31-40). Eisele's rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969),
edition of The New Elements 01 Mathematics by and which paralleis the physical process of dif-
Charles s. Peirce (1976) presents an important ferentiation and elaboration at very basic, cel-
aspect of semiotic history. Peirce's contributions lular levels (cf. Caws, 1959; Kevelson, 1977d;
to The Nation between 1869 and 1908 have been Hamburgh, 1971).
edited by Ketner and Cook, and have been pub- Further, the case for differentiation points up
lished through the institute at Texas Tech Uni- Morris's credo in "The Open Society of Open
versity in three volumes (1975, 1978, 1979); the Selves" (1948: pp. 135-154):
540 ROBERTA KEVELSON

The open society of open selves will accept and dignify diver-
lection, according to Peirce, share only the rela-
sity .... It will be a society in which all varieties of persons
tionship of contiguity, while members of a system
can attain their own unique forms of integrity .... To make
are related in an organic, mutually reciprocal
a culture in which each person is effectively free to the limit
organization.
of his capacity is the task which man must now set him-
It would be contrary to the aims of semiotics,
self .... I t is this ideal alone which can furnish the necessary
unity for a society built on diversity. (1948, p. 149)then, to speak of a collection of semiotics ... of
art, of advertising, of animal communication, all
On this model, with its suggestive, under- the way through to a semiotics of zero. It would
written "one out of many" Americanism, or be more in keeping with basic tenets of semiotic
motto, semiotics in the United States has fash- theory to speak of a system of observations,
ioned itself, and is, indeed, its interpretant. Mor- descriptions, and analyses of semiosis in all these
ris says there are no blueprints for the open modes of communication.
society, which is comparable to an authentic The virtually unlimited range of inquiry which
community of scientists. If, as Morris stresses, studies in semiotics have taken and will take
our personal problem is "What do I choose to corresponds to as many different points of view
become?" our main question in semiotics today as there are persons and stages of personhood.
is "What am I entitled to believe?" Thus it is Eventually it should be possible to subdivide
referent beliefs, or paradigms, rather than "eter- semiotic research into two kinds: (1) the practice
nal truths," together with freedom of inquiry, in which the observer and the material observed
which especially characterizes the whole of are placed in isolation from contextual influence,
semiotic fields and practices. and the observer records selected aspects of a
But just as it is understood that a system of defined total process; he re the observer controls
notation or a structure of reasoning is not only the process, may interrupt it at will, decide from
a useful tool, but also a communicable sign with time to time when the material gathered thus far
certain powers of persuasion, we regard even is sufficient to enable hirn to reconstruct from
systems of classification as effecting the rhetor- secondary material an adequately inferred
ical force of such systems and structures. It will description; (2) the experimental approach, in
be recalled that the topics and the common- which the analyst is permitted to introduce into
places of classical rhetoric did not belong to the the controlled environment a variety of param-
division of rhetoric known as arrangement or clas- eters which are not normally observed, and are
sification, but rather were considered two of the imaginary, in order to test and record conceiv-
three major functions of invention, (the other being able relations of the object to each of these hypo-
the function or burden of proof). The relation thetical, possible encounters. This latter approach
of proof to invention has been reconsidered by allows a wide latitude of explanatory hypotheses
Peirce in a radically new way, in semiotics and to be explored in order to confirm-or reject-
especially in semiotic methodology. an initial conjecture. With reference to scientific
Although all the five major "skills" of classical inquiry in general, both these methods of
rhetoric-invention, style, memory, delivery, and approach are useful and complement one another.
classification-were slanted in the direction of In Max Hamburgh's words, "The study of mor-
effective juridical procedure, it is in its associ- phology teaches us the diversity of living
ation with classification that legal science has forms; ... biochemistry and molecular biology
come to be mainly linked, and is generally referred must increasingly impress us with the unity of
to as the science of classification. life" (1971, p. vi). We may draw the analogy
According to our consideration, the itemizing between biochemical and molecular semiosis and
of various fields and practices-and major a synthesizing approach to semiotic fields and
topics-of modern semiotics, would be analo- practices presented in all their versimilitude.
gous to the laying-out of the facts of a legal case, In this way we avoid the temptation to infer
in almost laundry-list fashion, as a stage in the from the impressive number of topics considered
classificatory procedure. At this stage we can by semioticians that there are a like number of
regard the key concepts in the recent issue of semiotic subdisciplines. However, there are gen-
Semiotica as either an aggregate collection or as eral patterns suggested by this index that should
members of a unified system. Members of a col- be noted, e.g., Communication has no fewer than
 UNITED ST A TES
29 entries, Culture lists 19 entries, Gesture 26,
Interaction 24, Narrative 31, Semantics 32, Art
and Texts 30 each, General Semiotics and Struc-
turalism are almost neck and neck with 17 and
15 respectively. Some of the other topics, with
fewer entries, could easily be accommodated
within the framework of these larger topics.
While this is only a rough head-count, and not
a statistical analysis, samplings as such present
not only what does, but more significantly, also
indicate what does not appear, and what is
expected to appear. For example, there is only
one entry explicitly on the relation between Peirce
and Mukarovsky (Kevelson, 1977b); two entries
on Peirce and Saussure (Benveniste, 1969a,
1969b); one entry on Morris and Mukarovsky
(P. Steiner, 1977). There is, indeed, an entire
issue of Semiotica devoted to articles on Peirce's
and MukarovskY's theories of signs (19:3/4,
1977). The point here is that with few exceptions
researchers into all the above-indicated semiotic
topics do not have both feet on semiotic ground,
but rather, straddle semiotics and other tradi-
tional disciplines.
As advanced education in semiotics as a dis-
cipline becomes more widespread, and as con-
ferences and colloquia and special institutes on
semiotic studies evolve, scholars from the more
established disciplines who are strongly co m-
mitted to the principles on which semiotics is
based will find themselves in accord on the fun-
damental premises of semiotic theory, and able
to utilize standard paradigms for researching
special areas of semiotics. At present, formative
fields are emerging with respect to semiosis in
art, in culture, in gesture, in animal communi-
cation, in law, in film, in bio-chemistry, in inter-
systemic communication between all social
institutions, and in such obvious areas as
information-processing, pattern-recognition, and
dis course-analysis.
Since it is assumed that "every message is
composed as signs according to so me ordered
selection ... (and that) the subject matter of
semiotics encompasses any messages whatso-
ever" (Sebeok, 1978, pp. 36-37), there is a feIt
need, as indicated by the list of key concepts,
for systematic analysis of all areas 01' non-verbal
communication, such as music, dance, architec-
turc, and so forth. Preziosi's The Semiotics 01 the
Built Environment (1979b), Von Raffler-Engel's
presentations on interactional behavior (1980:
54]
Semiotic Society of America), Pearson's work on
word shapes and eidometers (1980: Semiotic
Society of America), Sebeok's vast studies of non-
human communication (cf. 1978b, The Sign and
its Masters), Lidov's work on semiosis in music,
Goffman (1974) and Sacks etal. (1974) on frames
and other conventions in conversational situa-
tions, are examples of some of the new directions
in semiotic analysis.
Michael Argyle (1972) says that
thc discovery of the importance of non-verbal communica-
tion ... has transformed the study of human social behav-
ior .... Now a new level of analysis has been opened up---
the level of head-nods, shifts of gaze, fine-hand-movements,
bodily posture, ete .... This kind of research started in the
early 1960's; rather later we realized that ethologists, espe-
eially those doing field studies of primates, were using very
similar variables. It looked as if NVC was similar to animal
so ci al behavior, and perhaps conveyed similar messages. (in
Rinde, 1975, p. 243)
Significant vanguard literature has developed
on many special areas of non-verbal behavior,
including "gaze", twitches and tics and facial
expressions, and a wide range 01' sign commu-
nication generally regarded as "kinesics" and/
or "speech surrogates," e.g., Argyle (1972,1973,
1978); Given (1977); Kendon (1978a, b) Mathiot
(1978); J. W. Smith et al, (1974); Birdwhistell
(1972); Ekman et al, (1971, 1976, 1969); Sebeok
and Umiker-Sebeok (eds.) (1976), to mention
only a few. Birdwhistell says that
By the study of gestures in context, it became clear that the
kinesic system has forms wh ich are astonishingly like words
in language ... it has become clear that there are body
behaviors which function like significant sounds, that com-
bine into simple or relatively complex units like words, which
are combined into much longer stretches of structural behav-
ior like sentences or even paragraphs. (i 972: p. 103)
In the area of sign-language for the hearing
impaired, there is considerable controversy which
sterns from unclear definitions distinguishing
deafness from impaired hearing; it is hoped that
further research, from a semiotic perspective, will
clarify pedagogical concerns in the teaching of
manual communication (cf. Benderly, 1980,
pp. 66-76).
Overlapping studies of both verbal and non-
verbal semiosis is the area of research concerned
with communicating fictive messages, as men-
tioned earlier. For example, Goffman (1974)
understands significant intersubjective behavior
542 ROBERTA KEVELSON
to be a kind of estranging, or setting apart from
non-significant behavior, i.e., from behavior
which is, at least on the surface, not goal-oriented
or valued by the participants as specifically
problem-solving:
In looking at strips of everyday actual doings involving ftesh-
and-blood individuals in face-to-face dealings with one
another, it is tempting and easy to draw a clear contrast to
copies presented in fictive realms of being. The copies can
be seen as mere transformations of an original, and every-
thing uncovered about the organization of fictive scenes can
be seen to apply only to copies, not to the actual world.
Frame analysis would then become the study of everything
but ordinary behavior. (1974, p. 563)
As early as 1868, in "Some Consequences of
Four Incapacities," in which his anti-
Cartesianism is most explicit, Peirce says that
we do not begin with truth but with a belief.
This belief is a construction or sign of "all the
prejudices which we actually have when we enter
the study of philosophy . , .. Let us not pretend
to doubt in philosophy wh at we do not doubt in
our hearts." (p. 140). This stricture is the most
essential rule against pretense.
Studies which explore the function of illusion
in semiosis are of especial interest; Hinton, for
example, writes on the topic of "natural decep-
tion" in Gombrich and Gregory's Illusion in Nature
and Art (1973, pp. 97-160). All the contributions
in this collection pertain to the significance of
the lie in communicative pro ces ses at all levels
of life; included here are Blakemore's "The Baf-
fled Brain," Gregory's "The Confounded Eye,"
Deregowski's "Illusion and Culture," Gom-
brich's "Illusion and Art," and Penrose's "In
Praise of Illusion." Of note is Gregory's
observation:
Illusions are sometimes regarded as deviations from fact: but
this is not a sufficient description. In the first place it is not
helpful to call any deviation from fact illusion. All
observations-whether by sense or instruments-suffer ran-
dom disturbances, so that they ftuctuate around some aver-
age reading or report. It is not helpful to call each ftuctuation
"illusion." Illusions should, rather, be regarded as systematic
deviations from fact. (p. 51)
In ms. 741-"The Course of an Expression"-
Peirce refers to Schiller's aesthetics, in order to
gain understanding about the problem of how
to discover a mode of expression, and how to
select a mode of expression. Again, with refer-
ence to Schiller's aesthetic play, in ms. 675 (1911),
Peirce writes that logic and ethics "should pre-
pare the way" for aesthetics; as far as he knows,
Schiller's aesthetics is the only work of value on
that subject. "I am willing to admit," he says,
"the truth of all the great poet said of that kind
of beauty that is a matter of play, whether idle
play or busy play" (p. 14).
Wilkinson and Willoughby's work on Schill-
er's aesthetics calls attention to the essential cor-
rectness of Peirce's grasp of Schiller's aesthetics,
and situates Schiller's concept within "what may
be called the tradition of transcendental pragmatism.
That is to say, the truths they contain, though
not arrived at empirically, are to be treated oper-
ationally. By acting on them, but only by acting
on them can we verifY them" (1967, p. 79). Other
studies on Peirce's aesthetics are referred to
above.
All of human culture can be understood as an
aesthetic construction-a system of value-signs to
which ethical behavior and behavioral norms are
subordinate, including such behavior-enforcing
norms as are interpretants of legal codes (Kev-
elson, 1981 g). Eco considers all of social life as
a sign system (in Robey, 1973, pp. 57-72):
If the interpretant is not, as many so-called semioticists believe
or sometimes believed, the interpreter, but if it as a sign
translates, makes clear, analyzes, or substitutes a previous
sign, then the world of semiosis proceeds from sign to sign
in infinite regression.... In this continuous movement
semiosis transforms into signs everything it encounters. To
communicate is to use the entire world as a semiotic appa-
ratus. I believe culture is that, and nothing else." (p. 57)
Sebeok remarks that the demarcation between
anthroposemiotics and zoosemiotics is not clear;
in primitive form allliving organisms share sim-
ilar processes of sign communication. He extends
the notion of culture from specifically human
culture to include subhuman organizations in
"Prefigurements of Art," in Semiotics if Culture
(1. P. Winner andJ. Umiker-Sebeok, 1979). Here
Sebeok argues that the tendency to order and to
pattern-production for its own sake--for non-
utilitarian purposes-is found at all levels of life
(pp. 3-74).
In this anthology Jean Umiker-Sebeok shows
how specific contexts produce a restricted array
of visual phenomena which in turn limit the
choices available to children, and which reduces
their ability in later life to produce new value
signs (pp. 173-220).
 UNITED STATES
In this same collection Thomas Winner
explores the conceptual base of a semiotics of
culture within the Prague School framework.
J. Boon, comparing Peirce and Saussure in rela-
tion to language, society, and culture, says that
"Peirce's symbol-type most nearly approximates
Saussure's general view of the sign" (pp. 94,95).
Boon's reading of Saussure is careful; but his
understanding of the Peircean icon-index-symbol
sign relationship is inadequate to the subject
matter.
From another perspective Jameson points to
so me reductive aspects of structuralism in The
Prison House oJ Language (1972). He observes cor-
rectly that the presupposition of structuralist
models is "that all conscious thought takes place
within the limits of a given model and in that
sense is determined by it" (p. 10 1).
Among the most fruitful alliances semiotics
has established with other more tradition al dis-
ciplines are those seen in its relationship with
philosophy, especially philosophies of law, of
language, and of logics; with anthropology, in
the areas of folklore, social structures, mythol-
ogy, play patterns, and proto-human organiza-
tions; with linguistics, on all levels of verbal
communication and text analysis; with political
science, especially in the areas of conftict and
power; with art, in all its special areas of verbal
and non-verbal expression; with medicine from
cytology to pathology; with legal science andjur-
isprudence, especially in the areas of legal cul-
tures and the relation between discourse and
practice; in applied and theoretical mathemat-
ics; and especially in its relation to the systematic
study of structures of all kinds.
Of note are significant studies of semiosis in
relation to religion, in the areas of didactic dis-
course, authority and revealed law-as-sign, and
the problem of translation of canonical religious
texts. It is surprising how few approaches to
semiosis in economic transactions have been
attempted in this country, especially when the
notion of value-transaction and exchange of
equivalences are so evidently common to both
disciplines.
Important work has been done in the appli-
cation of modern semiotic concepts to analyses
of traditional and "new" rhetoric, including sty-
listics. We cannot trace here the subtle fusion of
rhetorics with poetics, except to note that most
current work on stylistics is primarily concerned
543
with style in artistic texts; thus "ornament" as
an aspect of rhetorical style has come to stand
for the whole of "figurative" or non-utilitarian,
non-technicalliterature.
The association of rhetoric with deception, i.e.,
as the "mother of lies," is essentially a Socratic
judgment. This judgment continues in Bacon and
Montaigne; but with the advent of modern sci-
entific inquiry, in which the res or things of the
world came to be valued over and above the verba
of figurative speech, the whole notion of repre-
sentation, or sign, became suspect. Even Locke
argues against the use of ornamental speech for
"meaningful" communication, for speech should
not lie, he says (Essay, 111.10).
Rhetoric, in this century, comes full circle. For
example, I. A. Richards' attack on Whately in
The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936, p. 8 ff.) defines
a new rhetoric which seeks to study "misunder-
standing and its remedies" (p. 3). Thus the "new
rhetoric" was to language deception and mis-
understanding as medical pathology was to dis-
ease. It is perhaps more than coincidence that
Richards' study appeared at almost the same
time that pathology was conceived to be an intro-
duction to the study of medicine, and dis tin-
guished from the earlier study of "morbid
anatomy" by the term "special pathology" (Boyd,
1938).
The time was ripe for the now-classic anthol-
ogy on Style in Language (Sebeok, ed., 1960) in
which Jakobson's famous paper on linguistics
and poetics appears (pp. 350-377). This collec-
tion contains the proceedings of the 1956 Social
Science Research Council, at Indiana U niver-
sity, at which literature came to be defined as
an aspect of behavior.
In 1970 Donald Freeman writes that "Recent
work in linguistic stylistics may be divided into
three types: style as deviation from the norm,
style as recurrence or convergence of textual pat-
tern, and style as a particular exploitation of a
grammar of possibilities" (p. 4). But by 1973,
according to Kachru and Stahlke, stylistics has
still not been adequately defined. "On the one'
hand, style has been defined in distributional
terms .... On the other, it has been defined as
the deviation from the norm" (p. xii).
Clearly thinking within the frame of Peircean
semiotics, Michael and Marianne Shapiro write
that "Just as the teleology inherent in the rela-
tion of phenomena to ends leads ineluctably (as
544 ROBERTA KEVELSON

Peirce has it) to the triumph of Law or Third- and report on the distribution of teaching and
ness, so the lexicalization of tropes and the nor-
research activities in higher education in the
malization of style furnish us with the ground, United States. This project, initiated in 1977,
via patterning and regularity, for the recovery was followed by a preliminary report in 1978,
of meanings embedded in texts and artifacts fromreprinted in The Semiotic Scene (II 4, pp. 151-54).
past generations .... Change as an aspect of At that time Brown University offered an
continuity in human culture thus arises as a con-
undergraduate semiotics concentration pro-
comitant of the teleology of function in aB gram, semiotic elective courses at both graduate
semiosis" (1979, pp. 1-8, at 5). Their citation and undergraduate levels, and a Ph.D. in semiot-
from Peirce-"the only moral evil is not to have ics. Vanderbilt U niversity offered an interdis-
an ultima te aim" (CP 5. 133)-points up that theciplinary minor in semiotics. Iridiana University
then offered a Ph.D. minor; since the report, an
behavior, or style of the text, i.e., its ethics, derives
from its self-referential function which is not nec-
undergraduate concentration in semiotics has
essarily to represent truth, but to express emer-
been approved and accredited at Indiana. At
gent value, value in the process of becoming that time, too, Georgia Tech, which equates
realized. information science with applied semiotics,
Before continuing to the final section of this
offered B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees, with either
paper, with areport on the institutional aspectsa major or a minor in semiotics. In the Depart-
of semiotics and on publications of reference ment of Speech Communication at Southern Illi-
nois University, semiotics could be chosen as a
works, it is appropriate here to call attention to
Richard Martin's remarks on certain limitations major research area at M.A., M.S., and Ph.D.
implied by the Peircean notion of representation.
levels. At Texas Tech University, through the
"The sign can only represent the Object and tellDepartment of Philosophy, special courses were
about it ... it cannot furnish acquaintance withoffered in Peirce and in semiotics. At the time
or recognition of that object; for that is what is
of this writing (1980), more than 26 institutions
meant ... by the object of a sign: namely, that of high er education offered courses specifically
with which it presupposes an acquaintance in described as Semiotic, or which included instruc-
order to convey some further information con- tion in semiotic method and theory.
cerning it," Peirce says (CP 2.331). But Martin Donald Thomas has been coordinating pro-
stresses that the representation in itself does not
grams in semiotics at the secondary schoollevel
"add to a person's knowledge of or acquaintancein Massachusetts, and has conducted seminars
with objects." Representations are signs of rela-
for teachers of semiotics at the secondary school
tionships, he points out correctly, but do not level, using the manual for teaching semiotics
"serve to express factual information" (1969, which he wrote as an introduction to semiotics
for teachers, and for use in the orientation of
pp. 143-157, at 146). That is precisely the point,
except when we understand that the existence students, from grade school on, to basic concepts
of a sign is the fact of that sign, in the same of semiotics.
sense that unicorns are factive signs of fictive Of the 32 institutions which responded to the
texts. initial questionnaire sent out by the Curriculum
Committee, 15 mentioned the existence of
semiotic research and discussion groups, some
111. Institutional Framework of which are institutional affiliates and others
(Research and Teaching) which are available as resource centers proxi-
and Publications mate to the institution. Specific data on this report
is available in "The State of the Semiotics Cur-
riculum" (unpublished ms., 1978). A second
report to the Semiotic Society of America,
A. Curricula Development reprinted in The Semiotic Scene (1979: III 2, pp. 75-
Under the auspices of the Semiotic Society of 93) by Richard Jakobson with Margot Lenhart,
America a Curriculum Committee, chaired by is a survey of the teaching and teaching resources
Irmengard Rauch, was appointed to investigate of semiotics in the Midwest; included in this
 UNI TED STA TES
report is a directory of faculty who are either
working on various aspects of semiotics, or who
are interested in the discipline as a whole.
At this writing (1980), as the Curriculum
Committee continues its work, there are, in addi-
tion to the above-mentioned programs, the pos-
sibility for master's degrees in Semiotics at SUNY
in Buffalo; doctoral study in semiotics is also
available there through the departments of Eng-
lish, Linguistics, Comparative Literature, or
Modern Languages. Also at SUNY Buffalo there
is now organized a Graduate Group in Semiot-
ics, associated with a variety of off-campus orga-
nizations, including the Circle for Visual
Semiotics and the Center for the Study of Cul-
tural Transmission. The nearby active Toronto
Semiotic Circle vastly extends the semiotic
resources for this group. Wray Herbert's report
on semiotics in the Uni ted States (The Humanities
Report, J anuary, 1980) shows that despite the
decline in student enrollment in colleges and uni-
versities, and despite the cutbacks in funding
new departments or even new courses at most
institutions, the interest in semiotics shown by
students and faculty alike continues to grow
enormously and to make its inftuence feIt in
interdisciplinary courses and programs through-
out the country.
B. The Role of Alternative
Education in Semiotics
Budgetary problems which beset colleges and
universities throughout the Uni ted States at this
time and which inhibit development of new cur-
ricula have led to the creation of alternative forms
of semiotic education in the institutions. One
way of offsetting budgetary restrictions has been
the establishment of semiotic centers of research
and study. The most active of these include the
Graduate Group in Semiotics at SUNY Buffalo,
directed by Paul Garvin; the Structuralist
Research Group at Vanderbilt, directed by Dan-
iel Patte; the Institute for Studies in Pragmati-
cism at Texas Tech University, Directed by
Kenneth Ketner; the Council on Semiotics at
Yale University, directed by Edward Stankie-
wicz; the Center for Research in Semiotics at
Brown University, directed by Thomas Winner
(since the time of this writing, 1980, the center
545
directed by Winner has relocated to Boston Uni-
versity); the Research Center for Language and
Semiotic Studies at Indiana U niversity, directed
by Thomas Sebeok (acting director Michael
Herzfeld ); and the Peirce Edition Project at Indi-
ana/Purdue Universities at Indianapolis, directed
by Edward Moore and Max Fisch, assisted by
Christian Kloesel (since 1984 Kloesel edits the
new edition). The Program for Semiotic Research
in Law, Government, and Economics was estab-
lished in 1984 at Penn State University, directed
by Roberta Kevelson; it is also the third Peirce
Center in the U. S. together with the centers at
Texas Tech University and Indiana University.
Special-interest groups in semiotics have also
been established, such as the group on Empirical
Semiotics, under the direction of Charles Pear-
son of Georgia Tech University.
In lieu of adequate formal instruction in
semiotics in the institutions, there have been
organized conferences, colloquia, seminars, and
summer institutes-some of which grant uni-
versity graduate credit-to meet the need for
disciplined instruction, and to provide forums
for the communication of experimental research
in new areas of semiotics.
The centers of semiotics at Brown, Indiana,
and Yale, together with the Department of Log-
ical Semiotics at Warsaw University in Poland,
directed by Jerzy Pelc, have established collab-
orative projects and colloquia which meet at these
various centers; e.g., in October, 1979, such a
conference on the topic of "Semiotic Systems and
their Functions" was held at the Bloomington,
Indiana campus; proceedings are in preparation
for publication. The precursor of these collab-
orative four-centered colloquia was the Inter-
national Symposium on Semiotics and Theories
of Symbolic Behavior in Eastern Europe and the
West, sponsored by Brown University in 1976.
A meeting was held in 1980 at the University of
Warsaw, and future meetings are planned.
The Semiotic Society of America, conjointly
with the Charles Sanders Peirce Society, have
met annually since 1976, at host universities, to
present papers, participate in workshops on var-
ious special-interest areas of semiotics, and to
exchange ideas on research at the fron tiers of
semiotics. I t has become the policy to publish
the proceedings, and thereby make this material
available to that wider community of scholars
546 ROBERTA KEVELSON
whose interest in semiotics is tangential to their
own research.
In this manner scholars from all established
areas of inquiry are drawn into active partici-
pation with semiotics activities; it has become
commonplace to hear persons who have for years
been working on the fringes of their own, tra-
ditional disciplines express surprise that they had
been "doing" semiotics for a long time without
knowing the "technical" terms for their insights
and investigatory procedures.
Through special National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) summer seminar grants,
teaching programs for university and college fac-
ulty employed in nonsemiotic fields have been
established for the purpose of supplementing this
lack of instruction in semiotics; such supple-
mentary education has been recognized as essen-
tial to a broad background in the sciences and
humanities. One such seminar in which I was
invited to teach was initiated in 1978 by teachers
from Wellesley, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (M.I.T.), Dartmouth, and Yale, who
proposed to the National Endowment for the
Humanities a summer seminar in semiotics which
they themselves coordinated and for which they
sought instruction.
The first more conventional NEH-sponsored
Summer Seminar for Teachers in Semiotics was
directed by Thomas Sebeok at Indiana Univer-
sity, Bloomington, in 1978. This was followed in
1979 by similar summer seminars, also spon-
sored by the NEH, at the U niversity of Michigan
(directed by Ladislav Matejka), and at the Uni-
versity of California, (directed by Michael Shap-
iro). Participants in these summer seminars met
as a cohesive group at the next annual meeting
of the Semiotic Society of America to share the
results of their research with the larger assembly.
In addition to the annual joint meeting of the
Charles S. Peirce Society and the American Phil-
osophical Association, major papers on Peirce's
work are presented at meetings of the Society
for the Advancement of American Philosophy,
and other philosophical societies. The Institute
for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas Tech Uni-
versity, in addition to providing a forum on
Peirce's work, is also engaged in providing direct
access to Peirce manuscripts, preparing a con-
cordance on Peirce's thought, and in publishing
Peirce and Peirce-related material, e.g., the
Charles S. Peirce Newsletter, the Peirce Studies
series, and the three-volume collection of Peirce's
contributions to The Nation. Their joint meetings
with the Semiotic Society of America are con-
tinuing, and additional conferences and sym-
posia are planned.
For the first time, in the summer of 1980, a
collaborative Summer Institute, which granted
graduate credit in semiotics through appropriate
institutional departments, was organized and
held through the joint sponsorship of Vanderbilt
University and the University of Toronto. The
first meeting, in Toronto, offered courses in
Peirce's Semiotics, History and Theory of
Semiotics, Zoosemiotics, Semiotics of Natural
Languages, Semiotics of Music, Semiotics of the
Visual and Performing Arts, Semiotics of Lit-
erature and other Texts, and Semiotics of Reli-
gious Discourse. The participating faculty
included Thomas Sebeok, David Savan, Rene
Thom, Umberto Eco, Myrna Gopnik, Peter
Salus, David Lidov, Paul Bouissac, Lubomir
Dolezel, Michael Rifaterre, Daniel Patte,
R. Le Huenen, and Paul Perron.
The Second International Summer Institute
for Semiotic and Structural Studies, at Vander-
bilt University, 1981, was intended to include
the following courses, offered for graduate
credit: Introduction to C. S. Peirce's Semiotic
(D. Savan); Introduction to Greimas's Semiotics
(M. Rengstorf); Social Semiotics: Methodology
for the Analysis of Folklore and Folklife
(V. Voigt); Michel Foucault: The Structures of
Conftict and Order (C. Scott); Roman Jakob-
son's Linguistic Theory: Its Implications for
Semiotics (L. R. Waugh); Semiotics of the Non-
verbal Dimensions of Human Communication
(W. von Raffter-Engel); Towards a Semiotics of
Painting (C. Hasenmueller); Semiotics of the
Cinema (M. Morse); Introduction to Semiotics/
Structural Analysis of Literary Texts (D. Patte);
Semiotics of Didactic Discourse, (P. Fabbri);
Narrative and Lyric Structures in Literature: The
Song of Roland (L. S. Crist); Semiotics of Fic-
tion (L. Dolezel); Law as a System of Sign Rela-
tionships (R. Kevelson). (Not all courses listed
were offered.)
Special research groups at this Summer Insti-
tute at Vanderbilt were to include Anthropology
(M. Herzfeld and R. J oseph); Archi tecture
(D. Preziosi and M. Hammad); Biblical Studies
 UNITED STATES 547

(R. Polzin and N. Peterson, Jr.); Cinema and Semio.tica, Ars Semeio.tica, Transactions of the
Television (A. Mear and M. Morse); Compar- Charles S. Peirce So.ciety, and the American Jo.urnal
ative Literature (H. Ruprecht); Classics of Semio.tics.
(N. Rubin); Philosophy (E. Baer). Invaluable for semiotic research are the bib-
Three major colloquia on Fundamental liographies in all of Sebeok's major books, espe-
Options in Semiotics were offered by Thomas cially Co.ntributio.ns (1976) and The Sign and Its
Sebeok, AJ. Greimas, and Umberto Eco; a Masters (1978). The three book-length series,
fourth colloquium on Semiotics and the Classics Approaches to Semiotics, Advances in Semiot-
was coordinated by N. Rubin. Since the date of ics, and Studies in Semiotics, edited by Sebeok,
writing this article, (1980) ISISSS has been held represent international as well as specifically
at various universities, e.g., University of American contributions to this new field.
Toronto, Indiana University, and, forthcoming, Forthcoming, the Encyclo.pedic Dictio.nary 0.]
Northwestern University in 1986. Semio.tics will provide major research material on
Ever since the first specifically semiotic con- all aspects of semiotic inquiry together with an
ference held at Bloomington in 1962, referred to annotated glossary of special terms. Publication
earlier, the growing number of semiotics-oriented is anticipated by 1986 (Indiana University Press!
symposia and conferences attest to their effec- Macmillan) .
tiveness as supplementary and!or alternative The first two vo1umes of the new chtonological
learning experiences. Among so me of the most edition, The Writings 0.] Charles S. Peirce, is now
significant such forums held in the United States available through Indiana University Press. The
in recent years are the following: the conferences Institute for Studies in Pragmaticism at Texas
on the Semiotics of Art, at the University of Tech University has also published Charles Sanders
Michigan, and the Signifying Animal, at Uni- Peirce: Co.mplete Published Wo.rks Including Selected
versity of Illinois at Urbana (now edited into a Seco.ndary Materials: Micro.fiche Co.llectio.n (1977);
text by I. Rauch and G. F. Carr, 1981); the major members of the Institute have also edited A Co.m-
conference on Charles S. Peirce, in 1975, at The prehensive Biblio.graphy and Index 0.] the Published
Johns Hopkins University; the colloquium on Wo.rks 0.] Charles Sanders Peirce with a Biblio.graphy
Peirce's logical semiotics in 1980 at the Univer- 0.] Seco.ndary Studies (1977).
sity of Florida, and the exciting, controversial "The New Tools of Peirce Scholarship, with
symposium on the 'Clever Hans' phenomenon Particular Reference to Semiotic" provides
sponsored by the New York Academy of Arts important bibliographical resource information
and Sciences, in New York, 1980. The Hunter (1979) by Fisch, Ketner, and Kloesel, in Peirce
College Peirce Colloquium, 1981, celebrated the Studies, mentioned earlier. In a special volume
publication of Carolyn Eisele's addition of The of Synthese (1979), "living philosophical prob-
New Elements 0.] Mathematics 0.] Charles S. Peirce. lems" in the writings of Peirce are explored from
Annual symposia on semiotics and law have been a philosophical perspective; this special issue was
held since 1983; a conference on legal semiotics, reviewed by David Savan (1981).
sponsored by the Program for Semiotic Research An additional encyclopedia of semiotic fields
at Penn State will be held under the auspices of and concepts is in preparation, edited by Irene
Northeastern University in June 1986, as part Portis Winner. Professor Winner's forthcoming
of the annual summer institute (ISISSS). Encyclo.pedia 0.] Semio.tics 0.] Culture extends and
develops material originally presented at the
International Conference on the History and
C. Publications: Research Tools
Terminology of Semiotics at Budapest, June
The major American publications in semiot- 1979.
ics, apart from the books and book-length stud- Carolyn Eise1e's work on Peirce's semiotics
ies, are the journals, newsletters, encyclopedias, and mathematics, referred to above, has been
and the publications produced by the Institute reviewed by Max Fisch (1978b) at this writing.
for Studies in Pragmaticism, the Research Cen- A new bibliography of writings by and about
ter for Language and Semiotic Studies, and the Peirce is in preparation at the time of this writ-
Peirce Edition Project. The journals include ing, edited by Christian Kloesel; this will contain
548 ROBERTA KEVELSON
reference to new areas of semiotic inquiry which
develop from Peirce's semiotic, i.e., legal
semiotics.
As yet there are no special research tools to
provide working bibliography and exposition of
technical terms and concepts in many areas,
including film; recommended for the latter, how-
ever, is Henderson's A Critique oJ Film Theory
(1980), especially the section "Film Semiotics
and Cine-Structuralism" (pp. 109-233).
The special edition of Semiotica on Semiotics
of Culture, (1979), edited by Irenc Portis Win-
ner and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, is also available
as No. 53 in the series Approaches to Semiotics
(Mouton).
In the most profoundly pragmatic sense,
semiotics is an adventure in ideas, self-consciously
evolving toward the realization of its goal as the
science unifying the sciences, and as an "open
society of open selves." To conclude, we recall
Richard Bernstein's comments from The Restruc-
tu ring oJ Social and Political Theory (1978):
From the philosophy of language we have learned to
appreciate how language is embedded in practices and shaped
by intersubjective constitutive roles and distinctions. From
the theory of action we have learned that a proper analysis
of human action involves references to those social practices
and forms of life in which actions can be described and
explained. From the analysis of social and political reality,
we have come to see how this reality itself consists of prac-
tices and institutions that depend on the acceptance of norms
about what is reasonable and acceptable behavior. From the
post-empiricist philosophy and his tory of science we have
learned how misleading and simplistic the empiricist theories
of science are, and how central are interpretation and und er-
standing even in the hard natural sciences. (113, 114)
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 CHAPTER 25
Semiotics in the U .S.S.R.
Stephen Rudy
I. The "Moscow-Tartu School"
Nowhere has semiotics emerged as a scientific
discipline with such vigor and sweeping theo-
retical ambition as it has in the Soviet Union in
the last two decades.' The developments in
structural linguistics in the 1950s, in particular
work on machine translation and the application
of mathematical models to language, were an
important prelude to the emergence of the move-
ment, discussed in detail in the previous litera-
ture. 2 The genealogy of Russian semiotics, which
'The sheer bulk of the semiotic enterprise in the U.S.S.R.
can be grasped from a glance at the useful and conceptually
weil organized Subjeet Bibliography rif Soviet Semiotics: the Moscow-
Tartu School, comp. and ed. K. Eimermacher and S. Shishkoff
(Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1977), which
contains over 2,000 entries. A selected bibliography of some
100 items has appeared in Dispositio: Revista Hispanica de
Semi6tica Literaria, I, No. 3 (1976),364-370.
'See D. P. Lucid, "Introduction," in Soviet Semiotics: An
Anthology, ed. and trans. D. P. Lucid (Baltimore and Lon-
don: Johns Hopkins, 1977), pp. 2-4; A. Shukman, "Soviet
Semiotics and Literary Criticism," New Lilerary History, 9,
No.2 (Winter 1978), pp. 189-197; D. M. Segal, Aspecls 01
Structuralism in Soviet Philology (Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv Univer-
sity, Department of Poetics and Comparative Literature,
1974), pp. 4-10, 15-22 and the chapter on "Aspects of the
Theory of Structural Linguistics in the Soviet Union,"
pp. 24-52. Shukman (p. 189) astutely notes the "uniquely
Stephen Rudy • Department of Slavic Languages and Lit-
eratures, New York University, New York, New York, U.S.A.
10003.
555
is vital for an understanding of what D. M. Segal
terms the "essential hetereogeneity and freedom
of scholarly approach" of the movement,3 is
examined in Section II of the present survey. As
an introduction to the subject I shall briefty sketch
the main features of the movement's external
history and its key members.
Semiotics in the U .S.S.R. is often referred to
conventionally as the "Moscow-Tartu School"
after its main geographical research centers. The
founding of the Section on Structural Typology
of the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of
the Academy of Sciences in Moscow in August
1960 marks the ins ti tu tional beginnings of the
movement. The Section's first major publica-
tion, Strukturno-tipologiCeskie issledovanija (Struc-
tural-Typological Investigations), appeared in
1962. Although primarily devoted to problems
of linguistic typology, it included studies on the
Soviet way" in which semiotics was promoted: "If certain
areas are sensitive to investigation or even taboo, the energy
of speculative thought will be deflected into areas which are
neutral, perhaps 'scientific,' or even technologically usefu!.
It was by such a deflection into science and technology that
a whole new and original school of literary semiotics came
into being in the Soviet Union." The use of information
theory and cybernetic models in Russian semiotics is dis-
cussed in detail in an excellent article by Richard Bailey,
"Maxwell's Demon and the Muse," Dispositio, I, No. 3 (1976),
pp. 293-301. See also W. Rewar, "Tartu Semiotics," Bul-
letin 01 Literary Semiotics, 3 (May 1976), pp. 1-16.
'Segal, Aspects, p. 2.
556 STEPHEN RUDY

semiotics of myth and religion, text, literature, Revzin (1923-1974), D. M. Segal, a specialist in
and the system of traffic signals. 4 The first con- folklore and literature who now resides in Jeru-
ference devoted to semiotics in the U.S.S.R. was salem,8 T. V. Civ'jan, T. M. Nikolaeva, Ju. M.
held under the Section's auspices in December Lekomcev, and M. I. Lekomceva.
of 1962 and resulted in a collection of theses on Moscow as a site of semiotic studies is hardly
the "structural study of sign systems."s The key restricted to the Institute of Slavic and Balkan
topics addressed in the theses indicate the broad Studies. The distinguished theoretical linguist
scope of semiotic research from its very begin- and expert on the his tory of the Russian lan-
nings: semiotics of natural and artificial lan- guage and on Russian literature, religion and
guages, systems of writing and problems of art, Boris Andreevic U spenskij of Moscow U ni-
decipherment, communication systems other versity, has been active in the movement since
than language, mythology and folklore, verbal its inception and has made many seminal con-
and nonverbal art as sign systems. tributions. Several members of the Institute of
The researchers based at the Institute of Slavic Oriental Studies have played a leading role:
and Balkan Studies indude some of the most A. M. Piatigorsky (now in London),
active and prestigious semioticians in the Soviet D. Zil'berman, B. L. Ogibenin (now in Paris),
Union. Foremost among them is Vjaceslav Vse- A. Ju. Syrkin (now inJerusalem), and T. Ja. Eli-
volodovic Ivanov, the son of the Soviet writer zarenkova. The distinguished folklorist E. M.
V sevolod I vanov and a scholar whose extraor- Meletinskij of the Institute of World Literature
dinary contributions to theoretical as weIl as to has led the extraordinarily active structural work
Indo-European and Slavic linguistics and on folk-tales, epic and myth, along with E. S.
mythology, poetics, and semiotics single hirn out Novik and S. Ju. Nekljudov. The mathematician
as one of the most prolific and profound scien- J u. I. Levin's work on literature is distinguished
tists of his generation. He has been credited with by the sophistication vof its theoretical appar31tus.
having "introduced into Soviet linguistics the The linguists A. K. Zolkovsky and J u. K. Sceg-
entire conceptual universe of modern linguistics, lov (now in America and Canada, respectively)
both Western and Russian," and with having have elaborated a "generative poetics" of great
brought "the wealth of Russian linguistic tra- explanatory power. This list hardly exhausts the
dition back into the mainstream of scholarly life number of collaborators from Moscow, but it
in the Soviet Union.,,6 Ivanov's dose colleague does indicate the variety of disciplines brought
and frequent co-author, Vladimir Nikolaevic into the semiotic project and the extremely high
Toporov, shares with hirn the above-mentioned intellectual quality of its leading practitioners.
fields of interest, as weIl as considerable exper- The development of semiotics in the U.S.S.R.
tise as an Orientalist. Like I vanov, Toporov is was considerably facilitated by the participation
a man of legendary erudition and prodigious of a group of scholars at the U niversity of Tartu,
energy whose work has laid the foundations for which rapidly became a leading institutional
the development of semiotics in the U.S.S.R. As center for conferences and publications in the
a privileged observed has noted, "the whole range field. Jurij Mixajlovic Lotman, chairman of the
of problems discussed in the works of Soviet Department of Russian Literature at Tartu and
semioticians in connection with culture, mythol- a literary critic with an already impressive cur-
ogy, history, etc., are dearly derivative from the riculum vitae, joined the movement in 1964. His
basic ideas of ToporoV.,,7 Other prominent fig-
ures have induded the theoretical linguist I. I. 8Segal's emigration, like that of certain other key members
of the movement such as A. M. Piatigorsky and Boris Ogi-
4A cardinal manifesto of the movement that originally benin, has promoted the diffusion of the ideas of the Moscow-
appeared in the 1962 Investigations is A. A. Zaliznjak, V. V. Tartu school in the West. His survey, Aspects rif Structuralism
Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, "Structural-Typological Study in Soviet Philology (Tel-Aviv, 1974), benefits from his first-
of Semiotic Modeling Systems," in Soviet Semiotics, ed. Lucid, hand knowledge of semiotics in the U.S.S.R. and remains
pp. 47-58. the best single work on the subject. He is also to be credited
'Simpozium po strukturnomu izuCeniju znakovyx sistem (Moscow: (along with Omry Ronen) for founding Slavica Hierosolymi-
Academy of Sciences, 1962). tana (Vols. I-VI, 1977-1981), an excellent journal which
6Segal, Aspects, p. 8. has provided a valuable publication outlet in the West for
7Ibid., p. 87. members of the Moscow-Tartu school.
 SOVIET UNION
role in extending the study of semiotics from
more technical disciplines to the humanities,
broadly conceived, cannot be overemphasized.
Lotman was instrumental in organizing regular
"summer schools" on semiotics in Kääriku,
Estonia, which enabled the movement to system-
atically debate key issues in the discipline on a
more or less regular basis. 9 He also established
and directs the main journal of the Moscow-
Tartu school, LT)f1ELW'TLKiJ: Trudy po znakovym sis-
temam (Semeiotike: Works on Sign Systems).10
The author of three books readily available in
English translation on the semiotic study of lit-
erature and film, Lotman is the best-known
member of the group in the West. J1 As Ann
Shukman has noted, Lotman's work since 1970
has been important in shifting the emphasis of
9"Summer Schools" on semiotics were held in 1964, 1966,
1968, 1970, and 1974; see Eimermacher and Shishkoff, Sub-
ject Bibliography, p. xiii, for a listing of the collections of
theses they generated (abbreviated there as Letn. fk., 1964,
1966, 1968, 1970, and Materialy, 1974).
IÜThe journal is a non-periodical series in the Transactions
of the Tartu State University, Estonia (Tartu Riikliku Üli-
kooli Toimetised) of which the following volumes have thus
far appeared: 2 (transactions vol. 181), 1965; 3 (198),1967;
4 (236), 1969; 5 (284), 1971; 6 (308), 1973; 7 (365), 1975;
8 (411),1977; 9 (422),1977; 10 (463),1978; 11 (467), 1979;
12 (515), 1981; 13 (546), 1981; 14 (567), 1981; 15 (576),
1982; 16 (635), 1983; 17 (641), 1984; 18 (664), 1984. In
citing it in the present article I shall use the abbreviation
TZS followed by the volume and year.
"Ju. Lotman, The Structure ofthe Artistic Text, trans. R. Vroon
(Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1977); Anal-
ysis of the Poetic Text, trans. D. Johnson (Ann Arbor: Ardis,
1976); Semiotics of Ginema, trans. M. Suino (Ann Arbor:
Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1976). See Ann Shukman's
monograph, Literature and Semiotics: A Study in the Writings
of Ju. M. Lolman (Amsterdam, New York, Oxford: North-
Holland, 1977), and the special issue of Russian Literature
devoted to his work (5, No. I,Jan. 1977). Three important
volumes in Lotman's honor containing contributions exem-
plifying the approach of the Moscow-Tartu school have
appeared: Quinquagenario: Sbornik slatej molodyx filologov k 50-
letiju prof Ju. M. Lotmana (A Collection of Essays by Young
Philologists for Ju. M. Lotman's 50th Birthday) (Tartu:
Tartu State Univ., 1972); Finitis duodecim lustris. Sbornik stalej
k 60-letiju Prof Ju. M. Lotmana (A Collection of E5'ays for
Prof. Ju. M. Lotman's 60th Birthday), comp. S. Isakov
(Tallin: Eesti Raamat, 1982), with an informative bio-
graphical sketch and bibliography by B. F. Egorov, pp. 3-
53; and Semiosis: Semiotics and the Hislory oJ Culture. In honorem
Georgii Lotman, ed. M. Halle, K. Pomorska, and B. Uspensky
(Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1984). Some
ofLotman's colleagues at the University ofTartu who have
contributed to semiotics include B. F. Egorov, Z. G. Mine,
and B. M. Gasparov (now in the U.S.A.).
557
the Moscow-Tartu school from analysis of indi-
vidual sign systems to "bolder speculative think-
ing on the nature of culture as a whole and on
the question of cultural universals."12
As a participant in the movement, O. G.
Revzina, notes, the first stage of semiotic studies
in the U.S.S.R. represents a shift "from the pri-
mary modeling system, which is language, to
secondary modeling systems-different forms of
social consciousness (mythology, religion, folk-
lore), literary texts (poetry, prose), non-verbal
art (film, painting, architecture, etc.). The inspi-
ration for this first stage consisted of discovering
and demonstrating the structure of specific
second-order modeling systems, and of applying
linguistic methods and of working out semiotic
methods of analysis." 13 The second stage, which
the movement is still elaborating in a lively debate
that has extended to the international forum, 14
is concerned with semiotics of culture under-
stood as the functional correlation of different
sign systems from a typological and diachronic
perspective.
Despite the loss of some key members of the
movement in recent years (evident from our enu-
meration above), Moscow and Tartu remain vital
international centers of the "semiotic sphere."
The last decade has seen a tremendous number
of new publications, and the Institute of Slavic
and Balkan Studies in Moscow regularly spon-
sors symposia on the structure of texts and related
subjects. 15 The extent to which semiotics has been
accepted by the scholarly establishment in the
U.S.S.R. may be judged by the recent publica-
tion of a two-volume encyclopedia of mythology
12A. Shukman, "Soviet Semiotics," p. 191.
I3O.G. Revzina, "The Fourth Summer School on Secondary
Modeling Systems (Tartu, 17-24 August, 1970)," Semiotica,
6, No. 3 (1972), 222. Revzina's article is of particular sig-
nificance for the history of the Moscow-Tartu school, since
it represents an effort at stock-taking at a crucial moment
in the evolution of the movement.
14See the comprehensive discussion by 1. P. Winner and T. G.
Winner, "The Semiotics of Cultural Texts," Semiotics, 18,
No.2 (1976), pp. 101-156.
"To name the most recent: Balcano-Balto-Slavica. Simpozium
po strukture teksta, ed. V. V. Ivanov and T. V. Civ'jan
(Moscow:Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies, 1979);
Slruktura teksla (Structure of the Text), ed. T. V. Civ'jan
(Moscow: Nauka, 1980); Struktura leksta-81. Tezisy simpoz-
iuma. ed. V. V. Ivanov, T. M. Sudnik and T. V. Civ'jan
(Moscow: Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies, 1981).
558 STEPHEN RUDY

in an edition of 100,000 copies that is charac- of a particular scientific movement, structural-

terized by an overall semiotic conceptualization ism, and of contemporary cultural dynamics.
of the field and marked by literally hundreds of Semiotics addresses the perennial issues of the
brilliant entries by V. V. Ivanov, V. N. Toporov sign, language, and culture at a time when tech-
and E. M. Meletinskij.16 In the West several nological advances in communication and cyber-
important anthologies of English, Italian and netics make those issues of more than merely
German translations have appeared recently, and theoretical concern. Furthermore, the stark con-
the work of the Moscow-Tartu School is by and trast between the state of the sciences, especially
large accessible to non-Russian-speaking stu- the "sciences ofman," in the U.S.S.R. today and
dents of semiotics. 17 My primary task in the pres- thirty years' ago is symptomatic of tremendous
ent survey is to orient the reader in approaching changes in Soviet intellectual and cultural life
the available literature in English as well as to which semiotics has contributed to and must
bring hirn up to date on developments that have account for. As shall become apparent in the
occurred since the appearance of previous syn- course of this survey, the movement in the Soviet
thetic surveys of the movement. 18 Before under- Union cannot be viewed entirely as a dispas-
taking that task I shall turn to certain aspects sionate scientific discipline: it is keenly aware of
of the prehistory of Russian semiotics that should its own cultural specificity and role as well as of
aid the reader in understanding the features dis- the moral and ethical dimensions such aglobai
tinguishing it from the semiotic movement in science of signs necessarily must assurne. While
other countries. the cultural topicality of Soviet semiotics should
not be invoked in order to avoid an objective
evaluation of the scientific methods it applies
11. Predecessors and Models and the validity of its results, it is nevertheless
a factor that should be heeded if one is to arrive
The members of the Moscow-Tartu school, at an understanding of the tremendous vitality,
Lotman in particular, have stressed the fact that theoretical aspirations, and distinctive profile of
the general theory of signs is an outgrowth both semiotics in the U .S.S.R. as compared to other
major world research centers in the field.
16 Mi/j narodov mira (Myths of the Peoples of the World), ed. Previous writers on the subject have been sen-
S. A. Tokarev el al., 2 vols. (Moscow: Sovetskaja enciklo- sitive to the question of the unique context and
pedija, 1980-1982). circumstances accompanying the growth of
17Particularly representative is the authorized Italian collec-
ti on Ricerche semioliche. Nuove lendenze delle scienze umane
Soviet semiotics. Ann Shukman, quotingthe dis-
nell'URSS, ed.Ju. Lotman and B. Uspenskij (Turin: Einaudi, tinguished Russian Formalist critic Yurij Tyn-
1973). The main anthologies in English are: Semiotics and janov, has noted that in the Russian case
Siructuralism: Readings from the Soviel Union, ed. H. Baran "evolution does not go by plan but by leaps and
(White Plains, N.Y.: International Arts and Sciences Press, bounds; it is not a development, but a disloca-.
1976); Soviet Semiotics, ed. and trans. D. P. Lucid; and Soviel
Semiolics and Crilicism: An Anthology = New Literary History, tion.,,19 The political and ideological realities of
9, No. 2 (Winter 1978). See also Soviet Studies in Literature, Soviet life from the la te 1920s to the mid-1950s
12, No. 2 (Spring 1976), devoted to semiotics, and the spe- imposed a generation al hiatus on legitimate sci-
cial issue "Soviet Semiotics of Culture" = Dispositio: Revista entific inquiry that the members of the Moscow-
Hispdnica de Semiotica Literaria, I, No. 3 (1976), which con-
tains translations as weil as interesting reviews and cri-
Tartu school have sought to elose, for cultural
tiques. Two collections containing reprints of texts in the reasons elaborated in semiotic terms. Even DelI
original will be of interest to readers with a knowledge of Hymes, the American anthropologist, whose
Russian: Teksry sovetskogo literaturovedleskogo strukturalisma/Texte evaluation of the movement is mostly negative,
des sowjetischen literaturwissenschtifilichen Strukturalismus, ed. could not avoid the question of "the significance
K. Eimermacher (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971); Readings
in Soviet Semiotics (Russian Texts), ed. L. Matejka, S. Shishkoff,
M. E. Suino and I. R. Titunik (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Summer School"; D. M. Segal, Aspects rif Structuralism (see
Publications, 1977). note 2, above). Ann Shukman's book on Lotman, Literature
18Three previous surveys of Soviet semiotics, whose conclu- and Semiotics, is another useful secondary source for the
sions I shall cite when necessary for the sake of brevity, history and conceptual apparatus of the Moscow-Tartu
are of particular interest: E. M. Meletinskij and D. M. schoo!.
Segal, "Structuralism and Semiotics in the U.S.S.R.," 19 Ann Shukman, "Soviet Semiotics and Literary Criticism,"
Diogenes, 73 (1971),88-125; O. G. Revzina, "The Fourth New Literary History, 9, No. 2 (Winter 1978), 189.
 SOVIET UNION
and resonance of the work in its country of ori-
gin" and applauded its "verve and [the] bold-
ness of [its] formulations" which "express a sense
of the opening up of new perspectives." He con-
cludes with a sage anthropological statement on
what semiotics can offer, one that should be kept
in mi nd not only when considering semiotics in
the Soviet Union but also in relation to the eth-
ical perspectives of the discipline in countries
that have not suffered cultural disjunctions and
displacements as severe as those of Russia: "The
comprehensiveness of a semiotic viewpoint is in
effect, perhaps, a way of gaining the compre-
hensiveness of a cultural viewpoint.,,20 The defi-
nition of culture advanced by the Moscow-Tartu
school is couched in terms of information theory
and may strike one initially as either needlessly
abstract or so obvious as to be trivial: "the sphere
of organization (information) in human society
and the opposition to it of disorganization
(entropy).,,21 When put in simpler terms, even
2°Dell Hymes, "Comments on Soviet Semioties and Critieism,"
New Literary History, 9, No. 2 (Winter 1978), 189 (the italics
are mine---S.R.). The feeling of exuberance semiotics pro-
vokes as a discipline that engenders a sharpened conscious-
ness of culture and its critique is a familiar phenomenon
to anyone engaged in teaching the subject. It is to Roland
Barthes' great credit that he realized this dimension of the
discipline from his very earliest work on. Anyone who has
taught his book Mythologies cannot help but be struck by
the response of students, which verges on a sort of con-
version experience at times. The productivity and popu-
larity of semiotic method is doubtlessly linked to the absence
or bankruptcy of other explanatory models in contempo-
rary culture. As such it raises a "fundamental ethical prob-
lem," in Barthes' words, "to recognize signs wherever they
are, that is to say, not to mistake signs for natural phe-
nomena, and to proclaim them rather than to conceal them"
("Une problematique du sens," Cahiers Media, 1967-1968).
This aspect of the discipline may be viewed by some as
transcending its properly "scientific" dimensions, but such
a view strikes me as untenable in respect to any science
today, particularly a cuItural discipline. I doubt the con-
ditions of Western culture differ so fundamentally from
Russian as regards the ethical dimension of semiotics: the
centrality of this issue in France during the last decade
and a half would certainly indicate that they do not.
21B. A. Uspenskij, Y. Y. Ivanov, Y. N. Toporov, A. M.
Pjatigorskij, Ju. M. Lotman, "Theses on the Semiotic Study
of Cultures (As Applied to Slavic Texts)," in Strueture qf
Texts and Semiotics qf Culture, ed. J. van der Eng and M. Grygar
(The Hague: Mouton, 1973), p. 2. The original Russian
text should be consulted in view of errors in the translation:
"Tezisy k semioticeskomu izuceniju kul'tur (v primenenii
k slavjanskim tekstam)," in Semiotyka i struktura tekstu, ed.
M. R. Mayenowa (Wroclaw-Warsaw-Krakow-
Gdansk: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1973), pp. 9-32.
559
with an admixture of informational jargon, it
cannot but give one pause: "underlying human cul-
ture is the tendency to overcome death, a tendency
expressed, in particular, in the accumulation,
preservation, and constant processing of
knowledge. ,,22
The need to rediscover one's cultural past, so
essential for the health of a culture and the indi-
viduals who comprise it, is particularly acute in
the case of Russian culture in view of the radical
disruptions and discontinuities that country suf-
fered during the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. In the Russian context semiotics has the
eminent responsibility of being both extremely
self-conscious and culturally engagi. The impor-
tance of memory for cultural dynamics, and in
particular memory as manifested in Logos (Rus.
slovo), is the dramatic message of a brilliant col-
lective paper devoted to the two great poets of
the Acmeist group suppressed under Stalin, Anna·
Axmatova and Osip Mandel'stam, appropri-
ately entitled "Russian Semantic Poetics as a
Potential Cultural Paradigm": "Memory, recollec-
tion is not only something that enables a man to
bring his own life into correlation with history,
but is also a deeply moral principle, opposing
forgetfulness, oblivion, and chaos, and serving
as the basis for creativity, faith, and truthful-
ness.,,23 The problem of memory, which in a
different context might seem to be merely a poetic
theme of the literary school under discussion, is
literally a question of life or death in the context
of Russian culture. As V. N. Toporov writes, "to
a man in the grip of despair, the image of life's
fulness takes shape through recollection and
memory, which stand in opposition to the dark
and inert elements of oblivion. Life and memory,
understood thus, constitute the highest
value .... ,,24
22y. Y. Ivanov, "The Category of Time in Twentieth-Cen-
tury Art and Culture," Semioties, 8, No. I (1973),44.
23JU. I. Levin, D. M. Segal, R. D. TimenCik, Y. N. Toporov,
T. Y. Civ'jan, "Russkaja semanticeskaja pohika kak
potencial'naja kul'turnaja paradigma," Russian Literature,
7/8 (1974), 50.
"Y. N. Toporov, "On Dostoevsky's Poetics and Archaic
Patterns of Mythological Thought," New Literary History,
9, No. 2 (Winter 1978), p. 347. Originally in Problemypoetiki
i istorii literatury (Problems of Poetics and Literary History ),
ed. M. P. Alekseev et al. (Saransk: Mordvinian State Uni-
versity, 1973), pp. 91-109. A fuller version of this paper
appeared in Strueture of Texts and Semioties qf Cutture, ed. J.
van der Eng and M. Grygar (The Hague and Paris: Mou-
ton, 1973), pp. 225-302.
560 STEPHEN RUDY
Thus, for example, the publication of archival
materials in the Tartu Trudy po znakovym sistemam
is hardly an antiquarian enterprise in the Soviet
cultural context. As Lotman wrote in justifying
the journal's editorial policy: "an inalienable part
of any legitimate scientific movement is the real-
ization of the relation of its research method to
preceding scientific and cultural traditions.,,25 It
was natural that Russian Formalism, which had
already been recognized in the West as a move-
ment that initiated the structural approach to
literature and anticipated the semiotic approach
elaborated by the Prague Linguistic Cirele in the
1930s, should become a focus of rediscovery and
debate. 26 The question of the rich and va ried
patrimony of the Petersburg Society for the Study
of Poetic Language (Opojaz) and the Moscow
Linguistic Cirele and their influence on the
development of semiotics in the U .S.S.R. in its
formative years is complex, but certain gen er-
alizations can be safely made. The limitations
of Formalism-its exelusive attention to art as
device and to the syntagmatics of texts at the
expense of their semantics and pragmatics-were
criticized by Soviet semioticians, who at the same
time pointed to late achievements of the move-
ment that may be regarded as essentially struc-
tural in orientation. Such are, for example, Jurij
"Ju. M. Lotman, "0 zadacax razdela obzora i publikacij"
(On the Tasks Confronting the Section of 'Reviews and
Publications'), TZS, 3 (1967),363.
26 Although Victor Erlich's trail-blazing monograph appeared
as early as 1955 (Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, 3rd ed.,
N ew Haven: Yale U niversity Press, 1981), the first major
anthologies of the Formalists' works appeared in French
only in 1965 (Theorie de la littirature, ed. T. Todorov, Paris:
Editions du Seuil), in German in 1969 (Texte der russischen
Formalisten, ed. J. Striedter, Munich: Fink), and in English
in 1971 (Readings in Russian Poeties, ed. L. Matejka and
K. Pomorska, Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT.). On the Prague
Linguistic Cirele see T. G. Winner, "The Aesthetics and
Poetics of the Prague Linguistic Cirele," Poeties, 8 (1973),
77-96 and "Jan Mukarovsky: The Beginnings ofStructural
and Semiotic Aesthetics," in Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quin-
quagenerio of the Prague Linguistie Circle, ed. L. Matejka (Ann
Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1976); Semioties of Art:
Prague Sehool Contributions, ed. L. Matejka and L R. Titunik
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.LT., 1976). The importance of
Russian Formalism for the Moscow-Tartu school is appar-
ent from A. Zolkovskij's and Ju. Sceglov's review "Iz pre-
dystorii sovetskix rabot po struktural'noj poetiki" (From
the Prehistory of Soviet Works in Structural Poetics), TZS,
3 (1967), pp. 367-377. See also Segal's remarks (Aspects,
p. 28) on the role of Ivanov's paper at the Conference of
Structural Linguistics in Fall, 1960 (Chernovtsy, the
Ukraine) in reviving the patrimony of the Formalists.
Tynjanov's 1924 book The Problem oJ Verse Lan-
guage, devoted to a subtle analysis of verse
semanties, or RomanJakobson's and Tynjanov's
1928 theses, "Problems in the Study of Language
and Literature," which anticipate the semiotic
approach in their call for the correlation of the
literary series with other historical series. 27 Rus-
sian Formalism floundered precisely on the abso-
lute distinction between synchrony and
diachrony, an antinomy inherited from Saus-
surean doctrine. Although its opponents exag-
gerated the extent of Formalism's avoidance of
his tory as a non-systemic realm and ignored its
valid theoretical conelusions on the question of
literary evolution, there can be no doubt that a
major task for semiotics, as for structural lin-
guistics, was the overcoming of the theoretical
rift between synchrony and diachrony. Jakob-
son's cntlque of the basic Saussurean
dichotomies-languelparole, statics/ dynamies, syn-
chronyldiachrony--and his elaboration of the notion
of language as a "system of systems" character-
ized by translatable subcodes certainly were
decisive for Russian semiotics, coming as they
did precisely in i ts formative period. 28
One theoretician elose to the Formalists whose
work was of paramount import an ce for the
"See Yuri Tynianov, The Problem ofVerse Language, trans. and
ed. M. Sosa and B. Harvey (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), and
the reprinting of the 1928 theses in R. Jakobson, Selected
Writings IJI: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry (The
Hague, Paris and N.Y.: Mouton, 1981), pp. 3-6. See Shuk-
man (Literature and Semioties, pp. 6-7) on the importance of
Tynjanov for Lotman in particular.
28A crucial text is Jakobson's "Zeichen und System der
Sprache," which was delivered in 1959 at the International
Symposium on that subject held in Erfurt, East Germany.
See the English translation of this seminal paper: "Sign
and System of Language," in R. Jakobson, Verbal Art, Verbal
Sign, Verbal Time, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 28-33.
Jakobson's role as a figure of continuity linking Formalism
and Structuralism with semiotics had a personal dimension
in the case of the Russian semioticians, with whom he was
in elose contact beginning with his visit to Moscow in 1958
for the Fourth International Congress ofSlavists (cf. Segal,
Aspects, p. 14). His significance was eloquently and poign-
antly portrayed in a paper Ivanov sent to be read at the
"Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982" held at M.LT.
on 12 Nov. 1982, entitled "Romanjakobson: The Future."
See A Tribute to Romanjakobson, 1896-1982 (Berlin, N.Y. and
Amsterdam, 1983), pp. 47-57. Permit me to quote its con-
eluding sentence: "Today we remember Jakobson as proof
that one can do scientific work cheerfully, without pedantry
or routine, that one can do it as something great and mean-
ingful, that one can do it under any circumstances, even
in the face of catastrophes-and successfully."
 SOVIET UNION
development of semiotics both in the West and
the East was Vladimir J akovlevic Propp (1895-
1970). Propp's fundamental monograph, The
Morphology of the Folktale, was first published in
1928; its English translation in 1958 and the sec-
ond Russian edition of 1969 sparked an immense
amount of research in folklore and the structure
of narrative. 29 Propp's relevant methodological
principles should be mentioned here. His anal-
ysis of the plots of the fairy-tale on the basis of
Afanas' ev's collection is a search for the unity
underlying the diversity of characters and motifs,
in other words, for the invariant in the midst of
variations. Propp succeeded in showing the pres-
ence of a limitcd number of plot functions (thirty-
one) and a limited number of roles (seven in all)
distributed among the dramatis personae. The plot
functions, furthermore, were shown to follow a
set syntagmatic order: the basic sequence of
functions proved to be invariant as weil. The
concept of variant retained through all trans-
formations of a given type is a fundamental
methodical device that permits one to establish:
(I) a synchronic model adequate to a large body
of texts; (2) generative rules which can be inter-
preted both synchronically and diachronically;
(3) an evolutionary scheme adequate to the texts
and other sign systems on which they are based. 30
Propp's work may be seen as contributing to
certain tendencies characteristic of the Moscow-
Tartu school: the reconciliation of synchronic
and diachronic approaches, the quest for seman-
tic universals with diachronic import, and the
correlation of various sign systems (in this case,
myth, folklore, and ritual).
Another distinctive forebear of Soviet semiot-
ics is a scholar who was directly at odds with
29See V. Propp, Morphology ofthe Folklaie, trans. L. Scott, 2nd
revised ed. (Austin-London: University of Texas, 1963);
Morfologija skazki, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 1969). The
work of the folklorists Meletinskij, Nekljudov, Novik, Segal
and others in verifying, revising and extending Propp's
apparatus constitutes a major sub-field within Russian
semiotics. See Segal, Aspeets, pp. 63-76; Soviet Struetural
Folkloristics, ed. P. Maranda, Vol. I (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1974); E. and P. Maranda, Struetural Models in
Folklore and Transformational Essays (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1971).
30V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, "The Invariant and
Transformations in Folklore Texts," Dispositio, I, No. 3
(1976), p.263. Originally in Tipologiieskie issledovanija po
fot' kloru. Sbornik statej pamjati V. Ja. Proppa (1895-1970)
(Typological Studies on Folklore. A Collection of Essays
in Memory ofV. Ja. Propp, 1395-1970) (Moscow: Nauka,
1975), pp. 44-76.
561
the Formalists, Mixail Mixajlovic Baxtin (1895-
1975). D. M. Segal goes so far as to state: "No
author can be compared with Baxtin as far as
inftuence on modern Soviet semiotics is con-
cerned."3! Baxtin's work has increasingly
attracted the attention of scholars in the West
as weil, and I think it safe to say that his standing
as a major literary theoretician of the twentieth
century is beyond challenge. 32 It is illuminating
to examine the reception of Baxtin's work among
Russian semioticians. A detailed study by V. V.
Ivanov which opened an issue of the Tartu Works
on Sign Systems dedicated to the scholar on his
75th birthday examines "The Significance of
M. M. Baxtin's Ideas on Sign, Utterance and
Dialogue for Modern Semiotics. ,,33 I vanov's
appraisal is so laudatory at tim es as to seem a
virtual canonization, and he has been accused
of distorting certain of Baxtin's views in an effort
to bring him deeper into the semiotic camp.34 It
strikes me that Baxtin's work is so protean in
nature that it can be coopted by movements as
diverse as Marxist aesthetics or Derridean
deconstruction, and still retain its vitality.35 Its
intrinsically semiotic orientation, however, is
obvious, and the key concepts of sign, utterance,
31Segal, Aspeets, p. 120.
32The major works of Baxtin are now available in English:
Problems rif Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R. W. RotseI (Ann
Arbor: Ardis, 1973); Rabelais and His World, trans.
H. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T., 1963), The Di-
alogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. C. Emerson and
M. Holquist (Austin and London: Univ. of Texas, 1931).
The authorship of three books by disciples of Baxtin has
been ascribed directly to hirn: P. N. Medvedev, The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. A. Wehrle (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins, 1973); V. N. Volosinov,
Marxism and the Philosophy rif Language, trans. L. Matejka
and I. R. Titunik (N.Y. and London: Seminar Press, 1973);
idem., Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. I. R. Titunik
(N.Y.: Academic Press, 1976). Though the question of
authorship is a complex one that has sparked a great deal
of con troversy, I share the opinion of the editor of The
Dialogic Imagination, Michael Holquist, that "ninety percent
of the text of the three books in question is indeed the work
of Bakhtin hirnself." ("Introduction," p. xxvi.)
33 TZS, 6 (1973), pp. 5-44; cf. the English translation in
Semiotics and Slructuralism, ed. H. Baran, pp. 310-367. D. M.
Segal's discussion of Ivanov's article extends its conclu-
sions considerably and is worth consulting: see Aspeets,
pp. 120-132.
34I. R. Titunik, "M. M. Baxtin (The Baxtin School) and
Soviet Semiotics," Dispositio, I, No. 3 (1976), pp. 327-333.
"Cf. K. Pomorska, "Mixail Baxtin and His Verbal Uni-
verse," PTL: A Journal fir Descriptive Poetics and Theory of
Literature, 3 (1973),334-335; M. Holquist, "Introduction,"
pp. xx-xxi.
562 STEPHEN RUDY
and dialogue as elaborated by Baxtin anticipate
diverse aspects of Soviet semiotics. Nevertheless,
Ivanov's presentation is as much a self-
characterization as an analysis, which is why it
interests us here.
Baxtin's use of the term "ideology," as D. M.
Segal notes,36 is almost synonymous with the
concept of "semiotic system": it encompasses all
material creations of society, i.e., cultural texts,
which are "endowed with meaning, sense, intrin-
sic value." The status of ideological and axio-
logical systems as systems of signs is the first
theoretical postulate that permits I vanov to
regard Baxtin as aprecursor of modern semiot-
ics. Equally important is the fundamental dis-
tinction between linguistic sign and utterance:
going beyond the Saussurean notion of the lin-
guistic sign as a static and invariant unit (an
element of langue), to an analysis of the systemic
aspects of the u tterance (parole), and beyond tha t
to extra-linguistic factors of semantic nature, is
vital for the development of modern semiotics. 37
Only in this larger perspective can the crucial
problem of the text be approached. Moreover,
Baxtin's emphasis on the essentially dialogic
nature of all discourse-including inner speech-
casts light on the question of transcoding, in
particular the asymmetry of addresser and
addressee. 38 Baxtin's notion of "polyphony" and
his focus on "heteroglossia" in general leads one
from the linguistic system proper to the wider
problems of alterity in language, which open up
an entire complex of semiotic issues. Finally, as
Ivanov stresses strongly, Baxtin's approach, par-
ticularly in his book on Rabelais, is directed
beyond texts to the "world image" (or "model")
underlying them, which is analyzed using binary
structural oppositions such as those applied in
structural anthropology. Baxtin examines the
"unofficial" culture of the Middle Ages in terms
of the primary opposition top-bottom on the
social, hierarchical, spatial and bodily scales. Its
most typical manifestation is the carnival, which
is characterized by inversion or reversal of the
36 Aspects, p. 121.
37Ivanov cites an influential article by Emile Benveniste in
this connection, "Semiologie de la langue," Semiotica, I,
Nos. 1 and 2 (1969), 1-12 and 127-135, respectively.
38Cf. Jakobson, "Sign and System ... "; Ju. Lotman, "Two
Models of Communication," in Soviet Semiotics, ed. D. P.
Lucid, pp. 98-101 (originally in Te::isy dokladov IV Letnej
.rkoly [Theses of the Reports of the Fourth Summer School],
Tartu, 1970, pp. 163-65).
values attributed to the members of the pair. 39
Baxtin's analysis of "carnival" culture and "folk
laughter" influenced the Russian semioticians'
own studies of archaic models reftected in certain
contemporary cultural phenomena and under-
lying concrete texts (see below). Ivanov's final
appraisal of Baxtin strikes me both as accurate
and as indicative of the aims of Russian semiot-
ics: "Baxtin is one of the first investigators of
sign systems who enriched the science of lan-
guage by broadening its horizons which were
thus illuminated in a ncw way by comparison
of language with superlinguistic (secondary)
modeling systems" (p. 218).
Ivanov's appraisal of Baxtin is but one of a
series of studies that might go under the label
of "historiography of semiotics" if it were not
for the fact that his procedure consists largely of
highlighting and systematically elaborating the
implicitly semiotic intuitions of his predccessors
in linguistics, philology, and aesthetics. A case
in point is Ivanov's important monograph Essays
on the History 01 Semiotics in the US.S.R.,40 the
opening section of which is appropriately enti-
tled "the Reconstruction of the Prehistory of
Semiotics" (italics mine-S.R.). Previous
reviewers have been struck by the fact that "fre-
quently we find the author translating the words
of his predecessors into the semiotic terminology
of his chosen discipline."'l They find this symp-
tomatic, as do I, and quote the revealing state-
ment with which Ivanov opens his book:
"Contemporary methods of linguistics, ethnol-
ogy and other sciences connected with semiotics
prove to be the very instrument für the study of
the history of that science." The "translation"
of concepts and terms is a heuristic device the
value of which should be apparent to anyone
concerned with semiotics of culture. Apart from
the insights he offers into developments in Rus-
si an science of the 1920s that were suspended
by his tory and can now be renewed and extended,
39See V. V. Ivanov, "Iz zametok 0 stroenii i funkcijax kar-
naval'nogo obraza" (Notes on the Structure and Functions
of the Carnival Image), in Problemy poetiki i istorii literatury
(Saransk, 1973), pp. 37-53, "K semioticeskoj teorii kar-
navala kak inversii dvoicnyx predstavlenij" (Thc Semiotic
Theory of Carnival as the Inversion of Binary Opposi-
tions), TZS,8 (1977),45-64.
40V. V. Ivanov, Ocerki po istorii semiotiki v SSSR (Moscow:
Nauka, 1976).
41R. and G. Vroon, "V. V. Ivanov's Essays on the History
of Semiotics in the U.S.S.R.," Dispositio, I, No. 3 (1976),
360.
 SOVIET UNION
Ivanov makes a telling analysis of Saussure's
theory of anagrams. It is typical that Russian
semiotics, while condemning the limitations of
the Saussurean doctrine's exclusively synchronic
view of language, should turn to his abandoned
work on anagrams as an example of the new
push toward "inter-level" analysis, in particular
the close ti es between sound and meaning 10
poetry. 12
The main hero of Ivanov's book, however, is
the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein (1898-
1948). This may come as a surprise to Western
readers, who are accustomed to regard Eisen-
stein as a classic but outdated experimenter and
to whom the majority of Eisenstein's writings
remain inaccessible. 43 N evertheless, anyone
fa miliar with Eisenstein's Selected Writings in Rus-
sian will certainly acknowledge hirn as one of
the great theorists of the arts in the twentieth
century, and the extraordinary archival material
Ivanov cites-the late, indeed crowning mono-
graphs entitled Grundproblem and Method, as well
as the diaries and notes-convinces one beyond
any doubt that Eisenstein was a seminal figure
in the exploration of sign systems whose insights
must be absorbed and elaborated by modern
semiotics.
Eisenstein in I vanov's presentation is of inter-
est to begin with as a distinctive personality type
emblematic of the dynamics of twentieth-century
culture. A polyglot of vast erudition and curi-
osity, a member of the avant-garde who ener-
getically pursued its new perspectives in theory
42The English reader may want to consult Ivanov's remarks
on the subject in his paper "Growth of the Theoretical
Framework of Modern Poetics," in Current Trends in Lin-
guistics, ed. T. A. Sebeok, Vol. 12 (The Hague-Paris: Mou-
ton, 1974), pp. 835-84. The concern for "inter-level
relations" and the semiotics of texts (contexts, subtexts,
intertexts) rather than a semiotics of langue in the Saus-
surean sense is, of course, a feature that emerged in French
semiotics with particular virulence in the early seventies.
See]. Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique (Paris: Seuil,
1974).]ean Starobinski's publication in 1971 ofSaussure's
notebook on anagrams certain1y influenced the trend: cf.
the English edition, J. Starobinski, Words Upon Words, trans.
O. Emmet (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1979).
43S. M. Ejzenstein (Eisenstein), Izbrannye proizvedenija v festi
tomax (Selected Works in Six Volumes) (Moscow: Iskus-
stvo, 1964-1971). Eisenstein's availab1e works in
translation-The Film Sense (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1942),
Film Form (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), and Film Essays,
ed.]. Leyda (N.Y.: Praeger, 1970)-fail to convey the fuH
extent of his theoretical research on language and the arts
as sign phenomena.
563
and practice, Eisenstein was the ultimate
embodiment of analytical intellect coupled with
creative genius. To use a favorite category of
Russian cultural typology of personality, he was
a "Mozart-Salieri" in one;44 his personal obses-
sion with and study of the personality of an anal-
ogous Renaissance figure, Leonardo da Vinci, is
indicative. Eisenstein was not unique in this
respect, either: similar in type are the symbolist
Andrej Belyj and the novelist-critic Jurij Tyn-
janov, to name but a few. It was not by chance
that he was particularly attentive to the work of
Juan Gris, whom he labelIed the "mathemati-
ci an within Cubism." The double passion for
analysis and creative expression which possessed
Eisenstein goes a long way toward explaining his
seemingly contradictory tendency to study the
"structure of things" (the syntax of art), on the
one hand, and the emotional and psychological
origins and effects of aesthetic phenomena (its
pragmatics), on the other.
Eisenstein was fortunate in having the rich
new medium of cinema at his disposal, and he
took as much theoretical as practical advantage
of that fact. He recognized the cinema as an art
form that occupied a unique position in the evo-
lution of art. I ts synthetic and syncretic potential
was the result of technological advances that
opened up new expressive possibilities and at
the same time allowed one to examine basic aes-
thetic laws fundamental to all arts. It is typical
that in an age reacting to what might be termed
the "onslaught" of the machine-cf. Bergson's
laments about the "mechanization of the
living"-Eisenstein viewed the development of
technology as an extension of man's biological
evolution and spoke instead of the "Pygmalion-
ization of the machine," its "domestication" in
line wi th exis ting cul tural patterns. (I vanov
compares Eisenstein's attitude to technology in
this respect to the philosophical extension of the
"biosphere" into the "noösphere" in the work of
V. I. Vernadsky and Teilhard de Chardin.)
That Eisenstein was semiotically oriented is
unquestionable. He steadfastly insisted on the
44It is peculiar that this opposition, which was presented in
Puskin's "little tragedy" of the same name in paradigmatic
form, is such a vital cultural category in Russian culture
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while it is almost
entirely lacking in Western culture of the same period. For
an idea of the vitality of the opposition in Russian culture
see Nadezhda Mandelstam's Mozart and Salieri, trans. R. A.
McLean (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973).
564 STEPHEN RUDY

sign character of the filmic image and empha- artificial language imposed upon the body for
sized the conventional (symbolic and expressive) purposes of training and/or scientific transcrip-
nature of the object as captured on film, its status tion of theatrical action, may be viewed as an
as sign rather than mere denotation. Though effort at recapturing primary meanings. As Iva-
aware of what he termed "the shot's tendency nov seems to suggest, there is a point at which
toward complete factual immutability," Eisen- the technological and the hieratic meet, and the
stein battled for the cinema of signification. As opposition archaic-modern is neutralized.)
he wrote, typically, of the elose-up, "its principal Despite his interest in culturally coded sys-
function ... is-not only and not so much to tems of signs/9 Eisenstein promoted an essen-
show or present, as to mean, to signW, to syrnbol- tially textual construction of meanings. The
ize.,,4S Like many members of his generation, signified was seen as determined primarily by
Eisenstein resisted the notion that art had any- the text-system rather than by pre-existing codes:
thing to do with mere representation in the illu- "in art it is not the absolute relationships that
sionistic sense. His major sources of inspiration are decisive, but those arbitrary relationships
were highly conventionalized art forms like the within a system of images dicta ted by a partic-
J apanese Kabuki or Chinese theater, where ular work of art."so In this respect Eisenstein
"every situation, every object is iiJ.variably prefigures the interest of the Moscow-Tartu
abstracted in its nature and purely symbolic."46 school in semiotics of text (utterance). Eisenstein
As I vanov discusses in detail, J apanese char- sought to dis Iod ge the static meanings of signs
acters attracted Eisenstein as one example of a by contexture (montage) and make of them
larger phenomenon in the his tory of language "symbols in' formation."
and art, the evolution of purely iconic into sym- Eisenstein's attention to the syntax and
bolic signs. 47 As Ivanov demonstrates, this phe- semantics of signs was accompanied by a strong
nomenon may be traced in the development of emphasis on the pragmatics of art as a com-
complex ideographie systems of writing from municative process, i.e., the relation of sender
essentially iconic pictograms, in "grammatical- and receiver to the text. Art models the complex
ization" of lexical morphemes in language, and inner state of the artist in both its "thematic-
in the history of ornament, which begins with logical" and "image-sensual" dimensions and
the simple display of the object as such and moves recreates an analogous state in the viewer. (The
to increasing degrees of abstraction. Eisenstein's terms reftect Eisenstein's dilemma as scholar-
montage theory is predicated on the principle of artist.) Thus, on the one hand, Eisenstein
conveying a "graphically inexpressible" concept advanced his theory of the cinema of "shocks"
through the syntactic combination of two essen- or "provocations," and on the other, was fasci-
tially iconic representations. In a similar fashion, nated by the synthetic nature of primitive cul-
Eisenstein finds the basis of the conventional tural forms such as magie, ritual, and circus, in
system of language in gesture. (One should note which he gleaned lessons for the modern arts.
an interesting paradox here that links Eisen- Eisenstein's synchronie and structural
stein's work with Baxtin's:48 if purely symbolic approach to film language was always counter-
systems contain evolutionary traces of their orig- balanced by a tendency typical of the scientific
inally iconic essence, the material substratum of life of the Soviet Union, particularly in the 19308:
the word is latently loaded with emotive, pri- a concern for evolution (diachrony) and for the
mary signification. From this perspective, bio- psychological arid social determination of signs.
mechanics, which at first sight might seem an Art was seen as limited to a small nu mb er of
basic situations and symbols, the later form of
45 Film Form, p. 238.
whose appearance could be explained by tracing
46S. M. Eisenstein, "The Enchanter of the Pear Garden," the early phases of the evolution of man and art,
Theatre Arts Monlhly, 19, No. 10 (1939), 764.
"Cf. V. V. Ivanov, "Evolution des signes-symboles," Semi- 4gCf. Eisenstein's writings on color: "Color and Meaning,"
olica, I, No. 2 (1969), 218-22l. in his The Film Sense (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and World,
"'In particular, Baxtin's concept of telo-znak 'body-sign', which 1942), pp. 113-153. It should be noted that color, in any
emphasizes the intrinsic connection between meaning and event, was a symbolic, not naturalistic, element of film in
material form: cf. Ivanov, "The Significance," p. 31l. (See Eisenstein's view, a type of metaphor.
note 33, above.) "'The Film Sense, p. 150.
 SOVIET UNION
with the correlate attempt at unearthing archaie
("prelogical") forms in contemporary sign sys-
tems. This tendency is clearly exhibited in cer-
tain aspects of the work of the Moscow-Tartu
schoo!. The complexity, heterogeneity and scope
of reference of Eisenstein's work makes it an
incredibly rich source for future semiotic inquiry.
I vanov's book is a remarkable first step in that
direction, and one of enormous cultural
significance.
Baxtin's and Eisenstein's interest in archaie
thought and its existence as a substratum of
modern sign systems is echoed in certain schol-
ars grouped around N. Ja. Marr, whose works
have been resurrected by the Moscow-Tartu
schoo!. This may be surprising at first sight since
Marrism was deeply antagonistic tc}--and in fact
directly prevented the development of-
structural linguistics, on which Russian semiot-
ics is based. 51 Jurij Lotman discusses this in detail
as an example of the "way structural-semiotic
methods formed and blazed a path for them-
selves within the framework of different and
sometimes conflicting trends in scholarly
thought."52 As I have tried to show above, this
fact is fundamental to the his tory and basic pro-
file of modern semiotics in the Soviet Union, in
particular its devotion to problems of historical
semantics in the study of literature, folklore, and
myth.
One disciple of Marr whose work Lotman
revived interest in is the remarkable scholar 01' ga
Mixajlovna Freidenberg (1890-1955), who was
a cousin of the poet Boris Pasternak and, inci-
dentally, the first woman to earn the degree of
Doctor of Philology in the U.S.S.R. (1924). Her
remarkable correspondence with Pasternak,
recently published, reveals her intelligence,
courage, and concern for the highest values of
Russian culture. 53 Several features align her work
with that of the Moscow-Tartu school: (1) an.
interest in relics, fragments of preceding textual
See D. Laferriere's discussion of this question, "Semiotica
.51
sub specie Sovietica: Anti-Freudianism, Pro-Marrism, and
Other Disturbing Matters," PTL: A Journal Jor Descriptive
Poetics and Theory 01 Literature, 3 (1978), p. 451f and the
references he cites.
52JU. M. Lotman, "0. M. Freidenberg as a Student of Cul-
ture," in Semiotics and Structuralism, ed. H. Baran, p. 259.
Originally in TZS, 6 (1973),482-489.
"The Correspondence rif Bons Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg, 1910-
1954, camp. and ed. Elliott Mossman (N.Y. and London:
Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1982).
565
formations (myths and rituals); (2) discovery of
invariant semantic models for generating the
endless array of concrete plots; (3) establishment
of the universal structure of archaie conscious-
ness and its "picture of the world"; (4) analysis
of the archaie elements in modern culture: and
(5) the study of culture as such, rather than some
particular aspect of it.
The above sketch does not exhaust the entire
range of precedents or the full list of Russian
scholars the Moscow-Tartu school has helped to
rehabilitate,54 but it does indicate the privileged
models the school appeals to which give it its
distinctive, at times .contradictory, flavor. The
interest in the archaie and in overcoming the
limitations of the synchronie method are signal
phenomena best illustrated by the school's study
of mythology, which is a logical starting place
for any survey of the movement.
111. Semiotics of Myth
Theearly survey by E. M. Meletinskij and
D. M. Segal (cf note 18, above) highlighted the
centrality of this domain for Russian semiotics:
"There is no doubt that folklore and mythology
are privileged objects of structural research.
There is a large number of works whose content
bears only an indirect relation to the arts of lan-
guage, and is situated at the frontier between
semantic linguistics and his tory of religions or
the study of cultures." (p. 105.) Mythology, in
particular, is the field in which certain crucial
concepts of Russian semiotics were first intro-
duced and elaborated, namely "secondary mod-
eling system," "model of the world," and "text."
The work of the Moscow- Tartu school on
mythology also permits the clearest grasp of cer-
tain of i ts methodological proced ures: the
"structural-typological" approach, the use of
binary principles of classification, and recon-
struction, a particularly thorny topic. Finally, as
Segal notes (Aspects, p. 85), it gives us a per-
spective on the historical and universalist thrust
"See Segal, Aspects, p. 119f, for a list of other forerunners
of Russian semiotics. A particularly important figure is
Pavel Aleksandrovic Florenskij (1882-1943), whose work
is too multiform and complex to analyze here: cf my entry
on this seminal philosopher in the Encyclopedic Diclionary 01
Semiotics, ed. T. A. Sebeok et al. (Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press, 1985).
566 STEPHEN RUDY
of the movement: "Mythology interests [Russian
semiotics J not only as a highly semio~ic system
the structural study of which may provide sig-
nificant insights into the process of semiosis in
general, but as an important stage in the history
of semiotic systems, as a universal stage in the
development of human consciousness, a typol-
ogical layer which may always be activated
again." This is particularly evident in Toporov's
controversial studies aimed at reconstructing the
"mythopoeic model of the world," as we shall
see in the final part of this section.
In an important early introduction to the prin-
ciples of semiotics V. V. Ivanov states that "the
basic function of every semiotic system is the
modeling of the world. ,,55 Furthermore, "the
world model constructed by a specific sign sys-
tem is usually held in common by an entire col-
lective and is introduced to each individual who
becomes a member of the collective." Such
models, being collective and unconscious, are to
a certain extent "programs for collective and
individual behavior."
The concept of "model" as a heuristic device
has given rise to controversy, particularly as con-
cerns its application in literary studies. The more
obviously flatulent objections should be dealt with
before turning to "modeling systems" proper.
Conservative critics have reacted with particular
virulence to the concept of model as a reductive
procedure. Semioticians have been at pains to
ass ure such critics that "models" lay no claim
to explain away the deeper mysteries of lan-
guage, culture and art, but are an operative
device. The limitations of models, as scientific
constructs systematically mediating the relation
of observer to the phenomena und er observa-
tion, are readily admitted by the Moscow-Tartu
school. As V. V. Ivanov puts it, "in constructing
a given model scholars consciously limit them-
selves in view of the consideration that a model
is capable of reflecting only certain aspects of
the object: other of its features, which are insig-
nificant from the given point of view [of the
observerJ, are consciously disregarded."56 The
""The Role of Semiotics in the Cybernetic Study of Man
and Collective," in Soviet Semiotics, ed. Lucid, p. 36f. Orig-
inally in the collection Logii'eskaja struktura naucnogo znanija
(The Logical Structure of Scientific Knowledge) (Moscow:
Nauka, 1965), pp. 75-90.
S6y. Y. Ivanov, "Fil'm v fil'me" (The Film Within a Film),
TZS, 14 (1981), pp. 19-21.
fear the concept of model instills is itself a cul-
tural fact, one not too distant, perhaps, from the
reaction of certain aborigines to having their pic-
ture taken: a fe ar of having one's soul, essence,
or spirit stolen. (One is tempted to observe that
such a fe ar of loss, ironically enough, implies a
faith in the efficacy of the apparatus that those
accustomed to its use do not share.) This point
was cleverly made by A. Syrkin in an erudite
and exhaustive study of the opposition "alive-
not alive":
The notion of analytical dissection of the living body as
mortifying during the analysis has a noteworthy echo in
scientific methodology. A correspondingly analytical pro-
cedure applied in the humanitarian sphere (particularly to
an artistic work) inevitably "disturbs" its object, eharacter-
ized by certain integral qualities (cf. to some degree analo-
gous "disturbance" caused by an instrument to the object
of physical study) and thus often meets with objections. The
case is well known in the history of the development of
corresponding humanitarian branches (e.g., "formal" method
in literary studies, semioties, ete.) where similarly to natural
seien ces a principle of complementarity of different descrip-
tions should be introduced. (cf. N. Bohr)57
I am reminded of Roman Jakobson's apt reply
to critics of his linguistic analyses of poetic texts
such as Riffaterre, who claimed his method
obscured-even effaced-"the subtle, indefina-
ble je ne sais quai that poetry is supposed to be
made of": "But thisje ne sais quai remains equally
elusive in the scientific study of language, or of
society, of life, and even of the ultimate physical
secrets of matter. It is quite useless to oppose
pretentiously theje ne sais quai to the insuperable
approximations of science."S8
The modeling capacity ofvarious sign systems
is tremendously diverse. A minimal capacity is
exemplified by artificial languages or mathe-
matical theories of sets, in which the structure
of the objective reality modeled by the system is
largely dependent on the latter's internal prop-
erties. Naturallanguage may be regarded as the
primary modeling system, with a tremendous
capacity: "the number of objects outside the sys-
tem's borders that the system can nonetheless
"A. Syrkin, "Alive--Not Alive (Some Additional Notes),"
Slavica Hierosolymitana, 5-6 (1981), I!. On complementarity
in linguistics and semiotics, cf. ]akobson, "Sign and Sys-
tem," p. 36; Zaliznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov, "Struetural-
Typological Study," p. 53.
58R.]akobson, "Retrospect" to his Selected Writings, III: Poetry
01 Grammar and Grammar 01 Poetry (The Hague, Paris, and
N.Y.: Mouton, 1981), p. 768.
 SOVIET UNION
potentially include within its model" is virtually
limitless. 59 Moreover, "those world models intro-
duced to man at a sufficiently early age through
instruction often function, both as world model
and behavioral program, automatically and
independently of how much they correspond to
the conscious world models constructed by the
individual at a later time." This fact helps explain
the unique status of language as man's "pri-
mary" modeling system. 50
The primacy of language as compared to other
sign systems has led to an extensive theoretical
debate over the respective status of linguistics
and semiotics witnessed in Roland Barthes' rad-
ical statement that "linguistics is not apart of
the general science of signs, even a privileged
part, it is semiology which is part of linguistics:
to be precise, it is that part covering the great
signifying unities of discourse. ,,61 While Russian
semioticians do not go as far as Barthes, they
underscore the fact that the "secondary model-
ing systems," like all semiotic systems, are con-
structed on the model of language. 62 The impossibility
of imagining language outside of the context of
other semiotic cultural systems such as myth,
art, literat ure, etc., or vice versa, is a point that
J urij Lotman and Boris U spenskij em phasize
emphatically:
No language (in the full sense of the word) can exist unless
it is steeped in the context of eulture; and no culture ean
exist whieh does not have, at its center, the structure of
natural language .... In its aetual functioning, language is
molded into a more general system of culture and, together
with it, eonstitutes a complex whole. The fundamental "task"
of eulture ... is in structurally organizing the world around
man .... But in order to fulfill that role, eulture must have
within itself a structural "diecasting meehanism." It is this
function that is performed by naturallanguage. 63
59Ivanov, "The Role of Semiotics," p. 36.
6°Benveniste ("Semiologie de la langue") stresses that the
metalinguistie funetion of language assures it of its distinet
pi ace in the system of human communication: not only can
language model any aspect of external reality, it alone is
able to translate all the signs of any other semiotic system
into its own terms. Ivanov makes the same point in his
article just eited.
61 R. Barthes, Elements 01 Semiology, trans. A. Lavers and
c. Smith (London: Cape, 1967), p. 11.
6'.Jurij Lotman, The Structure 01 the Artistic Text, p. 9.
63"On the Semiotie Meehanism of Culture," New Literary
History, 9, No. 2 (Winter 1978), 212f. Originally in TZS, 5
(1971), pp. 144-166. An important eontribution to the
debate by Ivanov and Toporov is their article "Strukturno-
tipologiceskij podxod k semanticeskoj interpretaeii pro-
izvedenij izobrazitei' nogo iskusstva v diaxroniceskom
567
Religious systems are exemplary secondary
modeling systems: they are based upon language
and share with it a high modeling capacity that
is, nevertheless, more limited than the systems
of modern arts, where the unconscious and co 1-
lective nature of sign production and consump-
tion is less prominent. The basic principles for
studying secondary modeling systems are char-
acteristically presented using religious systems
as data in an early programmatic essay by Za-
liznjak, Ivanov, and Toporov cited above (cf.
fn.4) The authors isolate the features common
to both language and myth as semiotic systems:
"the possibility of articulating a certain sequence
of elements belonging to the system, the presence
of at least two semiotic planes for each of these
elements, and the existence of syntactic and par-
adigmatic relations" (p. 47).
Mythological systems are constructed on the
basis of "directly observed facts that we can call
a text in the broad sense of the word." Text is
indeed broadly defined by the authors for the
purposes of semiotic research: it may include
"written or oral language; graphic, pictorial, or
sculptural representation; architectural compo-
sitions; musical or vocal phrases; gestures; spe-
cial forms of human behavior such as the state
of sleep, hypnosis, or ecstasy; ordinary forms of
behavior that are meaningful in a special way,
such as the consumption of food; articles of
everyday use that are invoked in the cultural
realm" (p. 49). Further it is defined as "the total-
ity of available data, which also amounts to the
totality of texts in a speciallanguage." Texts are
essentially heterogeneous in that the elements of
two different sign systems appear in them-in
the case of religious systems, the signs of such
secondary systems are encoded by means ofwrit-
ten or orallanguage-which pos es special prob-
lems in the reconstruction of texts used to build
a model of the system. In the case of multi-tiered
texts, careful procedures must be used to stratify
aspekte" (The Struetural-Typological Approach to the
Semantie Interpretation of Works of Visual Art in Their
Diachronie Aspect), TZS, 8 (1977), esp. 104-111. The
question is too extensive to be detailed further here, but
the reader may wish to consult two analyses of the problem
in particular: Boris Oguibenine (Ogibenin), "Linguistie
Models of Culture in Russian Semiotics: A Retrospeetive
View," PTL, 4 (1979), 91-118; for its relation to the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis and the anthropologieal perspective,
D. Hymes, "Comments on Soviet Semiotics and Criticism,"
p. 404f.
568 STEPHEN RUDY
the layers and isolate the elements conveying
religious information. Assuming a text of suffi-
cient length and diversity one is able to compare
the different combinations of elements of the
system and their differential traits. The latter
must be coded in a metalanguage of description,
which in the case of Russian semiotics is usually
based on a system of binary relations of the type
elaborated in structural anthropology by Claude
Levi-Strauss. 64
The ultimate goal of the reconstruction of
mythological texts is the structural typology of
religious systems as a whole and the establish-
ment of semantic universals: "The differential
traits that serve to distinguish between signs
within each separate system also function in this
theory as differential traits that distinguish
between entire systems .... The correspon-
dences between systems are used to construct a
new system, the universal set of differential traits,
which can be regarded as the review system that
describes aH of the others" (p. 55). The typology
of religious semanties, for example, involves
establishing a system of elementary semantic
units like good-evil, death-resurrection, higher
world-Iower world, etc., that serve as an algo-
rithm for translating from one system to another.
In contrast to the traditional comparative-
historical method, structural typology favors
internal reconstruction, which makes it possible
to determine chronological distinctions between
the elements of a system manifested in statistical
distinctions.
Ivanov and Toporov have applied the method
outlined to the reconstruction of the Common
Slavic mythological system in its relation to Indo-
European. 65 It should be noted at the outset that
64See V. V. Ivanov, "On Binary Relations in Linguistic and
Other Semiotic and Social Systems," in Lagic, Language, and
Probability, ed. R.]. Bogdan (Dordrecht: RiedeI, 1973),
pp. 196-200; "On Antisymmetry and Asymmetrical Rela-
tions in Natural Languages and Other Semiotic Systems,"
Linguistics, 119 (1974), 35-40; "Dvoicnaja simvoliceskaja
klassifikacija v afrikanskix i aziatskix tradicijax" (Binary
Symbolic Classification in African and Asian Traditions),
Narady Azii i Ajriki, No. 5, (1969), pp. 105-147. The ques-
tion of the descriptive adequacy of binary classification,
not to mention its status as a theory of the way the human
mind works, is too entangled to go into here, but cr. P. Pettit,
The Cancept af Structuralism (Berkeley and L.A.: University
of California, 1975), ch. 3, and]. Boon's engaging mono-
graph Fram Symbalism ta Structuralism: Levi-Strauss in a Literary
Tradition (N.Y.: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 75f.
65The theoretical principles and system of transcription
(metalanguage) for text reconstruction were first elabo-
research in the domain of Slavic mythology has
generally lagged behind the phenomenal renais-
sance in Indo-European comparative mythology
during the last fifty years for which Georges
Dumezil and his followers are primarily respon-
sible. 66 The paucity of primary sources and a
mistrust of secondary ethnographie, folkloric, and
linguistic (etymological and toponymic)
evidence-not to mention political considera-
tions-even led some scholars of the 1930s and
'40s to deny the Indo-European roots of the Slavic
pantheon, indeed to deny S1avic mythology the
status of anything but adegenerate heathenism
of late and local derivation. 57 Thus Erwin Wie-
necke, in a work of dubious value from a schol-
arly point of view and motivated by Fascist
ideology, advanced the thesis that early Slavic
beliefs existed only on the level of primitive
demonology and did not evolve into a faith in
individual gods until the S1avs ca me under the
religious influence of the Germans. 68 The meth-
ods of comparative structural 1inguistics were
applied in an epochal paper of 1950 by Roman
Jakobson, who was able to demonstrate that "the
pantheon of the Slavs offers more Common Slavic
than tri bai features and partly points to Indo-
Iranian, especially Iranian, and perhaps Thraco-
rated in relation to Common Slavic (simple and compound
names of gods, phraseological combinations, as weil as
longer texts such as charms, lamentations, fragments of
Common Slavic epics and fairy tales) in a paper presented
at the Fifth International Congress ofSlavists, Sofia, 1962,
"K rekonstrukcii praslavjanskogo teksta" (Reconstruction
of a Common Slavic Text), in Slavjanskae ja<,ykaznanie. Dak-
lady sauetskaj deligacii na V Meidunaradnam S"ezde slavistav v
Safii (Moscow: Nauka, 1963), pp. 88-158. The reconstruc-
ti on of the pantheon and the basic semantic elements of
the Common Slavic religious system was accomplished in
Slavjanskie ja<,ykavye madelirujuJCie semioticeskie sistemy (Drevnyj
periad) (Slavic Linguistic Semiotic Modeling Systems [the
Ancient Period] ) (Moscow: N auka, 1965).
66See C. Scott Littleton, The New Camparative Mythalogy: An
Anthrapalagical Assessment af the Thearies 01 Georges Dumezil
(Berkeley: University of California, 1973). Two important
collections are of particular interest from a semiotic stand-
point: Myth and Law Amang the Inda-Europeans: Studies in Inda-
Eurapean Camparative Mythalagy, ed. ]aan Puhvel (Berkeley:
University of California, 1970) and Myth in Inda-Eurapean
Antiquity, ed. G.]. Larson (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia, 1974).
67The sad state of Slavic mythological studies prior to the
works of ]akobson, Ivanov and Toporov is attested to by
a typical conservative survey of the subject: F. Vyncke,
"The Religion of the Slavs," in HistariaReligianum: Handbaak
JOr the History af Religions, ed. C.]. Bleeker and G. Widengren,
Vol. I (Leiden: E.J. BrilI, 1969), pp. 647-666.
6SE. Wienecke, Untersuchungen zur Religion der Westslaven
(Leipzig, 1940).
 SOVIET UNION
Phrygian connections."69 Jakobson is a seminal
figure in positing structurally sound methods of
reconstruction whose work is of paramount
importance for the Moscow-Tartu school. It is
noteworthy that his reconstruction of the Indo-
European origins of Common Slavic epic meters,
following the incentives of Antoine Meillet, was
completed in the same year as his path-breaking
mythological study.70 His report to the Eighth
International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences (Moscow, 1964) on the
role of linguistic evidence in comparative
mythology and his elegant analysis of one of the
Slavic gods and his Indo-European cognates may
be credited with resuscitating the field of Slavic
mythology.71 The work of Ivanov and Toporov
may be viewed as a systematic and original elab-
oration of Jakobson's proposals that succeeds in
bringing the study ofCommon Slavic mythology
back into the mainstream of the modern com-
paratist trend, with rich implications for future
work in Indo-European mythology. In particu-
lar, they are to be credited with the reconstruc-
tion of the Common Slavic pantheon of deities,
their hierarchical relations and the semantics of
their distinguishing traits. The semantics of the
system is carefully unearthed in a rigorous appli-
cation of typological oppositions universal enough
for establishment of correlation with other reli-
gious mythological systems.
One important consequence of Ivanov's and
Toporov's semiotic approach to reconstruction
is that it facilitates the reintroduction of "sec-
69R. Jakobson, "Slavic Mythology," in Standard Dictionary oJ
FoLklore, MythoLogy and Legend, ed. M. Leach, Vol. 11 (N.Y.:
Funk and Wagnalls, 1950), p. 1024. Jakobson's mythol-
ogical studies are inc1uded in Vol. VII of his Selected Writ-
ings: Gontributions to Gomparative Mythology. Studies in Linguistics
and PhiloLogy, 1972-1982, ed. by S. Rudy, with apreface by
L. R. Waugh (Berlin, Amsterdam and N.Y: Mouton, 1985).
7°R. Jakobson, "Slavic Epic Verse: Studies in Comparative
Metrics," in his SeLected Writings IV: Slavic Epic Studies (The
Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1966), pp. 414-463. Originally pre-
sen ted as the Ilchester lecture at Oxford U niversity, 10
May 1950.
71 "Ro]' lingvisticeskix pokazanij v sravnitel'noj mifologii"
(The Role of Linguistic Evidence in Comparative Mythol-
ogy) VII" Gongre, International des Sciences Anthropologiques et
Ethnologiques, Moscou (3 aofit-lO aout 1964), Vol. 5 (Moscow,
1970), pp. 608-619-cr the English translation, in Jakob-
son's Selected Writings VII (see fn. 69 above); "The Slavic
God Veles" and His Indo-European Cognates," Studi lin-
guistici in onore di Vitlore Pisani (Brescia: Paideia, 1969),
pp. 579-599.
569
ondary" sources, previously regarded as spu-
rious, into mythological studies. Mythological
evidence of the reconstructed system, particu-
larly of a semantic nature, may be used as a
means of verifying the actually archaic layers of
meaning in later texts. As Segal notes (Aspects,
p. 81), this in a sense is "a reversal of the tra-
ditional position of comparative mythology,
according to which linguistic correspondences were
the final proof of archaism." Ivanov and Topo-
rov examine an eighteenth-century text that con-
tains archaic features relating to the two primary
gods of the ancient Slavic pantheon, Perun the
Thunderer and his opponent Veles, the "god of
cattle."72 The text in question also has motifs
that link it to the oldest Russian epic, the Igor'
Tale. The authors' argument provides further
proof for the authenticity of the Igor' Tale, a
stormy subject since its discovery in the late
eighteenth century, and raises, moreover, wider
questions of textological methodology. In par-
ticular, the authors note that internal textology,
which aims at reconstruction through the col-
lation and analysis of variants existing in time,
can benefit from "external" textology which does
not presuppose the preservation of the original
form of the text, but postulates an ideal structure
of the text on the basis of semantic mythological
evidence.
A fruitful extension of Ivanov and Toporov's
methods and concrete results in determining the
semantic features of the god Veles/Volos and his
relation to Perun is found in two recent works
by B. A. Uspenskij.73 The author succeeds with
72V. V. Ivanov and V. N. Toporov, "K rekonstrukcii obraza
Velesa-Volosa kak protivnik gromovedca (na osnovanii
vtoricnyx istocnikov)" (A Reconstruction of the Figure of
V eles-Volos as the Antagonist of the Thunderer [Based on
Secondary Sources ]), in Tezisy dokladov IV Letnej Jkoly po
vtorii'nym modeLirujuJi'im sistemam, Tartu, 17-24 avg. 1970g.
(Theses of Reports at the Fourth Summer School on Sec-
ondary Modeling Systems, Tartu, 17-24 Aug. 1970) (Tartu,
1970), pp. 45-50, "K probleme dostovernosti pozdnix vto-
ricnyx istocnikov v svjazi s issledovanijami v oblasti mifol-
ogii. (Dannye 0 Velese v tradicijax Severnoj Rusi i voprosy
kritiki pis'mennyx tekstov) (The Problem ofthe Reliability
of Late Secondary Sources in Connection with Studies in
the Field of Mythology: Data about Veles in North Russian
Traditions and Questions of Criticism of Written Texts),
TZS, 6 (1973), 46-82. The first study is summarized in
detail by Segal (Aspects, p. 8Ifr).
73B. A. Uspenskij, "Kul't Nikoly na Rusi v istoriko-kul'turnom
osveScenii (Specifika vosprijatija i transformacija isxodnogo
obraza)" (The Cult of Nikola in Russia in a Historico-
570 STEPHEN RUDY
enormous philological ilan in explaining the
extraordinarily vital and unique pi ace of St.
Nicholas in Russian orthodoxy as the result of
pagan survivals. St. Nicholas (Nikola) was ven-
erated above all other saints and occupied a puz-
zling relation to the Archangel Michael and St.
George. He was the guardian of livestock and
patron of agriculture and uniquely the "peo-
ple's" saint, as weil as being directly related to
the bear cult. Uspenskij proves beyond any doubt
that the figure of Nikola is isomorphie to Veles/
Volos and the puzzling aspects of his semantic
attributes and place in the hierarchy of saints in
Russia are explained by the survival of the ancient
Slavic myth of the struggle of the Thunderer
and his opponent. The elegance of his argument
and the amount of previously unexplained eth-
nographie, ritual and folklore material it pro-
vides a satisfactory framework for, makes
Uspenskij's work a tour deJorce in the application
of semiotic methodology to a difficult body of
philological and cultural evidence. I t shows as
weil the soundness and productivity of the
I vanov-Toporov model of the ancient Slavic
pantheon.
Evidence used in the reconstruction of the
Slavic pantheon (especially the combat between
Perun and V eies) and the wider cirele of data
from Balto-Slavic and Indo-European enabled
Ivanov and Toporov to reconstruct a fragment
of Indo-European mythology which they label
"the basic myth" and which has wide typological
paralleis in numerous other archaie traditions. 71
Cultural Light: the Specifics of the Perception and Trans-
formation of an Initial Image), TZS, 19 (1978), 86-140,
expanded in book form as Filologiceskie ra;:yskanija v oblasti
slavjanskix drevnostej (Philological Excursions in the Realm
of Slavic Antiquities) (Moscow: Moscow University, 1982).
"Secondary material-Belorussian and Lithuanian folkloric
texts-guided the authors' initial research: see "K semi-
oticeskomu analizu mifa i rituala (na Belorusskom mate-
riale)" (Toward the Semiotic Analysis of Myth and Ritual
[on the Basis of Belorussian Material]), in Sign. Language.
Culture, ed. A. Greimas et al. (The Hague and Paris: Mou-
ton, 1970), pp. 321-389. The "basic myth" is summarized
in an article dedicated to.Levi-Strauss on his 60th birthday:
"Le Mythe indo-europeen du dieu de l'orage poursuivant
le serpent: reconstitution du schema," in Echanges et Com-
munieations: Melanges offerts Ci. C. Liui-Strauss, ed. J. Pouillon
and P. Miranda, Vol. 2 (The Hague-Paris: Mouton, 1970),
pp. 1180-1206. The full range of material is elaborated in
their fundamental book Issledovanija v oblasti slavjanskix drev-
nostej: LeksiCeskie i frazeologiCeskie voprosy rekomtrukeii tekstov
(Studies in the Realm of Slavic Antiquities: Lexical and
Phraseological Questions of Text Reconstruction) (Mos-
cow: Nauka, 1974).
The basic plot has the following motifs: (I) the
Storm God is situated above-on a mountain, in
the sky (together with Sun and Moon), at the top
of the tripartite world tree, which faces the Jour
corners of the universe; (2) the Serpent is situ-
ated below, at the roots of the tripartite world tree,
on a black woolen garment; (3) the Serpent steals
a horned animal (and hides it in a cave, behind a
eliff); the Storm God breaks asunder the cliffand
frees the animal (or people); (4) the Serpent hides
successively under various live beings or turns
into them (a man, a horse, a cow, etc.); it hides
under a tree or beneath a stone; (5) the Storm God,
riding a horse or chariot, strikes the tree-or the
stone-with his weapon (a hammer, lightning) and
scorches or breaks it into pieces. The amount of
mythological material in the various Indo-
European traditions which may be regarded as
transformations of this invariant mythic kernel
is truly staggering. The wealth of data this sehe me
accommodates, which Ivanov and Toporov ana-
Iyze meticulously, makes their work a major con-
tribution to the reconstruction of the oldest Indo-
European mythological system. Their analysis
establishes the elose interrelations of the cos-
mological, anthropological and social aspects of
the model.
Several studies by V. N. Toporov are devoted
to the reconstruction of "mythopoeic conscious-
ness," the mode of thought characterizing man's
"pre-historical" or "cosmological" period. 75 In
particular, Toporov reconstructs one semiotic
complex which possesses such universality in
terms of symbolization, space, time, and psy-
chological topos (archetypicali ty) that he is bold
enough to name an entire epoch after it-the
"epoch of the world tree"-which he assigns to
the end of the U pper Paleolithic period. The
"world tree," according to the author, was of
sufficient generality to model all the aspects of
"'V. N. Toporov, "K rekonstrukcii Indoevropejskogo rituala
i ritual'no-poeticeskix formul (na materiale zagovorov)"
(Towards the Reconstruction of Indo·European Ritual and
Ritual-poetic Formulae [On the Material of Charms]), TZS,
5 (1969), pp. 9-43; "0 strukture nekotoryx arxaiceskix tek-
stov, sootnosimyx s koncepciej 'mirovogo dereva' " (On
the Structure of Certain Archaic Texts Related to the Con-
ception of the 'World Tree'), TZS,5 (1971), pp. 6-62;
"L'albero universale. Saggio d'interpretazione semiotica,"
in Rieerche Semiotiche, ed. Lotman and U spenskij, pp. 148-
209; "On the Origin ofCertain PoeticSymbols: The Paleo-
lithic Period," in Semiotics and Struetura!ism, ed. Baran,
pp. 184-225 (originally in Rannieformy isskustva, cd. S.Ju.
Nekljudov [Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972], pp. 77-104).
 SOVlET UNION
existence: the structure of the universe, its com-
ponent parts, spatio-temporal relations, and
semantics. At a certain point in his tory it was
common to all cultures and met the require-
ments of "mythopoeic consciousness," express-
ing as it did the fundamental unity of the universe,
the collective and individual man. Apart from
being a "world model" for a universal stage in
the development of mankind, it also provides the
origin for certain poetic symbols and is a typol-
ogical layer that may be reactivated later if the
appropriate psychological conditions are present.
The "world tree" models the universe on a
tripartite scheme: its upper branches model the
heavens, its middle the earth, and its roots the
subterranean realm. Three types of animals are
assigned those respective coordinates: birds,
ungulates (hooved mammals, especially deer or
horses), and chthonic creatures (fish or snakes).
The vertical structure from bottom to top models
the "idea of dynamic integrity"-of emergence,
development and decline. The semantic oppo-
sitiOn negative-pOSItive correlates with
bottom-top. The horizontal dimension became
elaborated at the middle level (earth), and pre-
sumably was determined by the opposition 'object
of worship'-'adept.' The texts Toporov uses to
reconstruct the model follow adefinite structure:
they are constructed as aseries of questions and
answers describing the creation of the world, its
spatial organization, generation, and the gradual
des cent from divine to human, cosmological to
historical. The model encodes rules of social
behavior, in particular the marriage and kinship
system. It provides a universal scheme of basic
semantic oppositions.
In his ingenious study of Paleolithic cave art,
Toporov demonstrates that the statistical distri-
bution of symbols (especially male and female
symbols, animals, etc.) in the topographic zones
of the sanctuaries represents a nascent "draft"
of the "world tree." Unlike the elaborated model,
however, Paleolithic art lacks the cosmological
plot and is based not on hierarchy, but on the
mere sequential addition of elements. This
"additive" organization, though primitive, may
be viewed as an essential step in the emergence
of human culture: "The reproduction of these
structures and the repetition of elements ... were
meant both to bare and emphasize the very
structure and its elements and, consequently, to
affirm the discrete (linked to culture), its triumph
over the continuous (a reflection of the chaotic
571
principles of nature).,,7G Toporov concludes by
sketching the transformations of the marked ele-
ments of Paleolithic art which were elaborated
in the later "epoch of the world tree."
The allo-elements of the "tree" in this "world
model" are extensive: world mountain, temple,
stupa, pole, anthropomorphic beings, etc. They
even include the mushroom, as Toporov proves
in a study which provides additional support for
Wasson's identification of Soma with the psy-
chedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria. 77 Other
members of the Moscow-Tartu school, espe-
cially E. Semeka, have applied Toporov's
approach to cultures with a basically horizontal
rather than vertical cosmic model. 78 This line of
76"On the Origin of Certain Poetic Symbols," p. 186. The
symbolism of numerical constants, particularly the num-
bers three, four, seven, and twelve, plays a leading role in
"additive" structuring. The developed model of the world
tree as a representation of space in art and mythology is
organized according to the translation ofjour (an optimally
static configuration) into seven, a "magie number" clearly
related to man's capacity for processing information (cf.
G. A. Miller, "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus
Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Infor-
mation," The Psychological Review, 63 [1956]). The world
tree models the cosmological space according to seven pri-
mary coordinates: (I) top; (2) center, (3) bottom, (4) north,
(5) east, (6) south, and (7) west (Toporov, p. 206). The
importance of numeri ca I symbolism is reflected in all of
Ivanov's and Toporov's works on myth. A definitive sum-
mation is Toporov's article "0 cislovyx modeljax v arx-
aicnyx tekstax" [On Numerical Models in Archaic Texts],
in Struktura teksta [Structure of the Text], ed. T. V. Civ'jan
(Moscow: Nauka, 1980), pp. 3-58. The semantic signifi-
cance of "odd" and "even" numbers may relate to the
physiology of the brain, in particular the polar structure of
its two hemispheres: cf. V. V. Ivanov, Cet i neeet. Asim-
metrija mozga i znakovyx sistem (Even and Odd. The Asym-
metry of the Brain and Sign Systems) (Moscow, 1978);
R. Jakobson, Brain and Language: Cerebral Hemispheres and
Linguistic Slructures in Mutual Light (Columbus, Oh.: Slavica,
1980). Numerical symbolism is the subject of one of Topo-
rov's entries in Mi/j narodov mira (Myths of the Peoples of
the World), ed. S. A. Tokarev, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Sovetskaja
enciklopedija, 1982), pp. 629-631. The numbers nine and
twelve playa particular role in the "basic myth."
nV. N. Toporov, "Semantika mifologiceskix predstavlenij 0
gribax" (The Semantics of Mythological Conceptions of
Mushrooms), in Balcanica: Lingvisticeskie issledovanija, ed.
T. V. Civ'jan (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 234-298. This
paper, written in 1970, has appeared in an English trans-
lation by the present author in Semiotica, 53, 4 (1985), 295-
357. See R. Gordon Wasson, Soma: Divine Mushroom oj
Immortality (N.Y.: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1971).
7HE. S. Semeka, "Antropomorfnye i zoomorfnye simvoly v
cetryrex- i vos'miclennyx modeljax mira" (Anthropo-
morphic and Zoomorphic Symbols in Four- and Eight-
Member World Models), TZS,5 (1971),92-119; "Struk-
tura cetyrex- i vos' miClennyx modelej mira v arxaiceskom
572 STEPHEN RUDY
approach to "archaic" culture has been criticized
by Dell Hymes as representing "a sense of
sweeping, simple periodization of human cul-
tures that has long been lost in American anthro-
pology," in particular, "a conception of 'archaic'
communication that suggests nineteenth-century
stereotypes on the basis of imagining the oppo-
site of modern rationality, stereotypes that
research into actual 'primitive' societies shows
to be false.,,79 It strikes me, on the contrary, that
Toporov's work is typical of a trend that suc-
ceeds precisely in overcoming such stereotypes,
one that, armed with more sophisticated meth-
ods in interpreting the significantly increasing
body of data, has contributed to our understand-
ing of "mythopoeic consciousness." Further-
more, the application of this concept in literary
studies has been advanced with fruitful results,
as we shall see below. Nevertheless, one must
heed Segal's legitimate call for caution: "The
new approach to mythological evidence intro-
duces new dimensions into semiotic reconstruc-
tion. At the same time new data are necessary
on the relations hip between 'true' archaisms in
semantics and archaic manifestations of pan-
chronic character. ,,80
iskusstve drevnej Azii" (The Structure of Four- and Eight-
Member World Models in the Archaic Art of Ancient Asia),
in Readings in Soviel Semiotics, ed. L. Matejka et al. (Ann
Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1977), pp. 416-448.
7gD. Hymes, "Comments on Soviet Semiotics," p. 403.
80Segal, Aspects, p. 83. E. M. Meletinskij provides a survey
of the main schools of mythological research in his Poetika
mifa (Poetics of Myth) (Moscow: Glavnaja redakcija vos-
tocnoj literatury, 1976). He points out the obvious paraIleis
between the work of Carl Jung and Russian studies of
"archaic" mythological systems. Despite the limitations of
analytical psychology,Jung remains a semina! figure. Among
the theoretical studies of myth in Russian semiotics that I
have not touched upon, particular mention should be made
of Lotman's and Uspenskij's article "Myth-Name-Culture,"
in Soviet Semiotics, ed. Lucid, pp. 233-252 (originaIly in TZS,
6 [1973], 282-303). See also, Segal, Aspects, pp. 76-80, on
Meletinskij's important studies on the Raven (a trickster
figure) in Paleo-Siberian mythology, and Meletinskij's recent
article "Semanticeskaja struktura tlinkitskix mifov 0 vorone"
(The Semantic Structure ofTlingit Myths about the Raven),
TZS, 13 (1981), 3-21. Several studies by Ivanov and Topo-
rov resulting from the research of the 1962 expedition to
the Kets are available in English: their coIlaborative study
"Towards .a Description of Ket Semiotic Systems," Semi-
otica, 9, No. 4 (1973), 318-346; Toporov's "On the Typol-
ogical Similarity of Mythological Structures among the Ket
and Neighboring Peoples," Semiotica, 10, No. 1 (1974), 19-
42; I vanov's The Structure qf the Ket Myth qf the "Denicheur des
Aiglons" and its American Indian Parallels = Working Papers
The study of folklore proper constitutes such
a vast domain-and one that has already under-
gone extensive review-that it cannot be included
within the purview of the present survey.81 Sig-
nificant gains in the study of the folktale, initi-
ated by Propp, are indicative, however, and
should be mentioned. Meletinskij, Segal, et al.,
have gone from the study of the syntagmatics of
the folktale to an analysis ofits semantics. 82 They
characteristically attempt to construct a "model
of the world" for the folktale, using the proce-
dures of the structural-typological approach to
assess the basic semantic groups of actors, states,
and loci. The analysis of spatio-temporal rela-
tions in folk tale and epic has advanced
considerably.83
IV. Semiotics of Literature
The work of the Moscow-Tartu school in lit-
erary studies is integrally tied to the rich ren-
aissance in poetics that has occurred in the Soviet
Union in the last two decades. ~t is the result of
a continuation of the research of the Russian
Formalists and the Prague Linguistic Circle car-
ried out in a lively dialogue with the advances
in poetics in the international forum as a whole
sparked by the application of structural methods
and Pre-publications, Centro Internazionale di Semiotica
e di Linguistica, University of Urbino, No. 78-79 (Nov.-
Dec. 1978), Series D; and Ivanov's "Restoration of the
Original Text of the Ket Myth of the Destroyer of Eagles'
Nests," in Semiotics and Structuralism, ed. H. Baran, pp. 226-
243. The mythology of the Paleo-Siberian tribes presents
a vital test case for the methodology of the Moscow-Tartu
school which I regret I cannot treat in more detail here.
See Ketskij sbomik (Studia Ketica), ed. V. V. Ivanov, V. N.
Toporov and B. Uspenskij, vols. 1-2 (Moscow: Glavnaja
redakcija vostocnoj literatury, 1968-1969).
81Cf. the references given in note 29, above, as weIl as E. G.
Schwimmer, "Folkloristics and Anthropology," Semiotica,
17, No. 3 (1976), 267-289.
82See two classic works: E. Meletinskij, S. Nekljudov, E.
Novik, and D. Segal, "Problems of the Structural Analysis
of Fairy-Tales," in Soviet Structural Folkloristics, ed. Mar-
anda, pp. 73-139; D. Segal, "The Connection between the
Semantics and the Formal Structure of a Text," in Mythol-
ogy, ed. P. Maranda (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pen-
guin, 1972), pp. 215-249 (originaIly in Poetics. Poetyka.
Poetika,2 [The Hague and Warsaw: Mouton/PWN, 1966],
pp. 15-44).
8'Cf. the studies by Civ/jan and Nekljudov mentioned in
Segal, Aspects, pp. 69-72.
 SOVIET UNION
to literary texts. 84 Particularly rich results have
been obtained in the realm of metrics, where the
application of statistical and generative models
have been fruitful and have permitted the char-
acterization and typology of Russian verse types
in their synchronic and diachronic dimensions. 8S
The analysis of the "semantic load" of particular
verse types has been pursued following the ini-
tiative of R. Jakobson and the Prague School in
this important aspect of "interlevel" study.86 The
phonemic level of verse, rhyme, and stanza types
have all been systematically studied. The struc-
tural analysis of individual poems has reached
a high level of theoretical and pedagogical ade-
quacy.87 Of special interest are the studies
devoted to poetic cycles and the oeuvre of indi-
vidual poets. 88 Lotman's The Structure of the Artis-
tic Text is an exemplary introduction to the study
of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic levels of
literary works. In the realm of prose, significant
results have been achieved in the study of plot
and point ofview. Boris Uspenskij's work on the
latter has been pursued within a semiotic frame-
work enabling a juxtaposition of visual and ver-
bal works of art, and clarifying such essential
phenomena as theJrame, the relation of center to
periphery, and inner and exterior viewpoints. 89 For
the purposes of the present survey I shall limit
84See T. Todorov, "La poetique en V.R.S.S.," Poitique, 9
(1972), 102-115; M. Mayenowa, "Poetika v rabotax tar-
tuskogo universiteta" (Poetics in the works of the Tartu
Vniversity), Russian Literature, 2 (1972), 152-165.
B'See J. Bailey, "Some Recent Developments in the Study
of Russian Versification," Language and Style, 3 (1972), 155-
191.
BGSee S. Rudy, "Jakobson's Inquiry into Verse and the Emer-
gen ce of Structural Poetics," in Sound, Sign and Meaning, ed.
L. Matejka, p. 506ff. K. Taranovsky's paper "0 vzai-
mootnosenii stixotvornogo ritma i tematiki" (On the Inter-
connection of Verse Rhythm and Semanties), American
Contributions to the Fifth International Congress oJ Slavists, I:
Linguistie Contributions (The Hague: Mouton, 1963), pp. 287-
322, is a particularly lucid statement of the problem.
8'See Ju. Lotman, Anafysis of the Poetie Text.
8"See in particular the works on twentieth-century poets such
as Axmatova, Blok, Mandel'stam and Majakovskij listed
in the Subjeet Bibliography, ed. Eimermacher and Shishkoff,
p.9Iff.
89Boris V spensky, A Poeties of Composition: the Structure of the
Artistie Text and Typology oJ a Compositional Form, trans.
V. Zavarin and S. Wittig (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Ca!.,
1973). Cf. the detailed reviews by S. Zolkiewski, "Poetique
de la composition," Semiotiea, 3 (1972), 205-224; F. de Valk
in Russian Literature, 2 (1972), 165-175; and especially
W. Steiner, "Point of View from the Russian Point of View,"
Dispositio, I, No. 3 (1976), 315-326.
573
mys elf to a discussion of three realms of partic-
ular interest from a semiotic point of view:
(I) mythopoesis; (2) the study of sub texts and
intertextuality; (3) the interrelation of art ~llld
social behavior. These three areas of investiga-
tion all relate to the intersection of literary codes
proper, and general cultural semiotic models.
The renewed interest in mythopoesis is due
largely to V. N. Toporov's initiative. As he dem-
onstrates, the "mythopoeic consciousness" is a
typologicallayer which may become reactivated
in modern society and often plays a key role in
the structure of literary texts. In his analysis of
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment from this per-
spective (cf. note 24, above) Toporov offers a
persuasive reading of the text which casts light
on problems central to the poetics of that author
and his unique transformation of traditional
novelistic structure. The "mythopoeic pattern"
deducible from archaic cosmological texts is
viewed as the resolution of afundamental problem
arising in a condition of crisis, when "the orga-
nized, predicted ('visible') cosmic principle is
threatened by areturn to a destructive, unpre-
dicted ('invisible') state of chaos" (p.333). It
involves trial by single combat which is decisive and
becomes a dominan t function transforming
everything that falls within its field: "under these
conditions, the boundaries between members of
opposing sides, between the hero and his oppo-
nent, signified and signifier, proper noun and
common noun, become blurred. The continuity
and homogeneity of time and space are
destroyed .... " Sacred space (the center) and
sacred time (the moment of eternity) are the arena
in which the fundamental problem is resolved.
The applicability of the mythopoeic pattern
should be obvious to any reader of Crime and
Punishment or The Idiot. The state of crisis domi-
nates Dostoevsky's plots, and heroes are typi-
cally described as morbid, "frequently losing their
memories, and incapable of social intercourse"
(p. 335). The disjunction of novelistic space is
typically represented by Dostoevsky's sudden
shifts in temporal perspective (the frequency of
the word vdrug 'suddenly' has been noted by pre-
vious critics) and correlated with shifts in mental
state domina ted by the feeling of the uncanny. The
hero's spatial and temporal movements are max-
imally marked: the twilight hours in the fantastic
city of St. Petersburg are the typical moment of
action. The opposition middle-peripheral,
574 STEPHEN RUDY
which is semantically correlated with maximal
lack of freedom versus maximal freedom, deter-
mines .the space of the novel, and in a brillian t
aside Toporov examines the re-etymologization
of key words dramatizing the stifting middle
ground: tesnota 'tightness' or 'overcrowding' and
toska 'melancholy', uzkij 'narrow' and uzas 'hor-
ror.' "All these words," as Toporov notes, "go
back ultimately to the same Indo-European root,
which is reftected in the Vedic arllhas, signifying
a relic of chaotic narrowness, a blind alley, the
absence of good both in the structure of the
macrocosm and in the soul of man, and opposed
to the uru loka-the wide world, the triumph of
cosmic over chaotic" (p. 341). Raskolnikov's
peregrinations, the road taken by the hero, is a
journey from middle to periphery that models
his quest for salvation. Dostoevsky differs from
the mythopoeic tradition only in reversing the
usual evaluation of the terms of the opposition,
where center (internal space, horne) has positive
connotations and periphery (external space, alien
realm) negative ones. Segal (Aspects, p. 113)
relates this to Dostoevsky's modernity, "his per-
ception of radically changed values: horne is no
longer safe, family is not a haven of refuge but
the focus of all evil, the 'own' is man's real
enemy."
Toporov's reading is a powerful interpretation
that makes it possible to correlate and explain
semantically a whole series of elements (includ-
ing repeated numbers) which previously escaped
notice, being taken as residues of the realia (phys-
ical or existential) of the novel rather than as
symbolic elements. Toporov's keen analysis of
the role the city of St. Petersburg plays in this
novel as weIl as other works of Russian literature
permits hirn to establish what he terms the "St.
Petersburg text in Russian literature," which is
a construct totally different in nature from what
is commonly understood as the "theme of St.
Petersburg." As Jurij Lotman has pointed out
recently, text in this sense is an intermediate link
between an artistic system or "language" and
actual texts, a type of "text-code" which models
not the structure of an object but the "real, even
if unmanifested textual object lying beyond the
structure."gO Such a text possesses semantic con-
tinuity and is integral in spite of the fact that it
90Jurij Lotman, "Tekst v tekste" [The Text in a Text], TZS,
14 (1981), p. 7.
is composed of different genres, is created over
a long period of time, and belongs to many
authors. Any reader familiar with the works of
Puskin, Gogol', Dostoevskij and Belyj in which
St. Petersburg figures as the center of action will
no doubt accept Toporov's concept of text in this
sense, which at first glance may startle some.
The mythopoeic approach has been applied
to works of twentieth-century literature with
outstanding results. Particular mention should
be made of Ivanov's analysis of a poem by Xleb-
nikov, and Meletinskij's work on mythopoeia in
the modern nove1. 91 In a fine analysis of Ma-
yakovskij's poem "Vot tak ja sdelalsja sobakoj"
(How I Was Made into a Dog), I. P. Smirnov
examines mythopoeic elements as a particular
aspect of the problem of context. 92 He argues for
an approach to the way meanings are genera ted
in literature that can accommodate both the
"proper meaning" of a text and what he calls
its reminiscentnyj smysl, the meanings created by
its "allusive armature." Mythopoeic elements
may be regarded, in asense, as mostly uncon-
scious subtexts as opposed to overt literary rem-
iniscences. The concept of subtext, the subject
of considerable debate in criticism of the last
decade, is essential for an understanding of lit-
erature as a semiotic system correlated with cul-
ture as a whole. A whole series of works by the
Moscow-Tartu school represent a fruitful exam-
ination of the problem, to which I now turn.
The study of subtext is intimately tied to the
renewal of interest in the work of two of the
great Russian poets of our century, Osip Man-
del'stam and Anna Axmatova. Members of the
Acmeist movement that arose, along with Futur-
ism, following the breakup of the Symbolist
91V. V. Ivanov, "The Structure of Khlebnikov's Poem 'Menya
pronosyat na slonovykh,' " Russian Poetics in Translation, 2
(1976), pp. 34-49 (originally in TZS, 3 [1967], 156-171).
E. M. Meletinskij, Poetika mifa, pp. 277-372.
92I. P. Smirnov, "Mesto mifopoeticeskogo podxoda k litera-
turnomu proizvedeniju sredi drugix tolkovanij teksta" (The
Place of the M ythopoeic Approach to Literary Works Among
other Interpretations of a Text), in Mif--Fol' klor-Literatura,
ed. V. G. Bazanov et al. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1978), pp. 186-
203, a collection containing several other valuable contri-
butions to the subject. See also Smirnov's monograph Xudo-
Zestevennyj smysl i evoljucija poetileskix sistem (Artistic Meaning
and the Evolution of Poetic Systems) (Moscow: Nauka,
1977). See also J u. M. Lotman and Z. G. Mine, "Literatura
i mifologija" (Literature and My thology) , TZS, 13 (1981),
35-55.
 SOVIET UNION
movement on the eve of World War I, these
poets espoused a poetry of semantics keenly con-
scious of the primary role and elose interrelation
of "Word and Culture," to use the title of one
of Mandel'stam's critical essays. The numerous
works of the Moscow-Tartu school on Man-
del'stam and Axmatova represent the most
extensive and methodologically interesting cor-
pus of criticism on any twentieth-century move-
ment that I know of. The Russian semioticians
have themselves acknowledged the "interrela-
tion between Acmeist poetry and scholarly lin-
guistic poetics" and it was central to the evolution
of their views of semiotics of culture. As they
put it: "The very structure of [Acmeist] poetic
language has inspired philology with new meth-
ods of description. The task of current semiotic
poetics is the fullest and deepest response to this
extremely significant linguistic experiment.,,93
Peter Steiner has sketched the reasons for the
affinities between semiotic theory and the work
of Mandel'stam in particular. 94 Chief among
them are the fact that Mandel'stam's theory and
practice are paradigm- or model-creating, his
emphasis on the inseparability of culture and
his tory, and-perhaps most importantly-the
way heterogeneous elements on all levels of the
text are semanticized in his work.
Subtext has been defined most scientifically in
the work of Kiril Taranovsky of Harvard and
Omry Ronen of Jerusalem as "the source of a
repeated element, a text diachronically corre-
lated with the text being analyzed."95 Such
"poetic quotations" are essential in establishing
the semantics of individual poems, cyeles and
the "world model" of Mandel'stam's corpus as
a whole, expressed with as much consistency in
his prose and critical essays as in his poetry. The
question of what may legitimately be regarded
as a subtext proper is a thorny one, and some
members of the Moscow-Tartu school adduce
":lSee the collective paper referred to in note 23, above.
"P. Steiner, "On Semantic Poetics: O. Mandel'Stam in the
Discussions ofthe Soviet Structuralists," Disposilio, I, No. 3
(1976), 339-348.
95 0. Ronen, "Leksiceskij povtor, podtekst i smysl v poetike
Osipa Mandel'stama" (Lexical Repetition, Subtext and
Meaning in the Poetics of Mandel'stam), in Slavic Poelies:
Essays in Honor of Kiril Taranovsky, ed. R. Jakobson el al.
(The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1973), p. 375. See
K. Tar~novsky, Essays on Mandel' siam (Cambridge: Har-
yard University Press, 1976).
575
so extensive a range of past texts that their work
extends the problematics of subtext to the wider
question of intertextuality and signification more
typical of French semioticians (Kristeva in par-
ticular).96 This question aside, subtext elearly
relates to problems in the semiotics of culture.
In an essay on Pasternak's early poetry, Lot-
man establishes a typology of Russian Symbol-
ism, Futurism, and Acmeism based on the type
of secondary modeling systems they use for shifts
in the semantics of naturallanguage. 97 All three
movements, refusing to "treat the linguistic pat-
terns as the embodiment of reality and the
semantic system of language as a structure of
the world," have recourse to different systems.
Symbolism uses the "language of relations"
(music, mathematics), Futurism the "language
of objects" (visual image of the word, painting),
Acmeism the "language of culture" (other,
already exis ting texts in the natural language).
The fact that Acmeism is largely meta-cultural
in orientation makes it vital in approaching the
semiotics of modern Russian culture, as Segal
emphasizes (Aspects, pp. 116-118) in relation to
Axmatova's "Poema bez geroja" (Poemwithout
a Hero), the object of considerable research.
Moreover, the semantic and semiotic orientation
of Acmeism leads to a projection of the author's
life into the poetic work of unprecedented sys-
tematicity. As Toporov has shown in a subtle
and persuasive work, the use of subtexts as part
of one poet's dialogue with another permits the
critic to abandon the naive approach to the "inti-
mate" biography of the poet and replace it with
true "poetic biography."98 Thus subtext is a
""E.g., G. A. Levinton, 'Na kamennyx otrogax Pierii Man-
del'stama: materialy k analizu," Russian Literature, 5, Nos. 2
and 3 (1977), pp. 123-170,201-238. (The representatives
of this trend, who are mostly younger scholars, have been
jokingly labelIed "SRy"-the Russian abbreviation used for
members of the main political movement in opposition to
the Boisheviks during the Revolution, the Social
Revolutionaries-because of the frequency of the abbre-
viation Sr. [Rus. sravnite 'compare, cr.'] in their works.) A
useful typology of intertextuality, which compares works
of French and Russian semiotics on this question, is given
by P. X. Torop, "Problema inteksta" (The Problem of the
"Intext"), TZS, 14 (1981), 33-44.
97yury Lotman, "Language and Reality in the Early Pas-
ternak," in Pastemak: A Colleclion 01 Critical Essays, ed.
Y. Erlich (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978),
pp. 21-38 (an abridged translation of an essay originally
in TZS, 4 [1969], 460-477).
98y. N. Toporov, Axmatova i Blok (Axmatova and Blok)
(Berkeley: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1981).
576 STEPHEN RUDY
valuable tool for establishing a poet's semantic
system, his "world model"gg and poetic myth.
Lotman has consistently emphasized the
importance of artistic sign systems as generators
of cultural models (see The Structure, pp. 8-9).
Literature, in particular, does not simply reflect
the semiotic models of culture: art and codes of
everyday behavior are in astate of dynamic
interrelation and mutual implication. The study
of this aspect of semiotics of literature has
resulted in so me of Lotman's best work, in par-
ticular his essay on "theater and theatricality"
in early nineteenth-century culture,IOO which is
devoted to the ways in which the extra-theatrical
world influences that of the theater, and vice
versa. Particularly telling is his analysis of war
and parade as spectacle, using material from the
Napoleonic era and the court of Paul I in Russia.
His analysis of a notable historical episode, Alex-
ander I's dis missal of Speranskij, as a "theater
for one actor" beautifully explains the antipathy
Alexander's contemporaries feIt toward hirn:
"Alexander's 'game' missed the style of the age:
romanticism required a constant mask that
became grafted to the personality, so to speak,
and became the model for its behavior. ... By
changing his masks in order to 'captivate' every-
one, Alexander only repelled everyone. One of
the most talented actors of his era, he was its
least successful actor (p. 177)." The "aestheti-
cizing" of everyday life, in Lotman's view, which
transforms a person into a character, is seen in
this period, contrary tu popular conceptions of
""The notion of "poetic world" is elaborated in an important
study by A. K. Zholkovsky, "The Window in the Poetic
World of Boris Pasternak," New Literary History, 9, No. 2
(1978), 279-314~. An excellent i:ltroduction to the genera-
tive poetics of Zolkovskij and Sceglov is L. M. O'Toole,
"Analytic and Synthetic Approaches to Narrative Struc-
ture: Sherlock Holmes and 'the Sussex Vampire,' " in Style
and Structure in Literature, ed. R. Fowler (Oxford: Blackwell,
1975), pp. 143-176. See Zolkovskij's and Si'eglov's numer-
ous studies in the journal Russian Poetics in Translation (espe-
cially Vol. I, 1975 and Vol. 6, 1979), as weil as their
collection Poetika uyra;jtel' nosti (The Poetics of Expressive-
ness), Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 2, 1980,
and more recently, A. Zholkovsky, Themes and Texts: Toward
a Poetics 01 Expressiveness, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1983).
J()('Ju. M. Lotman, "Theater and Theatricality in the Order
of Early Nineteenth-Century Culture," in Semiotics and
Structuralism, ed. Baran, pp. 33-63 (originally in his book
Stat' i po tipologii kul' tury [Essays on the Typology of Cul-
ture], Vol. 2 [Tartu: Tartu Univ. Press, 1974]).
later generations, as actually playing a liberating
rather than an inhibiting role. The "mytholog-
ization" of certain realia and their generation of
plot mechanisms is brilliantly analyzed, using
the example of cards, in another recent article.
These and other works of Lotman have opened
up major new vistas in semiotics of literature
and culture in their interrelation. 101
V. Semiotics ofVisual Art,
Film, and Music
Chief among the Moscow-Tartu school's works
on semiotics of visual art are those devoted to
semiotics of the icon, especially the rich and mul-
tiform contributions of Boris U spenskij. 102 Icons
are optimal material for semiotic analysis for sev-
eral reasons. 103 Apart from the fact that the
semiotic nature of the icon is indicated in its
very etymology (eikon 'image-sign'), which is not
as trivial a consideration as it may seem, the
nature of the icon as a maximally canonized and
conservative form facilitates investigation. Icons
on the same subject are copies of one and the
same text: the investigator can easily strip away
innovations to isolate the invariant content and
thus decipher the underlying system. Further-
more, the existence of interpretative podlinniki
IOIJU. M. Lotman, "Themes and Plot: The Theme of Cards
and the Card Game in Russian Literature in the Nine-
teenth Century," PTL, 3 (1978), 45.\-492 (originally in
TZS, 7 [1975], 120-142). Two important collections in
English have appeared since this survey was written: The
Semiotics 01 Russian Cultural History: Essays by Iurii M. Lotman,
Lidiia Ja. Ginsburg, and Boris A. Uspensky, ed. A. D. and A. S.
Nakhimovsky (Ithaca-Longon: Cornell University Press,
1985) andJu. M. Lotman and B. A. Uspenskij, TheSemiot-
ics 01 Russian Culture, ed. Ann Shukman (Ann Arbor: Mich-
igan Slavic Contributions, 1984). The latter, which contains
13 essays written separately or jointly by Lotman and
Uspensky, is the more comprehensive and betted edited
of the two, though the former is to be recommended for
the fine introduction by Boris Gasparov.
102See, in particular, "The Language of Ancient Painting,"
Dispositio, 1, No 3 (1976), 219-246 (originally in Russian
as the introduction to Zegin's book cited below, note 109);
The Semiotics rif the Russian Icon, ed. S. Rudy (Lisse: Peter
de Ridder Press, 1976), a revised and expanded version
of a study published in TZS,5 (1971), 178-222.
I03See Z. Podgorzec, "Semiotics of the Icon: An Interview
with Boris Uspenskij," PTL, 3 (1978), 529-548.
 SOVIET UNION 577
('pattern-books') supplies additional documen- Panofsky's famous article of the same period on
tary evidence ofboth a visual and verbal (seman- "perspective as a 'symbolic form.' ,,108 In par-
tic) nature. 104 U spenskij has made a distinction ticular, Florenskij regards the system of western
between what he calls "logical" and "linguistic" art since the Renaissance, "direct" or "linear"
semiotics, the former being the semiotics of the perspective, as but one of many possible modes,
sign-its semantics, syntactics, and pragmatics-- and advances the claim that the formal prop-
the latter of the language of a system of signs, erties of Byzantine and Old Russian art previ-
i.e., the mechanism for conveying content through ously regarded as anomalies or distortions of
elementary units (lexicon) with set rules for co m- that system actually constitute a distinct system
bination (grammar) to generate utterances of a different type, labelled "inverted perspec-
(texts) .105 He applies this distinction fruitfully to tive," which reflects the polar world-view of
the analysis of icons. 106 In the first case it is a Orthodox society and which should be regarded
matter of the complex of problems that in tra- as "equal in rights" to the Western mode.
ditional scholarship go under the label "theology Florenskij's views form the basis for the inves-
v

of the icon" in the widest sense. In the second tigations of Lev Fedorovic Zegin (1892-1969),
case one is concerned with the "language" of the a Russian artist, book illustrator and scholar who
icon as the system of special devices, both formal allied hirns elf with the Moscow-Tartu school. In
and semantic, used to convey meanings. This aseries of detailed studies,109 Zegin attempts to
second aspect has so far domina ted the semiotic prove that "inverted perspective" is created by
study of the icon. the artist's "summation" of visual data gathered
The philosopher and theologian P. A. Floren- from a multi pli city of viewpoints, by a narrowing
skij (1882-1943) initiated the semiotic study of of the visual field, and by the shallow depth of
the "language" of icon painting in a study on represented space in medieval painting. Objects
"inverted perspective," written in 1922 but first represented in "inverted" perspective are oppo-
published in the Tartu Works on Sign Systems in site to forms in "direct" perspective in two basic
1967. 107 Florenskij attacks the nineteenth-century respects: (1) the size of objects increases rather
view of icon painting as a "primitive" stage in than decreases at a distance from the viewer,
the his tory of art whose formal properties are and (2) parallel lines diverge rat!,ler than con-
due to the ignorance or inability of the artist to verge as they recede from the eye. Zegin adduces
systematically convey spatio-temporal relations elaborate diagrams to explain the physical and
on the picture plane, a view based on the typical opticallaws of transformation in the system.
and at times dangerous nineteenth-century belief Zegin's theory is fundamental vitiated by wh at
in "progress." He approaches perspectival devices Rudolf Arnheim labels the "illusionistic doc-
as a special system for "transcribing" reality in trine," the failure to realize the "essential dif-
painting that is conditioned by the philosophy ference between pictorial form and mechanical
and world-view of the society in question. His projection."11O It is a curious but indicative fact
emphasis on the conventional nature of per- that the effort to create an awareness of the pre-
spectival systems may be compared to Erwin viously denigrated aesthetic and formal values
104The relation of inscription to image in icons is part of the lOBE. Panofsky, "Die Perspektive als 'Symbolische Form,' "
wider semiotic problematic addressed by Meyer Schapiro VorträlJ! der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-25 (1927), pp. 258-330.
in his important monograph Words and Pictures: On the Lit- 109L. F. Zegin, "Nekotorye prostranstvennye formy v drev-
eral and the Symbolic in the Illustration,!! a Text (The Hague nerusskoj zivopisi" (Some Spatial Forms in Old Russian
and Paris: Mouton, 1973). See also Hubert Damisch, Painting), in Drevnerusskoe iskusstvo XVII veka (Old Russian
"Semiotics and Iconography," in The Tell-Tale Sign: A Sur- Art ofthe 17th Century), ed. V. N. Lazarevet al. (Moscow:
vey '!! Semiotics, ed. T. A. Sebeok (Lisse: Peter de Ridder Nauka, 1964), pp. 175-214; "'Ikonnye gorki.' Prostran-
Press, 1975), pp. 27-36. stvenno-vremennoe edinstvo zivopisnogo proizvedenija"
1050n the term "Ianguage" as applied to various sign systems ("Icon Hillocks." The Spatio-Temporal Unity of a Pic-
see B. Oguibenine (Ogibenin), "The Semiotic Approach torial Work), TZS,2 (1965), 231-47; Jaqk iivopisnogo pro-
to Human Culture," in Image and Code, ed. W. Steiner (Ann i::;vedenija. (Uslovnost' drevnego iskusstva) (The Language of
Arbor: Michigan Studies in the Humanities, 1981), p. 86. a Pictorial Work. [The Conventions of Ancient Art])
106See the interview with Podgorzec, p. 530f. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1970).
107p. A. Florenskij, "Obratnaja perspektiva" (Inverted Per- lloR. Arnheim, "Inverted Perspective in Art: Display and
spective), TZS,3 (1967),381-416. Expression," Leonardo, 5 (1972), 125-135.
578 STEPHEN RUDY
of the icon has led, ironically, to a distortion of
its essence. In trying to show the "equal rights"
of icon painting, Zegin turns it into a mirrar image
of Western art. But "inverted" perspective can-
not be regarded as a system of projection in the
sense that linear is: the formal phenomena und er
investigation are too heterogeneous to be prop-
erly labelIed a "system." Some of them may be
partly determined by optical or perspectival laws,
but most are of a semantic nature (cf. in partic-
ular the so-called "hierarchical perspective," in
which relative scale is determined by the sem an-
tic importance of the object or person depicted).
Arnheim dismisses the notion of "inverted per-
spective" altogether and eloquently argues for
the view that the supposed "distortions" in medi-
eval as weil as some modern painting are phe-
norne na o[ "display and expression" conditioned
by the very nature of the two-dimensional pic-
ture plane. Such elaborate formal complexes as
the schematic representations of mountains in
icons (ikonnye gorki 'icon hillocks') discussed at
length by Zegin clearly relate more to basic com-
position al laws of symmetry an~ design than to
properly perspectival ones. How Zegin can regard
these forms as optical transformations of a rep-
resented object baffles me: What is the original
object? What artist first saw it and so represented
it? How is one to explain the formal evolution
of such representations, by recourse to "optical"
updatings by later icon painter~? None of these
questions is even addressed by Zegin. (It should
be no ted that Zegin's discussion of the repre-
sentation of the temporal dimension, on the other
hand, is quite sound and useful.)
Later investigations, especially those of B. V.
Rausenbax, though they still regard "inverted"
perspective as a system, recognize that it involves
both perspectival and semantic factors. These
include: (I) perceptual constancy of form; (2) the
binocularity o[ vision; (3) dynamic point of view;
(4) the tendency to increase the amount of infor-
mation about an object that is conveyed to the
viewer (a particularly important factor observ-
able in children's art as weil); and (5) compo-
sitional demands. 111 Although Boris U spenskij,
in my view, relies too much on certain of Zegin's
111 B. V. Rausenbax, Proslranslvennye poslroenija v drevnerusskoj
bvopisi (Spatial Constructions in Old Russian Painting)
(Moscow: Nauka, 1975).
shakier conclusions, he has consistently empha-
sized the semantic component, which is of spe-
cial interest from a semiotic point of view.
Uspenskij, following Florenskij, notes the essen-
tial difference between Western and Orthodox
ideology, reftected in their attitudes toward rep-
resentation. From the Renaissance onward, rep-
resentation in Western art was regarded as a
window on the world and was based on the posi-
tion of an external viewer, objectively detached
from the represented world. Medieval painting
is based primarily on the notion of an inner view-
point, of subjective immersion in the represented
world (the world of the divine, which the wor-
shipper of the icon thus becomes part of). The
inner viewpoint explains the puzzling revers al of
left and right in icon painting, which U spenskij
has analyzed in an ingenious study of the ques-
tion. 112 He extends his conclusions to church
architecture as weil: the typical domed Byzan-
tine church in comparison to the Western tent-
shaped style reftects an inner as opposed to an
exterior point of view. 113
Uspenskij's monograph Semiotics ofthe Russian
Icon is important from a semiotic point of view
for its special emphasis on the pragmatics of the
icon, the unique relation between the icon wor-
shipper and the object of worship. The specific-
ity of the icon as a sign pertaining simultaneously
to the system of art and of religion should not
be underestimated. The question of the sem an-
tics of garments and colors leads to the analysis
of icons as a semiotic system encoding religious
consciousness. Uspenskij's research in this realm
is a continuation of his inquiry into naturallan-
guage as a medium of religious thought. 114 The
hybrid complex of relevant semiotic phenomena
that the icon subsurnes makes it a vital area of
investigation, and it is to be hoped that the
framework U spenskij establishes for i ts scien tific
study will be elaborated in further research.
1l2"Left and Right in Icon Painting," Semiotica, 3, No. I (1975),
33-39 (originally in Sbornik slalej po uloricnym modelirujusCim
sistemam [Tartu, 1973J, pp. 137-145).
113The problem of inner and exterior viewpoints, as weil as
the question of frame, center and periphery in art and
literature, are discussed by Uspenskij in "Structural Iso-
morphism of Verbal and Visual Art," Poelic" 5 (1972), 5-
39, as weil as in his book A Poetics 01 Composition.
111"The Influence of Language on Religious Consciousness,"
Semiotica, 10, No. 2 (1974), 177-189 (originaUy in TZS, 4
[1969], 159-168).
 SOVIET UNION 579
Especially pertinent for the semiotic analysis of Eastern art. 118 Todorov's work on Paleolithic
of the content of icon painting is the question art in connection wth the image of the world tree
of pagan survivals which exist in various trans- and mythopoeic consciousness was discussed
formations in Russian icons, the subject of a above. It appeared in a collection on Early Forms
study by V. V. Ivanov. 115 Compositional struc- 01 Art published in 1972, which contains several
ture and the semantics of several subjects (like important essays, in particular Ivanov's on the
St. George and the Dragon), as weIl as the spe- symbolism of hands in primitive art. 1l9 Partic-
cific features of certain saints, re la te to the "basic ularly interesting is Jurij Lotman's analysis of
myth" of the Storm god and his opponent, as the Russian folk picture (lubok) as a special type
well as to the gods of the pagan pantheon whose of "theatrical space" oriented toward spectaele
features were absorbed by particular Christian and play; his study extends the study of "car-
saints after the conversion of Rus', and such nival culture" initiated by Baxtin into the sphere
wider phenomena as the cult of the twins in of art. 120 Another study by Lotman examines the
world mythology. This topic is a logical exten- problem of "iconic rhetoric."121 The iconic basis
sion of the mythological research discussed in of pie tori al art, in his view, represents a mech-
Section III of the present study. Its theoretical anism of doubling that would seem to reduce
dimension is outlined in an important artiele by the consciousness of art as a sign. The appear-
I vanov and Toporov on the "Structural- an ce of mirrors in numerous works of art serves,
typological Approach to the Semantic Interpre- on the contrary, as a "double" of doubling that
tation of Works of Visual Art in their Diachronie highlights the conventional sign character of the
Aspect," which contains a wealth of illustrative medium. Lotman goes on to examine the elose
material. l16 Noting the prevailing tendencies of ties between painting and theater in various
studies of art toward critical subjectivism, the periods, and their relation to everyday behavior.
isolation of values relating to a specific period, He sees the three as being in astate of intense
or formal analysis disregarding the semantic mutual exchange of symbolism and expressive
component, the authors correctly state that "the means: "Theatricality penetrates everyday life
most urgent task at the present time is the study and influences painting; everyday life affects the
of those semantic characteristics of an artistic one and the other by advancing the slogan of
work that do not depend on individual percep- 'naturalness'; finally, painting and sculpture
tion, but to a significant degree are normative actively influence theater, determining the sys-
for the entire collective" (p. 104). tem of poses and movements, as weIl as the extra-
In conelusion, several other contributions to aesthetic reality, raising it to the level of some-
the study of art should be noted in passing.Ju. K. thing which has meaning" (p. 250). His artiele
Lekomcev has devoted artieles to the syntax of opens up an interesting perspective on the rela-
color in painting and the question of abstrac- tion of visual art to other semiotic systems as
tion. 117 Several studies ex amine the iconography well as on the "semioticization" of behavior.

1J5V. V. Ivanov, "Motify vostocno-slavjanskogo jazycestva

i ix transformacija v russkix ikonax" (Motifs of Eastern
Slavic Paganism and their Transformation in Russian
Icons), in Narodnaja gravjura ifol'klor v Rossii XVII-XIX vv.
(K 150-letiju so dnja rozdenija D. V. Rovinskogo) (Folk Prints
and Folklore in the 17th-18th cc. [On the 150th Anniver-
sary ofD. A. Rovinskij's Birth]) (Moscow: Sovetskij Xud-
oznik, 1976), pp. 268-287.
IIG"Strukturno-tipologiceskij podxod k semanticeskoj inter-
pretacii proizvedenij izobrazitel'nrgo iskusstva v diaxro-
niceskom aspekte," TZS, 8 (1977), 103-119.
I"JU. K. Lekomcev, "Ob algebraiceskom podxode k sintak-
sisu cvetov v zivopisi (An Aigebraic Approach to the Syn-
tax ofColors in Painting), TZS, 7 '(1975),193-205; "Process
abstragirovanija v izobrazitelnom iskusstve i semiotika"
(The Process of Abstraction in Representational Art and
Semiotics), TZS, 11 (1979), 120-142.
II·See the articles by Ogibenin, Petrov, Semeka, and Zavad-
skaja, listed as items 1401, 1403, 1408, 1418 in Eimer-
macher and Shishkoff, Subjeet Bibliography, pp. 95-96.
119V.V. Ivanov, "Ob odnom tipe arxaicnyx znakov iskusstva
i piktografii" (On One Type of Archaic Sign in Art and
Pictography), in Rannie formy iskusstva: Sbornik statej, ed.
S.Ju. Nekljudov (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1972), pp. 105-148.
120JU. M. Lotman, "Xudozestvennaja priroda russkix narod-
nyx kartinok" (The Artistic Nature of Russian Folk Pic-
tures), in Narodnaja gravjura, pp. 247-267.
121JU. M. Lotman, "Teatral'nyjjazyk i zivopis' (K probleme
ikoniceskoj ritoriki)" (The Language of Theater and
Painting [On the Problem ofIconic Rhetoric]), Teatral'noe
prostranstvo: Materialy nauCnoj konftrencii (Theatrical Space:
Materials of a Scientific Conference), ed. I. E. Danilova
(Moscow: Sovetskij Xudoznik, 1979), pp. 238-252.
580 STEPHEN RUDY
The works of the Moscow-Tartu school on
film are an outgrowth and elaboration of many
of the concepts first systematically introduced
into film theory by Sergei Eisenstein, whose sem-
inal inftuence on the Russian semioticians was
discussed in Section 11 of the present survey.l22
They benefit as well from the writings of Russian
Formalists liJe Boris Ejxenbaum, Jurij Tynja-
nov, Viktor Sklovskij, B. Kazanskij, A. Piotrov-
skij and Roman Jakobson, who were attracted
to film as a new medium that presented inter-
esting theoretical challenges and some of whom
were actively involved in the writing of scripts
and production. 123 Film, as a hybrid medium
employing a variety of sign systems and the art
form with the widest appeal in twentieth-century
culture, is an object of semiotic research that
radically tests its methodology, principles and
applicability. It is characteristic that although
the publications of the Moscow-Tartu school
which deal with film are limited in number, they
represent some of its best achievements. Lot-
man's Semiotics oJ Cinema,124 in particular, reads
not only as an extraordinary chapter in the his-
tory of film theory, but also constitutes one of
the best popular introductions to semiotics in its
full extent and scope. 125
'''In addition to Ivanov's fundamental monograph (er. note
40 above), er. A. K. Zolkovskij andJu. K. Sceglov, "Struc-
tural Poetics Is a Generative Poetics," in Soviet Semioties,
ed. Lucid, pp. I 75~ 192 (originally in Voprosy literatury,
1967, No. I, pp. 74-89); A. K. Zolkovskij, "Generative
Poetics in the Writings of Eisenstein," Russian Poeties in
Translation,8 (1981), 40-61; V. V. Ivanov, "Eisenstein et
la linguistique structurale moderne," Gahiers du cinema, 220-
221 (May-June 1970), pp. 47-50;]. Salvaggio, "Between
Formalism and Semiotics: Eisenstein's Film Language,"
Dispositio, 4, No. 11-12 (1979), 289-298.
""The heritage of the Russian Formalists on film has recently
become available to the English audience in two books
whose materiallargeiy overlaps: RUHian Formalist Film The-
ory, comp. and ed. H. Eagle (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
Publications, 1981), and The Poeties of Ginema, ed. R. Taylor
= Russian Poeties in Translation, 9 (1982), a complete trans-
lation of Poetika Kino, ed. B. M. Ejxenbaum (Moscow:
Kinopecat' , 1927). Herbert Eagle's anthology profits from
his informative and conceptually persuasive introductory
essay, "Russian Formalist Film Theory," pp. I-54, which
includes a discussion of the works of Lotman and Ivanov
on film.
1HCf. note 11, above. Originally Semiotika kino i problemy kino-
estetika (Semiotics of Film and Problems of Film Aesthet-
ics) (Tallin: Eesti Raamat, 1973).
125 1vanov's important book-Iength study Eisenstein and Modern
Semioties, which Eagle mentions (note 77 on p. 171), remains
unpublished, though many parts of it are in corpora ted in
The work of Lotman and I vanov on film is
particularly successful in resolving a central
debate in film theory which is crucial to es tab-
lishing the very object of study. This debate
focused on a polarization between film as a "con-
structed" medium versus film as a reftection of
reality (Eisenstein as opposed to Bazin and Kra-
cauer) .126 It is reftected in the contradictory
tendencies of the chief semiotic theoretician of
film in the West, Christian Metz, as H. Eagle
has observed (pp. 52-54). Ivanov has convinc-
ingly demonstrated that film his tory cannot be
polarized according to the model of montage vs.
the "long take" (early Eisenstein versus I talian
Neo-Realism): Eisenstein based his later films
on principles elose to Neo-Realism without
abandoning his search for the "language" of
film. 127 The semiotic problem of the "discrete"
versus the "continuous" applies equally to the
"intellectual cinema," where the former domi-
nates, and to more naturalistic film styles. Bazin's
and Kracauer's opposition to montage as a sup-
posed violation of the intrinsically iconic prop-
erty of the medium is actually a pseudo-problem
from a semiotic point of view.
Lotman shows quite eloquently that the "illu-
sion of reality," intrinsic to cinema because it
directly fixes realia on film, involves a semiotic
tension between art and reality characteristic of
any art form. That tension is a necessary result
of the duality of perception any aesthetic phe-
nomenon entails. Lotman takes off from Pus-
kin's famous line-"I shed tears over an
imaginary event"-in formulating this essential
semiotic fact:
Here, with the precision of genius, we are shown the dual
nature of the viewer's or reader's relation to the artistic text.
He "sheds tears," i.e., he beiieves in the genuineness, the
actuality of the text. The sight arouses in hirn the same
bis book Oeerki po istorii. A chapter in my translation, which
Eagle cites (p. 46), has been published under the title
"Eisenstein's Montage of Hieroglyphic Signs," in On Signs:
A Semiotie Reader, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins, 1985), pp. 221-235.
126This debate is discussed in length by Andrew Tudor, The-
ories of Film (N.Y.: Viking, 1974), pp. 77-115, and Brian
Henderson, "Two Types of Film Theory," in his A Gritique
of Film Theory (N.Y.: Dutton, 1980), pp. 16-31.
127See Ivanov's articles, "Eisenstein's :rvIontage" and "Func-
tions and Categories of Film Language," Russian Poeties in
7;ranslation, 8 (1981), 1-35 (originally in TZS, 7 [1975],
170-192).
 SOVIET UNION
emotions as life itself. But at the same time he remembers
that it is an "imaginary event." Crying over a fancy is a
blatant contradiction since, it would appear, we need only
know that an event is fictitious for the desire to experience
an emotion to vanish entirely. If the audience did not forget
that a stage or screen was before it, if it contin."ously, th?ught
about actors wearing makeup and about dlrector s mten-
tions it is natural that it would not be moved to tears or
expe;ience other emotions connected with real-life situations.
But if the vi ewer did not distinguish stage and screen from
real life and, weeping copiously, forgot that bef?re him was
an invention he would not be experiencing genumely artlstlc
emotions. A:t requires a two-:fold experience-:-sim."ltaneously
forgetting that you are confronted by an Imagmary event
and not forgetting it. Only in art can we both be hornfied
by the evil of an event and appreCiate the mastery of the
actor. (p. 17)
Moreover, the very concept of "likeness" which
the "realist" film theorists rely on so heavily is
itself "a fact of culture derived from previous
artistic experience and from certain types of
artistic codes employed at a particular time in
history" (p. 18).128 The very nature of the shot-
reduction of three dimensions to two and the
presence of a frame which sets of~ what i~ sh~wn
and excludes the continuous reahty outsIde It-
is alone sufficient to belie a naive belief in the
unfettered realism of cinema as opposed to other
artistic sign systems. An analysis of the relative
"realism" of black-and-white as opposed to color
in cinema supports the fact that any and every
apparently "natural" element in fi.lm. is a~to­
matically transformed into functlOmng slgn
material which may be used to reinforce or dis-
rupt the "illusion of reality." The notion of
markedness is used by Lotman to prove that any
iconic element of film language is easily con-
verted into a conventional sign (p. 32f.). As he
puts it-in italics: "any unit oJ a text can be an element
oJ cinematic language (visual image, graphics, sound)
if it has an alternative, including non-use oJ the alter-
native, and thus does not appear in the text automatically,
but is associated with a certain meaning. It is, moreover,
necessary that both in its use and its non-use a perceptible
order is manifisted (rhythm)" (p. 34).
128The relativity of "Iikeness" of the film image also holds
for "realistic" pictorial art using the system of direct .pe:-
spective, which relates to our discussion above. Even ':"Ithm
a technical system for transferring reality onto the plcture
plane, some distortion necessarily occurs, and conven-
tional compositional and semantic codes are supenm-
posed. See C. Guillen's essay, "On the Concept and
Metaphor of Perspective," in his Literature as System (Pnn-
ceton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 283-371.
581
Other insightful sections of Lotman's mono-
graph address general semiotic problems char-
acteristic of a hybrid medium like the film,
especially narration and the representation. of
spatio-temporal relations. One chapter tY~lc~l
of his concern for the question of the semlOtl-
cization of everyday behavior deals with the role
of the actor in film. The actor as sign in cinema
is the intersection of three main codes-the
director's, everyday behavior, and that of the
"actor's acting." The director's code, which must
elaborate filmic structures like composition or
montage, restricts the actor and determi~es his
iconic function. In the framework of the mdex-
ical representation of everyday reality, the actor
is somewhat limited by the natural norms of
behavior. Those norms are in turn subject, how-
ever to the conventions of acting, which even
in the most naturalistic trends is never a mere
duplication of everyday behavior. Generic codes
are another factor, as is the "star" system in
Hollywood: the former tend to impose almost
folkloric roles and traits on the actor, the latter,
while less primitive, is a definite manifestation
ofpopular myth that may limit the actor's access
to new character portrayals, if not ossify his actual
personality. The actuality of th~ "star" syste~
as a powerful semiotic classifier m modern SOCl-
ety is more than obvious: suffice it to mention
the joke that had wide circulation when Ronald
Reagan was nomina ted as a candidate for the
Presidency-"What do you mean? It should be
Jimmy Stewart for President, with Ronald
Reagan as his best friend."
Lotman stresses throughout his book the
dynamic nature of filmic codes. Any attempt to
analyze the "language" of film cannot opera~e
with a model that takes the shot as apreset umt
totally analogous to the phoneme or word i~
language. This does not mean, however, that lt
is impossible to establish a scientifically sound
methodology. The dynamic establishment of
norms and deviation from them (automatization
and de-automatization) is a phenomenon typical
of film as of any artistic text. Lotman stresses
this differential quality of montage: "the juxta-
position (contrast and integration) of .heteroge-
neous elements ... is one of the most wldespread
methods of forming [any] artistic message"
(p. 51). Cinema, like other artistic phenomena,
does not involve a mere linkage of apriori seman-
tic units, but the lively interaction of semantics
582 STEPHEN RUDY
and syntagmatics in actual texts. The complexity
and sometimes indeterminacy of filmic codes
poses unique challenges to semiotics, which help
its methodology to evolve.
Let us note in passing the interesting works
on the semiotics of music done by B. M. Gas-
parov, which are devoted to problems of eluci-
dating its semantic component. Gasparov views
music as a "structuralization of reality-a cer-
tain variant of Weltanschauung."129 He has devoted
detailed analyses to Mozart's last sonata and to
Bach's St. John and St. Matthew Passions. 130
The latter analysis succeeds admirably in cor-
relating the obvious differences in semantics (epic
and pathos-laden versus lyric and subjective) with
their structural counterparts.
VI. Afterword
The continuing vitality and importance of
semiotics in the U.S.S.R. is apparent from our
cursory survey. Faults of omission as weil as
commission are unavoidable in addressing such
a vast and complex field in such a short space.
If I have emphasized the work of the Moscow
group, particularly that of Ivanov and Toporov,
it is largely because their contribution has
received somewhat less dissemination and dis-
cussion in the West than has the work of J urij
Lotman. In concluding, I will briefty note some
of the tasks confronting Russian semiotics at the
present time.
The East-West dialogue has expanded the
"semiotic sphere" considerably. Semiotic
research in the West was partly sparked and
certainly invigorated by the rediscovery of the
seminal Russian (and Czech) scholars of the
1920s and '30s. In turn, the development of the
semiotic movement in the U.S.S.R. was a direct
response to the advances of Western structural
12'1B. M. Gasparov, "Some Descriptive Problems of Musical
Semantics," Dispositio, I, No. 3 (1976),247-262.
I:lUB. M. Gasparov, "Poslednjaja sonata Mocarta" (Mozart's
Last Sonata), TZS, II (1979),71-97; "Dva PassionaJ. S.
Baxa: struktura i semantika" (j. S. Bach's Two Passions:
Structure and Semantics), TZS, 12 (1981), 43--82.
linguistics and anthropology in the 1940s and
'50s. At present the work of the Moscow-Tartu
school is the focus of a major project of trans-
lation, presentation, and discussion in the West,
as is apparent from the references in the present
article. N evertheless, there are several areas
where the dialogue could be improved.
I noted above Deli Hymes' objections to the
sweeping typologies characteristic of "semiotics
of culture" in the Moscow-Tartu practice. Many
of these typological schemes do require more
anthropological support and further refinement.
On the other hand, the notable achievements of
the Russians in the field of mythology, where
the relation between concrete data and theoret-
ical claims is tighter, still await a detailed
response in the West. Finally, despite certain
notable contributions from individuals, there is
nothing in Western literary scholarship corre-
sponding on the large scale to the enormous Rus-
sian output in poetics, which is a brilliant
manifestation of the movement's theoretical
power and practical application.
One realm in which the dialogue particularly
needs to be sharpened is that of intertextuality,
arealm of cardinal importance für the study of
both literature and culture. The tremendous
growth of so-called post-structuralist or decon-
structive criticism has resulted in its occupying
a central place in avant-garde semiotic circles in
the West. It may seem at first glance that this
movement cannot be reconciled with the
structural-typological methods of the Moscow-
Tartu school, but that is not a foregone conclu-
sion, as certain phenomena discussed in the pres-
ent survey may have revealed obliquely. In any
event, "deconstruction" has met with no response
I know of among the Russian semiüticians, which
is both surprising and regrettable. In conclusion,
let us hope the dialogue between East and West,
so essential in the case of a wide and fast-growing
international discipline like semiotics, will con-
tinue to be as lively and fruitful as it has been
in the past, without obscuring the real differ-
ences that exist in methodology and practice at
the opposite poles of the "semiotic sphere."
 CHAPTER26
Semiotic Research on the Law
in Venezuela
Roque Carri6n-Wam
J. Some Conceptual and
Terminological Clarifications
A. "Law"
The sorts of terms that will be used in this study
might prove confusing to the English-speaking
reader educated in the Anglo-American intellec-
tu al tradition, wh ether he be a jurist, a semiol-
ogist, or any other professional.
In the first place the word "law" in Spanish,
a language which falls within the context of a
European-Roman tradition,l differs from the
English word "law" which is used in the contexts
of the English and North Americanjudicial sys-
tems. This situation is complicated if we take
into account the fact that the expression Common
Law "within the English system itself ... has
taken [on] a double connotation. The first usage
The translation of this chapter was prepared by Irene Upson
of the University of Santa Clara, California.
I Some English-speaking authors refer to this cultural tra-
dition by express ions such as civil law. For an overview,
refer toJohn Henry Merryman's The Civil Law Tradition. An
Introduction to the Legal Systems ~ Western Europe and Latin
America (Stanford, Ca.: Stanford University Press, 1969).
Roque Carrion-Wam • Centro Latinoamericano de Inves-
tigaciones Juridicas y Sociales, Faculty of Law, University
of Carabobo, Valencia, 2001-A Venezuela.
583
refers to Law created judicially, which is differ-
ent [from] Law created by legislation .... But
within the system ofjudicial creation the expres-
sion Common Law is used to distinguish between
(1) the law that is produced through the decision-
making process of the common law tribunals (or
common law courts), i.e., ordinary jurisdiction;
and (2) the law that results from the decisions
of a special court called a chancery court or court
of equity."2
Another clarification is in order here as weIl.
The expressions Common Law and Civil Law are
used to identify the different judicial systems of
different countries; thus "within this context,
Common Law nations are those that have fol-
lowed the English model, even though a con-
siderable portion of the law in these countries is
found in legislative dispositions. The countries
of the "civiI tradition," on the contrary, have
resorted to the Roman tradition in all that con-
cerns their concepts and vocabulary. Presently,
these nations are characterized by legislatively
consecrated codifications, from which-in the-
ory at least-the courts ob ta in the norms that
allow them to resolve cases in dispute.
'Lon L. Fuller, Anatomia dei Derecho (Monte Avila Editores,
C. A., 1969), pp. 150-151. Spanish translation from the
original English of Anatomy ~ Law (Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica, Inc., 1968).
584 ROQUE CARRION-WAM

It is possible to say, schematically speaking, C. The Codes in the United States in

that among those Western countries that have the Context of Common Law
adopted common law are the Engli~h-speak~n?
Following Bayitch, it is important to empha-
countries, while the countries in WhiCh the ClvIl
size the function of codes in the context of com-
tradition prevails are those in which languag~s
mon law. We may differentiate several stages in
derived from Latin are spoken. Of course, m
the code/common law relationship: (a) Common
making any sort of distinction there are always
law is an omnipresent law as well as a complete
exceptions. The state of Louisiana, for example,
system of law that emanates fundamentally from
is a small civilist redoubt in the Vnited States
case law (precedents); (b) consequently, each
which has been maintained with some success. 3
promulgation must accept, to a lesser or greater
As we see, it is not very easy to identify neatly
degree, the rule that promulgated law in general,
for our implied reader the cultural and ju.ridi~al
and codified law in particular, do not replace
context in which the investigations concemzng Jur-
pre-existent law; (c) legislative law will be i.nter-
idical semiotics in Venezuela are developed.
preted in tu.e light of common law and WIll be
able to merge with it, especially when the leg-
B_ Code islated law and even the codified law are con-
sidered only in relation to special problems (e.g.,
It would perhaps be convenient to define the
damages). Thus legislative law, by ~ts ~ery nat~re,
usage of another juridical term that will ?e used
will not proclaim the general prmClples WhiCh
as much in the investigations concernmg the
would be found in common law. 5
semiotic elements oJ law as in those concerning the
In contrast to the preceding, the terms "code"
semiotics of juridical discourse: the term "code"
and "codification" have yet another meaning in
.
or its variants (l.e., "d'fi . "" cod'fi
co 1 catlOn, 1 ed Iaw, "
the civil-Iaw jurisdiction, since here "law arises
"codes"). These terms are frequently used in
fundamentally from legislation, while other
common-Iaw jurisdictions to mean the "legis-
sources such as custom, general principles of law
lated law or written law, as opposed to the
or justice, and naturallaware considered sup-
'unwritten law' which includes not only custom
plementary and are made operative only when
but also jurisprudence (case law)." Codific~tion is
the law refers to them explicitly, or when they
used to designate various types oflaw: (~) It.may
become accepted, in varying degrees, by c?m-
designate simple compilations or consohdatlOns.
mon usages, as are judicial opinions o~ doctnr;tal
Examples of this are the systematic promulga-
writings."6 In the light of the foregomg clanfi-
tions of Congress in the Uni ted States, called
cations , we can understand the usage of the term
the V.S. Codes, or similar compilations of
"code" and "codification." We must, however,
administrative regulations, the Code of Federal
add a few important theoretical consequences
Regulations. (b) In a number of states of the
which are implied by these same terms. In the
union the term "code" is applied to the system-
investigations that we are presenting, for exa~­
atic ~ollection of the state's promulgations,
pIe, the term "code" also implies the opera!zng
reviewed on a periodic basis. (c) Finally, the term
positive law, which means that the data, the JU~­
can me an the legislation of the amply defined
idical phenomenon (the phenomenon ~~ l.aw) IS
areas of law which fluctuate among promulga-
expressed by an (objectified) written posztwzty. In
tions such as the uniform state laws, and among
addition this has to do with the theoretical and
thes~ the Uniform Commercial Code, as well as the philosoplücal intellectual tradi~ion with~n which
results of the efforts of men such as Livingston,
the topoi considered recurrent In the phllosophy
and Field in particular, with their civil and trial
of law acquire their meanings.
law codes , which are4 still operating today in some
We must now point out the difference between
states of the union.
expressions such as "philosophy of law" and
'Ibid., pp. 151-152. . .
's. A. Bayitch, "La Codificacion en el Derecho ClvIl y en el English original which appeared in .~. N. Yian~opoulos,
Common Law," in Boletin Mexicano de Derecho Comparado ed., Civil Law in the Modem World (LoUlS1ana St. Umv. Press,
(Universidad Autonoma de ~exico) N~eva serie, a~~ 3, 1965).
no. 7. January-April. (Universldad Au.tonoma. de Mexlco, 5Ibid., p. 10.
1970), pp. 9-10. This is a more extensive versIOn than the 6Ibid.
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LAW)
"methodology of law" in the two judicial tra-
ditions. In the context of civil law, "philosophy
of law" is identical with the types of problems
raised in works such as Huntington Cairns' Legal
Philosophy Jrom Plato to Hegel; an overview by
H.L.A. Hart, The Concept 01 Law; the works of
L. L. Fuller 7 quoted here; or symposia such as
Law and Philosophy.8 Notwithstanding, to treat
topics from different points of view in Western
thought (Anglo-Saxon and continental philoso-
phy, European-Iberoamerican philosophy)
sometimes leads to their being understood in very
different ways.
To conclude these conceptual and terminol-
ogical clarifications we must also add that a
recurring subject in the philosophy and meth-
odology of law (the European-Iberoamerican
philosophy) is the problem of "ideology," which
acquires theoretical relevance in the investiga-
tions we are presenting here. This, however, does
not mean that the philosophical perspectives of
the Anglo-Saxon tradition, its rich consequences
and new formulations, are absent from the the-
oretical reflection of the authors of these semiotic
investigations about law. On the contrary, they
are assumed in different stages of the analysis
with varying degrees of intensity. At present,
Latin American theoretical thought about law
is characterized, among other things, by its anti-
dogmatic stance and by its willingness to con-
sider general philosophical reflection.
11. Semiotic Elements of Law
Although the use of the expression "semiotics
of law" or "judicial semiotics" is relatively recent
in the writings 9 of J. M. Delgado Ocando, the
elements that make up a semiotic reflection on
the phenomenon of law have been present in
every one of his works. We will attempt to isolate
'Huntington Cairns, Legal Philosophy Jrom Plalo to Hege!, 4th
ed. (Baitimore: The]ohn Hopkins Press). H.L.A. Hart, The
Coneept oJ Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
"Sidney Hook, ed., Law and Philosophy: A Symposium (New
York: New York University Press, 1964).
'lFrom now on we will use the term "writings" for the pub-
lications (books and articles) as weil as any olher written
malerials that circulate in the university environment. We
will call "work" the set of writings of an author.
585
and characterize these elements in order to pres-
ent succinctly the specificity of Ocando's semiotic
method applied to law. lO
A. Law and Language
There are many intellectual currents that have
led us to see how relevant it is to center our
attention on the language of law, whether on the
plane of philosophical reflection about basic the-
oretical concepts, or on the plane of the language
of positive law. The influence of logical positiv-
ism, which emphasizes the importance of lan-
guage and scientific knowledge, is now clearly
present in our study.11 We must begin with a
"therapeutic analysis" of the problems; an
"analysis of the language in which the problems
are expressed." It is not "unusual that amirage
fashioned from words ties one in a 'philosophical
knot.' ,,12 The postulates of this "new philoso-
phy" will find fertile ground in the philosophy
of law, "not only because metaphysical abuse
has led the jurist to the most absurd construc-
tions clearly divorced from reality, but also
because the 'natural philosophical knot' of which
Warnock writes grows to abnormal proportions
in the hands of the jurist who, blinded by the
splendor of the scientific, imprudently borrows
ideas and terms completely foreign to the nor-
mative world."13 Philosophy of law is the place
where we can apply, with greatest accuracy, the
slogan of Kneale, who affirms that "one of the
tasks of philosophy is to break the authority of
words over the human mind."14
But the language of law manifests its nor-
mative specificity, and this implies an axiological
structure (a hierarchy of values); a scientific study
of this normativity demands objective criteria
which have yet to be attained; thus we are able
to understand that both a vertical and horizontal
structure, which accounts for the object ofvalue,
leads us to consider it in its widest context: a
context which comprehends conceptions of the
world and of life. But where are we to find con-
ceptions of the world and of life already
lOWe will not discuss the different stages of the intellectual
development of the writings of Delgado Ocando, which
span aperiod of 19 years: 1958-1977.
IIThis refers to the influence ofC.]. Warnock and B. RusselI.
12Delgado Ocando, Prolegamenos, pp. 38-39.
13Ibid., p. 40.
14Ibid.
586 ROQUE CARRION-WAM
formed?-in the positivity ollaw. The possibility
for an objective account of law is founded in its
positivity. To speak of "conception of the world
and of life" presupposes "ideologies." Now, pos-
itivity and objectivity, axiological and ideologi-
cal structures, also presuppose a vehicle in which
and by means of which they are expressed: lan-
guage. For Delgado Ocando, therefore, the
"problem of ideologies" brings linguistic implica-
tions to the fore. 15 Thus, our author affirms: " ...
Philosophy of law and politics come into mutual
contact whenever the criteria are at issue ac cord-
ing to which social values must be hierarchized."16
B. Theory ofJuridical Valuation and
Types of Language
In a later exposition 17 of these problems
Ocando establishes that "the logical expression
of juridical valuation is an exhortative judg-
ment" and that the truth and falsity of an exhor-
tation is verified "by means of the verifiability
of the truth or falsehood of enunciative judg-
ments that come into the exhortation and serve
as a basis for it." 18 To show the significative
character of exhortation, the author appeals to
J. Claude Piguet's critique of language. 19 Lan-
guage, according to Piguet, can be distinguished
in three ways: (a) scientific language (SL), sym-
bolic in character, which "gives", "bears" , and
transmits meaning; it is a starting point toward
reality and its very life is the cognitive conscious-
ness; (b) artistic or lyrical language (LL),
expressive in character because it "bears" and
"gives itself" meaning, but does not transmit it
in the way that SL does. This is the point where
we arrive at reality. Its very life is creative;
J5Ibid., pp. 44-47.
16Ibid., p. 55. In connection with these issues, see also Del-
gado Ocando, Una Introduecion a la Etica Social Descriptiva
(Maracaibo: Universidad de! Zulia,Facultad de Derecho,
1966) pp. 9,66-67,68-70, 73.
17De!gado Ocando, "Apuntes de una Teoria de la Valoraci6n
juridica," the third annex (anexo 3) of Una Introduccion,
pp. 215-236.
I"Ibid., p. 226. Here he follows P. V. Kopnin, "La Natur-
aleza de!juicio y sus Formas de Expresion en e! Lenguaje,"
in Pensamiento y Lenguaje (Montevideo: Ediciones Pueblos
Unidos, 1959).
19j. C. Piguet, De l'esthitique a la mitaphysique (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhof, 1959). According to our author, this cri-
tique of language unites French aesthetics, the phenomen-
ology of Husserl, and Anglo-Saxon neo-positivism (the
Oxford School).
(c) aesthetic or metaphysical language (ML),
indicative in character because it "bears" a
meaning, which indicates that it is a language
which goes towards reality and starts from real-
ity. It is a language that incites or invites, but
does not translate the exterior world or express
states of consciousness; that is to say, it is neither
symbolic nor expressive. 20 Its very life is
contemplative.
In line with Piguet's account of language,
Ocando asks: what type of language is Article
52 of the Civil Code?21 To start with, it would
not be a language of the SL kind, but neither
does it fall neatly into the language types LL or
ML. Our author will combine Piguet's criteria
with those supplied by semiotics (semanties,
pragmatics, and syntactics) and by the positiv-
ists of the Vienna Circle. Ocando's clarifications
(aside from the fact that the ML alone would be
meaningless because it is the language of the
jurist) are:
... the logical structure of the very (contemplative) life of
Article 52 of the Civil Code, inasmuch as it is ML, would
be: S (a), a norm (Ianguage LL) whose sense is to be an
exhortationl P (b), the sense of the exhortation shown by
the ML language; R, the indicative mood in which the syn-
tactical reference of ML language is com prised. It is to be
no ted that if the languagc of the jurist is of type SL, it can
only be used in philosophy of law. This would show that
(I) the language of law is an LL; (2) the language of jur-
isprudence is an ML; and (3) the language of philosophy of
law is a metalanguage of an SL. 22
C. Different Contexts in Which the
Semiotic Method Is Defined
1. Culturalist Theory and Modesof
"Normative Signification"
In a critical study of the works of Hollier,
Kristeva, Ross, Schrieber, and Malinowski,23
Delgado Ocando attempts to define the semiotic
method:
2°Ibid., pp. 227-228.
21 COdigo Civil Venezolano, Art. 52: "The marriage of siblings
(whether legitimate or not) is neither permitted nor valid."
22De!gado Ocando, "Apuntes de una Teoria," p. 235.
23 Problemas Fundamentales de Metodologia de la Ciencia dei Derecho
(Maracaibo: Universidad de! Zulia, Facultad de! Derecho,
1974).
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LAW)
The method used in this study could be considered semiotic
in the sense that its object is to establish a culturalist theory
of the modes of normative 'signification.' The value of such
an approach has been recognized, thanks to the accomplish-
ments of the critical theory of society, the sociology of knowl-
edge, psychoanalysis, logical positivism, and the theory of
so ci al relations. These accomplishments all require an inte-
gral methodological vision able to account for the concrete
conditionality of the meaningful character of socio-political
. 14
praclices.
Here semiotics is considered as both integrated
with the other methods, and as their integrator.
From this perspective, semiotics will have to do
with the theory of signifying function. In this
relation two things are revealed: (a) the "strong"
time of the production of knowledge (the theo-
retical articulation of the model in the signifying
practice) implies a materialist gnoseology, and
(b) the emphasis on the pragmatic relations hip
in the mechanism of socio-political reference
presupposes the plurisystematic nature of extra-
linguistic practices.
Semiotics introduces the category of the model in the domain
of the human sciences and discusses the question of the nexus
between language and i ts exterior level. 2; This is reflected
in the normative field (and thus, in the field of law) in the
problem of norm and action. But this type of semiotic anal-
ysis also attempts to rescue the understood semantic base-
on the basis of the Husserlian thesis-as an apriori in the
concordant unity of the universal experience. 2G
2. Semiotics and Ideology
To extend the conception of a semantics
beyond the formal scope, semiotics must con-
sider the pragmatic level of language as a fun-
damental aspect of signification. Semiotics
discovers the
structure of the signifying functionjust as grammar and logic
do. Yet, unlike grammar and logic, semiotics does not ignore
the lexical element (vocabulary and pragmatic use of lan-
guage). It attempts, rather, to be a theory of the cultural
background in which the subsets of symbolic order are
inserted: speech, writing, etiquette, pantomime, etc. This
explains the fact that: (I) the semiotic model is held together
by the theory of signifying systems; and (2) the theoretical
articulation of the model in socio-political practices elabo-
rates a new type of science, namely, the semiotic description
of the material condition of 'significance'. The semiotic field
24Ibid. p. 9
25Ibid., p. 16.
26Ibid., p. 21. Delgado Ocando also bases hirnself on Quine,
FiLosofia de La Logica (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1973).
587
thus becomes a network of a number of theories that uphold
a materialist conception of signification. 27
Thus, it is also possible to affirm the trans-linguistic
character of semiotics, since psychoanalysis and
ethnology have demonstrated the existence of
non-linguistic signifying systems, and both tech-
nology and economics have raised the problem
of the relationships between signifying systems
and production practices. 28 But it is also trans-
linguistic to the extent that it is a critique of
linguistics. In this way, labor is integrated into
the semiotic system, producing a clearer under-
standing of the "original relationships between
the signified and labor." In this context semiotics
would discover its own limits when attempting
to find answers to the following questions:
(I) What kinds of relationships exist between
the language studied by linguistics, and the lan-
guages whose plurality is studied by semiotics?
(2) since science-and mathematics in
particular-is one of these "languages", what
use could semiotics make of its own concepts for
its own analysis? Or, put in another way, what
kind of "transgression" of mathematics is implied
by semiotics? and (3) is there any reality (nature,
matter) that can be considered foreign to the
production of "significance"? For Delgado
Ocando, starting with these three questions,
semiotics will allow us to see the limits "within
which the Western ratio, beginning with the
Stoics, has confined itself. Further extending a
movement that owes its impulse to Marx and to
Freud (as well as to Nietzsehe and to Heidegger)
the human sciences have aspired to find these
same limits.,,29 To accomplish this, it has been
necessary to recognize "the essential plurality of
systems of signification (against 'nomologic'
rationality)," while also, "furthering the return
to the subject (while reason demands the elim-
ination of the subject)." Now, the reappearance
of the subject (and here we must understand the
concrete historical subject) is implicated in the sys-
tems of signification and the socio-historical
practices which "determine the historical inser-
tion that impedes consideration of the discourse
'external to the text,' and pretends to be a dis-
course free from all ideology. ,,30
"Ibid., p. 25.
2BIbid., p. 119.
29Ibid., pp. 120-12J.
30Ibid.
588 ROQUE CARRION-WAM
In this eontext semioties aequires its status as
a "methodology ofthe human sciences"; but this
time its methodological charaeter will not be ori-
ented towards the origin, but rather to the cri-
tique of the social sciences. The critical task of
semiotics will keep up an awareness of "the ide-
ological pretense of the scientific, that is to say,
the supposed neutrality or purity of science with
respect to ideologies."31
Semiotics appears, therefore, as an instrument
(organon) whose utility is not exhausted in its
pure instrumentality, but which projects itself
as a valid criterion for the critique of both the
exact and the human sciences.
III. The Semiotic Analysis of
Positive Law
The relevance of the semiotic analysis of posi-
tive law (of its concepts as well as of positive
juridical institutions ) appears justified, since "it
is obvious that positive law is a sign system.,,32
For the conerete semiotie treatment we will have
to begin by taking into aeeount Saussure's classie
diehotomous relation between language (langue)
and speaking (parole),33 and its "possible jurid-
ieal equivalent. ;,34 One of the eharaeteristie marks
of langue is that of being a "norm", that is to say
"the material form of the language." In the field
of law, the eoneept norm ean be related to the
notion of code. "In the field of law, code is a modal-
ity of written law. In the linguistie sense of the
term, code is langue, or more precisely, norm.,,35
Even though the term code is ambiguous in this
context, this ambiguity is "useful in the semiotic
treatment of juridical models."36 In what sense
31 Ibid.
"Delgado Ocando, Consideraciones sobre los Elementos Semi6ticos
dei Dereeho (Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1975), p. 7.
See also his C6digo Civil y Analisis Estructural, and Normas,
Lenguaje y Verdad.
33Ibid. Here, Delgado Ocando will have re course not only
to Saussure, but also to semiologists such as Barthes,Jakob-
son, F. Rossi-Landi, etc.
"To avoid the ambiguity of the word "Ianguage" in English,
we will use the French langue to mean, as Saussure defines
it, "both a social product of the faculty of speech and a
collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted
by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that fac-
ulty." Speaking, or parole, is the individual execution of
langue. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguisties
(New York: McGraw-Hili Paperbacks, 1966).-TRANs.
3sConsideraeiones, p. 10.
3ülbid.
is the dichotomy langue/speaking useful for the
semiotic analysis of law? Let us see: an economic
exchange, for example, "is a speech act with
respeet to the code of prices and the code of
property-contract." Here there is a spinoff of
langue as a pure form of codes, and in thi~ case
(price code and property-eontract code) "the
purely linguistic projection of the norm is extended
to the juridical code, inasmuch as i t is langue from
the point of view of juridieal eommunication.,,37
In this way, "the jurist discovers that the tra-
ditional use of the term code is an intuitive usage
of the term langue, in the hermeneutics of eco-
nomic interests. ,,38 The written juridieal code
(civii code, commercial code, penal code, ete.)
is thus langue, but this langue does not originate
in the "speaking masses" (even though this may
have been its origin in the case of eustom), "but
rather [in] a decision-making group that vol-
untarily elaborates the code and turns it into a
synthetic language (logotechnique). The possibil-
ity of juridical speech (individualized normative
relation) is born from verbal speech in which the
construction of juridicallangue is contained, inso-
far as the latter is a norm.,,39
A. The Distinction between
Langue/Speech and )uridical
Signification System
Adopting Roland Barthes's description of ali-
mentary langue as a frame of reference, our author
eonsiders thatjuridical speech could comprehend:
(I) social relations (semiotic or nonsemiotic aets):
(2) categories of secondary axiological orienta-
tion, for example, lawfulness/unlawfulness;
(3) syntagmatic relations between signs (ehain
or com bina tion of terms in praesentia) and
(4) commands or directives (messages). In the
following scheme we can see the methods of
expression of juridical langue and speech that
make up juridical language (Figure I).
B. Law as an Institutional-
Instrumental Sign System
Law may be regarded as a nonverbal sign sys-
tem, but also as an "institutional sign system,
that is to say, instrumental inasmuch as it refers
17Ibid.
38Ibid.
39Ibid.
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LA W) 589
JURIDICAL LANGUAGE

JURIDICAL "LANGUE" JURIDICAL SPEECH

7~
Tabus (rules of Material conditions
~
Social relations Acts
I
exclusion) of prohibitions
:
I
; (Semiotic or ~onsemiotic)
:
I I
I I

!
I
I Reality Principle I

:
I I
I I

:
I I
I I
I I
I I I
I I I
I
Signifying opo,!!tion of Lawful/Unlawful; Catego;ies of Lawfulness/Un awfulness
normative units axiological origin
Allowed/Forbidden i
I
I

:
I

I
I
Paradigm or system Good/Bad I
I
I
I I

:
I
Useful/Harmful I
I
I
I I
Social programmating Correct/l ncorrect Syntagm Type
of Behavior I
i I
I
I I
I I
I I
I
I Categories of ideological I
I
I I
I
I orientati on I
I
I

:
I
I I
I
I I
I I I
I

:
I I
I
I !
Codes Normative variants Mess ges Directives

Figure 1 Elements of juridical language.

to something exterior to the human organism.
While in organic sign systems (kinesthetic, prox-
emic, tactile, etc.) man behaves, in the instru-
mental systems (which include institutional
systems) man behaves with, he employes or applies
something ... the instrumentality of law spec-
ifies itself in 'signification' and programming of
modified behavior."4D I t is precisely thanks to
this programming (social programming of
behavior) that the comprehension and foresee-
ability of human conduct is made possible.
The analysis of a concept such as "juridical
presumption" will permit us to see the extent to
which this is a semiotic relation. Article 1394 of
Venezuela's Civil Code specifies that "presump-
tions are the consequences which either the law
or a judge draws from a known fact in order to
establish an unknown fact." Thus we have the
following:
known fact = index (indication or signal)
unknown fact = indicated fact
sense of the index = juridical consequences that result in
the translation of the indicated fact to
the language of the code.
from Venezuela's Civil Code, we would arrive
at the scheme shown in Figure 2. But the semiotic
relation is not always given so explicitly; there
are cases in which the lack of precision of the
"code and the kind of index gradually displaces
the semiotic process from the level of commu-
nication to the level of signification, so that we
can speak of a semiology of communication and
of a semiology of signification. The former sup-
poses a code by me ans of which the sign is deci-
phered; the latter ignores the code and must
therefore discover it in order to interpret the
indica tion. ,,41
C. Semiotic Anaylysis and the
Theory of Juridical Superstructure
A semiotic analysis of unlawfulness (which
Delgado Ocando will later present as a possi-
bility of investigation)12 in conjunction with a
sketch of a theory of the "material conditionality
of the juridicallanguage," would lead one author
Delgado Ocando, Ficciones y Presunciones en el Codigo Civil
41

Venezolano (Maracaibo: Universidad dei Zulia, 1974),

If we apply these definitions to a few articles pp. 112-114.
42Delgado Ocando, Textos para un Analisis Semi6tico de la Ilicitud
4°Ibid., p. 16. (Maracaiho: Universidad del Zulia, 1977).
590 ROQUE CARRION-WAM

INTERPRETATIVE
CONVENTIONS

Articles of the
civil code Index I ndicated fact Sense

I I
1. Article 197 Birth of a child Fatherhood Legitimate
from the celebration filiation
of the wedding to
300 days following its
dissolution or nullifica-
ti on

2. Article 438 Finding of a person Death by Presumption

in a shipwreck accident of death
(presumption of)

3. Article 794 Possession of a Ownership Ownership

piece of furniture (presumption of) (title)

Figure 2 A semiotic relation: legal presumption in the Venezuelan Civil Code.

to "point out the broad outlines of a critical-
material theory of the juridical superstruc-
ture. ,,43 His Texts flr a Semiotic Anarysis rif Unlaw-
folness (1977) and Notes flr a Theory 01 Juridical
Superstructure (1977) must be considered comple-
mentary to the goal of "completing the selection
of the Texts flr a Semiotic Anarysis 01 Unlawfolness,
but from a materialist perspective."44 We must
add that the texts collected in the Notes are selec-
tions from among the many works of Karl Marx,
the founder of historical materialism. Our author
would darify the extent to which this juridical
superstructure-also called normative
superstructure--is "specific," as weIl as its "rela-
tions with the socio-economic referent"; "an
analysis of this type must (also) account for the
phenomena of alienation and ideology." Finally,
this whole analysis would be inscribed within
the framework of a material-critical theory of
culture."45 It is interesting to note (contrary to
what the reader might expect, especiaIly in view
of our author's theoretical perspective) that Del-
gado Ocando's propositions are not offered in
43Delgado Ocando, Notas para una Teoria de La VaLoracion Jur-
idica (Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1977).
44Ibid.
"Textos.
the context of Marxist orthodoxy; rather, Marx-
ism is an element (used to either a greater or
lesser degree depending on the different stages
of the analysis) among others that make up the
background of the theoretical structure of the
analysis. The other intervening theoretical and
methodological perspectives are: linguistics, psy-
choanalysis (Freud), the systematic analysis of
cybernetics, the theory of models, and
structuralism.
The "structural" model of Hans Kelsen (pure
theory of law), conceived as a pyramid, is ade-
quate for the macro-juridical analysis, but not
for the "micro-juridical" study, "that is to say,
at the level of normatively programmed concrete
social action."46
D. Ideology and Fiction as a Model
of Juridical Creation
Delgado Ocando has a dear objective: to dar-
ify the ideological level of law, in the different
forms and stages in which it is present in the
juridical phenomenon. Thus, for example, "doc-
trinal fiction" plays a "decisive role": to "serve
as an ideological justification für the politics
46Ibid., p. 37.
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LAW)
implied in the judicial order. Such is the case
with the so-called declarative function of the
judge and of the gaps of law.,,4J
In this perspective the science of law takes
into account three fundamental stages: (a) the
elaboration of the catalogue or codes of rules
that will be applicable for decodification in regard
to conduct; (b) the development of an appro-
priate technique for decodification; (c) the
employment of institutionalized repression,
which-within the limits of the tolerable-will
permit the maintenance of the "political project
imposed by the ruling class.,,48 Therefore, law
and the science of law are "business in fieri"; this
means that the function of law and of the science
of law cannot escape the political project in which
they are immersed, not even when the plan is
re-elaborated from its origins. 49 Nevertheless, this
does not necessarily imply that such a function
must be conservative.,,50 In this context thejurist
"is the factor par excellence of the political proj-
ect.,,51 Now, what are the functions of the jurist?
In the first place, the jurist is a decodifier (or
cryptographer); the jurist helps to maintain the
political project, but at a dialectical level. For
these reasons, the jurist performs a technique
that is dogmatic and creative at the same time.
It is dogmatic to the extent that "the science of
law disposes of a catalogue of subjects elabo-
rated by thejuridical tradition"; and it is creative
or heuristic "to the extent that the science of
law, in the processes of social change above all,
must turn itself into aprospective rhetoric that
generates the new topoi in which it will make
feasible the subrogation of the established polit-
ical project.,,52
Delgado Ocando's semiotic analysis of law is
all-encompassing and multidisciplinary; we must
understand it as a method, and as such it is
formulated at a "logical" level: Here we must
understand that we are dealing with a "material
logic" since it refers to a determined sphere of
objects. As a method, the semiotic analysis of
law will have to construct a metalanguage (or
metalanguages). What this means, according to
our author, is the constmction of "purely rational
47Ibid., p. 55.
48Notas, p. 17.
49Ibid., p. 19.
50Ibid.
5lIbid.
52Ibid.
591
symbolic systems in order to arrive at scientific
knowledge. ,,53
We must add that "scientific knowledge" is
not, in this case, an element that removes us
from either the political or the ideological project
inherent in the law. The semiotic analysis oflaw,
for Delgado Ocando, is situated in the place of
the theory of. the science of law and as such it
is a subset of the philosophy of law Uuridical
epistemology); and the philosophy of law is also
a philosophy of human praxis. As a result, the
semiotic method of law, in the final analysis, has
to constitute an objective and scientific stage of
structured human action consistent with the mIes
of the code. 54
IV. Concerning the Semiotics
of Juridical Discourse
From 1976 to 1980, R. Carri6n-Wam
attempted to lay the bases for a semiotic of jur-
idical discourse, taking into account, in the con-
stitution of this semiotics, the contributions of
the juridicallogicd semiotics OLS), and of the "ana-
lytic" semiotic ofthe language oflaw (ASLL), in the
context of A. J. Greimas's semiotic theory of a
signification. 55 The conception presented here
takes as its starting point the hypothesis that the
juridical phenomenon appears, that is to say, is
presented to us as a self-evident "significative
linguistic manifestation.,,56 The basic methodo-
logical point can be formulated in this way:
53Delgado Ocando, Curso de Filosofia dei Derecho Actual (Mara-
caibo: CEFD-LUZ, 1976), pp. 48, 58.
54Delgado Ocando, Hipotesis para una Filosqfia Antihegemonica
dei Derechoy dei Estado (Maracaibo: IFD-LUZ, 1978), pp. I,
5.
55 A presentation of Semiotic Juridical Logic (SJL) and of
"Analytic" semiotics of the language of law (ASLL) can
be seen in R. Carri6n-Wam, Elementos de Semiotica Juridica,
in Anuario (Instituto de Derecho Comparado, Facultad de
Derecho, Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela
1976-77), pp. 261-324; and a more extensive study in Pre-
liminares de una SemiOtica Descriptiva de la Signijicacion Juridica
(Valencia, Venezuela: Oficina Latinamericana de Inves-
tigacionesJuridicas y Sociales. Facultad de Derecho, Univ-
ersidad de Carabobo, 1979), p. 141. In these as weil as in
subsequent writings we speak of "Anarytic" Juridical Semiotics
(AJS), an expression which we have now substituted for
"Anarytic" Semiotics ofthe Language of Law (ASLL), in order
to give more darity to our summary. An exposition of the
writings that make up the SJL can be found in Semiotica
Juridica.
56Carrion-Wam, Elementos, p. 270.
592 ROQUE CARRION-WAM
" the juridical phenomenon, as a manifes-
tation of a socially determined praxis, is appre-
hended by its own language."57 Juridicallanguage
is, then, the vehicle by means of which the jur-
idical phenomenon appears to our intelligible
experience. In this sense, this is a linguistic jur-
idical semiotic whose first definition would be
the following: " ... the linguistic juridical
semiotic is the analysis of the juridical sign in its
discursive form, in the heart of sociallift."58
Now, there are at least two basic points that
are asserted in this definition: (a) the object of
study is the linguistic juridical sign conceived
from the perspective of a theory of discourse,
and (b) this juridical sign, inasmuch as it is dis-
course, is analyzed in its specific process of pro-
duction, comprehending its social function
(communication) in the constitution of sense. 59
A_ Discourse
Independent of the rhetorical, stylistic or log-
ical definitions, the term "discourse" is und er-
stood here as antagonistic to the term "phrase".
This means that "discourse" is characterized as
a statement (inonce) superior to the phrase, con-
sidered from the point of view of the rules of the
linking of phrases. From this we can say that
"the perspective of the discursive analysis is
opposed to any perspective that attempts to treat
the phrase as the finallinguistic unit.,,60 But in
addition, the "discourse" will be understood as
"the linguistic ground in which the semantic uni-
verse is exposed and transformed. ,,61 This
semantic universe is structured (is formally pres-
ent and oriented) as a specific mode of semantic
behavior of the "linguistic objects" created by
the same discourse. This last remark refers us
to a central problem in the theory of language.
The dominant theory of language maintains,
grosso modo, aseparation between sign and rifCrent:
something signifies inasmuch as the sign corre-
sponds to the "concept: or to the 'state of things'
57 "Preliminares de una Semi6ticaJuridica," Revista de Ciencias
Sociales (Valparaiso, Chile), 5 (Second Semester, 1979),
p. 72, and Preliminares de una Semiotica Descriptiva, p. 51.
58Here we see the obvious influence of the Swiss linguist and
semiologist, Saussure, and his definition of semiology.
59 Elementos, p. 270.
60This definition was taken from the Dictionnaire de Linguistique
(Paris: Larousse, 1973) in Elementos, p. 271.
61 Elementos, p. 271.
identifiable by the sign. On the contrary, the
position that we adopt here is that which asserts
the internalization of the rifCrent; adopting the posi-
tion of A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes, we regard
the extra-linguistic world as shaped and insti-
tuted by man in signification." In this way, "the
world, far from being the referent (that is to say,
the denotative signified of the naturallanguages)
is, on the contrary, abipolar language, a natural
semiotics (or semiotics of the natural world).
The problem of the referent is now no more than
a question of correlating two semiotics . .. a
problem of "intersemioticity." Conceived in this
way, the referent loses its raison d'itre as a lin-
guistic concept." In this very sense, "any dis-
course (not only literary discourse, but also, for
example, juridical and scientific discourse) con-
structs its own internal rifCrential discursive level that
serves as weIl for the other discursive levels it
develops."62
B. ]uridical Discourse as Semiotic
Object
The analysis of the following specific semiotic
object, juridical discourse, requires a description
from the moment it appears in the social world.
Thus "to ask for its origin is to enquire about
its process of production; to investigate the cir-
cumstances in which it is exposed and commu-
nicated is to clarify the conditions of production
of this same object.,,63 It is a process of analysis
that attempts to account for the appearance of
this particular semiotic object. Inasmuch as we
have considered (as a basic point in this
approach) that the juridical phenomenon (what
appears as juridical) appears as a discursive lin-
guistic structure,64 we must ask ourselves how
this linguistic discourse is produced in our own
social and institutional experience of juridical
language. 65
6'A.J. Greimas andJ. Courtes, Semiotique, Dictionnaire raisonni
de la tMorie du langage, art. "Referent," quoted in R. Carri6n-
Warn, Preliminares de una semi6tica descriptiva, pp. 53-54.
63 Elementos, p. 271.
64"The non-linguistic juridical semiotic practices can be tran-
scribed into a linguistic syntagmatic," R. Carri6n-Wam,
"La Apertura deI Signo J uridico," in Historia, Problema y
Promesa, Homenaje a J. Basadre, Vol. II (Lirna: Pontifica
Universidad Cat61ica deI Peru, 1978), p. 20.
65Here we must keep in mind that we refer to a type ofjuridical
language: the one that is given socially and institutionally
in the systems of written law.
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LA W)
C. The Production Process of
juridical Discourse
"We understand as a production process, the
stages and elements that take part in the con-
stitution of two types of juridical discourse: the
legislative and the jurisprudential discourses that
correspond to autonomous semiotic entities
starting from a linguistic semantic universe
expressed in a determined natural language
(NL)."66
This definition of juridical discourse-produc-
tion obliges us to distinguish the following: (a) to
define a natural language (NL), and (b) to
establish the relationship between an NL and
the linguistic expression of the juridical
phenomenon.
A natural language, NL, is, in the framework
of this theory, a discourse of the social complex
expressed in a concrete and specific language:
i.e., English, Spanish, German, French, etc.
Notice that we are not affirming that the NL is
a discourse about the social complex. We affirm,
rather, that the NL is a dis course 01 the social
complex. In other words, it is the social complex
itself structured in an NL. Therefore, from the
linguistic point of view, an NL is composed of
at least a grammar and a semantic. Symbolically
this may be expressed as: NL : GI 1\ Sb in which
":" means "is composed of;" G = grammatical
eomponent; S = lexieal eomponent whose
semantie references (definitions) constitute a
dietionary; 1\ = and. 67 We are not only dealing
here with a linguistie definition, beeause in addi-
tion, an NL is the form and the signification (an
inherent structure in its discourse) of the social
world, the very world that is transmitted to us
in each and every moment of our sociallife. This
NL is therefore the structure of meaning (sig-
nification) of our social world. In sum, an NL
can be defined as the "ideologieallanguage" (IL)
in the latent sense of the expression: a language
that structures the universe of values that pre-
dominate in soeiety.,,68 From this definition of
the NL it is necessary to point out the following:
(a) ideology is defined as a "certain way of
66 Elementos, p. 272.
67 A first elucidation of this point is found in A. J. Greimas
and E. Landowski, "Analyse semiotique d'un discoursjur-
idique," in A. J. Greimas, Semiotique et seienees sociales (Paris:
Editions du Seuil, 1976), pp. 79-128.
6s"l'reliminares de una Semi6tica Juridica," p. 75.
593
organizing the soeial world"; (b) the social world
is given to us as an already established "structure
of meaning" (of signification). As a eonseguenee
of wh at has just preceded, our NL (in this spe-
cific case, Spanish) is "ideologieally oriented, that
is to say, our language gives us a meaning of the
social world. In other words, our NL is an ide-
ologieally oriented instrument of communiea-
tion. ,,69 For the moment, the semiotics of juridical
discourse, whieh we are presenting, only aceounts
for this phenomenon, and as a semiotie analysis,
it does not offer values, judgments or ideologies,
but limits itself to describing thc NL phenom-
enon in the process by which juridieal discourse
is produced.
Since the NL is both reeeptacle and "origin"
of any semiotic phenomenon, the juridical dis-
course OD) is defined, in this context, as a prod-
uct "eonstituted by a Grammar 2 and by a
Semantics;z. In symbols we may express this first
stage of the production as:
in whieh - p--? me ans "produee." Now, neither
the Grammar 2 nor the Semantics 2 of JD is iso-
morphie in relation to the NL and its compo-
nents GI 1\ SI; on the other hand, the G 2 1\ S2
of the JD are isotopic. With this, we wish to
indieate that there does not exist a one-to-one
eorrespondence between NL and JD (it is not
an isomorphie relations hip ); on the other hand,
there is an isotopie relations hip bctween NL and
JD, in the sense that, in this state of the analysis,
both NL and JD structure the very same topoi,
though in different ways.70
Having described this first stage of the JD in
relation to its NL (in a given NL), it is now
necessary to specify the production of the Jur-
idical Legislative Discourse (JLD) and the Jurispru-
dentialJuridical Discourse (JJD).71 The production
of the JLD runs through the following stages:
(a) starting from an isotopic relation with the
NL, (b) the JLD constitutes itself in virtue of a
change-maker (CM), (c) an authority (Al) that
69Ibid., pp. 75-76.
7°This will be better appreciated in the definition ofSemantic
Universe, NL and JD.
71 Here we must understand a JLD as law, that is to say, as
the obliging linguistic expression sanctioned by the Con-
gress (Parliament) of a country; and JJD as the linguistic
expression of the sentenee given by the highest instanee of
justice in a given case.
594
possesses a (CM) organizes the JLD in such a
way that it assurnes the "contents" of the NL to
trans la te them into a linguistic structure with a
G 2 /\ S2. In symbolic terms this is expressed as:
where: - p (AICM) ~ means: an authority (Al)
provided with a change-maker (CM) produces
(- p~) a JLD. 72 What is the m·eaning of Al
and of CM? Al is the institution of Congress
(Parliament) that by virtue of the power invested
in it (by an originallaw called the Constitution)
promulgates (dictates) a discourse (a linguistic
organization) that will be called law. What is the
CM that the Al puts into operation?; the trans-
flrming action that is produced and expressed in
law, assuming the universe of the NL and con-
verting and changing it into a (G 2 /\ S2) universe
of a new product. Thus, this authority (A), which
is the institution of Congress or Parliament, is
primary (I) in relation to the secondary authority
(2) that is presented in the process of the pro-
duction of the jurisprudential juridical dis-
course. It is also primary by virtue of being
originary: the original productive process of the
JLD. 73
D. The Semantic Universes of NL
andJLD
By semantic universes (SU) we must und er-
stand the signifying structure that makes up the
NL and the JLD. This means that both the NL
and the JLD contain a group of elements that
when grouped together constitute the signified
(semantic) universe they express linguisticaIly.
We must keep in mind that we had previosuly
asserted that the NL is a "significative-oriented
linguistic organization." More precisely, the NL
structures (organizes linguisticaIly) the social
world in its totality as weIl as the world of indi-
vidual social events. In symbols we have:
72«Preliminares de una Semi6tica Juridica," pp. 88-90.
73The formulation of this point also treats the question of would become more complicated when we take
the performative juridical act. See "Preliminares de una
Semi6tica Juridica," p. 92; "La Apertura," p. 25 ff.; and
Preliminares de una semiotica descriptiva de la significacion juridica,
p. 79 ff.
ROQUE CARRION-WAM
NL [ social world ]
social-individual events
Now, these components of NL do not appear
as "external referents" to our understanding. Its
mode of appearance is a discursive linguistic
structure of various topoi; that is to say, the uni-
verse of NL (social world: individual-social
events) is a discursive-linguistic organization:
religious discourse, ethical discourse, political
discourse, economic discourse, etc. All of these
discourses claim to "say" something about this
same universe. This discursive organization of
the NL universe is called the Semantic Ideolog-
ical Universe (SIU). Thus a more extensive for-
mulation of the previous scheme would be as
follows:
SIU [(NL : social world /\ individual
social events)]
In what sense is the semantic universe of the
NL "ideological?" In the sense that the SU of
the NL is oriented towards this or that form of value
organization which is assumed by the NL. 74 Now,
since the SIU is constituted by a group of lin-
guistic discursive structures which we identify as
microsemantic universes (MSU), the SIU
acquires a formulation of this form:
SIU (MSU I + MSU 2 + MSU 3 ••• MSU n )
in which every single MSU corresponds to a
linguistic discursive structure. To determine the
form of the value organization (that is to say, the
ideology) of the SIU, an analysis of the totality
of MSUs will be required. This fact alone jus-
tifies the inter-semiotic task that must be
accomplished.
It is now possible to describe the relationships
between an SIU and a JLD with greater preci-
sion, since we have acquired a greater knowledge
of the organization of the SIU. These relation-
ships are expressed in Figure 3.
Starting from this scheme we can assert that
the SIU is projected in theJLD; but the scheme
"These formulations are aimed at making the writings quoted
here more explicit and clear.
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LAW) 595
JLD (b)
MSU, MSU,
prohi bi t (p)
MSU 2 MSU 2 SIU -i> (EM/DID) ~permit(per)-i>
require(r)
SIU MSU 3 MSU 3 JLD ("n" msu)
in which ~ indicates the isotopic relationship;
-i> indicates "produce"; and / is the symbol for
disjunction.
MSU n
Figure 3 Diagram of the semantic (MSU) transference. E. Production of the ]uridical
]urisprudential Discourse (UD)
Keeping in mind the previous schemes of JLD
into account that theJLD has a G 2 separate from production, the production of the JJD follows
its S2 (they are not mutually exclusive, although these steps:
they may be contradictory in some cases) and
to that extent, the semantic universe of the JLD (a) [NL (GI 1\ SI) - P (AI CM) -i> JLD
is composed of "n" MSUs that are isotopic in (G 2 1\ S2)]
relation to the MSU of the SIU, but not iso- (b) NL = SIU
morphic. A fundamental difference between the (c) SIU -i> (EM/DID) ~ (P.PER.R.) -i> JLD
MSUs of the SIU from those of theJLD is that ("n" msu)
the MSUs of the JLD are coated by a modal (d) a JJD is defined in relationship with (a) as
network whose opera tors (calIed deon tics in follows:
modal logic) orient the JLD in such a way that
a particular JLD can be defined in terms of the
semantic universe, as the "specific form" of the
ideology in relation to the SIU. 7,
To complete the description of the production which means: a secondary authority (A 2 ) (in
of the JLD (in relation to an SIU) we must add relation to a primary authority AI which takes
that the SIU immediate and relative to a JLD is part in the production of JLD) produces, thanks
not the SIU in itself (in its "original expres- to its change-maker (CM), aJJD which is made
sion"), but that in the production of aJLD this u p (:) of a Grammar 3 (in rela tion to the
has, as does an SIU, a characteristic linguistic Grammar 2 of the JLD), and (S), a Semantic2
discursive expression that is the Exposition of plus (+) a (I), an added (or confirmed, as we
Motives (EM) that usually precedes the creation will see later) semantic element that represents
of a JLD. And in the cases in which the EM is the "social event" that gives rise to the produc-
not produced, the relative SIU (isotopic) to a tion of a JJD; or (I) a Semantic3 different from
JLD will be the Dominant Ideological Discourse the Semantic 2 JI of the JJD itself and from the
(DID) that prevails in the SIU (NL). In this Semantic 2 of the JLD. In this scheme the two
way we may reformulate the scheme in Figure steps in the production of a JJD are indicated:
3 in this way: (a) the process of production proper, which
implies the transforming action of A 2 (A 2 CM)
and the jurisprudential refiection 76 in the constitu-
(a)
tion of the sentence in which a given "social
prohibit(p)
event,,77 is either incorporated into or rejected
SIU [(msu, + msu 2 + ... msu,,)] <E-permit(per)~
require(r) from the SU of the JLD; and (b) the stage of
JDL [(msu, + msu 2 + ... msu,,)] 76In this summary we use the expression "jurisprudential
reflection" to indicate that act of sentencing (the action of
judging by ajudge).
77"Social Event" is a -generic expression to refer to "confticts
">Preliminares de una semi6tica jUrZdica, p. 85. of interest" and to cases 01' "pure law."
596 ROQUE CARRION-WAM
the "creation" of a new MSU that is incorpo-
ra ted into the SU oftheJLD, which is identified,
within the scheme, with S3' by virtue of the judi-
cial sentence OJD).
The A 2 must confirm or reject that "social
event" Xis included in the MSUs of theJLD. 78
But another case arises in which the "creative"
jurisprudential reftection, which affirms that the
"social event" X must be incorporated into the
MSUs of the JLD's SU even though that par-
ticular "social event" had heretofore been dis-
carded as an MSU of the JLD. It follows that
the creation of a JJD supposes a process of pro-
duction and veri.fication.
F. The Grammar of
]uridical Discourse
Up to this point we have only attempted to
describe the semantic element of juridical dis-
course (both the JLD and the JJD); it is now
necessary to point out the grammar of the JD as
well. Here we must understand grammar in a
larger sense than that given to it by linguistics,
but as the same time more in line with the JD
phenomenon. By grammar of the JD, we must
understand a set of rules (some of which are
explicit and compelling, others rooted in custom)
for the written enunciation of theJD, and which
are defined with the following elements:
(a) it is an explicit grammar in comparison to other gram-
mars of different objects (social semiotic signs); (b) it is con-
structed, that is to say, the enunciation of the juridical
statements requires given conditions for the creation of its
grammar; (c) it is a grammar imbued with aperformative
character that creates semiotic objects by institutingjuridical
statements; (d) the created juridical statements manifest
themselves through a modal network that goes from the
institution of qualifying statements in which the say-so of
the legislator (enunciator) is identified with the existence of
the statement which institutes (defines them in their being)
the ')uridical objects"; (e) the created juridical (semiotic)
objects require a field of action in which they unfold; this
will be determined by the functional statements that deter-
mine the sphere of the maker of the created discursive objects;
(f) the "functional statements" are coated by a modal net-
work whose linguistic manifestation is recognized by deontic
expressions or operators: prohibited, permitted, required or
their equivalents. The "functional statements" are not only
those which indicated the (legal) method of appearance of
juridical signs (commercial society, creation oflaws) but also
the subset of statements known as "the discourse pertaining
7"This is the stage of the interpretation of law.
to a triallaw" that establishes the conditions of valid devel-
opment (legal truth) in the application of the first type of
functional statements. 79
The elements of theJJD grammar are: (a), (b),
(c) only in the case of the creation of S3 in the
process of the production of JJD; (f) rules the
JJD with more force because it is both a fun-
damental formal feature that limits the meaning
of the "truth of the facts" in the world of law.
G. Conditions of the Production
of]uridical Discourse
From the point of view of this semiotics of
juridical discourse, the conditions of the pro-
duction of a JD is the
set of elements that intervene in the juridicallinguistic com-
munication. These conditions will be understood in their
linguistic structure. This is important in order to differentiate
the exterior social conditions in which this juridicallinguistic
communication is developed and acquires social significance.
Methodologically, we assume that the social features should
be detected and ought to be described in the linguistic struc-
ture; only in this way can we confirm and control the ele-
ments that will allow us to reconstruct the effectively
participating "subjects" who, in effect, participate In
communication. 80
In a first level of analysis theses conditions of
production are those which govern the juridical
communication. Between the destinator (Al) of the
JLD and the destination, the "subject of law",
there exists a functional juridical communication,
even though in point of fact, there is no actual
communication. Why is this the case? Because
Al is a destinator whose existence precedes its
concrete anthropological appearance (that is to
say, the Al of the JLD exists only as explicit
"will" in the JLD proper). Because of this, it is
possible to affirm that "the destinatar subject exists
as a linguistic construction prior to the existence
of the real subject."8l We must now define the
destination. To whom is (AlCM) directed? The
same thing occurs here as with the destinator,
since the destinator has "a semiotic existence
79Preliminares de. una semirftica juridica, pp. 90-91.
8°Ibid., p. 99.
8IIbid., p. 101. "We call operation of depersonalization the semiotic
operation which consists in building the destinator 'subject'
(al cm) independent of its concrete anthropological
manifestations. "
 VENEZUELA (SEMIOTICS OF LAW)
prior to the anthropological subject," and only
insofar as the juridical communication is in fact
put into effect (in the case of the JJD) will it be
possible to clarify the "destination subject." At
the level of communication of the JLD, the des-
tination is "an empty space, an eventuality that
will be realized and defined and will be deter-
mined as the authentie decodifier destination only
in the process of communication of the JJD.,,82
It is precisely in the analysis of the condition of
the production of JD in terms of conditions of
communication of JLD andJJD that we find the
dichotomy between the (constructed) subjects 01
law and the real subjects that only exist in the SU
and in the JLD inasmuch as the JJD recognizes
them as subjects 011aw. In this type of analysis,
we can recognize very important consequences
for the theory of law.
H. A }uridical Pragmatics
The meaning of a "juridical pragmatics" as
put forth by this semiotic of juridical discourse
is a litde different from the "pragmatics" of Mor-
ris's semiotics. The question that requires us to
enter onto the pragmatic level is the following:
to what extent do the socially operating elements
condition and succeed in introducing this proc-
ess: NL ~ JLD ~ JJD into their representative
semantic universe?83
A position coherent with the basic postulates
of this juridical semiotic demands "a subject the-
ory that covers the modes of expression signifi-
cant of itself," and it must therefore "postulate
the constitution of a semantic pragmatics." That
is to say, it must "emphasize the fact that sig-
nification has the pragmatic level as a constit-
uent element of its process. But such a pragmatics
must not consider the concrete historical 'data'
as faCts independent of the linguistic sign."84 Thus
we may assert that "the social praxis in which
something can signify can only be apprehended
with rigor in the effort of a rational reconstruc-
tion of this social practice of signification, through
its language .... ": with this it is a question of
looking at "the deep relation between subject-
language-discourse-action .... In this sense it
82Ibid.
83Ibid., p. 103.
84Ibid.
597
is possible to say that pragmatics will cover all
the levels of the constitution of meaning, since
human social action is present in each and every
one of them.,,85 In addition, we will also have
to account for "the fact that there is no "semantic
experience" without the identifying sign and that
it is through this sign-a discursive linguistic
sign in our case-that it becomes possible to
establish certain levels of study that will premit
the reconstruction of meaning."86
I. The Semiotics of }uridical
Discourse and }uridical
Information Science
This type of juridical semiotics will permit us
to gain ground in the investigation of one of the
most difficult problems affecting juridical infor-
mation science: the analysis of "content". In order
to do this, "an interdisciplinary perspective for
research between juridical semiotics (linguistic)
andjuridical information science"87 is necessary.
Specifically, we observe that "automatie docu-
mentation must face much more difficult prob-
lems" when it is a matter of information in which
the "signification" of the juridicallinguistic uni-
verse must be clarified. 88
}. The Semiotics of}uridical
Discourse and Philosophy of Law
Throughout these investigations we have
emphasized topics that have traditionally been
treated by the philosophy of law. It is obvious
that just as these topics have come up in the
semiotic analysis oftheJD, thejuridical semiotic
approach would permit us to arrange them and
to treat them with greater rigor and precision.
A semiotics of law developed in this way would
be an excellent propedeutics to the philosophical
problem of law. This also allows us to see that
this semiotics-understood as a general theory-
can be regarded as an ORGANON. In this sense,
juridical semiotics must be used as a propedeutic
85Ibid., p. 104.
86Ibid.
8'''Semi6tica Juridica e Informätica Juridica, p. 55.
88 Preliminares de una Semi6tica Descriptiva, p. 48.
598 ROQUE CARRION-WAM
instrument for developing a systematic aware-
ness of the central problems of the philosophy
of law. 89
v. Bibliography
Bayitch, S. A. "La Codificacion en el Derecho Civil, y en el
Common Law." Boletin Mexicano de Derecho Comparado
(Universidad Autonoma de Mexico), 3, No. 7 (Jan.-Apr.
1970).
Cairns, Huntington. Legal Philosophy lrom Plato to Hegel. 4th
ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
Carrion-Wam, Roque. "Elementos de Semiotica Juridica.
Anuario, Institute de Derecho Comparado, Facultad de
Derecho, Universidad de Carabobo. Valencia, Venezuela.
(1976-77), pp. 261-324.
- - - . "SemioticaJuridica e InformaticaJuridica," Revista
Latinoamericana de Informatica Juridica. (Valencia, Vene-
zuela: Instituto de Derecho Comparado, Facultad de
Derecho, Universidad de Carabobo), I (1977),55-62.
- - - . "La Apertura del Signo Juridico." In Historia, Pro-
blemay Promesa, Homenaje aJorge Basadre. Vol. 2. Eds. Pease
et al. Lima: Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru, 1978,
pp. 17-43.
- - - . Preliminares de una Semiotica Descriptiva de la Significacion
Juridica. Valencia, Venezuela: Oficina Latinoamericana de
InvestigacionesJuridicas y Sociales, Facultad de Derecho,
Universidad de Carabobo, 1979.
- - - . "Preliminares de una Semiotica Jurzdica." Revista de Cien-
eias Sociales (Valparaiso, Chile: Facultad de Ciencias Jur-
idicas, Economicas y Sociales), 5 (Second semester, 1979),
pp. 67-119.
- - - . "Semiotica Juridiea." In Enciclopedia Juridica OMEBA,
V. Appendix. Buenos Aires; Deskril, in press.
Delgado Ocando, J. M. Prolegomenos para una TeorZa de la
Valoraeion JurZdica. Maracaibo, Venezuela: U niversidad dei
Zulia, Direccion de Cultura, 1958.
- - - . "Apuntes para una Teoria de la V_aloracion Juri-
dica." Anexo 3, in Una Introduccion a la Etica Social Des-
89Ibid.
eriptiva. Universidad del Zulia, Facultad de Derecho, 1966a,
pp. 215-236. _
- - - . Una Introdueeion a la Etiea Social Descriptiva. Mara-
caibo, Venezuela: Universidad del Zulia, Facultad de
Derecho, 1966b.
- - - . Normas, Lenguaje y Verdad. Centro de Estudios de
Filosofia del Derecho. Facultad de Derecho. Cuadernos
de Trabajo, 3. Maracaibo, Venezuela: Universidad del
Zulia, 1973.
- - - . Codigo Civil y Analisis &tructural. Centro de Estudios
de Filosofia del Derecho. Facultad de Derecho. Cuadernos
de Trabajo, 6. Maracaibo, Venezuela: U niversidad dei
Zulia, 1974a.
- - - . Ficciones y Presunciones en et C6digo Civil Venezolano.
Centro de Estudios de Filosofia del Derecho. Facultad de
Derecho, 1974b.
- ' - - . Problemas Fundamentales de Metodologia de la Cieneia dei
Dereeho. Centro de Estudios de Filosofia del Derecho.
Facultad de Derecho. Maracaibo, Venezuela: Universidad
del Zulia, 1974c.
- - - . Consideraciones sobre los Elementos Semi6ticos dei Derecho.
Centro de Estudios de Filosofia dei Derecho. Faeultad de
Dereeho. Cuadernos de Trabajo, 9. Maraeaibo, Vene-
zuela: Universidad del Zulia, 1975.
- - - . Notas para una Teoria de la Superestructura Juridiea.
Maracaibo, Venezuela: Instituto de Filosofia del Dereeho,
Universidad del Zulia, 1977a.
- - - . Textos para un Analisis Semi6tieo de La Ilicitud. Mara-
caibo, Venezuela: Centro de Estudios de Filosofia del
Dereeho, 1977b.
- - - . Hipo!esis para una ,/ilosofia antihegem6nica det Derecho y
det Estado. Coleeeion de Cursos y Lecciones, 6. Maracaibo,
Venezuela: Instituto de Filosofia dei Dereeho, Universi-
dad del Zulia, 1978.
. . ' - - . Curso de Filosofia dei Derecho Actual. Coleeeion de Cur-
sos y Leeeiones, 11. Maraeaibo, Venezuela: Centro de
Estudios de Filosofia dei Derecho, U niversidad del Z ulia.
Fuller, L. L. Anatomia det Dereeho. Caracas: Monte Avila Edi-
tores, 1969.
Hart, H.L.A. The Coneept 01 Law. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1961.
Hook, Sidney, ed. Law and Philosophy: A Symposium. New
York: New York University Press, 1964.
Merryman, J. H. La Tradici6nJuridica Romano-Canonica. Mex-
ieo: Fondo de Cultura Eeonomiea, 1971.
 CHAPTER 27
Semiotics in Venezuela
A Critical Revision of the Notion of the Unconscious
and Its Effects in the Second Semiology Field
Hugo McCormick
I. Introduction
I intend in this chapter to examine Jacques
Lacan's theory of the supremacy of the signifier,
because it represents a point of convergence for
today's semiolinguistic, psychoanalytic, philo-
sophical, and epistemological studies. The the-
oretical, philosophical, and ideological aspects
of the different positions of present-day semiot-
ics, or "secondary semiology,"l cannot be prop-
erly discussed without taking a look at the
inftuence it has received from Lacanian work.
Lacanianism in turn has also generated a set of
theoretical elements bearing on die statement of
the language problematic in general.
The Lacanian perspective, more so than any
other trend in psychoanalysis (e.g., Kleinism,
All quotations have been freely translated from Spanish by
the author.
'Hugo McCormick, "EI significante imaginario de Metz 0
la oscilacion de la primera a la segunda semiologia," in
Video Forum, Ciencias y Artes de la Comunicacion Audio-
visual, No. 9 (Caracas: Fundacion Academia Nacional de
Ciencias y Artes dei Cine y la Television, 1980), pp. 223-
227.
Hugo Me Cormiek • Calle 47, no. 18-58, Barquisimeto,
Edo. Lara, 3001 Venezuela.
599
ego psychology), provides reftection on anti con-
sideration of a structural theory oflanguage, and
of the implicit epistemological assumptions which
lie at the heart of post-Saussurean linguistic
structuralism. One of Lacan's merits has been
to strip psychoanalytic theory of statements
derived from the genetic-evolutionary theories of
Abraham, Numberg, and others, which enclosed
the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious
within biological dimensions; (see aspects related
to the psychogenesis of psychopathological cases,
Kleinian constitutional envy, etc.).
It is not so much a matter of correcting the
Lacanian theory of the signifier, which regards
linguistic analysis 2 as the appropriate method for
studying the unconscious as a semiotic system,
meaning by this that the structure of the uncon-
scious is the structure of language;3 it is rather
a matter of supporting the critical confrantation
of Freudian theory and the complexity of the
2Charles Melman, "Retorno a Freud enJacques Lacan," in
Las flrmaciones dei inconsciente. (Buenos Aires: Nueva Vision,
1970), pp. 37-48.
'Jacques Lacan, "Funcion y campo de la palabra y dellen-
guaje en psicoanalisis," in Escritos I (Mexico: Siglo XXI,
1971), pp. 59-139.
600 HUGO McCORMICK
unconscious processes, of confronting the theo-
retical dimension in Freud's work which is con-
cerned with working out the signification of the
discursive subject, which has, so far, not been
done.
We are trying to introduce a critical revision
of the Lacanian concept of the signifier viewed
in elose relation with the unconscious processes
of signification in the psychic subject. I believe
that the limitations of the abovementioned the-
ory are evident from the fact that it does not
account for the existence of the semantic com-
ponent in the discursive subject. In spite of their
theoretical character/ with the emphasis on "a
return to Freud," Lacanian writings end up
avoiding the problematic 01 historical production in the
discursive semantics rif the libidinal subject. In order
to explain and correctly und erstand this posi-
tion, we must begin our essay by delimiting as
a problematic the supreme position of the sig-
nifier. For this we will use the epistemological
notion of problematic mentioned above. A
"problematic"s is a system of concepts and their
combinations, which have to do with specific
problems of a scientific theory, a philosophy, or
even an ideology. These problems are elements
to which is applied transformative operations of
the respective praxis: 6 the problem of knowledge
of the unconscious, of the conscious in reference
to our critical considerations, of the signified
(starting from Lacan's structuralist concept). As
a result, we will say that a given inquiry in the
semiotic field corresponds to a given problematic
to the extent that its problems, its way of han-
dling them, and the results obtained may pos-
sibly be combined to form such a problematic.
Such an inquiry has to start from suppositions
for or against certain major lines, and to obey
certain priorities as registered in that problematic.
4There is a declaration by Jacques Alain-Miller, Lacan's
disciple, that sums up the theoretical character: "Psycho-
analysis is possible only if the unconscious is structured as
a language." In Cinco con.ferencias caraquenas sohre Lacan (Cara-
cas: Ateneo, 1980), pp.7-27.
5Louis Althusser, La revolucion teorica de Marx (Mexico: Siglo
XXI, 1972).
61 understand by "praxis," in general, every transformational
process of given or determined law-governed material; such
transformation takes place through a specific task that uses
specific production means. Praxis, in historical materialism,
means an activity with a product as areal and, therefore,
a dynamic space and as the materialization of a heteroge-
neous contradiction. In it, production of signification proc-
esses are spread out in their complexity.
The identification of the problematic has to
allow for the definition of the new knowledge
that the semiotic doctrine will contribute, such
as the signified's supremacy, its definition, its
specific fields, the types of modifications that it
introduces, the new investigative space that it
opens up, and the previously known space that
it encompasses.
11. The Problematic of the
Signifier in the Semiotic Field
The unity of the sign as the fusion of two faces,
as originally stated in Saussurean linguistics, is
represented as the relation of signifier and sig-
nified: sr/sd. Lacan intercepts the linguistic algo-
rithm as follows: sr/sd, also known as S/s. From
being a nexus or reunion, as in Saussure, it
becomes a line of separation in Lacan. He insists
on taking the line in the S/s alogirithm "Iiterally"
as a "line resistant to signification." This trans-
lates the merely formal function of the signifi-
cant-which is red~cible to combinatory laws
(such as the composition of differential elements
according to a elosed order of rules )-into some-
thing irreducible to laws of "content" or sense.
This is to say that the laws of the combination
of signifiers are, in themselves and lacking any
sense, the ones that determine the genesis of the
signifier.
Speaking of the structural conditions of the
signifier's function, Lacan says:
In Lacanian theory the signifier becomes the correlate of the
stable categories in Saussurean langue and synchrony. The
signified remains on the side of the fluent parole and diach-
rony, that is, through "the concretely pronounced discourses. ",
It is the formal play of the signifier that rules
the set of signifieds; the langue rules the parole.
Lacanian analysis leads to the supremacy of sig-
nifiers.
We turn the notion of the problematic of the
signifier (in the Lacanian structuralist concep-
tion) into an epistemological category. We use
it to delimit the theoretical field of semiotic stud-
ies whose characteristic is the incidence of
Lacanian observations that revolve around the
'Jacques Lacan, "La instancia de la letra en el inconsciente
o la razon desde Freud/ in Escritos, pp. 179-213. See note
3.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
processes and the signifying chain. Such a notion
thus becomes a theoretical support to authors
such as Kristeva, Baudry, Goux, and Metz, and
it also works as an imported metatheoretical
articulator 8 for a variety of fields of linguistics
(Milner), philosophy (Tort, Wahl), and logic
(Badiou, Miller), in which the overly positive
estimation of the signifying depth in semiological
processes was incorporated as a pertinent prop-
osition in their respective investigations.
This viewpoint coincides with that of Nancy
and Lacoue-Labarthe in that, instead of the
supremacy of the signifier, we should speak of
the autonomy of the signifier to designate the
propositions that in Lacanian writings have to
do with Saussurean linguistics of the sign to pre-
vent psychoanalysis from becoming some kind
of "letter seien ce. "
III. From Sign to Discourse
Post-structuralist linguistic developments have
permitted us to overcome and in so me cases to
restate the limitations derived from sign theory,
and they have taken us into the domain of dis-
course theory. They provide a passage from the
space of the sign to that of discursive practices.
The "first semiology," identified with a formalist
conception of the linguistic sign, has been dis-
placed. Production operations in the sense of
semiotic practices have been reduced to the
binary structural model and its basic cate-
gories-signifier/signified, langue/parole, deno-
tation/ connotation, syntagm/paradigm-which
takes us to a "second semiology" located next to
textual analysis in enunciatioll operations of cre-
ative aspects of the langue.
Saussurean linguistics practically eliminated
the semantic question due to its notion of the sign
as a biphasic entity. Of the two faces that make
up the sign (sound and sense), only sound appears
to have been studied at length in the Gours and
immediately after it. Phonology emerged as the
post-Saussurean linguistics dedicated to the study
of units which are merely distinctive and without
BThe word metalheory is used as a synonym for epistemology
meaning broadly an approach to every existing knowledge
about semiotic theories, their controversies, and the critical
revision of the analysis of the theoretical articulation basis
in each one of them.
601
meaning. The notion of the langue as a system
of formal differences was taken as a methodo-
logical and epistemological inheritance by the
phonological work of Troubetzkoy and Jakob-
son, which in turn gave birth to the field of the
so-called linguistic structuralism adopted by
Levi-Strauss and Lacan. Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis was born as a structuralist conception of the
signifier. It was built upon the epistemological
net of the Saussurean sign, which was later con-
tinued as structural phonology as weil as worked
on at length by the Hjelmslevian formalization
of the Copenhagen Circle.
IV. Semiotic, Semantics
We believe that the model of the sign is pres-
ently undergoing an intense process of critical
revision, and also that epistemological co nd i-
tions different from those under which the model
had originally been conceived have been set in
motion. A critique of the Saussurean model of
the internal state of the sign must inftuence the
metatheoretical need to reformulate the status
of semanties, to discuss and rethink the subor-
dination of the signification of value that took
place in Saussure's work. This subordination
allowed Saussure to think of language as a sys-
tem in which linguistic value pertained to langue
whereas parole pertained to the signified 9 and the
subject's intervention. As· a result, we see that
the problem of signification, which is external
to the homogeneous depth of langue, has no place
in Saussurean theoretical space in relation to
parole.
The langue/parole dichotomy has undergone
reformulation. Mention should be made here of
some of the pioneering reftections of Benveniste
that appeared in his "Semiology of the Langue,'dU
with regard to the two manners 01 signification that
language uses and his criticism of their reduc-
tion, by some authors, to what he calls "the
semiotic manner." In the same work, Benveniste
asks two questions after inquiring into the exter-
nal characteris tics (opera tional mann er and
91t also appears in Lacan (pp. 145-178) when he opposed
the signified to langue or the spoken chain. "The second net
of language is the diachronie set of discourses. "
IOEmile Benveniste, Problemas de lingüislica general 11 (Mexico:
Siglo XXI, 1977), pp. 47-69.
602 HUGO McCORMICK
validity field) and the internaiones (nature of
the signs and functioning type) that make up a
semiological system: (1) Can all semiological
systems be reduced to units? and (2) Are such
units signs within the systems in which they exist?
Benveniste answers that langue is the only system
which can be analyzed into discrete units which
are at the same time signs. N evertheless, the
manner in which langue signifies does not end
with the "semiotic manner." Language has
another manner of signifying which takes place
in the sign-unit. Each sign starts to operate out
of the network of opposite relationships which
it maintains with other signs and in which the
delimiting oppositions are the on es that define
and constitute it. Its value is generic and con-
ceptually general without the possibility of sig-
nification in particular. The only question that
the unity of the sign poses is that of recognition
by means of description of its differential traces.
That which in semantics designates the manner
of signifying peculiar to dis course and its differ-
ential traces, the sign designates as the signifying
manner 01 discourse and 01 the sentence. With the sen-
tence we leave the domain of formal
relationships 11 to enter that pertaining to mean-
ing, which is related to the body of history and
the desiring body of the subject. The sentence
is not just a set of morphological signs, and the
simple concatenation of words is not what pro-
duces meaning. The exclusion of the proble-
matic of the sentence l2 in the Gours is revealing,
and so is its exclusion from Lacanian theorizing.
The sentence had been "excluded" from Saus-
surean themes as weil as from Lacanian thought
because it was considered to belong to the world
of parole and not to the privileged category of
langue.
The categotematic level or sentence level
introduces "fractures" with reference to the pho-
nemic level. The sentence takes us to that other
world where linguistic matter exceeds the limits
of the relationships between libidinal subjects
participating in the interlocutory act and its daily
praxis. "The sentence is an undefined creation, an
unlimited variety which is life itself to language
11In traditional meaning, the word form opposes content or
sense. Saussure talks here of expression as opposed to content,
form is therefore the language structure not semantically
interpreted which opposes sense or signification.
"Thereby excluding the transformational and situational
activities of the subject.
in action.,,13 This turns the word into a sort of
pivot or enclave between form and sense. If we
look at it from the "Iower" level, the word is
formed by phonemes and, if looked at from the
level of the sentence, the word fa ces outwards,
toward the "real," toward the texture of a dis-
course open to a web of relationships and social
conditions, toward the discourse "situation." The
langue/parole dichotomy peculiar to (Saussu-
rean, Levi-Straussian, Lacanian) structuralism
becomes contradictory to the extent that lan-
guage, structure/happening, word, and des ire
mutally overlap in discourse. Therefore, signi-
fication, besides being considered, as in tradi-
tional semantic and structuralist theories, apart
of linguistics, as are phonology, morphology, and
syntax, should also constitute the point at which
various contradictions of linguistics meet and
interact. As a point of intersection, signification
is related to practical social sciences, such as
Freudian readings of formations of the uncon-
scious, as weil as to linguistics.
That part which is excluded by semiotic for-
malism from language is what is ins er ted by
semantics. That is, reference to the world and
the subject, the discursive subject, the subject
and other significatives to the his tory of inter-
subjectivity (not in the ingenuine sense of a sim-
ple chronology of events), and the particularity
and polysemy. Faced with the closed and homo-
geneous register of the sign (as pure equiva-
lency), the space of discursive practice is opened
to the heterogeneity of the "real.,,14 It is by means
of dis course that the world becomes language.
This doubly interactive articulation is known as
dialectic structuration 01 signification, or semiotic-
semantic, which makes possible the understand-
ing of the modeling and interpretative character
of language systems and also the mediative
insertion of social praxis in the text ure of dis-
course.
v. Return to Freud or Turn
Freud Around?
Lacan proposes areturn to Freud by reading
Freudian works. He decided to start from lin-
guistics in order to review the psychoanalytical
I:lEmile Benveniste, see note 10. Emphasis added.
"And is opened to risk in the theoretical lines of the first
semiology and to an extent also of the second semiology.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
theory of the unconscious and create a funda-
mental epistemological statement: The structur-
ation of the unconscious is a language. In Lacan's
key essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the
Unconscious," he writes:
I excuse myself for appearing to deeipher Freud's text, but
it is not only to show what we gain simply by not amputating
it but to loeate, over never revoked, fundamental and pri-
mary referenee points, what happened to psyehoanalysis.
He continues, "From the beginning, the con-
stituent role of the signifier was ignored in the
statutes that Freud set for the unconscious at
first hand and in the most precise formal man-
ner."15 These quotations show that Lacan him-
self stresses the theoretical and epistemological
consequences which his personal conception of
Freud's theoretical and elinical works have given
to modern psychoanalysis.
Lacanian theory states that signifiers are
engraved in the unconscious but stripped of any
signification, that is that they are unconsciously
engraved in letters, in pure signifiers. Signifiers
maintain agame of relationships in a network
of differences that form an articulated chain and
relegate signifieds to their theoretical formula-
tion. Signifieds which come from the subject's
personal his tory obtain their coherence or struc-
turation only und er the determination of signi-
fiers. We must not forget that Lacan's explanation
for his return to Freud has been derived from an
epistemologically compromised conception of a
formal linguistics of the sign.
VI. The Forgotten "Other
Scene" in Freudian Theory
Freud's work is full of constant allusions to
the importance of the signified, of signifieds, or
the consideration of a semantic dimension in the
unconscious. A sympathetic and attentive read-
ing of Freud should lead us to think that, besides
the existence of the game of signifiers in the
unconscious processes, there exists a significa-
tional field to be considered.
There is a continuous search for rationality in
the activity of the processes in the psychic sub-
ject, so that the most relevant procedure is inter-
pretation. Interpretation is the heart of Freudian
IC'Jaeques Laean, pp. 59-139. See note 3.
603
doctrine and technique. Psychoanalysis could be
characterized by interpretation, or by making
evident discourse's latent significations in the
unconscious subject within the space of the psy-
choanalytical session. According to Freud, there
is an implicit unconscious thoughe 6 with its own
verbal surface which has to be trans la ted into
the language of secondary processes by means
of agame of equivalencies and correspondences
and such a language is what corresponds to
structuralist and generative linguistics. In
Chapter 4 of The Interpretation of Dreams, 17 which
is so dear to the Lacanian theory as it reconfirms
the phonematic structure of the unconscious,
Freud says, "Notice only that our doctrine does
not stand in the consideration of the manifested
content of the dream but makes reference to the
thought content that is understood from the dreams
through interpretation" or "Did anyone ever try
to interpret a dream to discover its latent thought
content?" Both quotations emphasize what Freud
discpvers to be specific and original in his elin-
ical-theoretical findings.
If we look for a elinical example developed by
Freud about oneiric material, such as his auto-
analysis of dreams in the botanical monograph
(also used by authors elose to Lacanianism, such
as Leelaire), we see that he ends up decanting
little by little the profound sense of such a dream.
It has to do with the incest theme in his relation
to the mother, the symbolic debt to the father,
and a determining repressed meaning funda-
mental to the psychodynamism of such oneiric
productions. The designation of the pathology
cannot be of the order of the signifier. The
pathology is on the side of the signified.
In Psychopathology of Eueryday Lift and The Joke
and Its Relationship to the Unconscious, books which
constitute a widening of the psychoanalytic per-
spective, Freud not only studies hysterical and
neurotic symptoms and dreams but also the daily
events of the unconscious. The common denom-
inator of the subsequent widening of the psy-
choanalytic field is the confirrnation that none
of our psychic productions are anarchie (symp-
toms, dreams, fantasies, lapsus) but are imbued
with meaning by the unconscious and an inher-
ent mechanism-repression. Daily phenomena
IbSigmund Freud, "Relaeion del ehiste eon los sueiios y 10
ineonseiente," in Obras camp/etas, Vol. I, seetion 6 (Madrid:
Biblioteea Nueva, 1973).
l7Sigmund Freud, Obras camp/etas, Vol. I
604 HUGO McCORMICK
such as temporary forgetfulness of words or
familiar names, forgetting one's purpose, mis-
takes in dis course, and so forth carry a signified
ignored by the subject hirnself, but which can
be deciphered by analytical work.
In 1898 Freud published a small essay called
"The Psychic Mechanism for the Forgetting
Curve" (later added, in 1901, to Psychopathology
01 Everyday Lifi), where he analyzed the personal
forgetting of a first name. The name forgotten
by Freud was Signorelli and Freild not only
showed the games of substitution of the signifier
but emphasized the importance the dynamics of
the signifieds 18 and the determination of repressed
thoughts around the themes of death and sex-
uality. In this way, Freud repressed his initial
intention of describing some Turkish costumes
and was sidetracked from pursuing the lines of
association that could lead directly to the signifieds
of "death and sexuality." That which Freud
wanted to "forget" through the repressive proc-
ess was displaced to the name of the painter
Signorelli. Freud explains that
what Iwanted to [orget was quite different [rom the name
of the painter of Orvieto's frescoes; what Iwanted to forget
had to do with the name in an associative connection, and
thus my will missed its target and I [orgot the name against
my will while my intention was to [orget the other thing.
Freud also makes other statements that are not
isolated from his global context of inquiry, "The
name of psychoanalysis cannot be applied to this
case, but to the procedures adheres the intensity
of the transference used against the resistances."
This quotation is from the group of essays which
is known as Freud's technical writings. In those
writings, he emphasizes that the clinical session
with the patient is filled with the problem of
resistance or "that which opposes the emergence
01 thought contents and unconscious ideas." This state-
ment is a thread of thought that appears sys-
tematically in Freud's writings, from his early
work conducted with Breuer dealing with the
psychotherapy of hysteria, to the investigation
of psychoanalytic techniques proper. I think that
some of Lacan's basic statements do not agree
with the Freudian ideas presented in the para-
graphs above. Rather than going back to the
18Personal communication, Hugo Bleichmar.
sources," Lacan tried to rectify Freud's state-
ments by saying that it is the signifier which is
repressed, even though Lacan admits that "going
back to Freudian text, on the contrary, shows
the absolute coherence of his technique and his
findings."19 Nevertheless, Lacan ends up dis-
qualifying the unconscious significative aspect
by pointing out that "the contents of the uncon-
scious, in their disappointing ambiguity, do not
give us any truth more consistent in the subject
than what is immediate.,,20 I think that it is one
thing to denounce what is illusory in apparent
signification and another to refuse to consider
that unconscious discourse gives meaning to the
processes of the psychic subject's constitution as
far as concerns the revelation of the sense and
signifieds independent of the imagination of the
conscious subject. That is to say, even if it is
understood that the rebirth of meaning and its
effect take place due to the combination of the
formal order of the signifier, it is also true that
we get another specificity from the Freudian text's
other combinatory order, the repressed, as the
Freudian unconsciousness of the contents of con-
fEcting thoughts.
VII. The Dimension of the
Symbolic Function
In Lacanian theory, the symbolic order con-
stitutes the subject, and this constitution comes
from language. Thus, the structural apprehen-
sion of the unconscious dictates that man is
inhabited by the signifier. This is a similar con-
cept to the Levi-Straussian notion of structural
unconscious: men do not think up myths but
myths make their way to men. Even in Levi-
Straussian aesthetics, the notion of a "floating"
signifier as a source of art is connected to the
symbolic function. In structural anthropology,
the social structures of comrnunication (lan-
guage, marriage rules, economic relations, art,
science, religion, etc.) become true symbolic sys-
tems which "point to express certain aspects of
psychic reality and social reality and even more,
the relationships that those two kinds of reality
19Jacques Lacan, Escritos, pp. 59-139.
2°Ibid.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
maintain between themselves, and the symbolic
systems Wlt . h one anoth er. ,,21
ladmit that Lacan's ideas about psycho-
analysis and Levi-Strauss's about ethnology con-
tributed to the advancement of the various social
sciences and semiotic studies in general. They
placed the level of scientific work squarely within
the domain of symbolic function as it belongs to
the human subject, and the universality of which
brings cohesion and organization to every society
and culture. Thus, because of the structure of
linguistic signifiers in the formalist conception
of Levi-Strauss, the conscious appears "reduced
to a word by which a function is named: a spe-
cifically human symbolic function, no doubt, but
in all men it is reduced to a set of such laws.,,22
Also in Lacan we want to find the semiotic laws
that rule the unconscious, laws of syntax of a
linguistic nature.
Freud reminded us that mankind, from its
beginnings, has dreamed and that dre~~s a~e
the via regia of the unconscious, so that It IS SCl-
entifically legitimate to investigate the determin-
ing processes of its modes of functioning.
Therefore, I want to point out not only that the
laws about the supremacy of the signifier in the
linguistic subject constitute the universality of
the unconscious, but also that the human "spe-
eies" is identified in the repressed. Such formal
universality cannot be detached from the history
of the subject inscribed in the play of signifieds
within the universality of incest and tht oedipal
scenario. Within the codifying situation of the
oedipal space, the subject, on the basis of the
his tory of his history and by being submerged
in a "language bath," learns texts, discursive
transcodifications and significations due to the
impact of words. In this way, the biogeograph-
ical field is expanded to include cultural patterns
such as transcodifications from the parents.
Here we think it relevant to mention La
Rochefoucauld's famous quotation from his
Escrits, "Some people would never have fallen in
love if they had not heard about the existence
of love." Lacan claims that this quotation does
not make reference to the romantic notion of an
imaginary realization of love but rather is an
21Claude Levi-Strauss, "La eficacia simb6Iica," in Antropol-
ogfa estruetural (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1973), pp. 168-185.
22Ibid.
605
"authentie recognition of that which love owes
to the symbol and of that which the word con-
tributes to love." It is clear that the vision of
love is not given as a formal signifier but basi-
cally as the signified vehicle and generator of
semantic evocations and radiations.
VIII. Revision of the Role of
the Signifier in "The
Purloined Letter"
There are a number of reasons which lead us
to refer to Lacan's treatise on "The Purloined
Letter." On the one hand, there is Lacan's
emphasis on the importance of this treatise for
his conception of the symbolic order, together
with the multiple references to it by psychoana-
lysts who have adopted his views. Even if Lacan
had not published papers on literary criticism,
this treatise would have inftuenced literary semi-
otics. Lacan takes Poe's text as a model for the
signifier function of the unconscious. I think that
Lacan's statements are the interpretations of a
given stor/3 and, therefore, must be based on
the characteristics of that story; they only have
meaning in relation to it and in no way could
its interpretations express the nature of the sym-
bolic order under the conditions and manner of
its productions as Lacan pretends it does.
According to Lacan, Poe's text establishes the
supremacy of the signifier over the signified. He
argues that the plot puts in evidence the deter-
mination of each of the characters in relation to
the the letter. The games and movements are
organized from this perspective and those who
know the appearances involved in the plot do
not know the contents of the letter. Granted that
Poe's text unfolds in such a sequence that the
characters seem to be organized that way, the
essence of the story is nevertheless that a variety
of characters fight over a letter of which they
have no direct knowledge. We should conclude
that the "pure signifier" structures the uncon-
scious relationships, that the meaning is incom-
prehensible and, in the last instance, has no
meaning other than the lack of meaning. I t turns
out that, at the level of the explicitness of the
23Edgar Allan Poe, Cuentos I, trans. Julio Cortazar (Madrid:
Alianza, 1970).
606 HUGO McCORMICK

properties of what we have been told, text and developed by Lacan around the unconscious as
context 21, will not show the letter to be a "pure a combinatory of the signifying order became an
signifier." No doubt the contents of a letter or impartant semiological finding because it brought
writing have to be called "signifier" or "signifier to light the fact that there is a lawful order-the
material," in as much as its reading can produce order of signifiethe acts of the subject,
told, the letter is not presented in Poe as a sig- his destiny, his experiences, and his luck, are
nifier; it does not function as such. The letter "feIt" without the subject being aware of them.
has never been read in the story. It can be seen In the same way, we understand that there is
that to be a signifier here would be in the sense another unconscious lawfulness in action, that
pretended to be attributed to it, a meaning·dif- of the dimension of significatiün, the game of
ferent from the one on which the story is con- the signified, the articulation of the signifieds of
structed. The letter is, in the context of the story,
the unconscious psychism, and the signifier act-
that to which the signified-the confusion that ing as another type of combinatory of the uncon-
its presence produces in the Queen after the scious, the action of the chain of unconscious
King's entrance-can be attributed, the fact that organization of intra- and intersystematic inter-
its knowledge would jeopardize the lady. Even action: signifieds and signifiers, signifiers among
when the letter is a potential signifier, it does themselves, and the signifier in relationship to
not act as such, because no one will see it. How- the signified.
ever, we know quite well, and so do the char- The unconscious as language, as headquarters
acters, what the signified of the letter iso Its for the Other, is seen not only from the formal
content has a meaning which, if known, endan- structure of signifiers but also as implicating the
gers the Queen. The letter in Poe's text is not a pertinency of the existence of the acquisition of
"pure signifier" whose signified stays totally out- new meanings provided by familiar dis course and
side the story and our knowledge; in fact, it does which do not depend solelyon the immediate
not furiction as a semiolinguistic signifier. experiences from the outside warld. I am opposed
In conclusion, in "The Purloined Letter" the to trying to understanding the subject from the
story and the knowledge we have of it are struc- naive historicism of experiences subordinated to
tured by its signification and not by the orga- a chronology of clinical biographism. Words,
nization around the "pure signifier," or the letter.sentences, texts and semantic-discursive codifi-
We cannot say that this letter exposes, directly cation modes of "the real" have a hierarchy above
or indirectly, the nature and the symbolic struc- supposedly direct experiences.
turation. Moreover, when we look for the organ- We declare that to see the unconscious out-
izing principle of this story we do not find a lined by Freud as a structured language it must
signifier but a signified. be conceived of as an operation of signifiers and
signifieds with many müdes of producing sig-
nification, sense, and signifieds. At this point we
IX. The (Linguistic) Subject, should differentiate between sense and signifi-
Questioned at Last cation. Sense has to do with the signifying chain,
more global in character and prior to the sig-
In my view, it is impossible to assert, as Lacan nified. It is specific to the metaphoric and poetic
does, that the signified is only an effect of the effects of minar and discrete units (Nancy and
signifier working through the rhetorical process Lancoue-Labarthe) of lexical character (Lacan-
of linguistic metaphor and that, according to the ian semanthemes). Lacan is in agreement with
signified, consideration of unconscious signifi- the conception of signification taken as an effect
cations would remain merely an accessory to the- of the relations hip of one word to another,25 that is,
oretical elaboration, revolving around the role
"A wordforanother, is the Lacanian formula for the metaphor;
of the signifier as in Lacanian analysis. Never- sense springs from two signifiers one of which has substi-
theless, I think that the fragmentary reading tuted the other in the signifying chain, whereas the hidden
signifier continues to be present due to its metonymie con-
24Teun A. Van Dijk, Textyeontexto (Madrid: Catedra, 1980). nection to the rest of the chain.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
an effect of sense, of semantic roads as opera-
tions of the signifier. Signification (signified) is
based on the web of discursive signification
which, from a psychoanalytic point of view,
claims dialectics that phenomenology hardly
permits. It deals with operations of the uncon-
scious psychism of data building and is not just
a passive sensory apprehension in the world. I t
deals with the inclusion of the discursive subject
in the transformation al job of "the real," with a
regulation of the process through the codifying
operations that form it and it is a discursive
emergence of the operations that rule the rep-
resentational game of the psychic apparatus
theorized about by Freud. Signification would
be knowledge that crosses experience to become
a practice and which is similar to the following
quotation from Levi-Strauss:
Between praxis and practice there is a media tor which is the
conceptual outline by which a matter and a form, each without
an independent existence, turn into structures, that is, as
beings at once empirical and intelligible.'6
X. Secondary Semiology or
Logocentrism of the Signifier
There is an unending capacity for ingenious
logocentrism in the second semiology field, which
lies in the mysterious ability of significant matter
to create reality and also to recreate and change
it. Thus, a logocentrism with a new face was
born, which we will now examine.
Second semiology maintains that semiological
studies of the mode of producing a meaning effect
do not specify how and where signification takes
place. On the contrary, meaning is lodged in the
intimacy and immanence of each text, there is
to say in each particular genre (literature, paint-
ing, dance, sculpture, clinical session, etc.) and
so the meaning of writing is in written texts, for
example, and written signifiers are not signifiers
of a signified that could be meaningful within
the discourse of economics (the circulation of
goods, social production of value), or of the
unconscious with its libidinal contents repressed.
Second semiology studies meaning eJfect and not
signification.
26Claude Levi-Strauss, EI pensamiento salvaje (Mexico: FCE,
1972).
607
In Sollers, for example, textual writing or lit-
erature only has the plural meaning it can give
itself, within its internal folds, that is completely
sheltered from social relationships of production.
He refers to textual writing as a "literary net of
several dimensions, generative chains and empty
reciprocal transformations, accretions of consum-
mations of language through its articulation,"27
and he adds that we should make "an object that
can be studied by any form other than writing
itself,,28 out of the signifier as effect.
From our perspective, signification is the dis-
cursive emergence of a semiotic-seman tic
(psychic) knowledge-doing in which the histor-
ical process, whose field, regime and point of
view are different and much more complex than
those of the signifier, can explain the constitution
of semantic codification of reality's possible
readings; and signification cannot be rid of the
theoretical category of the signifier, as in
structuralism.
Sollers removes from his Logiques every trace
of the work of the writing subject: "the text can-
not be localized in a head or in a world; it is,
then, literally, a machine for disintegrating time
and pulverizing space.,,2'l Being aspatial, atem-
poral and in conftict with other series from the
dialectic relations hip of subject and reality, the
Sollersian text is obviously removed from the
situation of the discourse, from history and from
the social contradictions of classes. Within this
perspective of second semiology, Baudry would
say that "The text is not a sign for anything but
is the signified of itself, infinite but removed from
history,,,30 and Goux would maintain that "dis-
course self-produces its meaning."3!
To second-semiology Tel-Quelians, the text
me ans nothing because it prevents dialectics from
displacing itself from the signifier-signified game,
which is essential to the significative act. Baudry
writes:
27Philippe Sollers, La escritura y la experiencia de los lZmites
(Caracas: Monte Avila, 1976), pp. 9-11. Emphasis added.
28Ibid.
29Jacques Henric, "Entrevista a Philippe Sollers. Escritura
y revolucion," in Teorla de conjunto (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
1971), pp. 81-95.
30Jean Louis Baudry, "Escritura, ficci6n e ideologia," in Teo-
rza de conjunto, pp. 153-176.
3lJean-Joseph Goux, "Marx y la inscripci6n dei trabajo," in
TeorZa de conjunto, pp. 223-250.
608 HUGO McCORMICK
Sense is in the text as life is in the cell, in the body. To
pretend to isolate life, take it away from living matter, to
make a principle out of it is to think backwards .... Every
writing, every text is already unthinkable as expressions of
a show of a reality field outside itself, but it can be thought
of .a~ ac};ng as an agent for the total text that is constantly
wntmg.
In other words, for Baudry, meaning IS m the
text exactly as value is in the merchandise pro-
duced by the merchandise itself, inherent in itself,
untranslatable to any world other than that of
its structure's formal positiveness.
In a different manner, Marx, comparing the
phenomenon of value and language, demon-
strates that both are the result of social rela-
tionships of production and, ultimately, economic
reasons. Value is not something which is inher-
ent in merchandise, as meaning is not something
which is inherent in language. Here we should
remember what was said before about signifi-
cation as a convergence point of linguistics, social
formations and unconscious productions. In spite
of the insistance of Derrida and of second-
semiology theoreticians on defeating (Aristote-
lian) logocentrism, we end up with another kind
of logocentrism, of the inverse sign which is to
take as its creative principle the text, the written
language, not so much as a "translation of
things," but as its own being.
We have gone from decentricism of the subject
to centrism of the signifier. We have arrived at
the Heideggerian pole of Derrida, which says
that there is a speaking being everywhere and
always, and in aB languages, whose ineffable
traces are in writing which is the essentiaBy
grammatological part of language and whose
understanding escapes his tory. It is interesting
to note that decentering human beings from their
own reality means taking away from them aB
praxis as historical agents, and we go back to
Todorov's dedaration that "Man has built him-
self from language .... Words are what create
things. ,,33 By producing a sort of sanctificatwn
of writing and by decentering the subject from
the discursive situation, second semiology
attacked the dialectic of a historical (not histo-
ricist) consideration 01 the problem 01 signification.
32Jean Louis Baudry, pp.l53-176. See note 30.
"Tzvetan Todorov, Literatura y signijicacion (Barcelona: Pla-
neta, 1974), pp. 223-224.
It is evident that man is preconstituted by the
langue that exists before hirn and will endure after
he is gone. But the langue is the systematization
of a human social practice which is sufficiently
media ted by dass struggle, by its oedipal hori-
zon, to appear turned into an epistemological
fetish. Such a fetish is the autonomy of the sig-
nifier or a sort of formal spontaneity of the word
which creates a world starting from a supposedly
zero social degree. We do not need to believe,
as Aristotle did, that language is the expression
of a metaphysical essence (the logical entelechy)
to admit that thought and language may be dis-
sociated and exist separately. We understand that
by making reference to thought every implicit or
expressed order is being turned into an order or
a practice.
Undoubtedly, the analysis oflinguistic science
has evolved since Saussure thanks to the sepa-
rate description of the orders of the signifiers
(semiotics) and signifieds (semantics), and such
an evolution created the conditions for the sup-
posed confirrnation of the Lacanian point of view.
Today semantic studies describe relationships,
separations or differences, combinations, oper-
ational rules, and so forth, at the level of the
signified itself, and later on discover the speci-
ficity of their structuration. With this they puH
away from Lacan and from the entire second
semiology field.
XI. Provisional Conclusions
Not to Conclude
I believe that the seeds for a dialectic semiol-
ogy are germinating. They spring from the need
to consider as a whole the processes by which
the productions of the unconscious subject are
discursively signified. Such a semiological per-
spective has undergone an "epistemological rup-
ture" with the study of language which is endosed
by reductionism and formalism, sheltered from
the "imperialism of semiotics." In this sense, it
is a paradox that Kristeva, who was the one who
complained about phonocentric imperialism over
any other semiotic practice, should end up
adopting the ideological and epistemological
bases of the second semiology of the textual anal-
ysis of signifying writing.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
I dare say that an imperialism did appear and
was responsible for an uncritical extrapolation
from first to second semiology. This extrapola-
tion was not restated in its philosophical, theo-
retical and ideological premises, which
transferred the linguis tic ca tegories to the
translinguistic universe 34 and reduced the con-
stitution of signification to the effect of a simple
game of a formal combinatory of the signifier.
This was done with the literary processes of icon-
icity and psychopathological discourse, and it
ended up achieving the production of a homog-
enizing epistemological imperialism that pro-
claimed an intraphilosophical deconstruction in
the metaphysics of the signified. It contributed
to the edification and reification of an almighty
metaphysics of the signifier.
The "radical" reftection that took place in
Derrida strongly inftuenced the philosophical and
theoretical production of second semiology and
made it possible for the Lacanian problematic
of the signifier to enter its field. 35 This brought
about an almost total misunderstanding of the
specificities of the different significative mate-
rials and the different types of social discourse
that work on them.
I think that, with respect to the epistemolog-
ical implications of current semiological studies,
their foundations and reasonings must expand
to the extent that they include the perspective
theorized by Freud, which is to say that they
must face the logic of the two orders coexistent
in unconscious processes. Therefore, besides the
logic of the signifier, the logic of signification
and the logic of the articulation of signifieds,
combined according to organizational laws of
semiotics to determine the subject's behavior,
must be included. This means that it must con-
sider an integral structurallogic of unconscious
processes of signification as an agent in the struc-
turing of meaning and a generator of signifieds.
This is the only way out of the dilemma created
by the imperialism of the autonomy of the sig-
nifier, and of clarifying the epistemological and
philosophical opening that access to the total
discursive realization of the unconscious subject
brings. This is how clinical psychoanalysis
HHugo McCormick, see note I.
3"Julia Kristeva, "EI engendramiento de la formula," in Semi-
otica 2 (Barcelona: Fundamentos, 1978), pp. 95-216.
609
understands that the same drive object can carry
out successively different opposing functions,
or functions that are contradictory in mean-
ing and signified wi thin certain unconscious
configurations.
I would like to clarify that expressions such
as "signifieds" and "semantics" differ in usage
from those of the Greimasian structural sem an-
tics of the sixties, which were built upon the
semiotic space drawn in the theoretical coordi-
nates of the first semiology. The Greimasian
project was inspired epistemologically by the
phenomenology of perception of Merleau-Ponty
and methodologically by the Hjelmslevian con-
viction of isomorphic parallelism of the two
planes of the linguistic sign. I do not agree with
Pecheux, either, in the way he deals with his theo-
rization about semantic aspects, even if he raises
questions about the Saussurean dichotomy of
langue and parole and emphasizes historical mate-
rialism and psychoanalysis, and even consider-
ing that his linguistic theories deal with
theoretical considera tions a bou t discursi ve
semantics. Pecheux emphasizes the profile of the
morphosyntactic aspect, providing it with the
"desuperficialization"36 of the text function,
without intervention of the semantic processes,
in spite of the fact that they supposedly are the
goal in his investigations about dis course anal-
ysis. He describes the analytic device for the dis-
cursive process and emphasizes the fundamental
importance of "the role of syntactic analysis on
the process of discourse analysis such as we know
it.'>37 Pecheux does not hesitate to make use of
the nucleus-statement pattern in his syntactic
approach to discourse analysis. The nucleus-
statement pattern was a key notion in Harris's
transformational procedure. It was Harris who,
in his discourse analysis, and representing Amer-
ican distributional linguistics, tried to investi-
gate the utterance beyond the boundaries of
sentences. It is interesting to note that Pecheux
does not systematically "question" current the-
ories of semantics, and, if we compared Pecheux
and Chomsky, we could say that Pecheux gives
preference to Chomsky and his standard theory,
36The word desuperficialization in Pecheux means a linguistic
analysis of the enunciate sequences as a must to realization
of automatie analysis of the discourse.
37Miguel Pecheux, Haeia el analisis automatieo dei diseurso (Mad-
rid: Credos, 1978).
610 HUGO McCORMICK
which emphasizes the autonomy of syntax with
regard to semantics, instead of paying attention
to those authors and works related to generative
semantics which, in spite of being associated with
Chomskyism, restate and question such a formal
autonomy.
It is relevant to remember here that in gen er-
ativism, the essential theoretical conflict revolved
around the concept of a "semantic component,"
which, besides its purely interpretive character,
operates by the combination, or "amalgama-
tion" of significative atoms (semantic markers).
The meaning of sentences is "interpreted" start-
ing only from their syntactic structure, which
reminds us of the formal treatment given mean-
ing in the theoretical productions of second
semiology and Lacanianism, both of them deal-
ing with the problematic of the signifier. Critics
of this approach questioned the fact that lexical
elements are always a knot of very complex
semantic relationships and that meaning resulted
from these relationships and not from the "amal-
gams" of significative atoms or minimal units of
signification. A critical revision started and led
to the effort to create a "generative semantics"
which would advocate the inversion of Chom-
sky's model in relation to the subordination of
syntax vis-a-vis semantics and the identification
of "deep structures" with directly semantic rep-
resentations. In a way, and from a different per-
spective, it evokes our goal of rescuing the
importance of the semantic dimension of the
unconscious processes described by Freud. The
difficulties the Chomskyan model had in appre-
hending the reality of discourse must be noticed.
Chomsky's "speaking subject," whose linguistic
competence he wanted to explicate in his theo-
retical developments, is an ideal and artificial
"subject" from a community of speakers. As a
result, the subject and his discourse are excluded
from the Chomskyan perspective. In its funda-
mentals, the Chomskyan model is equivalent to
a model of abstract grammar; because it has as
a base an ideal and formallinguistic subject, it
must examine the implications of the notion of
competence. In the way it has been developed
until now, it does not let us know the "reality"
of discourse, since the theory of the sentence has
this fictitious locutor and allocution and does not
concern itself with showing the existence of the
discourse or of a subject wishful of unconscious
processes submerged in the diseourse of its his-
tory's significations and their ideologically com-
promised intersubjective situations. It can be seen
that Chomskyism, as well as descriptive linguis-
ti es (including Rarris), suffers from this type of
deprivation.
I also maintain that the implications of the
Freudian consideration of the unconscious as a
complex structure of signifiers and signified must
point to a history and subject referenee. Within
Greimasian struetural semanties and the auto-
matie analysis of diseourse, this was diffieult to
do.
I understand that the direetions are not easy
to follow. It is impossible to abandon meta-
physics by decree or by declaring ourselves to
be free of it. If we make agame of crossing out
words that we write with (for example: "the out-
side is the inside), we will fall into a mere self-
flattery38 in the game of the written signifier.
Such is the game of words, the baroque game
in which the player ends up being the game trap-
ped in the stylistic metaphysics of the signifier.
This is the reason why someone like Derrida,
leader of antimetaphysics, ended up accepting
that "all gestures are here necessarily misleading
and supposing, which I doubt, that one could
simply escape metaphysics, the concept of sign
which have created, in that sense, both a draw-
back and a step forward at the same time."
XII. Bibliography
The following is a list of books and essays
published in Venezuela on semiotics and psy-
choanalysis. Articles written für special issues
(Nos. land 2, 1980), of the journal Analitica
(Caracas: Ateneo) deal with the theoretical per-
spective of Lacanian theory. INTERtexto Oour-
nal of Semiotics and Psychoanalysis) A
publication of the Circulo de Estudios de Semi-
6tica y Psicoanalisis, Barquisimeto) presents
articles focusing on language and writing from
the viewpoint of their semiotic relations hip to
psychoanalytical concepts.
3BJacques Alain-Miller, "EI piropo," in Cinco conferencias cara-
quenas sobre Lacan, pp. 31-50.
 VENEZUELA (LACANIAN SEMIOTICS)
Abouhamad, Jeanett. EI psicoantilisis: Discurso fondamental en
la teoria social y la epistemologia dei siglo. Caracas: UCV, 1978.
Bleichmar, Hugo. EI enfoque familiar en el tratamiento de la
enftrmedad mental. Caracas: MSAS, 1978.
- - - . "Dei enunciado a la enunciacion, el yo ideal y el
ideal del yo: Efectos de dos tipos de discursos." INTERtexto
(1980), pp. 7-35.
Bravo, V. A. "De la poetica lingüfstica a la semi6tica poe-
tica." INTERtexto (1980), pp. 55--65.
Conte, A. "La verdad como pre-texto." INTERtexto (1980),
pp. 37-39.
Ephraim, D. "Elementos de una teoria de la identificaci6n."
Analitica, No. 2 (1980), pp. 37-61.
Gear, M. and E. Liendo. La accion psicoanalitica. Caracas:
Monte Avila, 1977.
Godino, Cabas. "La letra romantica 0 la pasi6n tragica."
Analitica, No. 2 (1980), pp. 63-79.
611
Hornstein, L. "Acerca del edipo." Analitica, No. (1980),
pp. 59-89.
Lacan, J. "Seminario dei 15 de enero de 1980." Analitica,
No. 2 (1980), pp. 7-9.
Lopez, R. Simbolo y mutacion (una vision estructuralista de psi-
coantilisis). Caracas: Monte Avila, 1980.
McCormick, H. "La neurosis como proceso de (psico)
semiosis." INTERtexto (1980), pp. 67-82.
Miller, J. A. Cinco conftrencias caraqueiias sobre Lacan. Caracas:
Ateneo, 1980a.
- - - . "Teorfa de la lengua (rudimentos)." Analitica, No.
1 (1980b), pp. 5-27.
Rabinovich, D. "EI psicoanalista entre el amo y el peda-
gogo." Analitica, No. 1 (1980), pp. 29-57.
Sazb6n,J. "Lenguaje y escritura." INTERtexto (1980), pp. 41-
53.
 Notes on Contributors

Enrique Ball<>n (born 1940) is Director of the Centro de Investigaci6n en Infor-

matica Aplicada a las Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (Lirna), President of the Aso-
ciaci6n Peruana de Semi6tica, and Associate Professor of Semiotic and General
Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos de Lima and the
Universidad Cat6lica deI Peru, and Research Member of the Groupe de Recherches
Semio-Linguistiques of the EHESS of the CNRS of Paris. In addition to several
articles on semiotics, his publications include Vallejo como paradigma (Un caso especial
de escritura) (1974); Cesar Vallejo: Ohra Poetica Completa (1979); Cesar Vallejo: Teatro
Completo (1979); and Poeticay PoHtica en la Escritura de Cesar Vallejo (1981).

Gianfranco Bettetini (born 1933) is Full Professor of Theory and Technique

of Social Communications at the Universita Cattolica, in Milan. He is also a Member
of the Consiglio Scientifico of the Istituto Agostino Gemelli and General Secretary
of the Associazione Internazionale di Studi Semiotici (lASS). At the same time, he
has been involved in the creation of screenplays, and TV and film direction. Among
his many publications on audio-visual semiotics and general problems of semiotic
practice in mass communications are: Il segno, dalla regia fino al cinema (Milan, 1962);
La regia televisiva (1965); Cinema: lingua e scrittura (1968); L'indice del realismo (1972);
Produzione del senso e messa in scena (1975); Teatro e comunicazione (with Marco de Marinis)
(1977); Tempo del senso (1979); and Scritture di massa (1980).

Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou (born 1939) has published articles on medieval

literature (1977) and recently edited Semiotics and Society (1980, in Greek), a collection
of papers mainly by Greek semioticians. Her present research interests center around
the articulation of semiotic texts with social structure and the development of a
Marxist semiotic analysis.

Paul Bouissac (born 1934) is a Professor in the Department of French at Victoria

College, University of Toronto. In addition to serving as a member of the Executive
Committee of the International Association for Semiotic Studies and the Semiotic
Society of America, and of the Editorial Board of Ars Semiotica and the Encydopedic

613
614 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dictionary oJ Semiotics, he has been the editor-in-chief of RS/ SI, Recherehes Semiotiques/
Semiotic Inquiry since 1980. Among his many publications on non-verbal communi-
cation and the semiotics of the performing arts, which include numerous articles, are:
La mesure des gestes: Protegomenes ii une semiotique gestuelle (1973), Circus and Culture (1976)
and Iconicity: Essays on the Nature oJ Culture (ed. with Roland Posner, 1985).

Roque Carri6n-Wam (born 1942) is a Full Professor at the University of Car-

abobo, in Valencia, Venezuela, where he also carries out research in the Latin Amer-
ican Office of Juridical and Social Research (O.L.I.].S.). He is in charge of the course
and seminar curriculum as weil as the publications of the O.L.I.].S. for Latin America
in the fields of methodology and philosophy of law, juridical semiotics, philosophy
and his tory of ideas, and social sciences. He has carried out advanced research on
the philosophy of law and is editor of Investigaciones Semioticas and the Cuadernos de
Semiotica Juridica.

Francesco Casetti (born 1947) teaches History and Criticism of the Cinema at
the Catholic University in Milan. He is also Vice-President of the Associazione Ital-
iana di Studi Semiotici. His research is concerned primarily with problems of film
and visual semiotics, working on a model inspired by text grammars. He has published
several essays and s tudies as weil as three books: Bernardo Bertolucci (1975); Semiotica
(1977); and Teoria del cinema dal dopoguerra a oggi (1978). He also belongs to the editorial
staff of Comunicazioni Sociali and Ikon.

Anne Freadman is a Lecturer in the French Department of the University of

Queensland. She has written articles on literary semiotics and on theoretic issues
arising from the work of Benveniste, Morris, Peirce, and Saussure. She is currently
working on a book on fictions of the enonciation in women's writing, a Ph.D. thesis on
Peirce, and (with Meaghan Morris) a book entitled Senders and Receivers.

Andres Gallardo (born 1941) obtained his Ph.D. from the State University of
N ew York at Buffalo in 1980, with a thesis on "The Standardization of American
English." He is an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Concepcion
in Chile. His publications reftect a culture-oriented approach to grammar and socio-
linguistics. His interest in semiotics sterns from his interest in language, but slowly
has been acquiring an identity of its own, which, by now has manifested itself in its
direction of literature, and chiefty fiction. Among Gallardo's many publications are:
"Hacia una teoria dei idioma estandar," R.L.A. (Concepcion) no. 16 (1973); "Vision
dellexico en la 'Oda' al diccionario de Pablo Neruda," R.L.A. no. 17 (1979); "Dic-
tionaries and the Standardization Process," in Ladislav Zgusta, ed., Theory and Method
in Lexicography (1980); "Gramatica de los nombres de colores," R.L.A. no. 19 (1980);
"Planificacion lingüistica y ejemplaridad literaria. Gabriela Mistral y la cul tura del
idioma," R.L.A. no. 21 (1983); Historia de la literatura y otros cuentos (short stories) (1982);
Cdtedras paralelas (unpublished noveI).

Sanda Golopentia-Eretescu (born 1940) is Assistant Professor in the Depart-

ment of French Studies at Brown University. She was a member of the Board of the
Romanian Group for Semiotics from 1976 to 1979, Vice President of the Linguistic
Society of Romania (1978-79), and member of the Board of the International Asso-
ciation for Semiotic Studies (1979-1985). Her research interests include linguistics,
especially syntax and semantics; folklore and poetics; general and descriptive semiot-
ics; and currently pragmatics, particularly speech-act theories. She has wri tten and
edited over 100 articles and books on these subjects. So me of her publications in
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 615
English are: The Romanian-English Contrastive Anafysis Project: Reports and Studies (ed.
with T. Slama-Cazacu and D. Chitoran, 1971); The Transformational Syntax of Romanian
(1972); and Current Trends in Romanian Linguistics (ed. with Alexandru Rosetti, 1978).

Cristina Gonzalez (born 1951) is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Purdue

University. Her principal research interests are Medieval Spanish literature and semiotic
criticism. Among her articles on semiotic topics are: "Wilkins y Funes: EI Lenguaje
Imposible," Insula 383 (1978) and "Bibliografia Comentada de la Critica Semio16gica
Espanola," Dispositio, 2/5-6 (1977).

Anne HenauIt was graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure and is now
Professor at the University of Paris, after having taught at a number of foreign
universities. In 1978 she founded the Bulletin du Groupe de Recherches Semio-Linguistiques
de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes de Paris. She has published Les enjeux de la semiotique (1979)
and Narratologie semiotique generale (1982).

Regina Jimenez-Ottalengo (born 1938) is a Research Associate at the Institute

of Social Research of the National University of Mexico. Her area of interest is the
sociology of communication, and her most recent publications deal with the problem
of semiology and its role in the analysis of communication. Her publications on this
topic include "Reflections about Semiology; the Problem of the Sign and Reality" (in
Readings on Semiology, 1980) and "The Complexity of Signs from the Sociological Point
of View," Dispositio 4/10 (1979). Two books, Sciences 01 the Human as Sciences 01 Meaning
and Social Realily, its Projection and Signalization, are in press.

Jorgen Dines Johansen is Professor of General and Comparative Literature at

Odense University and member of the Board of the International Association of
Comparative Literature. In addition to his many scientific articles on various aspects
of literature and literary semiotics he has published: Gm fortolkningssituationen (1972),
Novelle og kontekst (with S0ren Baggesen, 1972), Communication et sujet (ed. with Sven
E. Larsen and Morten Nojgaard, Degris 8, 1980), Jürgen Habermas: Teorier om samfond
og sprog (ed. with J. Glebe-Moller, 1981), and Hvalerne venter. Studier i Klaus Rifbjergs
forfatterskab (1981). He is currently finis hing a book on the implications of Peirce's
semiotics for the study of literature.

Roberta Kevelson holds the first Ph.D. in Semiotics in the Uni ted States, from
Brown University, and is currently Professor at Pennsylvania State University. She
has published extensivelyon Peirce's contributions to modern semiotic theory and
method and has introduced the concept of legal semiotics and cultures in several
publications. Among her main publications are: Inlaws/Gutlaws: Toward a Semiotics 01
Intersystemic Communication (1977) and The Inverted Pyramid (1977). She is presently
preparing three books; one is on Charles S. Peirce's methodology and semiotics, the
second is on legal semiotics, and the third is an introduction to semiotic methodology.

A.-Ph. Lagopoulos (born 1939) is Professor of Urban Planning at the School

of Engineering of the U niversity of Thessaloniki. His publications in semiotics include
Structural Urbanism (1973, in Greek), and articles on the semiotic production and
conception of settlement space in Semiotica, Communications, and elsewhere (1975, 1977,
1978).

Annemarie Lange-Seidl is Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics at the Tech-

nical University, Munich. She has written numerous articles on sign problems and
616 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

a book, Approaches to Theories rif Nonverbal Signs (l977). She has also edited two vol-
umes on sign-constitution.

Per Erik Ljung (born 1943) teaches Swedish Literature at the Institute of
Scandinavian Phi1010gy, University of Copenhagen. In addition to his articles and
reviews concerning the theory of literature and communication, he has pub1ished a
book, Vilhelm Ekelund och den problematiskafoifattarrollen (1980), and has edited (with
Jan Thavenius) Litteratur i bruk. En antologi om litteraturundervisning (1978).

Richard Martin (born 1953) teaches at the University of Liege, where he was
graduated with honors, in 1976, with a thesis on the oxymoron. Abrief excerpt of
his thesis was pub1ished in Revue d'Esthitique (1-2, 1979). Dr. Mart~n has contributed
articles to the Rivista di Estetica and has taken part in colloquia at the Centro Inter-
naziona1e di Semiotica e di Linguistica, in Urbino.

Hugo McCormack (born 1946) is a psychiatrist in private practice. He is a

member of the publications committee of Intertexto. Among his publications are: "Notes
on the Logic of Narcissism" (Letra Continua) and "About Semiotics Eco-Iogy of the
Model Reader" (Investigaciones Semi6ticas). He is presently editing a vo1ume of essays
on theoretical and metatheoretical aspects of semiotics.

Meaghan Morris (born 1950) is a freelance writer, film journalist and part-time
lecturer in semiotics at the A1exander Mackie College of Advanced Education. She
has published articles on feminist criticism and has edited (with Paul Foss) Language,
Sexuality and Subversion (1978) and Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy (wi th Pau1
Patton) . She is currently the film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and is comp1eting
a Ph.D. at Griffith University (Queensland). She is also writing Senders and Receivers,
with Anne Freadman.

Christopher Norris (born 1947) is Lecturer in Eng1ish Literature at the Uni-

versity ofWales Institute of Science and Techno10gy. He has published William Empson
and the Philosophy 01 Literary Criticism (1978) and numerous articles on aspects of musical
and literary theory. He is presently editing a vo1ume of essays on Shostakovich and
comp1eting a book on Jacques Derrida and post-structura1ist criticism.

Monica Paula Rector (born 1940) teaches at the Pontificia Universidade Cat6-
1ica do Rio de Janeiro and the Universidade Federa1 F1uminense. She is Director of
the Centro de Semi6tica of the Conjunto U niversitario Candido Mendes. Her research
interests include semiotics, semantics, and verbal and non-verbal communication.
Among her publications are: A Linguagem da Juventude (1975), C6digo e Mensagem do
Carnaval. As Escolas de Samba (1976), Para ler Greimas (1979), and Manual de Semantica
(1980) .

Stephen Rudy (born 1949) is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Lit-
eratures, New York University. He is co-editor of the New York University Slavic Papers.
His research interests include 19th-century Russian literature, Russian poetics, and
semiotics. Among his pub1ications are: Roman Jakobson's Selected Writings (Editor of
vo1s. 3, 5, 6, & 7, 1979- ); Keats' "Sorrow 01 Love" Through the Years (with Roman
JakobsOll, 1979); and Dostoevsky and Gogol: Texts and Critics (ed. with P. Meyer, 1979).

Jorge Sanchez (born 1955) studied esthetics (Catholic University) and archi-
tecture (Techno10gical University) and was graduated in 1anguage and literature
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 617

(1981) from the University of Concepci6n. He is currendy writing his M.A. thesis
on Latin American Literature at the University of Concepci6n. He is a Graduate
Assistant (Literary theory) in the Spanish Department of the same university. During
the academic year 1982 he studied at the Instituto de Cooperaci6n Iberoamericana
in Madrid (Spain) and at the University of Malaga. His interest in semiotics is derived
from his experiences in the field of art and design.

Jose Augusto Seabra (born 1937) is Professor of the Theory of Literature and
Portuguese Language at the Faculty of Arts of Oporto U niversity as well as Portugal's
Minister of Education. He is also Secretary of the Literature Center of the University
of Oporto and Literary Editor of the journal Nova renascentia. Among his major pub-
lications is Fernando Pessoa ou 0 Poetodrama (1974) and Poiitica de Barthes (1980).

Thomas A. Sebeok (born 1920) is Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and

Semiotics, and Chairman of the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies,
as well as of the Graduate Program of Semiotic Studies at Indiana U niversity. He
is also President of the Semiotic Society of America, and since 1969 has served as
the Editor-in-Chief of Semiotica. His recent publications include a tetralogy, Contri-
butions to the Doctrine of Signs (1976), The Sign and Its Masters (1979), The Play of Musement
(1981), and I Think I am a Verb (forthcoming).

Sven Storelv (born 1923) is Director of the Department of Romance Languages

and Literatures of the University of Bergen. His principal research interests are
dis course analysis, rhetoric, literary symbols and myths, French poetry, and the
Catholic "Renaissance" in French literature. His publications include "A propos du
symbolisme nocturne chez Pequy" (Feuillets Mensuels de l'Amitii Charles Piguy 203,
1975), "Incarnation et symbolism religieux chez Pequy" (Charles Peguy I, 1980, Revue
des Lettres Modernes), and "Remarques sur le mythe du declin du monde" (in Georges
Bernanos, ed. Max Milner, 1972).

Pierre Swiggers (born 1955) is a Fellow of the Belgian National Science Foun-
dation. He has published some seventy articles, in numerous journals, on the histo-
riography of linguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, the grammar of the
West-Semitic languages, and on problems of theoretical and descriptive linguistics.

Eero Tarasti (born 1948) is Professor of Art Education at the University of

Jyväskylä, Finland. He founded the Structuralist Circle of Finland in 1970, which
became the Semiotic Society of Finland in 1979, of which he is President. Since 1979
he has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the International Asso-
ciation of Semiotic Studies. He has published several essays and anthologies (mosdy
in Finnish) dealing with musicology, musical aesthetics, and semiotics.

Tomonori Toyama (born 1942) studied architecture for his Doctorate in Engi-
neering at the University of Tokyo. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation (1977-79) and Visiting Research Associate at Indiana Uni-
versity (1979-80). He is currendy an Associate Professor at Shizuoka U niversity. He
has published a monograph, Semiotic Studies 01 Design Methods (1977).

Jean Umiker-Sebeok (born 1946) is a Research Associate of Indiana Univer-

sity's Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies. She has published numer-
ous articles on aboriginal sign languages, children's conversations, semiotics of culture,
nonverbal communication in magazine advertisements, and the "language" of apes.
618 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Among her recent publications are: "You Know My Method": A Juxtaposition 01 Sherlock
Holmes and C. S. Peirce (with T. A. Sebeok, 1981) and Speaking 01 Apes: A Critical
Anthology (ed. with T. A. Sebeok, 1981). She is currently pursuing research on the
semiotics of marketing.

Vilmos Voigt (born 1940) is Chairman of the Department of Folklore, Eötvös

Lorand University, Budapest. His principal research interests are comparative phi 1-
ology, comparative literature, anthropology, folklore, and social semiotics. He has
served as Chairman of the Committee for Semiotics of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences since 1974. Among his numerous publications, which include more than 150
papers and 15 books, are: Modellalas afolklorisztikaban (1969); Strukturalis folklorisztika,
I-lI (1971-72); A folkor esztetikajahoz (1972); A folklor alkotdsok elemzise (1972); 1973
Majus I (1974); Jel es közösseg (1975); Bevezetes a szemiotikaba (1977); Szemiotikai tanul-
manyok (1979-80); Kultura es szemiotika (1981); Uvod do semiotiky (1982).
 Index of Names
Aalbaek-Nielsen, K., 133, 139
Aarne, A. J., 145-146
Aarseth, A., 373, 383
Aarsleff, H., 343, 353
Abad Nebot, F., 474, 476, 482
Abouhamad, J., 610
Abraham, W., 44, 355, 599
Achatz, K., 182
Achitei, G., 453
Adauto, 0., 403
Adascalitei, V., 453
Adorno, T., 130-131,499
Adragäo, J. V., 409
Adriaens, M. 352
Advis, L., 104, 110
Afanas'ev, 561
Agassi, J., 355
Ager,527
Agh, A., 286, 287
Agosti, S., 300, 303
Agrafiotis, D., 255, 268-269, 271-
272, 275
Aguilera, N., 108, 110
Ahumada, G., 101
Aicardi, R., 103, 110
Aicher, 0., 217
Alarcos Llorach, E., 473
Alain-Miller, J., 600, 610
Albera, F., 512-513
Albrecht, E., 184,217
AJcalay, R., 103, 110
AJcazar, J., 360
AJcmaeon of Croton, 526
Alekseev, M. P., 559
Aleman, M., 479
Alexander, G., 3 Andueza, M., 360, 362
Alexandrescu, S., 433, 453 Angel, L., 65, 88
Alexandru, T., 424, 453 Angelelli, I., 220
AI-George, S., 432, 439-440, 442- Angelet, C., 356
447,453 Angenot, M., 75, 79, 83, 87, 88
Alivizatos, N., 254, 275 Anghel, D., 461
Allardt, E.; 361 Anglin, J., 66, 89
Almeida, M. J. de, 58 Anrieu, P., 41, 45
Almeida, M. L. F. de, 58 Anscombe, G. E. M., 243
Almeida, R., 145 Anttila, R., 147, 150
Alonso, D., 384, 409, 413, 473 Aomi, J., 330, 336
AIthusser, L., 100, 131, 141, 147, Apel, K.-O., 181, 184, 218
232, 239, 273, 383, 408, 489, 600 Apergis, 270
AItrichter, F., 287 Apo, S., 148
Alvar, M., 473-474 ApolIon, D., 377
Alvarez, L. F., 365 Apostel, L., 42, 44, 348, 356, 365
Alvarez Sanagustin, A., 476, 478 Apostol, P., 454
Amador, R., 366 Apotheloz, D., 508
Amaral, M. T. d', 54 Araujo, A. S., 58
Ambjörnsson, R., 503 Arana, C., 403
Amprimoz, A., 72,88 Arany, L. A., 288, Araya, A., 107,
Amzulescu, A. L., 452, 453 110
Andersen, J. K., 139 Arcaini, E., 296, 303
Andersen, M. B., 138, 142 Archibald, J. F., 14
Anderson, C. W., 67, 88 Ardener, E., 250
Anderson, J., 443 Arghezi, T., 453-454, 456-457, 461,
Anderson, P. R., 521, 539, 549 469-470
Andersson, B., 502-503 Arguedas, J. M., 112, 397-398
Andion, E., 362 Argyle, M., 541, 548
Andkjaer Olsen, 0., 134, 138-139 Arias, R., 396
Andoniou, 270 Ariosto, L., 295
Andonopoulos, T., 255, 266, 268, Aristotle, 101, 142, 165, 168,271,
275, 276 273, 302, 313, 357, 382, 395, 441,
Andor, C., 287 444-446, 608
Andriescu, A., 454 Ariyoshi, T., 325
619
620 INDEX OF NAMES

Armstrong, D., 4 Baldi, P., 312 Baudrillard, J., 136, 151,308

Armstrong, E. A., 245
Arndt, H. W., 179, 218
Arnheim, R., 577-578
Arnold, M., 240
Arnold, T. W., 548
Aronpuro, K., 150, 151
Arreola, J. j., 112
Asanuma, K., 331, 336
Ashworth, E. J., 343
Aspelin, G., 503
Aspelin, K., 147,370,486-487,
494-500, 503
Asplund, J., 502-503
Assump~ao, N., 58
Astaburuaga, R., 101, 110
Aston, G., 511
Aubert, V., 548
Auerbach, E., 310
Augustine, St. 305, 325, 329, 342,
472
Auroux, S., 354
Auschlin, A., 512
Austerlitz, R., 281, 343, 355
Austin, J. C., 48
Austin, J. L., 130, 185,236, 243,
244, 250, 336, 373, 378, 500, 510
Autrum, H., 187, 192,218
Avalle D'Arco, S., 298, 300, 303-
304,310-311
Axmatova, A., 559, 574, 575
Ayala, F., 481
Ayer, A. J., 249
Ayim, M., 64, 89
Bach, J. S., 456, 582
Bachand, D., 75, 81, 89
Bachelard, G., 21,141,171
Bachofen, J. J., 419
Bacon, 543
Bacovia, G., 459, 461
Badea, S., 454
Baer, E., 538, 547-548
Baggesen, S., 615
Bahner, W., 213
Bailey, J., 573
Bailey, R., 555
Bain, B., 65, 89
Baird, G., 81, 92, 550
Bakhtin (Voloshinov), M., 7, 17,
73-74,97, 130, 148,496,498,507,
548, 561-562, 564-565, 579
Bakker, D. M., 351
Bai, M., 352
Balacciu,J., 417, 454
Balai§, M., 454
Balazs, B., 282
Baldinger, K., 400-401, 509 Baudry,J.-L., 137,601,607-608
Baldovinescu, A., 454 Baxter, E. H., 78, 89
Baldwin, j., 523, 536, 548 Bayitch, S. A., 584, 597
Ba1l6n, E., 387, 389-390, 393, 395, Baxtin. See Bakhtine
397-403,613 Bazanov, V. G., 574
Ba1l6n, J., 387 Bazin, A., 580
Bally, C., 296, 327-328, 340, 510 Biidiirau, D., 454
Balzac, H. de, 71-72, 92-93, 439, Biidescu, 1., 454
463, 551 Biidiou, 601
Bambiniotis, G., 255-256, 272, 275 Biiliiceanu, C., 464
Banchcro, 1., 402 Biiliinescu, T., 448, 454
Banchero, L., 401 Biiniiteanu, T., 454
Bang, B., 132, 138 Biirbulescu, C., 454
Bann, S., 248-249 Bärlea, 452
Banta§, A., 454 Beas, C., 362
Banu, 1., 454 Beattie, J., 249
Barabas, j. J., 283 Beaudry, N., 79
Baran, H., 548, 558, 561, 570 Beaulieu, 98
Barbosa, J. M., 409 Beauze, N., 443
Barbosa, M. A., 56, 58 Beccaria, G. L., 3i I
Barbu, 1., 449, 453, 456, 458, 465 Beck, B., 76, 89
Bardon, S. G., 42 Beck, L. W., 218
Bar-Hille!, Y., 218, 223 Becker, 509
Barko, 1., 13 Beckett, S., 132,140,316,475,491
Barnard, C., 527 Beekford, 72
Baron, N., 548 Bee, R., 375
Barrera, M., 108, 110 Beethoven, L. van, 427
Barros, D. L. P. de, 48 Begg, 1., 66, 95
Barros, R., 105, 110 Beitz, C., 3
Bartet, L., 403 Beja, M., 249
Barth, E. M., 348, 356 Bejan, D., 454
Barth, F., 374-375 Beichior, M. de L., 409, 413
Barthes, R., 6, 9-10, 20, 22-26, 28, Belchilii, A., 454
40,48-50,61, 71, 82, 85, 99-101, Belleau, A., 88
103, 107, 111, 120, 122, 126, 128, Bellert, 1., 63, 83, 89
139,146-147,153-154,172,181, Bellman, B. L., 498, 503
206-207, 230, 232, 235, 239, 241- Bellour, R., 497
242, 248-251, 258, 262, 266-269, Belnap, N. D., Jr., 548
272-274, 333-334, 336, 347, 352, Belsey, C., 239
359-360, 362, 364-365, 371, 377, Belyj, A., 563, 574
383, 388, 392, 394-395, 397, 408- Benderly, B. L., 541, 548
410,414,438,453,456,468,477, Benedetti, M., 360, 362
485, 488-489, 492, 496-497, 499, Bengtsson, 1., 501-503
501, 539, 559, 567, 588 Beniue, M., 464
Bartok, B., 145,281,287,427,454 Benjamin, W., 130,206,242,495
Bascovici, 451 Benk8, L., 289
Bashö, 325, 336
Bassnett-McGuire, S., 249 Bennett, J., 63, 89
Bastide, F., 167 Bennett, T., 249
Bastos, R., 102 Benoit, E., 79
Bataille, G., 126, 139 Bense, M., 50, 52, 181, 184, 191,
Bateson, G., 50, 61, 83, 374, 553 194,201,204,207-209,213-216,
Battisti, E., 307 218,262,331,336,550-551
Baud-Bovy, S., 424, 454 Bentele, G., 206-207, 216, 218, 223
Baudelaire, C., 94, 130, 149,451, Bentham, j., 537
469-470, 515 Bentoiu, P., 454
 INDEX OF NAMES 621

Bentz, I. M. G., 58 Blanco, D., 389, 391-393, 397, 400, Bouazis, C., 142
Benveniste, E., 9, 24, 27, 30, 35, 99, 402 Boubat, 173
101,171,360,371,380,383,407, Bleeker, C. J., 568 Bouchard, G., 63-64, 89
412,499,541,562,567,601-602, Bleichmar, H., 604, 611 Boudon, P., 68, 75, 80, 82, 89
614 Bleier-Brody, A., 205, 218 Bouissae, P., 59, 61, 65, 68, 78-79,
Berea, E., 454 BIeton, P., 79, 89 83-84, 86-87, 89, 213, 216, 333,
Berea, 0., 417, 454 BIom, A. G., 375 336, 497, 546, 548, 613
Berger, ]., 243 BIom, ].-P., 375 Boulding, K., 526-527, 548
Berger, P., 249 Blonsky, M., 580 Boulez, P., 43, 94
Bergman, B., 494 Bloom, H., 491 Bouma, H., 92
Bergman, 1., 134, 393, 463, 50(/) Bloomfield, L., 32, 51, 61, 154,238, Bourdieu, P., 490
Bernea, E., 454 345, 371, 525, 529, 548 Bouris, A., 10
Bergonzi, B., 239 Blum, A., 78, 89 Bousono, C., 473
Bergson, H., 491, 523, 563 Blumler, ]., 249 Bowlt, S., 249
Bergstrom, C. H., 371 Bobes, M. del C., 474, 476-478 Boysen, G., 137
Beristain, H., 360, 362 Boboe, A., 454 Bogeskov, T, 138, 140
Berkeley, G., 197 Bobrow, D., 377 Braakhuis, H. A., 354
Berlyne, D. E., 65, 67, 89 Bocaz, A., 109, 110 Braaten, L. T., 376
Bermann, H. ].,526,548 Bochenski,]. ]., 548 Bradley, R., 548
Bernard, C., 167 Bochenski, M., 345 Braga, M. L. S., 56
Bernard, ] ., 204 Boqa, M., 455 Brainerd, B., 69, 83-84
Bernath, A., 290 Bodington, S., 551 Brailoiu, C., 418, 424-426, 453-456,
Bernea, E., 468 Bogatyrev, P., 332, 333, 497 460,466-468,471
Berns, E., 357 Bogdan, A., 455 Brancusi, C., 466
Bernstein, B., 236-237, 249 Bogdan, R. ].,568 Brandt, P. A., 120-121, 127-128,
Bernstein, R, 548 Bogdan-Dasdilu, D., 455 133-140,412
Bernstein, R. ]., 336 Boggs, R. S., 106, 110 Brask, P., 124-125, 130, 136-139
Bertalanffy, L. von, 281, 527 Bogza, G., 459 Bratu, S., 455
Berthelsen, ] ., 138 Bohn, 0., 138 Braten, S., 377
Bertilsson, M., 502-503 Bohr, N., 566 Bratulescu, M., 455
Best, D., 249 Boitär, E., 290 Breal, M., 357
Bettetini, G., 293-294, 297-298, Boklund-Lagopoulou, K., 253, 257, Breazu, M., 455
300-302, 304, 308-310, 313-318, 259, 262, 264-265, 274-278 Brecht, B., 242, 249, 250, 497
321, 613 Bolckmans, A., 383 Brediceanu, M., 455
Beuehot, M., 365 Boleo, M. de P., 407 Brekle, H. E., 199, 218
Biardeau, M., 446 Boll-]ohansen, H., 138-139 Bremer, F., 499
Bidu-Vranceanu, A., 454, 457 Bollinger, D., 509 Bremond, C., 48, 71-72, 101-102,
Biedermann, H., 212, 225 Boltzmann, R., 190 113, 145, 149, 174,266,359,362,
Bierwiseh, M., 183, 193, 195-196, Bolyai, ].,286 365, 377, 453, 497
201, 213, 218, 223, 225, 496 Bo1zano, B., 179, 215,218,327,329 Brennan, C., 6
Binding, 523 Bonfantini, M., 305 Brero, G., 403
Bird, 0., 532, 548 Bonnycastle, S., 73 Breuer, 604
Birdwhistell, R, 79,89,541,548 Bonomi, A., 303, 321 Brueghel, P., 470
Birou, V., 454 Bonsiepi, G., 298 Brewster, B., 249
Bitomsky, H., 206, 218 Boon, ]., 543, 548, 568 BrilI, T, 455
Birgu-Georgeseu, L., 454 Booth, W., 474 Brin d'Amour, L., 70,90
Birlea, 0., 417, 454 Borbe, T, 190, 195,201,213-214, Bringeus, A., 375
Black, M., 244, 554 216,218,220-223,225,517 Brisson, D. W., 530, 548
Blacking,]., 244 Borci1a, M., 418, 453, 455 Britten, B., 244
Blackwood, R. T., 528, 554 Bordeianu, M., 455 Broadhurst, P. L., 535, 548
Blaga, L., 418-421, 454-455, 458, Bordreuil, 81 Brock,]., 216, 536, 548
461,463, 468-469, 471-472 Borel, M.-]., 508 Brodeur, P., 63, 68, 75, 90
Blakar, R M., 373-374 Borges, .1. L., 397-398 Brog, H., 208, 218, 224-225
Blake, T., 3 Bori, 1., 282 Broms, H., 146, 148, 151-152
Blakemore, C., 542 Bosco, N., 297, 305 Bronte, E., 439
Blanche, R., 516 Boström, A., 503 Bronzwaer, W . .1. M., 352
Blanchot, M., 490 Botezatu, P., 455 Brooke-Rose, C., 249
622 INDEX OF NAMES

Brown, A., 13, 16 Cal!oud, J., 74 Castro, L., 367

Brown, H. C., 548 Calude, C., 456 Catul!us, 394, 398
Brown,J., 73,87,90 Calzavarra, E., 309, 314 Caws, P., 524, 526, 539, 549
Brondal, V., 115, 119, 133, 137, 142 CamaraJr.,J. M., 51 Cazacu, B., 456, 461
Brunetta, G., 309 Campod6nico, H., 390, 399-401 Cazimir, B., 456
Brunning, j., 64 Campos, A. de, 49, 52 Calinescu, G., 455

°
Bryce, A., 396 Campos, H. de, 48-49, 51-52, 56 Cebrian Herreros, M., 483-484
Bubenik, A., 62 Campos, J. A., 367 Cecereu, L., 103, 11
Bubner, R., 218 Candido, A., 51 Celan, E., 456
Bubnova, T., 360 Candiescu, C., 456 Celli, E., 209, 314
Buchenski, K., 365 Candrea, I. A., 456 Cereda, B., 313
Bucher, E.-j., 515 Canoa Galiana, j., 476, 478 Cernuda, L., 479
Buck, G. C., 221 Cantemir, D., 418 Cervantes, M. de, 132,474,479
Buq, A., 456 Cantemir, N., 456 Cesped, I., 102, 110
Bucur, M., 452, 456 Cantor, G., 349 Chabrol, C., 453
Buffier, 357 Cantrel!, L., 7 Chaney, D., 249
Buenaventura, E., 475 Capek, M., 529, 535, 549 Chaplin, C., 41
Bueno, R., 389, 391-392, 397-398, Cappabianca, A., 309 Charon, C., 79
400,402 Caprettini, G. P., 294, 305, 311, 314 Chateaubriand, F. R. de, 423, 467
Bueno, V., 401 Caracostea, D., 456 Chatman, S., 30,43-44, 57, 61, 73,
Buero Val!ejo, A., 475 Caragiale, I. L., 461, 463, 469 80,90-95,97,213,219,223, 226,
Buga, M., 456 Caragiale, M., 461 250, 353, 453, 464, 493, 503
Bühler, K., 30, 107, 180, 182, 204, Caraion, 451 Chaucer, G., 98
218, 225, 354 Carcamo, C., 110 Chavero, A., 360, 364
Buhr, M., 183, 222 Cardano, 525 Chebat, J. C., 75, 77, 90
Bukdahl, j. K., 133, 138, 140 Carey, R., 88 Chereau,94
Bulgar, G., 456 Carlini, A., 207, 218-219, 225-226 Cherry, C., 238, 462, 525, 549, 552
Bul!, 0., 382 Carlson, J., 147 Chevalier, J. C., 153
Bulow, E., 218 Carlson, L., 382 Chiarenzo, C., 85
Bunge, M., 63, 90 Carlyle, T., 240 Chino, E., 334, 336-339, 342
Buiiuel, L., 206, 267, 393 Carnap, R., 31,63, 177, 180-181, Chiriacescu, R., 417, 454
Burbank, j., 552 184, 190, 197,219,348,350,365, Chisholm, A. R., 6, 549
Burckhardt, J., 431 378, 477, 532, 549 Chitoran, D., 615
Bureau, C., 68, 90 Caron, j. P., 90 Chomsky, N., 28,30,32,38,61,63,
Burghard, D., 192,218 Carontini, E., 25, 42-43, 56 68,69, 72,90,95, 159,236-237,
Burke, K., 95, 347, 548 Carpov, M., 456 240, 246, 273, 316, 328, 341, 360,
Burks, A. W., 327, 548, 552, 554 Carr, G. F., 97, 547 374,411,426,441,443,477,489,
Burotto, j. F., 107, 110 Carril!o, G., 101, 110 494-496, 502, 529, 609-610
Bursill-Hal!, G. L., 343 Carri6n-Wam, R., 391, 403-404, Chonati, I., 403
Burton, F., 62 591-592,597,614 Chopin, F. F., 151
Busse, K.-P., 180, 218 Carrol!, L., 532 Choul, j. c., 69,90
Bussmann, H., 219 Carrol!, M., 76, 90 Christensen, N. E., 137
Busza, A., 85 Carvajal, M. de, 479 Christin, A.-M., 43
Butler, S., 92 Carvalho, J., 48 Christou, J., 270,275
Butor, M., 43 Carvalho, J. H. de, 407 Chulam, T. M. 0., 58
Buttitta, A., 307 Carvalho, S. W. de, 58 Church, A., 350
Bux6, J. P., 360, 362 Carvalho-Neto, P. de, 105, 110 Churchland, P. S., 64, 65, 90
Buyssens, E., 19-26, 29-30, 32, 40, CaseI, j. del, 96 Chvatik, 496
42, 50, 99, 344-346, 470 Cases, C., 311 Cicero, M. T., 523
Bya,J., 41-42 Casetti, F., 293-294, 301, 304-305, Ciobotaru, S., 456
Bystrina, I., 218 309-310,313-314,319,614 Ciocan, D., 456
Caslett, P., 521, 551 Ciocärlie, L., 456
Cassirer, E., 21, 180, 197,219,224, Cioculescu, S., 456
Cairns, H. C., 548, 597 282, 292, 434-435, 454, 538, 549 Cirese, A. M., 307
Cajal-Marin, I., 456 Castagnino, R., 475 Cirne, M., 56
Calabrese, 0., 294, 305, 313 Castagnotto, U., 298, 313 Ciubotaru, S., 448
Calame, C., 516 Castro, A. P. de, 413 Civel!i, M. E., 316
 INDEX OF NAMES 623
Civ'jan, T. V., 556-557, 559, 571- Costa, P., 3 Darwin, C., 244-245
572 Costachescu, A., 457 Dascal, M., 57
Claes, P., 352 Costin, M., 464 Dascalu, C., 457
"Clarin" Alas, L., 480 Coteanu, 1., 457 Dascälu, L., 457
Clarke, H., 85 Coulmas, F., 217 Datcu, 1.,417, 457
Clarke, L., 249 Counihan, M., 13 Daus, 451
Claudel, P., 164 Counihan, T., 3 David, J., 507-508
Clausius, R, 190 Cournot, 436 David, M., 311
Clemmensen, J., 138 Courtenay, B. de, 371, 538 Davidson, 0., 140
Clini, M. P. M., 58 Courtes, J., 55, 155, 162, 167, 170, da Vinci, L., 246, 320, 563
Cocchiara, G., 315 397,401,412 Davis, M., 78, 90
Coelho, E. P., 408-409 Coutinho, A., 51 Davy, D., 250
Coelho Netto, J. T., 57 Covaci, V., 457 Debussy, C. A, 79, 91-92, 94
Cohen, L. j., 30, 35, 102, 249, 458, Coward, R., 7,9,239 Deely, J., 90, 537, 549
549 Creanga, 1., 454, 458, 469 De Fleur, M. L., 364
Cole, P., 510 Crebonod, R., 367 De George, F., 531, 538, 549
Coleridge, S. T., 229, 240 Cresswell, M. J., 250 De George, R, 531, 538, 549
Colle, R, 102-103, 110 Crick, M., 365 De Groot, G., 194
Colless, T., 3 Crisp, C., 14 De Heusch, L., 41, 43
Collins, F., 72, 90 Crist, L.S., 546 Delavrancea, B., 464
Comi§el, E., 424, 456 Cristescu, 1., 458 Deledalle, G., 42, 64, 72
Comte, A., 532 Critchley, M., 245, 250 Deleuze, G., 10, 126
Condillac, E. B. de, 353-354, 357 Crivat, E., 457 Delfosse, P., 41, 43
Condon, J., 336 Crivat, M., 457 Delgado Ocando, J. M., 585-591,
Conea, 1., 456 Croce, B., 294-295, 435, 486 598
Constantin, M., 456 Croy, P., 212, 219 Deliege, C., 41, 43
Constantinescu, A, 456, 461 Cruz, G., 413 De Marinis, M., 316-318
Constantinescu, N. A, 456-457 Crystal, D., 250, 361 De Morgan, A, 552
Constantinescu-Dobridor, G., 457 Csanyi, V., 287 Denes, 1., 285
Contardo, S., 103, 109, 110 Csere, J. A., 286 Denison, N., 195
Conte, A., 611 Csuri, K., 284 Densusianu, 0., 421, 457, 465
Conte, M.-E., 219, 301 Cube, F. von, 191,201,219 Deregowski, 542
Contini, G., 295, 310 Culler,J., 238, 250, 354, 498, 531, Dermentzoglou, A. N., 268
Contreras, C., 106, 110 549 De Rossi, G., 303
Contreras, H., 101, 110 Culley, R, 74, 90 Derrida, J., 9, 25, 32, 71, 87, 89,
Contreras, L., 101, 110 Cummings, E. E., 52 100, 112, 120-121, 126-128, 130,
Cook, J., 539, 552 Cunha, E. de A., 58 139, 141,239,251,267,273-274,
Cooke, D., 250 Curran,).,241 347, 353, 371, 380, 383, 408, 490-
Copernicus, 523 Cury, j. J., 58 491, 494, 608-610, 616
Cople, L., 365 Cuvier, B., 420 Derwing, B., 68
Coquet, J.-C., 153, 164-165, 174, Descartes, R, 21
516 Dacque, 419 Descombes, V., 26
Cornea, P., 457 Dahl, W., 372-373 Desroches, M., 79, 90
Corneille, J.-P., 30 Dale, j. A., 372 Dessoir, M., 523
Corneille, P., 95 Dal Pra, M., 305 Destutt de Tracy, A. L. C., 363
Corno, D., 294 Dame, H., 71, 90 Detienne, M., 347
Cortazar, A., III Damisch, H., 80, 247-248, 577 Devoto, G., 295, 310
Cortazar, j., 464, 478, 605 Daniel, A, 52 Dewar, R., 67, 90
Corti, M., 294, 299-300, 304, 310- Daniel, J. L., 58 Dewey, J., 523, 534, 536, 548, 549,
311, 321, 490, 503 Danilova, 1. E., 579 553
Cortraco, S. de, 343 Daiiino, G., 392-393, 396 Diaconescu, P., 457
Co§buc, 421 Dannemann, M., 105, 110, 111 Dias, E. da S., 407
Coseriu, E., 100, 102, 109, 111, 179, D'Annunzio, G., 298 Diaz-Migoyo, G., 482
181, 189, 191, 197-199, 219, 365, Dante Alighieri, 304, 311,432 Dibbets, G. R. W., 351
418, 457, 465, 509 D'Arcy, E., 153 Didaskalou, T., 255, 261-262, 275
Cossette, C., 81, 89, 90 Dardano, M., 314 Diderichsen, P., 119, 137, 381, 486
Costa, I. L. F., 58 Darrault, 1., 167, 172 Dietrich, R., 191, 219
624 INDEX OF NAMES

Diez Borque, J. M., 474-475, 482 Dubislav, W., 330 Ege, No., 137
Dignaga, 444-445 Dubois, J., 33-34, 38-39, 43, 87, Egebak, N., 121, 126-127, 132, 134-
Dil, A., 93 153-154, 348, 403 140, 142
Dima, A., 417, 457 Dubois, P., 42-43 Eggebrecht, H.-H., 203, 219
Dimitriou, S., 255, 267-268, 272- Duchamp, M., 513 Eggers, H., 191, 219
276 Duchesneau, F., 64 Eggs, E., 210, 219
Dimond, S. J., 250 Duchet, C., 87 Eglin, P., 77,91
Dimopoulos, M., 255, 275 Ducrot, 0., 24, 29, 44,336,412, Egorov, B. F., 557
Dindi, A., 457 510-511 Eguren, J. M., 396-397
Dingler, H., 184, 219 Duda, G., 453, 458 Egyed, P., 285
Dinu, D., 457 Dudley, G., 427, 458 Ehmer, H. K., 219
Dinu, M., 447-448, 457 Dufrenne, M., 44, 276 Ehrich, V., 44
Dionisio, E., 414 Dumarsais, C. C., 443 Ehrmann, H. W., 549
Disney, W., 103 Dumezil, G., 153, 155, 568 Ehses, H., 81, 91
Ditlevsen, T., 133, 138, 140, 143 Dumitra§cu, P., 458 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., 188, 192-193,
Dittborn, E., 109, 111 Dumitrescu, D., 458 219
Dittmar, N., 44 Dumitrescu, 1., 458 Eichenbaum, B., 496, 512, 580
Dixon, P., 549 Dumitrescu-Bu§ulenga, Z., 458 Eimermacher, K., 201, 217, 219,
Dizikirikis, G., 255, 266-267, 269, Dumitru, M., 448, 458 555, 557-558, 573, 579
273, 275 Dummett, M., 244 EiseIe, C., 216, 522, 536, 539, 547,
Docker, J., 7 Dumur, G., 44 549
Dogen, 324, 336 Dunbar, K., 63 Eisenstein, S. M., 143, 206, 47~,
Dohi, Y., 336 Dundes, A., 16, 71, 146, 167,266, 500, 512-513, 563-565, 580
Doina§, S. A., 458 271, 550 Eitel, W., 219
Dolezel, L., 73, 83, 84, 90, 496, 546 Dunham, D., 62 Ekelof, G., 503
Dombi, E. P., 285, 458 Dupriez, B., 70, 91 Ekelund, V., 499, 503
Dominte, C., 458 Duras, M., 14, 16 Ekman, P., 216, 541, 549
Donato, E., 531, 539, 552 Durgnat, R., 250 Elam, K., 250
Donatus, 372 Durkheim, E., 77,95 Elefandis, A., 254, 275
Donne, J., 311 Dutescu, R., 458 Eley, L., 221
Donoghue, D., 249 Dutu, A., 458 Eliade, M., 258,418,427-432,449,
Dorais, F., 87 458, 470, 472
Dorcescu, E., 458 Eliasson, S., 494
Dordarson, 0., 372 Eagle, H., 580 Eliot, T. S., 311
Dorftes, G., 296-298, 306, 311, 314 Eagleton, T., 85, 250 Elizarenkova, T.J., 556
Dorfman, A., 103, III Easthope, A., 250 Ellgring, H., 227
Dorfmuller-Karpusa, K., 255, 266, Eaton, T., 250-251 Elliott, B., 13, 15, 85
272, 275 Ebbinghaus, H., 523 Ellis, J., 7, 9, 239, 361
Dorra, R., 360, 362 Ebel, M., 507-508 Ellis, M., 387
Dostoevsky, F., 373, 439, 559, 561, Ebling, J., 250 Ells, J. G., 67
573-574, 616 Echeverria, A., 110 Eluard, P., 39, 43
Doty, W. G., 427, 472 Echeverria, E., 111 Ema, T., 324, 338
Douglas, D., 347 Eckerts, C. W., 500 Emerson, C., 561
Douglas, J. D., 97 Eco, U., 26, 30,43-44, 50, 61, 88, Eminescu, M., 421, 451,454,457-
Douglas, M., 76, 237, 250, 271 90, 93, 100, 105, 122, 136, 147, 459,461-462,464-467,469-470
Dozoretz, J., 536, 549 149, 182, 198, 206, 209, 211, 213, Empson, W., 239, 250-251
Dllving, K., 376 216, 219, 229-230, 232, 260-262, Emsheimer, E., 219
Drachman, G., 195, 219, 227 274, 294, 296-309, 311-313, 315, Enachescu, C., 459
Drachman, H., 128 317, 319, 321, 336, 344, 353, 364, Enckell, J., 147-148
Dragomir, A., 458 388, 395, 445, 453, 475, 485, 495- Engdahl, H., 491, 503
Dragos, E., 458 496, 503, 536, 538-539, 542, 546- Engelkamp, J., 217
Dragonescu, 1., 458 547, 549 Enkvist, N. E., 150, 494, 503
Dressler, W., 219, 223 Edeline, F., 33-34, 38, 43 Enqvist, P. 0., 487
Dreyer, C., 207, 219 Edwards, J., 553 Ephraim, D., 611
Drop, W. J., 348 Efron, D., 549 Erdmann, J. E.,223
Droste, F. G., 351, 357 Efstathiadis, E., 255 Eretescu, C., 459
Duarte; M. I. dos S., 58 Eftimie, M., 458 Erikson, J. D., 72, 91, 95-96
 INDEX OF NAMES 625
Erlich, V., 311, 370, 560, 575 Fichte, J. G., 179, 224 Foulke, E., 92-93
Ervin, S., 549 Fidjestell, B., 372 Fourcade, A, 53
Eschbach, A., 180-181, 201, 211, Field,584 Fowler, R., 236, 238, 250, 498, 576
215-216, 218-220, 224-226 Fierascu, C., 459 Foxley, C., 102, 110-111
Escobar, A., 398 Fierro, J. del, 104, 112 F0llesdal, D., 378
Escobar, R., 107, 111 Figueiredo, L. Ade, 58 Fradis, A, 459, 461, 472
Espeland, W., 375 Filho, M. G. Q., 57 Francis of Assisi, 439
Espinoza, E., 403 Fillmore, C., 443, 465 Francoeur, L., 64, 74, 82
Esposito, J. L., 527, 536, 539, 549 Filteau, C., 72, 91 Francoeur, M., 64, 91
Espronceda, J. de, 479 Finke, P., 44 Franc;ois, D., 380
Eudes, J., 93 Finlay, I. A, 248 Franc;ois, F., 391
Evangelinou-Santoriniou, M., 255, Finlay-Pelinky, M., 75 Frank, H., 214, 220
266, 275 Finter, H., 201, 205, 220 Frank,J., 536, 549
Even-Zohar, 1., 356 Fiorin, J. L., 57-58 Frank, T., 283
Everaert-Desmedt, N., 43 Firca, C. L., 459 Franke, H. W., 220
Evo1a,419 Firth, J. R., 234, 248, 250 Freadman, A., 1, 3, 14-15, 614, 616
Evseev, 1., 456 Fiscb, M., 216, 520-521, 523-524, Freccero, J., 85
527-528, 531-536, 539, 545, 547, Freed, B., 92
549, 550-552 Freedman, J., 77
Fabbri, P., 298, 301, 304, 313-314, Fischer, W., 467 Freeman, D., 543, 549
546 Fischer-J0rgensen, E., 116, 119, 138 Freeman, E., 150
Fabris, H. H., 220 Fischer-Lichte, E., 216, 220 Frege, G., 64, 96, 124, 179, 220,
Falconer, G., 73, 79, 91, 96 Fisette, J., 64, 71-72, 87, 91-92 350, 443, 456, 466, 532
Fa1kus, H., 251 Fiske, J., 242 Frei, H., 493
Falls, B., 62 Flaubert, G., 92, 129, 139 Freidenberg, O. M., 565
Faltin, P., 186, 203, 219-220, 222, Fleming, 1., 304 Frenzel, E., 499
224 Fleury, M., 81 Freud, S., 48, 127, 131, 134, 142,
Faltz, 350 F1ew, A., 250 273, 419, 437, 538, 587, 590, 599-
Fann, K. T., 549 Flitner, A, 221 600, 602-604, 606-607, 609-610
Farassino, A., 304, 309-310, 313- Floch, J. M., 173-174, 393 Freundlieb, D., 13
314,319 Florenskij, P. A., 565, 577-578 Friedlander, J. S., 553
Farber, C., 76-77 Florescu, V., 459 Friedman, A., 66, 91
Farrago, P. J., 250 Flydal, L., 371, 380-382, 385 Friedman, L., 526, 537, 549
Fatouros, D. A., 255, 262-263, 276 Foarta, M., 459 Fries, E., 204
Fauconnier, G., 351 Fochi, A., 452, 459 Friesen, W. V., 549
Fau1kner, W., 453 Fodor,J., 90, 238, 350 Friis, P., 138
Fauquenoy Saint J acques, M., 68, Foerster, R., 102, 111 Frisch, K. von, 188, 191-192, 220
91 Fokkema, D. W., 352, 498 Frobenius, L., 419
Faye, J.-P., 507 Folena, G., 313 Frow, J., 13, 17
Feher, M., 287 F6nagy, 1., 201, 285 Froelicher, P., 397
Feib1eman, J. K., 549 Forbes, J., 3 Frye, N., 61
Feig1, H., 243 Ford, J., ·500 Fua, A., 314
Feininger, L., 207 Forleo, R., 94 Fuchs-Kittowski, K., 185, 190, 220
Fenoglio, B., 304 Formigari, L., 305 Fucks, W., 191
Feral, J., 74 Fornari, F., 303 Fujieda, A., 336
Ferguson, G., 250 Forrest-Thompson, V., 250 Fujihira, H., 325, 336
Fernandes, R. M. R., 413 Forser, T., 486, 503 Fujii, H., 336
Fernandez, E., 403 Forsius, S. A., 151 Fujimoto, T., 334, 340
Ferrara, L. D'A., 48, 57 Fortes, M., 234 Fujiwara, S., 325, 336
Ferreccio, M., 110, 111 Fortes, M. C. de M., 57 Fukuda, S., 332, 336
Ferreira, E., 367 Foss, P., 3, 616 Fukui, Y., 339
F erreira, V., 409 Fossest01, B., 373, 382 Fukunaga, K., 324
Ferron, J., 88 Fotino, S., 448, 459 Fulchignoni, E., 205
Feuerstein, G., 207 Foucault, M., 88, 133, 136, 147, Fuller, L. L., 583, 585, 598
Feuk, D., 501, 503 230, 251, 257, 267-269, 271-274, Funeriu, 1.,459
Feys, R., 348 347, 408-409, 485, 488-490, 546 Funnemann, N. 0., 138
Fiala, P., 507-508 Fought, J., 355 Fusco, R. de, 105, 306
626
Gabelentz, G. von der, 111
Gabrielescu, D., 448, 459
Gabor, D., 281
Gadamer, H. G., 218, 347
Gajdos, A., 286
Galdi, L., 459
Galen,329
Gallardo, A., 99, 614
Gamberini, 1., 306
Gana, G., 433, 459
Garavelli Mortara, B., 301
Garcfa Berrio, A., 481
Garcfa Lorca, F., 397
Garcfa Lorenzo, L., 474-476,.482
Garcfa Marquez, G., 396
Garcfa Rendue1es, M., 390, 403
Garcfa Salgado, T., 366
Gareilaso, 474
Gardin, J.-C., 58
Garnitschnig, K., 220
Garrel, P., 309
Garrido Gallardo, M. A., 474, 476,
482
Garroni, E., 294, 298, 302, 304,
307, 309, 318, 320
Garvin, P., 92, 281, 531, 545, 549
Gasparov, B. M., 148, 557, 576, 582
Gasser, J., 508
Gaston, E., 102-103, 111
Gatschenberger, R., 180, 220
Gauss, K. F., 530
Gauthier, Y., 63
Gauvin, L., 74, 91
Gavrila, S., 470
Gayan, E., 106, 111
Gazzolo, A. M., 397
Gear, M., 611
Geckeler, H., 181, 197-198,219-
220, 225-227
Geerts, W., 43
Gemz0, A., 140
Genest, 0., 74, 91
Genette, G., 16,35, 71-73,87,347,
352,371,383,392,410,412,415,
514
Geninasca, J., 160, 170, 514-515
Genna, M., 363
George, B. G., 336
Georges, R. A., 550
Georgescu, C. D., 459
Georgescu, L., 461
Georgousopou1os, K., 255, 268
Gerhard, K., 499, 503
Gerias, E., 102, 111
Gerlach, P., 204-205, 220
Gerlach, W., 192, 220
INDEX OF NAMES
Gerlach-Nielsen, M. H. H., 138, Gombrowicz, W., 93, 299, 488
143 G6mez de la Serna, R., 475
Germain, C., 68, 91 G6mez Macker, L., 101, 106-107,
Ghetie, 1., 467 111
Ghioca, G., 459 Gomi, T., 323, 338
Ghisalberti, A., 305 Gongora, L. de, 362
Ghita, G., 459 Gonzalez, A., 396,401
Ghyka, M. C., 459 Gonzalez, C., 106, 111, 360, 362,
Gide, A., 16,96 473,615
Giddings, W. J. N., 66, 91 Gonzalez, H., 102, 111
Giel, K., 221 Gonzalez, M., 112
Giersing, M., 132, 138 Good, G., 85
Gig1io, Z. G., 58 Goodman, N., 136, 141,537,550
Giglioli, P. P., 298, 313 Gopnik, 1., 68, 80
Gil, F., 414 Gopnik, M., 66, 68-69, 74, 80, 91,
Gi1 Hernandez, A., 476, 478 546
Gi1es, E., 553 Gorascu, A., 460
Giles, H., 96 Gore, G., 524, 550
Gi1more, G., 550 Gorun, 1., 460
Gines, J., 103, 109, 111 Goudge, T. A., 64, 91, 550
Ginsburg, L. 1., 576 Goux,J.-J., 6(Jl, 607
Gipper, H., 218 Govaerts, F., 41, 43
Giordan,96 Goya, F. J. de, 246
Girard, R., 491 Grabner-Haider, A., 210, 220
Giroux, R., 71, 90 Grafik, 1., 282-283, 291
Giurchescu, A., 459 Graham, K., 250
Given,541 Graham, R. V., 13, 16
Gizelis, G., 255, 266, 271, 276 Grambo, R., 375, 377
G1eason Jr., H. A., 71 Grammont, 435
Glebe-M011er, J., 141, 615 Grandbois, A., 71,93
Glucksmann, C., 497 Grande, M., 298, 309-310
Glucksmann, M., 250 Grassi, L., 311
Gobin, P., 70, 79, 91 Grasso, A., 304, 313
Gochet, P., 44, 349-350, 356 Graur, A., 226-227, 452, 460
Godard, J.-L., 250, 277, 309, 513 Grazia, R., 305
Gödel, K., 50, 177 Grebe, M., 106, 111
Godel, R., 328, 34 • Green, B., 13, 17
Godino, C., 611 Green, J., 527
Goethe, J. W. von, 147,420,432, Greenberg, J. H., 98
464, 511 Greenfield,C., 13,16
Goffman, E., 50, 206, 271, 511, 541, Greenlee, D., 550
550 Gregoire, A., 344
Goga, N., 459 Gregory, R. L., 250, 542, 550
Gogo1, N. W., 574, 616 Greimas, A. J., 16, 32-33, 35, 38,
Golding, W., 240 41,48-50, 55, 60-61, 68, 71-72,
Goldmann, L., 7, 146,265-266, 81,84,90,96,100-101,106,111,
274, 383,475 121-123, 126-127, 130-132, 135-
Goldoni, C., 151 136, 139-140, 142, 145-151, 153-
Goldschlager, A., 75, 82, 84, 91 163, 165, 167, 169-171, 173-175,
Goldschmidt, H., 203, 220 197, 220, 226, 260-263, 265-266,
Golopentia-Eretescu, S., 417, 424, 274,292,311,313,316, 352,359-
446,459-460, 462, 466-467, 471, 362, 364-366, 371, 377, 383, 388-
614 389,392-393,395-397,400-401,
Gombocz, Z., 288 403,411-412,445,453,456,492,
Gombrich, E. H., 204, 246, 248, 499-500,509,513-516,546-547,
250, 542, 550 550, 570, 591-593, 609-610, 616

Grene, M., 96
Grewendorf, G., 218, 220
Grice, H. P., 95, 244, 436
Griffith, D. W., 513
Grigorakos, M., 268, 276
Gris, J., 563
Grivel, C., 352
Grize, J.-B., 171,507
Groda1, T., 135, 138, 140
Grootendorst, R., 348, 356
Gross, L., 13
Grosu, C., 448, 460
Grosu, 1., 448
Grotefend, G. F., 354
Group fL, 20, 34-37, 39, 40, 42-43,
45, 70, 461
Gmnhaug, R., 374-375
Grundt, L. 0., 382
Grusser, 0.-]., 189, 220
Grygar, M., 559
Gubbins, V., 110
Gubern, R., 483
Guelincx, A, 343
Guepin, J. P., 352
Guerra, M., 362
Guertain, M., 79, 91
Guglielmi, G., 311
Guillaume, G., 61, 68, 380
Guillen, J., 458, 474, 477, 499
Guimaraes, F., 409
Guiraud, P., 334, 336, 361, 363-
364, 372, 457
Gulian, C. L., 460
Gullichsen, H., 382, 385
Gulli Pugliatti, P., 316
Gullvag, 1., 378
Gumperz, J., 375
Gunderman, H., 102, 111
Gundersen, K., 383, 385
Gunther, A. R., 217
Gunzenhauser, R., 191, 201, 220,
222-224
Gustafsson, L., 487-488
Gusti, D., 424, 433
Gutierrez, C., 396
Guttenplan, S., 378
Guttgemanns, E., 211, 220,
352
Gurvitch, G., 363
Gyurcsik, L., 460
Haas, W. P., 550
Habenicht, G., 424, 460
Haberman, A:, 141
Habermas, J., 129-130, 184-185,
221,223
INDEX OF NAMES
Haga, T., 334, 337
Hajn6czy, G., 291
Hakanson, B., 488
Haldane, J. B. S., 245
Hall, E., 315
Hall, S., 241
Hallberg, P., 372, 497
Halle, M., 221, 371, 557
Haller, R., 182, 221
Halliday, M. A. K., 13, 16-17,69,
91, 235-237, 240, 248
Halloran, J. D., 250
Hamada, G., 324, 338
Hamblin, C. L., 531, 550
Hamburgh, M., 539-540, 550
Hamilton, W., 72
Hamm,J.-J., 70, 91
Hammad, M., 81-82, 91, 546
Hammerstrom, U. G. E., 13
Hamon, P., 412
Hamp, E. P., 532, 550
Hamsun, K., 132
Handke, P., 93
Handl, H., 213
Hankiss, E., 282-283, 289
Hansen, B., 140
Hansen, E., 137
Hansen, W., 270
Hansson, H., 503
Harder, P., 137
Hardt, M., 202, 221
Hardwick, C. F., 527, 535-536,
550-551
Harper, F. V., 550
Harper, W., 92
Harrah, D., 531, 550
Harris, Z., 154-155,609-610
Hart, H. L. A., 585, 598
Hartley, j., 242, 250
Hartmann, P., 221
Hartshorne, C., 327, 552
Hartung, W., 183, 193, 195-196,
221
HartzIer, H. R., 550
Hartvigson, G., 140
Harvey, D., 79
Haryu, 1., 336
Hasdeu, B. P., 418
Hasenmueller, C., 250, 546
Hashimoto, F., 325, 336
Hasper, J., 365
Hastrup, K., 138
Hasumi, S., 336
Hattori, S., 333, 336-337
Haubrichs, W., 191
Hauser, A, 281
627
Hausman, 534
Hawkes, T., 242, 248, 498
Hayakawa, S. 1., 337
Hayashi, S., 337
Hayata, T., 337
Hayek, F. W., 527, 536, 550
Heath, S., 80, 239, 242, 248, 250
Hebdige, D., 242
Hebert, A., 72, 88, 97
Hebert, P., 72, 91
Hedeboe, B., 138
HegeI, G. W. F., 121, 126,347,419,
585, 597
Heger, K., 221, 401
Heidegger, M., 126, 197, 587, 608
Heidolph, K. E., 218
Heilmann, L., 296, 303, 457
Heinekamp, A., 179, 221
Heinrichs, j., 221
Heinroth, M., 188, 221
Heinroth, 0., 188,221
Heintz, J., 65, 91
Heinz-Mohr, G., 212, 221
Helbo, A, 19, 33, 41-44, 68, 87, 91,
141, 29~ 317, 343, 462, 475
Heltberg, K., 137
Hemmersam, H., 375
Henault, A., 153, 168, 174,615
Henault, G., 77, 90
Henderson, B., 524, 548, 550, 580
Hennezel, C. d', 53
Henric, J., 607
Henry, E., 101, 108, 111
Herbart, J. F., 286
Herbert, W., 528-529, 531, 538,
545, 550
Herder, j. G., 224
Herlea, G., 460
Hermann, T., 225
Hermans, T., 356
Hermeren, G., 486, 503
Hermes, H., 177-178,221
Hernandez Esteve, V., 478, 481
Heros, R. M. de los, 393, 402
Herrera, M., 107, 111
Herseni, T., 417, 460
Hertel, M. H., 138
Herzberger, H., 63, 92
Herzfeld, M., 89, 90, 92, 545-546,
550
Hesselgren, S., 501, 503
Hess-Lüttich, E. W. B., 90, 96, 186,
193,207,215,221
Hevesy, 1., 281
Heyer, P., 80, 92
Heyvaert, F., 351
628 INDEX OF NAMES

Hidaka, T., 331, 337 Horalek, K., 363 lorgoviei, P., 418
Highman, K. C., 250 Horanyi, 0., 284, 290 losifeseu, S., 455, 461, 468
Hilbert, D., 532 Horii, R, 326, 333, 337 Irigaray, L., 10
Hildyard, A., 95 Horkheimer, M., 130 Irimie, 1., 461
Hili, A., 247 Hornstein, L., 611 Isakov, S., 557
Hillier, 262 Horsner, L. W., 138 Isanos, M., 466
Hilpinen, R., 150 Horvath, 1., 290 Isella, D., 311
Himmelestrand, U., 361 Hosle, J., 219 Iser, W., 499
Hinde, R. A., 250, 541, 548, Hosoi, Y., 337 Ishibashi, K., 328, 339
550 Hough, G., 238, 326, 333, 337 Ishihara, T., 337
Hintikka, J., 146, 150,350 Howell, W. S., 347 Isoya, T., 333-334, 337-338, 340
Hinton, C. H. 542 Howes, F. S., 250 Israel, J., 373, 502
Hirabayashi, Y., 337 Hozven, R., 101-102, 107-109, 1I1 Issaeharoff, M., 74, 92
Hirai, T., 337 Hristea, T., 460 Iswolsky, H., 561
Hirakawa, N., 333, 337 Huarag, E., 396, 398 Itani, j., 331, 337
Hirakawa, S., 334, 337 Hubert,442 Itkonen, E., 147, 150
Hirano, R., 336 Hubig, C., 179,204,217,221 Ito, A., 339
Hirbour-Paquette, L., 79, 91 Hudson, R. A., 550 Ito, 1., 331, 337
Hiromatsu, W., 330, 337 Huhtamo, E., 151 Ivan, V., 418, 461
Hiteheoek, A., 268 Huidobro, V., 102, 113 Ivanov, V., 556
Hiz, H., 531, 550 Huisman, D., 150 Ivanov, V. V., 556-572, 574, 579-
Hjelmslev, L., 21, 23-24, 30, 32, 60, Hulst, L. d', 356 580, 582
69, 115-120, 124-125, 128, 130, Hulten, 0., 502 I vaneseu, G., 461
133, 136-138, 147, 153, 158-160, Humboldt, W. von, 179,219,221, Ivelie, M., III
168, 175, 182, 197,221,292,296, 225, 273, 288 I velie, R., 103, 104, 1I1
298, 307, 309, 380-382, 407, 491- Hume, D., 235 Iwamoto, K., 331, 337
492, 494, 496, 601, 609 Humphrey, C., 250
Hjortsjö, C.-H., 492, 503 Huneeus, P., 103, 107, 111, 113 Jaar, A., 110, 113
Hobbes, T., 229 Hunter, 1., 13, 16 Jaekson, D., 53
Hoekney, D. J., 92 Hurley, N., 100, 111 Jaekson, R. F., 6
Hoeutt, M. 0., 534, 550 Husar, A., 461 Jaeobscn, M., 141
Hodge, B., 13, 17 Husserl, E., 31,121,126,177,181, Jäger, L., 181, 221
Hodge. R., 236 184, 197,221,225,273,347,374, Jakobson, R., 28-30, 35, 37-39, 41-
Hodne, B., 375 378, 454, 498, 553, 586-587 42,51-52,61,68, 71, 74,98, 101,
Hoenseh, J., 221 Huteheon, L., 70, 92 122,149,157,159,173,182,201,
Hoffmann, L., 221 Hyllested, H., 138 206,221, 235,238,296,312,328,
Höfler, 0., 195,221 Hymes, D., 236, 266, 343, 355, 334,337,341,352,354,360,362,
Hoger, A., 137 558-559, 567, 571-572, 582 370-371,381,389-390,397,410,
Hokama, S., 337 461,464,465,477,485,491-492,
Holderoft, D., 44 laneu, V., 461 495-499,503,525,528,532,535,
Holenstein, E., 221, 354, 498 Ibarrondo, B., 363 537-539, 543,546, 550, 560, 562,
Hollier, 586 Ibarrondo, E., 360-361 566,568-569,571,573,575,580,
Holm, B., 499, 503 Ibsen, H., 383, 502 588, 601, 616
Holm, 0., 140 lehim-Tomeseu, D., 461 Jakobson, Ri., 544
Holmberg, K., 376 Iijima, T., 339 James, H., 239
Holmes, J. S., 352, 527 Ijsseling, S., 348, 357 James, W., 238,523, 526-527
Holmes, O. W., 536, 550 Ikegami, Y., 328, 334, 336-338 Jameson, 498, 531, 543, 550
Holmgaard, J., 132, 135, 138, 140 Imbert, P., 71-72, 84, 87, 92 Jamieson, D. G., 90
Holmgren, 0., 499, 503 Impey, M., 461 Janes6, M., 475
Holquist, M., 74, 561 Imre, S., 283, 289, 361 Janet, P., 523
Holt,J., 137 Indrie§, A., 418, 461 Janik, D., 221
Homer, 516 Ingarden, R., 475 Jansen, G., 209,221
Honko, L., 149 loannidis, A., 268, 270, 276-277 Jansen, S., 134,140
Honorato, R., 112 loneseo, E., 457 Jansson, T., 494
Honzl, J., 497 Ioneseu, L., 418, 461 Jara, R, 101, 111
Hook, S., 550, 553, 585, 598 loniea, 1., 418, 461 Jardim, L. P., 53
Hoppal, M., 283-284, 290 lordan, 1., 417, 461, 470 Jauss, H. R, 499
 INDEX OF NAMES
Jeanes, R., 69, 92 Kant, 1., 31, 179, 218, 527
Jefferson, G., 553 Kany6, Z., 284, 290-291
Jeffrey, P., 13, 17 Kapsomenos, E. G., 255-256, 263-
Jencks, C., 81, 92, 247, 550 265, 274, 276
Jensen, H. J. L., 140 Karcevskij, S., 554
Jensen, J. F., 134, 138 Karkama, P., 147-148
Jensen, K. E., 138 Karlgren, H., 494
Jespersen, 0., 435 Karlsen, H. H., 141
Jimenez, G., 364 Karlsson, S.-G., 503
Jimenez-Ottalengo, R, 359-361, Karlsson, T., 138
363-364, 615 Karoly, S., 289
Jobling, 0., 74 Kashap, S. P., 96
Johannessen, K., 371, 375, 378-379, Kasher, A., 222-223
498,503 Kassak, L., 281
Johansen, J. D., 115, 127, 129, 130, Katlev, J., 137
132, 134, 136-141, 615 Kato, H., 331, 342
Johansen, S., 119-120, 128-129, Katona, G., 527
133, 137-139, 141 Katori, H., 338
Johanson, A. E., 550 Kattan, N., 97
Johnsen, E. E., 372 Katz, C. S., 57
Johnson, A. B., 527-528, 550 Katz, J. J., 95, 238, 350, 489
Johnson, D., 557 Kaulbach, F., 184, 222
Johnson, E., 499, 504 Kavouriaris, M., 254, 275
Johnson, K., 365 Kawabata, K., 338
Johnson, S., 550 Kawai, M., 331, 338
Jolles, A., 72 Kawama, T., 331, 338
Jong, W. R. de, 353 Kawamoto, A., 338
Jongen, R., 44 Kawamoto, S., 329, 333-334, 337-
J osefsson, 1., 486, 503 338
Joseph, R, 546 Kawano, H., 331, 338
Joyce, J., 52, 92, 239 Kawashima, T., 330, 338, 342
J6zsa, P., 283-284, 290-292 Kay, R., 109, 111
Juery, R., 72, 84, 97 Kayser, W., 413
Jung, C. G., 419, 437, 572 Kazanskiji, B., 580
Justo, J. M., 411 Keats, J., 616
Kechagioglou, G., 255, 266, 276
Kachru, B., 543, 550 Keenan, E., 350
Kaden, C., 203, 222 Keers, C., 348
Kaemmerling, E., 204, 206, 222 Keidel, W. D., 191
Kaflka, M., 463 Kelemen, J., 287, 550
Kafka, F., 469 Keller. A., 354
Kagel,269 Keller, J.-P., 512
Kahane, M., 424, 461 Kemp, P., 133, 141
Kahn, J., 79, 92 Kempson, R. M., 250
Kaila, E., 146 Kendon, A., 541, 550
Kainz, F., 193, 222 Kennedy, J., 67, 92
Kalinowski, 586 Kennedy, W. B., 550
Kalkofen, H., 183, 206, 213, 222 Kent, B., 534, 550
Kalogeropoulou, E., 276 Kepes, G., 250, 281
Kaltabanos, N., 276 Kepler, J., 523
Kamata, R., 325-326, 338 Kermode, F., 250
Kambouridis, C., 257, 276 Kerr, M., 6
Kamei, S., 334, 337 Ketner, K L., 535-536, 539, 545,
Kaminski, G., 222 547, 549-552
Kamlah, W., 184-185, 222 Kevelson, R., 519-520, 522-524,
Kandinski, W., 173-174 526, 531-534, 536-539, 541-542,
Kanngiesser, S., 222 545-546, 551, 615
6~9
Key, M. R., 551
Kibedi-Varga, A., 348
Kido, K, 331, 338
Kiefer, F., 218, 223, 225, 289
Kiefer, K. H., 222
Kierkegaard, S., 429
Kikuchi, T., 338
Kimpel, R, 69, 92
King-Farlow, J., 63, 92
Kinsbourne, M., 65, 92
Kirsch, R., 222
Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, B., 537,
551, 554
Kirsop, W., 6
Kis, E., 461
Kishi, K, 329, 338
Kitagawa, J. M., 427, 461
Kitagawa, M., 324, 326, 338
Kitagawa, T., 331, 341
Kitaoka, S., 338
Kitasono, K., 332
Kittang, A., 371, 373, 383
Kjaer, B., 134, 139
Kjaer,J., 141
Kjetsaa, G., 373
Kj0rup, S., 134, 136-138, 141
Klagges, 419
Klaus, G., 181, 183, 190,203-204,
211, 214, 222, 344
Klausen, A. M., 374-375
Kleberg, L., 499-500, 503
Kledzik, S. M., 217
Klee, P., 174, 207
Kleene, S. C., 168
Klein, 599
Klein, W., 191, 219, 222
Kleinpaul, R., 222
Klingberg, F., 224
Klinke, R., 189, 220
Klinkenberg, J.-M., 24, 27-28, 30,
33, 35, 38,42-44, 61, 90, 93, 353,
453,503
Klitgaard, V., 138
Klix, F., 190, 218, 222
Kloepfer, R., 201-202, 219, 222
Kloesel, C., 536, 539, 545, 547,
549-551
Kneale, W. C., 585
Kneepkens, C. H., 354
Kneif, T., 203-204, 222
Knight, S., 7, 10
Knilli, F., 206, 222, 227, 351
Knorringa, R. R, 461
Knudsen, N. L., 134, 137-138, 141
Kobayashi, H., 327-328, 333, 338-
340
Kobori, K, 334, 337
630 INDEX OF NAMES

Koch, W. A., 201-202, 206, 211, Kriszat, G., 226 Lalu, 1.,448, 461
215, 222 Krohn, 1., 145 Lambert, J. H" 93, 179, 223, 226,
Koda1y, Z., 145, 287 Krohn, K., 145 352, 355
Koenig Klaus, G., 297, 306 Krois, J., 551 Lambert, K., 548
Koerner, E. F. K., 68, 92, 150, 181, Kruckenberg, A. B., 498 Lambert, W., 67
222, 343, 379, 553 Kruiger, T., 348 Lancaster, R., 536, 551
Koh1er-Chesny, J., 505, 508 Krysinski, W., 72, 74, 83, 92-93 Lancoue-Labarthe, 601, 606
Kolbe, J., 222' Kubara, M., 64 Landgren, B., 503
Kolers, P., 65, 92 Kudo, K., 332 Landowski, E., 515, 593
Kolsrud, K., 375 Kuhn, T. A., 60, 93, 355, 379, 502, Landsch, M., 223
Komatsu, S., 340 523, 551 Landwehr, J., 395
Komiya, T., 325, 336 Kukai, S., 324-326, 338 Lane, M., 250
Komninos, N., 276 Kuklick, B., 551 Lang, E., 253
Kondo, H., 338 Kuleshov, L., 512 Lang, F., 500
Kondo, K., 328, 338 Kunne-Ibsch, E., 352, 498 Lang, G., 285
Köngäs-Maranda, E., 16, 76, 92- Küng, H., 211 Lange-Seidl, A., 177, 179, 181-182,
93, 146,561 Kupareo, R., 102-104, 107, 111 186, 193-194, 199-200, 202, 213,
Konvitz, M. R., 549 Kupfmuller, K., 190 217-224,226-227,615
Köpeczi, G. M. V., 283 Kurano, K., 323, 338 Langer, S. K., 203, 206, 216, 247,
Kopnin, P. V., 586 Kushner, E., 75 327-328, 331, 338
Kopsch, G., 224 Kuusamo, A. H., 151, 211 Lapa, M. R., 407, 409
Kornilios, 271 Kuusi, 0., 148-149 Laponce, J. A., 85
Kosik, K., 495 Kuwano, T., 338 Larbaud, V., 96
Kosmopoulos, P., 276 Kuyper, E. de, 174 Laroche, D., 32-33, 44
Kosslyn, S. M., 66, 92 Kuypers, K., 348 LaRochefoucauld, F. de, 605
Kotin, A., 73 Kyriakidou-Nestoros, A., 276 Larochette,J., 351,357
Koukios, M., 268, 276 Larsen, P., 138, 142-143
Kovacs, A., 57 Labe, L., 14 Larsen, S. E., 136-140, 142,615
Kovacs, F., 288 Labis, N., 454, 469 Larsson, H., 491
Kovecses, Z., 291 Laboelle, M., 19 LassweIl, H., 551
Kowalski, K., 209, 222 Laborit, H., 533, 551 Latorre, S., 403
Kozma, L., 282 Labov, W" 71 Laurette, P., 75
KlOppe, S., 134, 139, 142 Lacan, J., 9, 33, 48, 100, 120, 127- Lauridsen, P. S., 138
Krabbe, C. W., 348, 356 128, 134, 136-137, 142-143, 147, Lausberg, H., 413
Kracauer, 580 153, 181, 232, 239, 242, 251, 255, Lautreamont, 94, 130
Kragholm, J. F., 138 257, 267-268, 271-274, 303, 371, Lavelle, L., 465
Krampen, M., 81, 187, 201, 206, 383,408-409,412,490,538-539, Lavers, A., 230, 567
208, 213, 216-217, 220-225, 306, 599-611 Lawson, S., 13-14
551 Lacharite, N., 63 Lazar, N., 461
Kramsu, K., 149 Lachmayer, F., 210, 220, 222 Lazarescu, M., 461
Krause, F., 179, 222 La Cours, A., 142 Lazarev, V. N., 577
Krause-Jensen, E., 133, 137-138, Ladriere, J., 354 Lazaridis, P. G., 261,277
141,143 Laferriere, D., 565 Lazaro Carreter, F., 473-474
Kreindler, A., 461 Lafleche, G., 71, 93 Laziczius, Gy, 288
Kress, G., 13, 236 Lafon, D., 73, 93 Leach, E., 16,76,90, 147,234-235,
Kreuzer, H., 201, 222 Lagerkvist, P., 499, 503 250
Kriegbaum, H., 250 Lagerroth, E., 498, 503 Leach, M., 569
Kripke, S., 63 Lagerroth, U.-B., 499, 503 Leaman,262
Kristensen, P. E., 137 Laforgue, J., 458 Leard, J.-M., 72
Kristensen, T., 132, 140 Lago, T., 107, 112 Leavis, F. R., 7,240
Kristeva, J., 9-10, 20, 25, 32-33, Lagopoulos, A.-Ph., 253-255, 257- Lechte, J., 3
45,48,50,71,75, 100, 120, 122, 262,268-269,271,274-278,615 Leclaire, 603
126-128,130-132,141,147,174, Lahusen, T., 517 Lecortin, E., 364
255,260,267-268,272,274,277, Laillou-Savona, J., 74, 93 Lecours, A. R., 65, 83,93-94
302,347,352,383,393,410,412, Lakatos, 1., 60, 93 Lederer, A., 286
415,494,496-498,563,575,586, Lakoff, G., 505, 511 Lederman, S., 67, 93
60 I, 608-609 Laliberte, Y., 71, 93 Leech, G., 238, 250
 INDEX OF NAMES 631

Lefebve, M.-J., 33-34, 44 Lieber, F., 521-522, 527, 551 Lotman, Y. M. (Cont:)
Lefebvre, A., 107, 112 Liedman, S.-E., 486, 503 572-576, 579-582
Lefevere, A., 352 Liendo, E., 611 Lotz, J., 281, 288
LeGalliot, J., 94 Liesto1, K., 372 Lötzsch, F., 224
Legare, C., 71, 93 Ligeti, G., 281 Lourenc;o, E., 408
Lehe!, F., 281 Ligeti, P., 281 Lourenco, N. R. da P., 58
Le Huenen, R., 71, 92-93, 95, 546 Lihn, E., 110 Lovin, M. M., 458
Leibniz, G. W., 178-179, 223, 305, Lima, A. C., 55 Lovinescu, H., 460
420,498 Lima, L. C., 57 Lovi~tei, T., 468
Leino, P., 149 Lima, N. F., 58 Lucid, D., 555-556, 558, 562, 566,
Leischner, A., 189, 223-224 Limeira, E. de A., 58 580
Leites, N., 551 Linch, K., 104 Luckmann, T., 193, 217, 249
Lekomcev, J. M., 556, 579 Lindberg, P., 499, 503 Lüdi, G., 509-510
Lekomceva, M. 1., 556 Lindekens, R., 40-41, 44, 80, 82, 93 Lüthi, K., 210, 223
Lendvai, E., 287 Lindsey, S., 81, 85, 93 Luhmann, N., 221, 223
Lenhart, M., 89-90, 92, 544 Link, J., 394 Lukacs, G., 7, 130,281-282,286,
Lenin, V., 126-127 Lipps, T., 523 292
Lenneberg, E. H., 535, 551 Lissitozky, 174 Lukas, 108, 112
Lenzen, V., 551 Liszt, F., 149 Lullo, R., 305
Leodo1ter, R., 223 Litera, 1., 456, 461 Lumbelli, L., 301, 314
Leon, P., 91, 97 Littleton, C. Scott, 568 Lundberg, B., 370
Le6n, R., 107, 112,401 Liungman,C. G., 490, 503 Lundberg, B. A., 147,495,503
Leonard, H. S., 531, 551 Livingston, 584 Lurker, M., 211-212, 223, 226
Leondar, B., 141 Ljung, P. E., 485, 503, 616 Lyngouris, N., 255, 267-268, 277
Leopardi, G., 295 Llotrac, E. M. Lyons, J., 196, 218, 223, 250
Leppe, C., 198 Locke, J, 197, 229, 357, 521, 525, Lyotard, J F., 269, 271, 273, 393
Leps, M.-C., 75 527-528, 537, 543, 551, 553
Lepsch, G., 551 Lockwood, D., 96 MacAu1ey, G., 13
Lepschy, G., 303, 305 Lodge, D., 231, 238, 247, 250 Machado, A., 299, 303,478
Leroy, M., 44, 351 Logothetis, A., 270, 277 Machado, C. M. S., 58
Lesneiwski, S., 508 Lo-Johansson, 1.,499, 503 Machado, M. H. M., 58
Levendakos, D., 277 Lombezzi, M., 313-314 Macheray, P., 412
Levin, J. 1., 556, 559 Long, C. H., 427, 460 Machiavelli, N., 205
Levin, P., 137 Longum, L., 383 MacKay, D., 525, 551
Levin, S., 28, 496 Lönroth, L., 498 Mackett-Stout, J., 67
Levinton, G. A., 575 Lope, 474, 479 Mackey, R., 531, 539, 551
Levi-Strauss, C., 9, 16,28,41,48, Lopes, E., 55, 57 MacLennan, H., 76
61,68, 76, 80, 84, 90, 92, 100, Lopes, 6., 410 MacNamara, J., 66, 93
102,111,122,133,140-141,146- L6pez, R., 611 Macot, M., 81
147, 149, 153-157, 159, 162-164, L6pez, S., 400 Macri, 0., 311
181,206-207,230,233-235,251, L6pez A1bUjar, E., 396 Macza, J., 282
258,262-263,266,271-274,292, L6pez Manjarrez, V., 360-361, Madden, E., 521, 552
297, 352, 370-371, 374-375, 380, 363-364 Madsen, P., 120, 127, 130-131, 135,
383, 395, 408, 425, 442, 445, 459- Lopponen, P., 149 137-139, 142
460, 485, 488-489, 492, 496, 498- Lord, R., 363 Madvig,J. N., 115
500, 502-503, 525, 538, 551, 568, Lorentz, A., 364 Maeda, H., 333, 338
570, 601-602, 604-605, 607 Lorentzen, L., 382 Maenpaa, A.-L., 148
Levy, M., 137 Lorenz, K., 179, 188, 191-193, 223, Maga1haes, A. S. V., 58
Lewis, C. S., 531, 534, 551 227 Maga1haes, T. C. de, 354
Leyda, J., 563 Lorenz, Ku., 185, 223 Magli, P., 317-318
Leyhausen, P., 223 Lorenz, W., 223 Maher, J. P., 150
Lhote, J.-F., 80, 82, 93 Lorenzen, P., 184-185, 222 Mahler, G., 244
Lichtenstein, R., 512 Loriggio, F., 75 Maillet, A., 96
Lichtheim, G., 282 Loro, T. J., 58 Maiorescu, T., 418
Licitra, A., 508 Lotman, Y. M., 148,334,338,389, Mairet, P., 458
Lidov, D., 80, 93, 541, 546 394-395, 412, 461, 466, 485, 495- Major, J. L., 72
Lieb, H.-H., 199-200,213,223 497, 500, 556-560, 565, 567, 570, Makinen, K., 148
632
Makkai, A., 96
Makkai, V. B., 96
Maldonado, T., 223, 306-308, 313,
319, 321
Maleviteh, K., 174
Malinowski, B., 234
Malita, M., 462
Mallarme, A., 6, 39, 52, 71, 93,
160-161, 458, 466, 490
Malmberg, B., 354, 485, 487, 491-
494,497,503-504
Malmberg, T., 151
Maltese, C., 307-308
Maluf, U., 53
Manea§, M., 453, 457, 461
Maneini, M., 309
Mandaräsz-Zsigmond, A., 286
Mandelstarn, N., 563
Mandel'stam, 0., 559, 574, 575
Mandies, G., 285
Maneea, C., 458
Mannheim, K., 281, 361
Manner, E.-L., 149
Manning, F., 77, 93
Manoieseu, N., 462
Manoliu-Manea, M., 462
Manson, M., 107, 112
Mansour, M., 360, 362
Maranda, P., 16, 76,92-93, 146,
453,561,570,572
Maratsos, M. P., 548
Mareeau, M., 490
Marehant, P., 107, 112
Mareus, S., 35,417-418,421,432,
447-452, 456, 459, 462
Mareuse, H., 131, 489
Mareussen, L., 133, 138
Marin, L., 80, 497
Marineu, E., 455
Marineseu, M., 462
Marino, A., 463
Marks, C., 79, 94
Markidis, M., 273, 277
Maroosis, J., 64
Marotti, F., 315
Marquez, 367
Marquez, G., 299
Marr, N. J., 565
Marshall,J. C., 251, 363
Martens, J. L., 348
Marti, G., 484
Marti, K., 223
Marti, S., 484
Martin, G. D., 250
Martin, P., 69, 94
Martin, R., 19,505,544,552,616
Martin Santos, L., 480
INDEX OF NAMES
Martinet, A., 22, 24, 30, 32,61,68, Medvedev, P. N., 561
153, 296, 364, 380, 382, 409, 513 Meggle, G., 215, 223
Martinet, J., 24, 412 Mehler, J., 172
Martinez,J. A., 473 Meid, W., 219, 223
Martinez, R., 104, 112 Meier, G. F., 189, 195-196,214,
Martinidis, P., 255, 259, 260-261, 221, 223
265, 269, 274, 277 Meillet, A., 491, 569
Maruyama, K., 334, 338-340 Meissner, A., 190
Marx, K., 48, 128, 130-131, 136, Meissner, E., 105, 108, 110, 112
139-140, 239, 273, 302, 330, 361, Melan<;on, J., 74-75, 94
413, 481, 538, 587, 590, 608 Me1berg, A., 499
Maser, S., 185, 194-195,223 Meletinskij, E. M., 167, 556, 558,
Masterson, D. W., 251 561,565,572,574
Ma§ek, V. E., 463 Meletyinszkij, J. M., 283
Mäte, J., 285 Melis, L., 356
Matejka, L., 333, 531, 538, 546, 552, Meilers, W., 250
554,558,560-561,572,573 Melman, C., 599
Mathesius, V., 538 Meltzer, J. D., 553
Mathieu, M., 62 Melville, B., 3
Mathiot, M., 541, 552 Mendeleieff, D. 1., 435
Matos, N. de, 408 Menendez Pelayo, M., 473
Mattelart, A., 103, 111-112 Menendez Pidä1, R., 473
Mattelart, M., 103, 112 Meo Zillio, G., 107, 112
Matthias, J., 489 Merleau-Ponty, M., 126, 140,374,
Maupassant, G. de, 160, 169,467, 339, 493, 609 .
515 Meriluoto, A., 149
Mauro, T. de, 297-298, 303, 305, Merkel,435
311,315,325,328,340 Merrill, K., 552-553
Mauss, F., 502-503 Merryman, J. H., 583,598
Mauss, M., 442, 515 Mertens, F. J., 356
Maya, 0., 102, 112 Mesehonnie, H., 28
Mayakovskij, V. V., 574 Meserani, S. C., 58
Mayberry, R., 66, 94 Meszäros, A., 286
Mayer, G., 203, 223 Metaxas, 257
Maynowa, M. R., 559, 573 Metz, C., 9, 23,40-41,80,87, 143,
Mazis, A., 263, 277 181,206,215,266-267,274,308-
Maneseu, C., 463 309,364, 376,393,412,485,497,
Margineanu, A., 463 500, 580, 599,601
McCabe, C., 239, 248, 250 Meunier, J. G., 80
McCawley, J. D., 63, 94 Mey, J., 374, 379
McClelland, J., 63, 70, 94 Meyer, G. De, 351
McCormaek, T., 76 Meyer, M., 356
MeCormiek, H., 599, 609, 611 Meyer, P., 616
MeDuffie, K. A., 396 Meyerhold, 497,500
Mclntyre, M. C., 69 Meynaud, J., 254, 277
MeKellin, W., 76 Mieeli, S., 307
MeLaughlin, T., 250 Michaelsen, A. G., 384
MeLean, M., 13 Michelangelo, B., 246
MeLuhan, M., 61, 78, 100, 103, Michelis, P. A. 104, 112
111-114,245 Miehon, J., 71-12, 94
MeMaster, G., 67, 88 Mic1au, P., 417-418, 458, 463
MeNaughton, S., 91 Midgaard, K., 378
MeQuai1, D., 249-250 Mier, R., 362
Mead, G., 520, 527, 552 Miereanu, C., 112
Mear, A., 547 Mieville, D., 508
Meat, A., 82 Migliorini, B., 296
Medina Eehavarria,]., 363 Mih1iil1i, E., 463

MihäiHi, R., 463
Mihailescu, L., 459
Mihnea, T., 448, 463
Mikl6s, P., 290
Miles, F., 552
Miles, M. A., 535
Miller, G. A., 571
Miller,J. A., 127,611
Miller, 0., 73, 98
Miller, R., 242
Milner, J. C., 155
Milner, M., 601, 617
Minakata, K., 326, 339
Mine, Z. G., 557, 574
Minegishi, Y., 331, 339
Minguet, P., 34, 38-39, 42, 44
Minnis, N., 237, 250
Minson, J., 3
Mirabeau, Comte de, 79
Miranda, M:, 103, 109, 112
Miranda, S., 110, 112
Mirza, T., 463
Mishra, V., 13, 17
MitchelI, J., 9
MitchelI, L. R., 92, 94
Mitropoulos, E. G., 277
Mittelstaedt, H., 190
Mitterand, H., 73, 79, 91, 96, 153
Miura, B., 325, 339
Miura, T., 333-334, 339
Miyazaki, T., 336
Modola-Prunea, D., 463
Moerman, M., 552
Moeschler, J., 511-512
Mohanty, J. H., 378
Moholy-Nagy, L., 281
Mohrmann, C., 116
Moisil, G., 449, 463
Moles, A., 216, 269, 308
Moliere, 134, 229
Molina, E., 106, 112
Molina, T. de, 475
Moller, K.-D., 206, 224
Monegal, E. R., 53
Monelle, R., 250
Monnai, T., 328, 332, 335, 339-341
Monod, M., 81
Monod, P., 81-82, 86
Monserrat, L., 362
Montague, R., 63
Montaigne, M. E. de, 97, 543
Montale, E., 303, 311
Montanari, M. E. de L., 58
Montani, P., 321
Monteiro, A. C., 410
Montherlant, H. de, 475
Moore, E., 539, 545, 551, 552
INDEX OF NAMES
Moragas Spa, M. de, 483-484
Moran, A., 13, 15
MoreI, C., 103, 112
Moreno Martin del Campo, F., 366
Morgan, J. L., 510
Morgenstierne, G., 371
Morin, V., 364
Morita, M., 332, 339
Morren, L., 43
Morris, C. W., 20, 31, 61, 65, 88,
100, 181, 183-184, 190, 193, 198,
201, 204, 206, 209-211, 214-215,
218, 220, 224, 243, 261, 263, 267,
292, 296-297, 302, 305-306, 308,
327-328, 331, 339, 344, 361, 365,
377-378, 384-385, 411, 413, 477,
480, 482, 492, 520, 524, 528, 532-
535, 537, 539-541, 549, 552, 554,
614
Morris, D., 251, 376
Morris, M., I, 3, 14-15,614, 616
Morrison, K., 74, 77, 94
Morse, M., 546-547
Mortensen, A. T., 133, 136-137, 142
Mortensen, F., 138, 142
Morton, P., 81
Moser, W., 72, 75, 94
Mossman, E., 565
Moumtzis, A., 277
Mounin, G., 24, 26-27, 61, 94, 216,
317, 339, 361, 445, 497
Mouralis, B., 391
Moya, M., 112
Moyaert, P., 357
Mozart, W. A., 563, 582
Mucci, E., 305
Muck, H., 207, 210-211, 224
Muecke, S., 13, 15
Muhlen-Achs, B., 206, 224
Mujica, G., 112
Mukai, S., 329, 331-332, 335-336,
339
Mukarovsky, J., 203, 206, 352, 412,
479-480,485,496-498,538,541,
552, 554, 560
Mulhern, F., 240
Muller, F., 435
Müller-Hagemann, D., 224
Mundle, C. W. K., 244
Munizaga, C., 106, 112
Mufi6z, R., 362
Munsterberg, H., 523-524, 552
Munteanu, R., 463
Munteanu, ~., 463
Murasaki, K., 337
Mureh, A., 13
Mure§anu, I., 463
633
Murphy, A. E., 549
Murvai, 0., 290, 460, 463
Musarra, F., 356
Musgrave, A., 60, 93
Musset, A. de, 140
Nabokov, V., 16-17
Nadin, M., 186,215,224,417,463
Naert, P., 492, 503
Naess, A., 377-378
Nagai, S., 330, 339
Nagashima, Y., 337
Nagel, E., 537, 552
Nagy, M. J., 285
Nagy, P., 533-534, 552
Nakamura, Y., 335, 339
Nakazawa, S., 333, 336, 339
Nakhimovsky, A. D., 576
Nakhimovsky, A. S., 576
Nakono, A., 339
Nakono, 0., 332, 339
Nasta, M., 433, 448, 453, 463
Natori, Y., 331, 339
Natorp, P., 327
Natsopoulos, D. S., 277
Nattiez, J.-J., 64, 75, 79-80, 82, 87,
93-94, 148,213,244,411
Naud, G., 79, 94
Naumann, M., 224
Navratil, L., 187, 224
Nazario, J. F., 58
Neagu, I. G., 464
Needman, R., 234
Nef, F., 158
Negrici, E., 464
Negru, R., 464
Neiva Jr., E., 48-49, 57
Nekljudov, S. J., 556, 561, 570, 572,
579
Nelson, P. J., 91
Nemeth, G., 288
Nemoianu, V., 464
Nencioni, G., 316
Neruda, P., 102, 111, 397
Nerval, G., 383
Nespoulous, J.-L., 65, 83, 93-94
Nesselroth, P., 70, 94
Nestle, W., 209, 224
Nethol, A. M., 361-362
Neuhardt, G., 208, 224
Neumann,J. von, 281
Neumann, W., 193-197, 224
Neves, H. G., 414
Nichols, B., 80, 94
Nicholson, G. G., 6
Nicolau, E., 447, 462, 464
Nicolescu, A., 417, 464
634 INDEX OF NAMES

Nicolescu, M., 449 Ogden, C. K., 171,232-234,243, Ouspenski, P. D. See Uspenskij

Niculescu, A, 464 327-328, 339, 360, 377, 445, 537, Overington, M., 77, 95
Niculescu, R., 464 552, 554 Ovesen,J., 133
Nida, E., 529 Ogino, M., 326, 339 0fsti, A, 373
Nielsen, E., 135, 139 Ogodescu, D., 465 0ysteb0, 0., 373
Nielsen, H. A., 95, 137 Oguibenine, B. L., 556, 567, 579
Nielsen, H.-J., 141 Ohashi, Y., 333, 339 Pacheco, A., 103, 112
Nielsen, K. H., 138 Ohlin, P., 63, 33, 39 Pacht, 0., 204
Nietzsche, F., 126,420,491,533, Oishi, H., 339 Paetzold, H., 130, 224
587 Ojala, A, 147-148 Pages, 1., 91
Niikuni, S., 332 Okada, M., 336 Pagliaro, A., 303
Niiniluoto, 1., 150 Okubo, T., 337 Pagnini, M., 294, 293, 301, 303,
Niitamo, 0., 148 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 347, 532, 539, 310-312, 314, 316
Nikolaeva, T. M., 556 552 Pagnot, A., 75
Nishie, M., 339 Oldfield, R. C., 251 Pagoulatos, A., 277
Nishio, M., 325, 342 O'Leary, P. J., 64 Pais, C. T., 51, 57
Nishioka, T., 324, 338 Olesen, K. R., 142 Paivio, A., 66, 95
Nishiyama, Y., 339 Oleza, J., 473-480 Palm, G., 438
Nobayashi, M., 332, 334, 336, 339, Oliva, A, 57 Paleolog, T., 464
341 Olivarius, P., 133 Paleolog, V. G., 465
Nogami, T., 325, 342 Oliveira, C. de, 412 Palo, M. J. P. G., 58
Noica, C., 417, 464 Oliveira, E. B. R. de, 53 Palomo, P., 474-475, 482
Nomoto, K., 332, 334, 336, 339, 341 Oliveira, M. H. L. de, 53 Pamfil, E., 465
Nomura, H., 339 Oliveira, M. R. D., 58 Panaccio, C., 63
Norberg-Schultz, C., 105, 376 Oliver, P., 258, 276 Panagiotatos, D., 267, 277
Nordmark, D., 500, 503 Olsen, B. M., 372 Pandolfi, A. M., 110
Nordström, G. Z., 503 Olsen, M., 122, 132, 136-138, 142 Pät:J.ini, 440-443, 446, 453
Nordström, H., 494 Olsen, P., 139 Panofsky, E., 204, 220, 247, 250, 576
Non~en, A, 491-492 Olson, D., 65, 95 Papachronis, L., 277
Norris, C., 229, 248, 251, 616 Olsson, A., 498, 503 Papadima, 0., 417, 457,465
Nöth, W., 201-202, 224 Olsson, J., 500, 503 Papahagi, T., 465
Novik, E. S., 556, 561, 572 Olsson, T., 502, 503 Papaioannou, G. G., 255, 270, 275,
Novitz, D., 246 Oltean, S., 464 277
Nowak, K., 503-504 O'Neill, D., 13 Papp, F., 283, 289
Nowell-Smith, G., 241, 251 O'Neill, .1., 63, 74, 77, 95 Papu, E., 465
N0jgaard, M., 132, 136-138, 142 Onicescu, 0., 464 Paquot, A., 75, 95
Nuchelmans, G., 350, 354, 357 Ono, S., 323, 338 Paras chiv es cu, M. R., 154
Numata, R., 326, 339 Ooka, M., 325, 339 Pardo, A., 104, 112
Numelin, R., 374 Oprea, 1., 464 Pardo Bazan, E., 480
Numberg, 599 Oprescu, G., 470 Pareto, W., 361
Nunez, E., 110, 112 Oquendo de Amat, C., 396 Parker, H., 113
Nlinez Ramos, R., 476, 478, 483- O'Regan, T., 3, 13, 16 Parland, H., 146
484 Orlando, F., 312 Parland, 0., 151
Nyirö, L., 283, 290 Orosz, M., 232 Parra, C., 109
Nygaard, E., 142 Ortega y Gasset, J., 101 Parret, H., 29-32,42, 44, 68, 95,
Nysenholc, A., 41-42, 44 Ortiz, A. M. B., 57 15~ 216, 219, 221, 224, 346, 348,
Ort1z, V., 367 353, 356
Ortony, A., 251 Pascadi, 1., 465
Ochagavia,J., 109, 112 Osgood, C. E., 67, 365, 377, 549, Pascal, B., 432, 515, 525
Ockham, W. of, 305 552 Pasini, W., 94
Odin, R., 91, 215 Osmond-Smith, D., 245 Pasolini, P. P., 206, 304, 308
Odobleja, S., 464 Ostria, M., 102, 109-110,112 Pasqualino, A, 307
Oehler, K., 179, 190, 215-217, 222- Ostrowetsky, 81 Passmore,J., 251
224, 535, 552 Ostwald, P., 552 Passow, W., 205,224
Oelker, D., 102, 110, 112 Otano, R., 100, 103, 112 Pasternak, B., 565
Oesterreicher-Mollwo, M., 212, 224 O'Toole, L. M., 13, 17,576 Patanjali, 445
Ogata, T., 325, 339 Otten, M., 42 Pater, W. A., 352-353, 357

Patte, A., 174
Patte, D., 74, 174, 545-546
Patton, T., 69, 95
Paulin-Siade, G., 361, 363
Pausanias, 516
Pave1, T., 63, 68, 72, 83, 95, 163,
170, 465
Pavis, 1'., 74, 86, 95
Payant, R., 80, 82, 95
Paz, 0., 342
Paträu1escu, C., 465
Paum, G., 448, 465
Pariu, S., 465
Parvan, G., 465
Parvu, S., 465
Pas1aru, E., 465
Pearson, C., 520, 541, 545, 552
Pe ase, 597
Pechini, M., 362
Pedersen, H., 115
Pedersen,J. M., 138-139, 142
Peeters, j.-M., 41, 44
Peguy, C., 617
Peirce, B., 521, 536
Peirce, C. S., 15, 20, 22, 25-26, 30-
31,41-42,48-52,56,59,61,64,
72, 74, 83, 85, 89, 91-92, 95-97,
100, 126-127, 129-130, 136, 142,
146-147, 150, 181, 184, 194, 198,
201,204,206,208,210-211,214-
216, 218, 22~ 238, 243, 245, 247,
249, 261, 266, 292, 296-297, 302,
304-305, 309, 324, 327-330, 332,
336, 339-340, 342, 354, 360-361,
365, 370, 377-378, 380-381, 385,
407,411,426,431,441,445,480-
481, 492, 502-503, 520-548, 549-
554,614-615
Peirce, J., 521
Pekkila, E., 149
Pelc, j., 148,213, 216, 545
Pelinski, R., 79, 95
Pelle tier, F. J., 63, 95
Pennanen, J., 149
Penrose, 542
Pentck, J., 285, 291
Pentek, J., 465
Pentikainen, J., 149
PeiiuelaCaiiizal, E., 55, 57
Pequegnat, C., 508
Peraldi, F., 64, 75, 95-96
Peralta, J. J., 58
Peraya, D., 25, 43, 56
Pereira, E., 105, 112
Pereira, H. T. de M. T., 58
Perelman, C., 35, 89, 347-348, 532,
539, 552
INDEX OF NAMES 635
Perez de Ayala, R., 477-478 Pleh, Cs., 287
Perez Galdos, B., 480 Plqu, A., 465
Perez Gallego, C., 474-475, 481-482 Plett, H., 44
Perkins, D., 141 Pleynet, M" 130, 137
Peronard, M., 107, 112 Podgorzec, A., 576
Perron, P., 63, 71-72, 84, 90, 92-95, Poe, E. A., 605-606
546 Pohl, J., 27, 45
Perry, T. S., 521, 552 Poinsot, J., 538
Pesonen, 1'., 148 Polanyi, K., 281
Pesot, j., 64, 95 Polith, A., 448, 465
Peter, M., 283 Politi, j., 265, 277
Peters, J.-M., 351 Polzin, R., 74, 95, 547
Petersen, 0., 139 Pomerantz, R. j., 66, 92
Peterson, Jr., N., 547 Pomorska, K., 557, 560-561
Petöfi, J., 91, 94-95, 266, 285, 289, Ponge, F., 490
508 Pontoppidan, H., 132
Petrarca, F., 295 Ponzio, A., 294
Petrescu, C., 453, 464, 471 Poole, R., 230-231
Petrov, 579 Pop, M., 424, 452, 464-466, 470
Petrovici, E., 465 Popa, C., 466
Petterson, T., 494 Popescu, I. A., 466
Pettersson, Ä., 499, 503 Popovici, D., 466
Pettit, P., 251, 523, 531, 552, 568 1'01'1', H., 92
Peuranen, E., 148 Poppe, E., 174
Peuser, G., 189, 224 Popper, K., 38, 246, 502
Peytard, J., 497 Portis-Winner, 1., 216
Pecheux, M., 393, 609 Pos, H. J., 346-347
Pfeifer, D. E., 216, 536 Pos er, H., 179, 181,224
Philippide, A., 451, 453 Posner, R., 149, 194,203, 207, 213,
Piaget, J., 65, 125, 191, 258, 287, 215-217,219-221, 223-224,614
348, 502, 505, 538, 553 Pottier, B., 48, 69, 95, 160, 197,379,
Piatigorsky, A. M., 216, 556 393, 396, 401, 509
Picard, R., 408 Pouillon, J., 570
Picasso, P., 143 Poulsen, j., 138, 142
Piccini, M., 103, 112 Pound, E., 49, 52
Pichler, F. R., 190, 226 Pousseur, H., 41, 45
Pickenhain, L., 189, 224 Poyatos, F., 76, 79, 95
Pier, J. 1'., 223 Pracht, E., 204, 224
Pieraut-Le Bonniec, G., 508 Prado Oropeza, R., 359
Piero della Francesca, 93 Praxiteles, 420
Pignatari, D., 48-49, 52, 57 Prebensen, H., 137
Pignotti, L., 312-313 Presley, V., 13
Piguet, J. C., 586 Preti, G., 305
Pike, K. L.. , 529 Preziosi, D., 81, 541, 546, 552
Pinborg, j., 343 Pribram, K., 88, 524, 535, 552
Pino, Y., 106, 112 Price-Williams, D. R., 251
Pinsker, H., 526, 533, 552 Prideaux, G., 68
Pinto, M. da G., 414 Prieto, A., 474-475, 482
Piotrovskij, A., 580 Prieto, L. j., 20, 22, 24-27, 30, 61,
Pirandello, L., 93 87,102,216,307,321,340,344,
Pire, F., 34, 36, 45 364
Pirola, L. T., 58 Printz-Pählson, G., 488-490, 504
Pittelkow, R., 131-132, 137-139, Prior, A. N., 552
142 Priscian, 372
Plath, 0., 107, 112 Pritchard, K. S., 3
Plato, 163,350,357,395,419-420, Prokopiou, G. A., 277
440, 445, 523, 585, 597 Propp, V. j., 67, 102, 113, 122, 135,
636 INDEX OF NAMES

Propp, V. J (Cont.) Raynaud, J-M., 13, 15 Riffaterre, M., 70-71, 88, 94, 96,
143, 145-146, 149, 153, 155-156, Rlidoi, 1., 448, 454, 466 458, 513, 546, 566
162-163, 167, 174, 263, 266, 268, Rlidulescu, C., 466 Rigsby, B., 13
274, 296, 298, 311, 313, 352, 359, Rlidulescu, N., 424, 466 Rijk, L. M. de, 350, 354
362, 365, 395, 412, 477, 485, 492, Rlidu1escu-Motru, 418 Rimbaud, A., 130
500, 560, 572 Rautu, R., 466 Ringel, E., 188, 225
Pross, H., 206 Reagan, R., 581 Ringle, M., 96
Proust, M., 49, 96 Rector, M. P., 47-48, 57, 616 Rios, P., 101, 109-110, 113
Puhve1, j., 568 Reeder, R., 552 Rischel, J, 137
Puig, L., 360, 362 Rehbein, J., 224 Ritter, W. E., 354
Pu~ca1liu, E., 454 Reich, C. M., 96 Rivarola, J. L., 390,400-401
Pu~cariu, S., 418 Reich, P., 66, 91, 96 Roa, A., 103, 106, 110, 113
Pushkin, A. S., 563, 574, 580 Reichardt, W., 190 Roas, S. J., 58
Putsch, L., 217 Reichenbach, H., 162, 168, 532, 552 Robbe-Grillet, A., 278
Pye, D., 251 Reichling, A., 347 Roberts, 523, 553
Py1yshyn, Z., 66, 96 Reimarus, H. S., 179, 224 Roberts, D. C., 64, 96
Reimers, K. F., 206, 216 Robey, D., 531, 538, 542, 549, 553
Queir6s, E. de, 412 Reinecke, H.-P., 194, 201, 203-204, Robin, R., 549, 551-552
Quevedo, F. de, 479 216, 219-224 Roceric (-Alexandrescu), A., 417,
Quine, W. van 0.,178,361,553, Reis, C., 412 466
587 Reis, Z., 57 Rocha, A. M., 396
Quintavalle, A. C., 320-321 Reiss, T., 64, 96 Rocha, E. P. G., 58
Quinti1ian, 395 Reisz-Rivarola, S., 389, 394-395, Rodingen, H., 210, 225
398 Rodrigues, A. D., 412, 414
Rabana1es, A., 101, 103, 107-108, Rembrandt,420 Rodriguez, G., 101-102, 113
110,112 Remsky, M., 361 Rodriguez, 1., 113
Racine, J. B., 432 Rengstorf, M., 546 Rodriguez Adrados, F., 474-475
Radar, E., 41, 45 Renier, A., 172 Rodrigu{;L Sala, M. L., 360-361,
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 234 Renier, V. M., 33, 45 363-364
Rader, W., 201, 215-216, 220 Renouvier, 433 Roediger, H. L. III, 66, 92
Radu, L., 458, 466 Rentzis, T., 255, 268, 277 Roelandts, H., 348, 357
Radu, M., 467 Renzi, L., 363, 466 Roelandts, K., 343
Rafailidis, V., 255, 268 Rescher, N., 531, 552 Rogge, F., 225
Raffa, P., 298, 302 Resendiz, R., 366 Rogoz, A., 448, 466
Raffler-Engel, W. von, 541 Reti,245 Roheim, G., 281
Raicu, L., 466 Revzin, 1., 497, 556 Rohrer, C., 191, 198, 225
Raimondi, E., 298, 311 Revzina, O. G., 497, 557-558 Rokem, F., 500, 504
Raischi, V., 466 Rewar, W., 552, 555 Roman, A., 466
Rajoy, M. D., 476, 478 Rey, A., 60, 89 Romanelli, G., 313
Ralea, M., 466 Rey-Debove, J., 44 Rombold, G., 210-211, 224-226
Ramirez, U., 394 Ribeiro, A. M. B., 58 Romeo, L., 538
Raml0v, K., 138 Ribeiro, L. F., 106, 113 Romera Castillo, J., 478, 480-481
Ranke,. K., 465 Ribeyro, J R., 396 Rommetveit, R., 373-374, 377, 384
Ransdell, J., 536, 550-552 Ribot, T., 434 Ronen, 0., 556, 575
Rantavaara, 1., 146 Ricard,96 Rorty, R., 251
Raou1, V., 85 Ricardou, J., 383 Rosa, A. R., 413
Raphael, 246, 336 Ricci, V. L. Z., 57 Rosander, G., 375
Rapoport, A., 96, 552 Richard, N., 109-110, 113 Rosenbaum, B., 134, 137, 143
Rask, R., 115 Richards, I. A., 171, 232-234, 239, Rosengren, K. E., 503-504
Rasmussen, 0., 138 243, 251, 328, 339, 360, 377, 445, Rosetti, A., 452-453, 460, 462, 466,
Rastier, F., 38, 160-161, 173, 397 492, 543, 553 468,470-471, 615
Rauch, 1., 97, 544, 547, 552 Richter, B., 194, 224 Rosiello, L., 296, 298, 303, 305, 310
Rausenbax, B. V., 578 Richter, H., 194, 224 Rosner, M., 508-509
Ravar, R., 41, 45 Ricoeur, P., 36, 89, 133, 162, 246 Ross, R., 519, 523,526, 553
Raven, F., 221 Riedl, R., 187, 224 Rossi, A., 298, 310-311
Ravila, P., 146 Rieger, B., 191, 200, 224 Rossi, 1., 90
Rayfield, 552 Riegl, A., 419 Rossi, M., 94

Rossi-Landi, F., 213-214, 294, 297-
298, 300, 302, 305, 307, 321, 365,
588
Rosted, J., 372
Ro~cau, M., 467, 470
Ro§ianu, N., 467
RotseI, R. W., 548, 561
Rouget, G., 424-425, 455, 467
Rou1et, E., 511-512
Rousseau, J.-]., 423
Rousset,]., 72
Routi1a, 1., 147, 150
Roventa-Gabrielescu, D., 467
Rovinskij, D. A, 579
Roy, G., 88
Royce,]., 523, 553
Reder, V., 122-125, 130, 135, 137-
138,142
Rubattel, C., 512
Rubin, N., 547
Rudy, S., 555, 560, 573, 576, 616
Ruesch, J., 553
Ruffinatto, A., 311
Ruffini, F., 315, 317
Rugho1m, P., 138
Ruiz, J., 479
Ruiz, 1., 396
Ruiz A1dea, P., 107, 113
RUlz de Cbavez, L., 360-361, 363-
364
RUlz G6mez, S., 367
Ruke-Dravina, V., 494
Runcan, A., 467, 470
Ruprecht, H. G., 71,84,96, 389,
547
Rusa, L., 467
RusselI, B., 243, 444
RusselI, 1.]., 553
Rusterholz, P., 202, 225
Ruthrof, H., 13, 17
Ruwet, N., 28, 33, 36-38, 41, 45,
497
Ruxandoiu, P., 466-467
Ruzsa, 1., 286
Ryle, G., 350
Rynin, D., 528, 550
Ryö, K., 328, 339
Si, 0., 58
Sach, C., 203
Sacks, H., 511, 541, 553
Sacy, S. de, 357
Sadoveanu, M., 456-457, 461, 469-
470
Saez-Godoy, L., 101, 113
Saigusa, H., 325, 338, 340
INDEX OF NAMES 637
Saint-Jacques, B., 68, 96 Savan, D., 63-64, 83, 96-97, 521,
Saint-Jacques, D., 75 524, 534, 546-547, 553
Saint-Martin, F., 80, 96 Savary, C., 63
Sajavaara, K., 150 Savignac, P., 80, 97
Sakamoto, H., 336, 340 Savvatis, N., 268, 277
Sakellari~ou, 1., 93 Sawamura, K., 336
Salanitro, N., 305 Sawasaki, K., 336
Sa1azar, A., 391, 398 Sazbon, J., 611
Sales, G., 251 Sändulescu, A., 467
Salieri, 563 Säteanu, C., 467
Salles, A. M. S. de, 58 Sbisa, M., 301
Salosaari, K., 151 Scalvini, M. 1., 105, 306
Sa1ud, M., 367 Schaar, C., 498, 504
Salus, P., 546 Schaeffer, P., 376
Sa1vador, G., 473 Schaeffner, A., 424, 467
Salvaggio, J., 580 Schaff, A., 89, 321, 365
Samara, Z., 256 Schapiro, M., 553, 577
Sambhpta, T., 441 Schecker, M., 225
Sampson,]., 67, 96 Scheffler, 1., 216
Sinchez, J., 99, 102, 113, 616 Schegloff, E., 553
Sinchez, L. A., 387 Schelbert, T., 221
Sand, G., 14 Scheler, M., 361
Sanders, G., 553 Schenker, R., 245
Sandmann, 443 Scherer, K. R., 194, 225
Sandrich, M., 97 Scherzer, J., 553
Sandstrom, S., 501, 504 Schiff, W., 92-93
Sankey, M., 13 Schiller, F., 522, 527, 537, 542
Santa Cruz, D., 104, 113 Schiwy, G., 181, 207, 211, 225
Sant'Anna, A. R. de, 54 Schlegel, F. von, 499
Santillana, M. d (Lopez de Men- Schlenstedt, D., 201, 225
doza, I), 479 Schlieben-Lange, B., 181, 198-199,
Santos, J. H., 57 218-219, 225-226
Sapegno, N., 315 Schlovsky, 249
Sapir, E., 32, 51, 553, 567 Schmalriede, M., 208, 225
Saraiva, A.]., 410 Schmidt, F., 185, 225
Saramandu, N., 467 Schmidt, H., 190
Sarkany, S., 73-75, 96 Schmidt, S. J., 207, 225, 335, 453
SarIes, H., 553 Schmidt-Brummer, H., 208, 225
Sartre, J.-P., 43, 126, 133 Schmitter, P., 218, 225
Sasu, A., 417, 467 Schmuck, N., 225
Satarelli, M., 363 Schmuler, H., 361
Satö, N., 334, 336, 340 Schnaiderman, B., 51
Saussure, F. de, 20, 22-26, 28-32, Schneider, B., 207-208, 218-219,
36, 48-50, 54, 59, 60-61, 63, 67- 225-226
68, 76, 81, 92, 99-103, 107-108, Schneider, R., 225
110-111, 113, 130, 136, 153-155, Schnelle, H., 185, 199, 225
181, 207, 221, 230, 233, 235-236, Schnur-Wellpott, M., 225
247, 249-250, 273, 288, 297, 300, Schoffer, N., 281
303, 308, 311, 325, 327-329, 332- Schogt, H., 69, 97
333, 339-341, 345, 352-353, 357, Scholes, R., 553
370, 376, 378-382, 384, 407, 436- Schou, S., 138-139, 141-143
437, 440-442, 445, 467, 473, 485- Schreckenberger, W., 209, 225
486, 490-494, 505, 525, 528-529, Schrieber, 586
531,538-539,541,543,553,560, Schroder, E., 225
562-563, 588, 592, 599-600, 602, Schroedinger, E., 527
608-609, 614 Schulte-Herbrüggen, H., 101, 113
Savage, W., 96 Schulz, A, 208, 225
638 INDEX OF NAMES

Schulz, W., 206, 225 Sesemann, W., 146 Sjögren, 0., 500, 504
Schur, E. M., 553 Sestoft, J., 133, 138 Skalicka, V., 288
Schuster, A., 59, 97 Setatos, M., 255-256, 272, 278 Skalkottas, 270
Schveiger, P., 285,467,471 Seymour-Ure, C., 241, 251 Skarup, P., 137
Schwartz, L., 447, 449, 467 Sezai, Y., 329, 340 Skinner, B. F., 112
Schwartz, N., 499, 504 Sfirlea, L., 467 Sklovsky, V., 311,495-496, 512, 580
Schwartzkopff, J., 191 Sgard, J., 354 Skouteri-Didaskalou, N., 255, 266,
Schwartzmann, F., 103-104, 107, Shahan, R. W., 552-553 271, 274, 278
113 Shakespeare, W., 311, 316-317, 420, Skupien, J., 90
Schwarz-Winklhofer, 1., 212, 225 432, 439, 491 Slama-Cazacu, T., 365, 468, 615
Schweisthal, K. G., 194, 225 Shands, H. C., 535, 538, 553 Slater, J. G., 92, 97, 549, 554
Schwimmer, E., 76, 97, 572 Shannon, C. E., 297, 525, 527 Slave, E., 468
Scott, A., 85 Shapiro, Ma., 543, 553 SHivescu, M., 468
Scott, C., 546 Shapiro, Mi., 543, 546, 553 Sless, D., 13, 15
Scott, L., 561 Sharpe, R. A., 251 Smith, C., 567
Scruton, R., 244, 247, 249, 251 Shaumjan, S. V., 553 Smith, H., 79, 97
Seabra,J. A., 407, 410, 617 Sheed, R., 458 Smith, J. E., 150
Seaford, H. W., Jr., 553 Shepherd, J., 245 Smith, J. W., 541
Searle, J., 29, 48, 88, 130, 218, 223, Sherman, G., 13, 16 Smith, K., 553
225, 236, 243, 378, 395, 500, 510 Sherrington, B., 13 Smith, M. D., 553
Sebag, L., 147 Sherzer, J., 551 Smith, M. 1., 110
Sebeok, T. A., 41, 50, 53, 60-62, 71, Shinmura, 1., 324, 340 Smythe, W., 65, 92
84,88-90,97,111,146,193,196, Shinmura, T., 324, 340 Sö, S., 333, 336
205, 213, 216, 218, 225, 235, 244- Shinoda, K., 334, 340 Soder, K., 226
245, 281, 288, 329, 343-344, 354- Shinosawa, H., 336 Solari, M., 104, 113
355, 365, 370, 415, 460, 520, 524- Shirai, K., 339 Sollers, P., 137, 607
525, 528, 532-535, 537-539, 541- Shirane, T., 340 Solomos, 264
543, 545-547, 549, 550-554, 563, Shishkoff, S., 219, 555-558, 573, 579 Sommer, D., 201,226
565, 577, 616 Shklar, J., 537, 553 SommerfeIt, A., 116, 371
Seche, L., 467 Shostakovich, D., 616 Sonesson, G., 494, 504
Sechehaye, A., 327-328, 340 Shub,512 Sonne, H., 134, 137, 143
Seeberg, W., 138 Shukman, A., 74, 555, 557-558, 560, Sonnevi, G., 489
Seferis, 263-264 576 Sophocles, 420
Segal, D. M., 555-556, 559-562, Sibelius, J., 149 Sorescu, R., 453
565, 569, 572, 575 Siertsema, B., 116 Sorin, C., 468
Segeth, W., 183, 225 Sifakis, G., 268, 278 Sornig, K., 195
Segolin, F., 58 Sigurd, B., 491, 494, 502-504 Sosa, M., 560
Segre, C., 294, 297, 299-301, 303- Silva, F. 1., 58 Soto, R., 102, 110, 113
305, 307, 310-312, 316, 320, 359- Silva, I. A., 55 Selvberg, H. A., 374
360, 475 Silva, J. C. da, 58 Sendags, B. T., 138
Seguchi, T., 332, 340 Silva, M. B. de 0., 58 Serensen, H. C., 119-120,137-138,
Seibert, T.-M., 210, 217, 225 Silva, T., 396 143
Seiler, H., 181 Silva, U., 309 Spang-Hansen, H., 116, 119, 137-
Seixo, M. A., 409, 412-413 Silva, V. M. de A., 411, 413 138, 445
Sellars, W., 243 Silverman, K., 85 Sparshott, F., 65,97
Semeka, E. S., 571, 579 Silverman, L., 13 SpeideI, M., 329,332-333, 335, 340
Sempere, P., 494 Simionescu, F., 467 Spencer, H., 244
Sena, J. de, 410, 413 Simmoneau, N., 489 Spengler, N. de, 512
Sendoya, L., 360 Simmons, P., 223 Spengler, 0., 419
Sepulveda, F., 105, 110, 113 Simone, R., 305 Speranskij, M., 576
Sensho, A., 326 Simonescu, D., 468 Sperantia, E., 468
Serpieri, A., 311, 317 Simpson, D., 229 Spiegel berg, H., 553
Serrus, 346 Sincu, A., 467 Spillner, B., 226
Servien, P., 35,418,421-423,447- Sini, C., 297, 305 Spinner, K. H., 202, 225-226
448, 457, 462, 465, 467 Sipek, B., 226 Spinoza, B., 64, 96, 169
Sesemanas, V., 146 Sissi, J., 106, 113 Spitzer, L., 295, 310
Sesemann, V., 151 Siverts, H., 375 Spyridonidis, K.-V., 262, 278
 INDEX OF NAMES 639

Srour, R., 53 Stutterheim, C. F. P., 347 Takeuehi, Y., 333, 339, 340
Staal, F., 443 Suda, K., 148 Takeyama, M., 332, 340
Stahl, H. H., 418, 424, 468 Sudnik, T. M., 557 Taki, K., 331, 340
Stahlke, H. E. W., 543, 550 Suino, M., 552, 557-558 Takita, F., 336
Stampe, D. W., 95 Suliteanu, G., 468 Takiura, S., 341
Stan, K., 454 Sumner, L. W., 92, 97, 549, 554 Talens, J., 478-481
Staneu, Z., 469 Sundhausen, E., 455 Talos, L, 469
Stanislavsky, K., 497 Suppe, F., 60, 97 Tamiya, H., 336
Stankiewiez, E., 315, 343, 355, 545, Surce!, A, 468 Tamme!o, L, 183, 194, 209, 226
553 Surdu, A., 468 Tamura, S., 337
Starobinski, J, 87, 563 Sutton-Smith, B., 537, 554 Tanaka, T., 332, 341
Stati, S., 447, 460, 462, 464, 468 Suvin, D., 75 Tanaka, Y., 331, 341
Staneuleseu, N., 468 Suzuki, T., 340 Tanaka, Yu., 341
Staneseu, M., 468 Svejgaard, E., 134, 138, 143 Taniguehi, L, 341
Staneseu, N., 462 Svenbro, J., 490, 504 Taniguehi, 0., 332, 341
Steen, E., 373 Svendborg, B., 138, 140 Tanner, T., 239
Stefani, G., 314 Svensson, L.-H., 485, 504 Taranovsky, K., 573, 575
Stefanini, J., 343 Svoronos, N., 253-254, 278 Tarasti, E., 145, 148-149, 151-152,
Stefanou, J., 262, 269, 278 Swang, A, 375 617
Stegmuller, W., 184, 226 Swartz, N., 548 Tarski, A, 177-178, 349, 532
Steimberg, 0., 49 Swiggers, P., 343, 357, 617 Tärau, P., 469
Stein, A., 77,97 Sydow, H., 218, 222 Tasea, N. B., 411-412, 414
Steinboeh, D., 151 Syrkin, A, 566 Tasmowski-De Ryek, L., 44
Steinbuch, K., 190-191,226 Szabö, Z., 285, 468 Tayama, T., 329
Steiner, G., 237, 240, 246, 252 Szabolcsi, M., 283, 289 Taylor, G., 390
Steiner, P., 538, 541, 554, 575 Szathmäri, L, 283, 289 Taylor, K., 473
Steiner, W., 531, 554, 573, 577 Szeeskll, T., 283 Tataru, D., 469
Stender-Petersen, A, 119, 137, 143 Szegedy-Maszäk, M., 290 Tegner, E., 491
Stepanov, Y. S., 334, 340 Szekffi, A., 290, 475 Teilhard de Chardin, P., 563
Stephenson, P., 77, 97 Szemerkenyi, A, 291 Teiszler, P., 285
Steriadi-Bogdan, M., 448, 468 Szepe, G., 283-284, 289 Teixeira, J., 57
Stern, L., 13, 15 Szerdahe!yi, L, 283-283 Tembroek, G., 187, 190, 192-193,
Steszewski, J, 202, 226 Szilgyi, G., 290 226
Stetter, C., 181, 216, 226 Szöke, P., 287 Temkin, 0., 526, 554
Stewart, J., 581 Szörenyi, L., 290 Teodoreseu, C.-N., 469
Stierle, K., 394 Szuts, L., 283 Teodoreseu-Brinzeu, P., 469
Stoekholder, F. E., 85 ~aineanu, L., 468 Terai, M., 333, 341
Stoekmann, D., 202, 226 ~erban, F., 468-469 Terestyeni, T., 287
Stoekmann, E., 202, 219, 226 ~olohov, M., 455 Terraeini, B., 295, 310, 315
Stöekinger, P., 392 ~tefan, S., 418 Tesniere, L., 61, 164, 167-168
Stokoe, W. C., 216, 554 ~uteu, F., 469 Thagard, P. R, 554
Stolpe, J, 488 ~uteu, V., 469 Thavenius, J., 616
Stolz, B. A., 554 Sceglov, J. K., 556, 560, 580 Theban,443
Stone, P., 93 Theriault, S., 72, 84, 97
Storelv, S., 369-370, 617 Tabareea, C., 469 Theriault, Y., 95
Stotzei, G., 181 Tada, M., 326, 342 Therien, G., 65, 82~3, 88, 97
Strasse!, J., 226 Tafuri, M., 307 Thibault, P., 13, 17
Straub, J. M., 309 Tagg, P., 502, 504 Thobo-Carlsen, J., 132, 138
Stravinsky, L, 149,244 Taife!, H., 373 Thody, P., 249
Strawson, P., 95 Tajima, S., 340 Thom, R., 88, 214, 414, 525, 546,
Streinu, V., 468 Takagi, L, 338 554
Strindberg, A., 500 Takahashi, M., 326, 340 Thomas, D., 88, 544
Stroe, A., 468 Takalo, M., 149 Thompson, C., 70, 73-74,91,94,
Stroeseu, S. C., 417, 452, 457, 468 Takashina, S., 340 97-98
Stuart, J M., 68 Takeda, L, 323 Thompson, M., 554
Sturm, H., 225-226 Takeuehi, L, 331, 342 Thompson, P., 513-514
Sturroek, J., 251 Takeuehi, T., 331, 337-338, 340-'341 Thompson, S., 146
640 INDEX OF NAMES

Thoms, A., 8 Trappi, R., 190,226 Umiker-Sebeok,]., 541-542, 548,

Thomsen, V., 115 Trask, W. R., 458-459 553-554, 617
Thorne, J. P., 240, 251 Traversa, 0., 49 Unamuno, M. de, 475
Thorpe, W. H., 251 Trebbi del Trevigiano, R., 104, 113 Ungaretti, 39
Thule, V., 143 Tremblay Querido, C., 75, 89, 94- Ungeheuer, G., 189, 194,215-216,
Thunberg, A.-M., 503-504 95,97 226
Thüriemann, F., 174, 393, 514 Trentman, ]., 354 Uotsu, 1., 328
Thurot, C., 343 Tretyakov, P. N., 500 Ure,]., 361
Thwaites, T., 3 Treves-Gold, N., 73, 97 Ureche, G., 464
Tibor, Z., 460 Trevifio, P., 360 Uribe Villegas, 0., 360, 363-364
Tillmann, G., 194, 226 Trinon, H., 34, 40, 45 Urion, C., 69, 98
Timencik, R. D., 559 Tripet, C., 508 Urrutia, J., 474-476
Tinacci-Mannelli, G., 298, 313 Tripp, D., 14, 17 Ursache, P., 469
Tinazzi, G., 309 Trivifios, G., 110 Urteaga, A. M., 401
Tinbergen, N., 191, 251 Trofin, A., 467 Usami, H., 330, 342
Tirson,479 Trubetzkoy, N., 352, 488, 491, 538, Uspenskij, B. A., 556, 558-559, 567,
Titunik, I. R.,333, 538, 552, 558, 601 569-570, 572-573, 576-578
560-561 Tschauder, G., 266, 275 Utaker, A., 371, '375, 378-379
Tirnoveanu, M., 469 Tsochatzidis, S., 278
Todd, C. L., 528, 554 Tsoukalas, K., 253-254, 278 Vaccaro, J.-M., 94
Todela, F., 364 Tsuchida, K., 325-327, 341-342 Vachek, J., 531, 554
Todoran, E., 418, 469 Tsurumi, K, 326, 341 Vaihinger, H., 537, 554
Todorov, T., 15-16, 24, 35, 48, 71, Tsurumi, S., 326, 328, 330-331, 335, Vaina, L., 447, 451, 469, 472
87,89, 101, 132, 267, 336, 352, 341 Vaisman, L., 101-102, 104, 108,
359-360, 362, 370, 383, 392, 410, Tudor, A., 251, 580 110, 113
412,413,463,480,490,493,496, Tunstall, ]., 251 Vajda, M., 287
514, 560, 573, 579, 608 Turbaceanu, M., 418, 469 Vakalo, E., 278
Todt, D., 187, 226 Turcu, 1., 469 Vakalopoulos, C., 268, 278
Toft,]., 137-138, 143 Turner, D., 76, 97 Valdes, A., 100, 102, 109-110, 113
Togeby, K., 119, 137-138 Turner, G. W., 251 Valdes, M., 73,98
Tohaneanu, G. 1., 469 Turner, R., 77, 97 Valdivieso, H., 109, 113
Toivonen, P.-M., 149 Turner, V. W., 251 Valenzuela, A., 100, 114
Tokarev, S. A., 558, 571 Tutescu, M., 469 Valenzuela, R., 102, 111
Tokei, F., 286-287 Tynjanov, Y., 496, 499, 512, 538, Valery, P., 119, 143, 458,493
Tokieda, M., 333-334, 341 558, 560, 563, 580 Va1esio, P., 296, 303, 554
Tokumaru, Y., 341 Tzara, T., 418 Valin, R., 68
Tolton, C., 80, 97 Tziotzios, G., 268 Vallejo, B., 367
Tomimori, N., 341 Törnqvist, E., 500 Vallejo, C., 394-398, 400-401
Tomkins, G. M., 554 Van Benthem, 1., 348
Tomkins, S. S., 549 Vance, E., 70, 83,90
Toporov, V. N., 556, 558-559, 561, Ubersfeld, A., 92 Vandamme, F., 45
566-575, 579, 582 Uchida, T., 330, 341 Van De Velde, R., 346,353,356
Tordai, Z., 287 Ueda, S., 330, 341 Van den Boom, H., 217
Tordera Siez, A., 478, 480-481 Ueki, T., 327, 342 Van den Bosch, A., 110, 112
Torop, P. X., 575 Uexküll,]. von, 179-180, 187-188, Van den Broeck, R., 352-353
Torrance, N., 95 226, 525, 535 Van den Toorn, M. C., 351
Torri, B., 310 Uexküll, T. h. von, 188, 213, 217, Van Der Auwera,J., 348-349,354,
To§a, A., 469 226 356
Toulmin, S., 533, 554 Ueyama, S., 328, 330, 339, 342 Van der Velde, M., 266, 275
Toury, G., 356 Uhl, 0., 210, 226 Vandervecken, D., 63
Tovar, A., 360 Uhr, L., 554 Vanderweghe, W., 266,275
Townsend, H. G., 531, 554 Ujfalussy, J., 287 Van Dijk, T. A., 91, 352,356,360,
Toyama, S., 328 Uldall, H. ]., 115-116, 119, 137-138 453, 508, 606
Toyama, T., 323, 328, 332, 334,·341, Ullian, ]., 554 Van Dun, 356
617 Ullmann, S., 238, 251 Vandrik, A., 286
Trabant, ]., 177, 181-182, 184-186, Umehara, T., 325, 342 Van Eemeren, F. H., 348, 356
198, 207, 209, 215, 219, 226, 341 Umetsu, 1., 342 Van Fraasen, B., 63, 91

Van Ginneken,J., 343
Van Gogh, V., 420
Van Gorp, H., 352, 356
Van Hamel, A. G., 351
Vanhamel, W., 354
Van Iersel, B., 352
Van Lier, H., 41-42, 45, 105
Van Overbeke, M., 44
Van Sehendel, M., 75,97
Vartolomei, L., 470
Vasarely, V., 86, 281
Vaseoneelos, C. M. de, 407
Vasileseu, L. S., 458, 470
Vasiliu, E. M., 363, 470
Vasiluta, L., 470
Vazon, W., 92
Valeanu, R. C., 470
Vatu, I., 470
Vega, C., 106, 114
Vega, G. de la, 398
Vegas Seminario, F., 396
Velculeseu, V., 469
Veltsos, G., 257, 271, 273, 278
Verburg, P., 44, 352
Vergauwen, R., 351
Verkuyl, H. J., 351
Vemer, K. A., 115
Ver6n, E., 52-53, 68, 98, 364, 393
Vera Lujan, A., 481
Verbeke, G., 353-354
Veres, A., 290
Vemant, J.-P., 490
Vemet, M., 70, 98
Versehueren, J., 42, 45, 348, 356
Versteegh, C. H. M., 352
Vianu, T., 432-439, 453, 459, 464,
470
Vieol, A., 470
Viehweg, T., 209, 226
Viehweger, D., 197, 226
Vieira, J. L., 57
Vigil, R. G., 392
Vikis-Freibergs, V., 67, 98
Vilar, J., 362
Vilches, M., 103, 114
Villaneuva, D. Violi, P, 482
Villegas, J., 102, 114
Vineenz, A., 471
Vindricaire, A., 82
Vinea, 1., 468-469
Vinge, L., 499, 504
Violi, P., 314, 316
Virden, P., 245
Virgil,398
Vitänyi, 1., 287, 290
Vitsentzatos, M., 262, 278
Vlad, C., 471
INDEX OF NAMES 641
Vlad, 1., 471 Weaver, H. F., 297, 525, 527, 552,
Vlad, U., 424, 471 554
Voda-Capu§an, M., 471 Weber, M., 245
Vodieka, F., 479-480 Webley, I., 14
Voigt, V., 148,213, 226, 279, 282- Wehrle, A., 561
286, 290-291, 417-418, 460, 471, Weibull, L., 502
546,618 Weigand, E., 266, 275
Voineseu, 1.,471 Weigl, E., 189,226,472
Voineseu, L., 459 Weimann, R., 499
Vollbreeht, R., 223 Weinberger, C., 209, 227
Volli, U., 303, 313, 320 Weinberger, 0., 183, 209, 227
Voloshinov, V. N., 7,17,554,561 Weingartner, P., 182-183, 227
Volp, R., 26, 211-212, 224-226 Weinhandl, F., 227
Voltaire, 357 Weinreieh, U., 63, 98, 554
Von Zoest, A. J., 354 Weinrieh, H., 181, 200-201, 227
Voo, G., 291 Weisgerber, J., 43
Vomieu, M., 453 Weiss, P., 327, 552, 554
Vrabie, G., 471 Welby, V., 536
Vranceanu, G., 449 Wellek, R., 370, 413, 538
Vroon, G., 562 Wells, R., 554
Vroon, R., 557, 562 WendelI, B. C., 427, 472
Vryehea-Haidopoulou, A., 278 Wergeland, 384
Vuehinieh, S., 554 Wernicke, C., 189
Vulcaneseu, M., 418 Wesselman, T., 512
Vulcaneseu, R., 471 Westergaard-Nielsen, M., 132, 138
Vulliamy, G., 245 Weydt, H., 181, 198, 227
Vultur, 1., 471 Whately, R., 527, 543, 554
Vultur, S., 417-418, 471 Whatmough, J., 116
Vyncke, F., 568 Whitfield, A., 73, 98
Whitfield, F.J., 182,221
Waal, A. de, 133, 138 Whiting, H. T. A., 251
Wagner, C., 100-101, 106, 108, 114 Whorf, B. L., 236-237, 240, 371, 567
Wagner, R., 190 Wiehelhaus, B., 208, 227
Wagner, W. R., 79,94, 149,423 Widengren, G., 568
Wahl, F. 601 Widlöeher, 391
Wlihlin, R., 501, 504 Wiegner, E., 281
Wald, H., 471 Wienecke, E., 568
Wald, L., 472 Wiener, N., 190,527, 554
Waldinger, K.-G., 226 Wiener, P. P., 96, 553-554
Waldron, R. A., 251 Wienold, G., 201-202, 227
Walker, E. A., 63, 74 Wierzbieka, A., 14
Wallbott, H. G., 225 Wieser, W., 188-190,227
Wallon, H., 287 Wigdorsky, L., 101, 114
Walter, H., 380 Wigmore,J. H., 526, 554
Walther, E., 177, 181, 184, 194, 201, Wiingaard,J., 134, 143
209, 211, 214-215, 218, 226, 354, Wilden, A., 9, 78, 85, 98, 491
550-551 Wildgen, W., 44
Warhol, A., 512 Wilkinson, E. M., 554
Wamoek, C. J., 585 Wilkinson, J., 522, 542
Warren, A., 370, 413 Wille, N. E., 138, 143
Wasson, R. G., 571 Williams, A., 500
Watanabe, J., 336 Williams, C., 251
Watase, Y., 342 Williams, 1., 14
Watt, 1., 239 Williams, R., 7, 240-243, 251
Watzlawick, P., 525, 554 Williams, S., 14, 16
Waugh, B., 16 Williamson, D., 14
Waugh, L., 546, 554, 569 Williamson, J., 241
642 INDEX OF NAMES

Willis, W., 526, 533, 552 Wright, W., 500 Zamfir, M., 418, 453, 472
Willoughby, L. A., 522, 542, 554 Wrolstad, M. E., 92 Zamudio, M., 101, 114
Wilson, A., 551 Wunderlich, D., 206, 222, 227 Zapffe, P. W., 377
Wilson, F., 92, 97, 549, 554 Wundt, W., 179,227, 288, 435 Zavadskaja, 579
Wilson, N., 63, 98 Zavarin, V., 573
Wilss, W., 227 Xanthoudakis, C., 255, 269, 278 Zawadowski, L., 68-69, 98, 365
Winkin, Y., 43 Xenakis, Y., 270 Zayas, M. de, 479
Winkler, B., 227 Zarnescu, N., 472
Winner, I. P., 542, 547-548, 554, Yamaguchi, M., 329, 342 Zeami, 325, 342
557 Yamaguchi, T., 55, 333 Zeitoun, J., 172
Winner, T. G., 535, 538, 543, 545, Yamamoto, I., 323, 330, 342 Zeller, A., 62
554, 557, 560 Yamasaki, T., 324, 342 Zellmer, S., 227
Winograd, T., 348 Yamashita, M., 328-329, 339, 342 Zeman,]. J., 523, 533-534, 554
Wishart, T., 245 Yamauchi, K., 326, 328, 340 Zemanek, H., 189, 227
Withalm, G., 213 Yamauchi, T., 342 Zenon~, A., 512
Wittenborn, J. R., 373 Yamazaki, K., 327, 342 Zevi, B., 307
Wittgenstein, L., 31, 180, 184,227, Yano, M., 328, 338 Ziegler,]., 193,227
243, 287, 374, 350, 443, 475 Yasaki, M., 330, 342 Ziff,95
Wittig, C., 103, 114 Yasuda, T., 326, 342 Zilberberg, C., 173
Wittig, M., 14 Yatsuka, H., 332, 342 Zil'berman, D., 556
Wittig, S., 573 Yawataya, N., 337 Zinkernagel, P., 137
Wittkower, R., 251 Yiannopoulos, A. N., 584 Ziomek,J., 497
Wittoch, Z. D., 363 Yllera, A., 474, 481-482 Zires, M., 362
Wodak-Leodolter, R., 210 Yokozawa, S., 325, 336 Zirmunskij, B., 146
Wölck, W., 92 Yoncmori, Y., 329-330, 342 Zohn, H., 242
Wolf, M., 301, 313 Yoneshige, F., 337 Zola, E., 92
Wolff, C., 179,218,498 Yoshida, T., 331, 342 Zolkiewski, S., 573
Wollen, P., 151,251,554 Young, F. H., 96, 553-554 Zonneveld, W., 351
Wood, D., 514 Young, J., 14 Zsilka, T., 285, 289
Woods, J., 63, 98 Young, R., 251 Zumthor, P., 70, 82, 86, 98, 472
Woolsey, T., 551 Yrjölä, H., 148 Zuse, K., 190
Worth, S., 554 Yunes, E., 57 Zylberberg, J., 75, 95, 98
Wotjak, G., 223 Zegin, L. F., 576-578
Wright, C., 521, 527, 552, 554 Zalabai, Z., 285 Zolkovskij, A. K., 475,556, 560,
Wright, G. H. von, 146,243 Zaliznjak, A. A., 556, 566 576, 580
 Subject Index
Advertising, 17,41, 51, 75-76, 80, 103, 133, 141, 151,
173, 202, 224, 241, 250, 261, 298-299, 304, 312-
313, 363, 392, 401, 412, 483, 489,501, 510, 512,
542, 617
Aesthetics, 4, 44, 52, 63, 65, 67, 89-90, 103-105, 108,
111, 113, 121, 125, 136, 139, 141, 146, 148-149,
151, 185-186, 203-205, 207-208, 214, 218, 220,
222-226, 240, 247, 250-251, 269-270, 272-273,
275-276,286-287,290,298-299,302,311,314,
321, 325, 327, 331, 336, 341-342, 344, 352, 389,
398, 414, 421, 423, 433, 439, 454, 457, 459, 462-
463, 465-467, 481-482, 490, 495-497, 499, 501,
504, 512-513, 522, 531, 534, 542, 549-552, 554,
560-563,580,616,617
Animal communication. See Zoosemiotics
Anthropology, 29, 41, 43, 75-78, 93, 97, 99, 106, 112-
113, 138, 149, 153-157, 188, 234, 236-237, 244,
250, 257-258, 265-266, 271-272, 274, 276, 282,
285-286, 290-292, 294, 302, 305, 307-308, 333,
335,371,374-375,380,385,392,400,.402-405,
425-432, 454-456, 460, 465, 471, 537, 546, 551,
567-568, 570-572, 582, 604-605, 607, 618
Architecture, 51-52, 57, 68, 80-81, 89, 91-93, 101, 104-
105, 108, 111-113, 133, 138, 142, 172, 181, 207-
208, 210-211, 214-215, 219, 224-226, 247, 249,
255, 260-262, 276-278, 291, 296, 298, 306-307,
321, 332-333, 336, 339-342, 355, 359, 366-367,
376,421, 447, 457, 459, 461, 501, 503, 541, 546,
550, 552, 557, 567, 617
Art, 3, 14, 16-17, 44, 57, 65, 68, 78, 80, 90-92, 97, 103-
105, 107-109, 111, 113, 125, 150-151, 204, 210-
211, 216, 219-220, 223-226, 242-243, 246, 248,
249-250, 266-269, 272-273, 277, 283, 290, 292,
295-296, 302, 321, 326, 328, 331, 336, 338, 340,
343, 359, 377, 388, 393, 395,404, 420-422, 426,
643
Art (Gont.)
432-434, 438-439, 454-455, 463, 465-466, 468,
470, 481, 486, 490, 495, 497, 501, 503, 512, 542,
543, 546, 548, 550, 552-554, 556-557, 559-560,
563-564, 566-567, 571-573,576-579, 581, 614,
616
Artificial intelligence, 96, 508-509, 525
Axiology, 289, 363-364, 392-393, 396, 400, 419-420,
433-434, 552
Behavioral sciences, 327
Behaviorism, 297; 302, 340, 377, 384,477
Biology, 187, 190, 193, 215, 219-220, 226-227, 287, H7,
533-534, 540, 551-552
Body, 88, 93, 96, 101, 104, 106-107, 110, 126, 128, 138,
367, 520, 525-526, 537, 554, 564
Brain, 65, 78, 83, 90, 92-96, 189, 221, 223-224, 227,
467, 535, 542
Catastrophe theory, 214, 525, 554
Cinema, 3, 8-9, 14-16, 23, 36, 38, 40-41, 44, 55, 58, 80,
94:"'95, 97, 102-104, 133-134, 138, 141-143, 150-
151, 181, 202, 205-207, 215-216, 218, 220, 222,
224, 227, 232, 239, 242-243, 248-251, 255-257,
266-268, 272-278, 284, 290, 292, 296-298, 301-
302, 304, 308-310, 315, 321, 331, 336-337, 351,
355, 376, 393-394, 411, 481, 483-484, 495, 497,
500-501, 503-504, 512-513, 523-524, 537, 546-
548, 550, 554, 557,563-564, 566-576, 580-581,
613-614, 616
Circus, 79, 89-90, 336, 497, 548, 564, 614
Clothing,.112, 271, 333-334, 336,460, 465, 470, 510
Cognition, 42, 60, 66, 69, 91, 93, 96, 120-121, 246, 348,
355-356, 375, 384, 400, 509, 524, 530, 536, 552
644 SUBJECT INDEX
Comics, 51, 103, 134, 138, 202, 215, 261, 277, 401, 483,
497, 512
Computers, 88, 91, 190-191, 203, 219-220, 289, 373,
377, 382, 456, 462, 467-469, 508
Conversation, 50, 96, 98, 221, 244, 248, 356, 460, 465,
508-509,511-512,541,551-554,617
Cuisine, 73, 90, 107, 112
Culture, 16-17,41,51,53-54, 73, 75-77,89-90,92-94,
96-97,99, 103-105, 113, 135, 148, 152, 195, 216,
220, 234, 237, 240-244, 250, 271, 283-284, 286,
290-292,294,300,302, 307, 321, 329, 333, 335-
338, 340, 342-344, 360-363, 392-393, 398, 402,
419-421,430-433,454, 458, 464-465, 469, 471,
542, 547-550, 554, 557-559, 562-563, 565-567,
571-572, 575-576, 579, 582, 614, 617
Cybernetics, 78, 90, 183, 187, 189-191, 200-201, 214,
219, 222, 225-226, 302, 328, 331, 337, 377, 491,
520, 522, 554, 566
Dance, 58, 97, 104-105, 113, 250, 290, 337, 422, 432,
455-456, 491, 499, 516
Design, 14,80-81,91,104-105,108,214,217-218,329,
331-332,335,337-338,340-341,364,616-617
Discourse, 3, 10-11, 15-17, 20, 23-24, 29, 31-34, 39,
43-44, 53-54, 57, 74-75, 80, 91-92, 93-94, 97-
99, 102, 112, 136-139, 155, 159, 163, 165, 167,
169, 174, 194,202, 236, 241, 248, 250-251, 255,
257, 260, 262, 267-268, 273, 304, 310-311, 317-
318, 334, 344, 347-349, 352, 356-357, 362, 371-
372, 377, 380, 383, 389, 391, 395, 397-401, 403-
405,411,443,453,464,478-479,481, 505-511,
514-516, 562, 567, 600, 606, 609-610, 617
Education, 1O-11, 15-17,41, 79, 89-90, 92, 97, 110,
194, 198,201,208,217,224, 227, 236, 330, 342,
468, 508, 544, 546
Epistemology, 21, 32
Ethics, 52
Ethnomethodology, 91, 98
Fashion, 41
Feminism, 4, 7-9, 113
Film. See Cinema
Folklore, 16,51,72,76,89,92-94,97, 102, 105-107,
110-113, 122-123, 135, 140, 143, 145-146, 148,
155-156, 162, 165, 167, 174, 195, 219, 226, 257,
264-265, 271-272, 276, 282-283, 285-286, 290-
291, 307, 321, 325-326, 333, 337-339, 342, 352,
362, 375, 390, 392, 395-396, 399-400, 402-403,
405,417,421,424-429,432,447,452-469,471,
498, 500, 516, 537, 546, 550, 554, 556-557, 561-
562, 565, 568-572, 579, 581, 618
Functionalism, 235, 345
Genre, 97, 102, 140, 291, 389, 395, 453, 465
Gesture, 51, 55, 58, 65, 77-78,89,94-95, 107, 112, 117,
Gesture (Cont.)
126, 201, 227, 315-316, 337, 346, 393, 433, 436,
513, 541, 549, 550, 567, 614
Glossematics, 116-117, 119-120, 126, 132, 133, 136-138,
142, 182, 198, 380-381, 492
Graphics, 101, 110, 125, 270, 278, 364, 382,414, 450,
493, 551, 567, 581
Heraldry, 326, 339
Hermeneutics, 42, 98, 129, 133, 209, 220-221, 227, 290,
427, 431-432, 504, 551
History, 76, 106, 133, 140, 235, 249, 300, 423
Ideology, 8, 17,41,44, 51, 58, 74-75, 78, 85, 88, 90, 94-
95, 97-98, 112, 123-125, 128, 130-132, 135, 139,
141, 211, 225, 236, 239, 241-242,259-260, 264-
265,267, 271, 276, 278, 300, 302, 307, 353, 360-
361, 363, 379, 383, 393, 396,400-402,409,412,
431,479,488, 499-501, 562
Information theory, 60, 69, 78, 90, 101, 183, 185, 190-
191, 220, 222-223, 227, 230, 296, 301-302,.328,
331, 341, 459, 462, 525, 527, 552
Intertextuality, 33, 72,96; 397-398, 471, 512,573,582
Journalism, 14, 41, 43, 55, 103, 225-226, 241, 250-251,
312,314,363,365,396,400-403,412,414,484,
507
Kinesics. See Nonverbal Communication
Law, 17, 107, 110, 183, 209-210, 219, 222, 225-226,
336, 338, 342, 388, 391, 403-404, 433-434, 436,
471, 522, 526, 528, 533, 536-537, 542-543, 545-
546, 548-554, 614-615
Linguistics, 5, 11, 16-17,20, 22-32, 36, 41-42, 44-45,
48-50, 54, 58, 61, 63, 67-70, 78-79, 90, 92, 94-
95,98-100, 113, 115-117, 120,124-127, 130-134,
136-138, 142-143, 146-150, 153-155, 157-158,
160, 163, 179-180, 182, 185, 189, 191, 193, 195,
199, 202, 209, 211, 218, 220, 222-224, 226-227,
230, 233, 235, 238, 240, 243, 248, 250, 255-257,
263, 272-274, 283-284, 286, 288-289, 294-296,
303, 305, 310-311, 328-329, 333-334, 336-341,
343-345, 347-348, 351-355, 357, 359-361, 363,
365-366, 369-375, 377, 379-382, 384-385, 388,
391,394,402-405,407-415,417-419,423,426,
434-443,445-447, 453-465, 467-472, 476-478,
483, 485-486, 489, 491-494, 500, 503-504, 507,
509, 512, 525, 537-538, 543, 545-546, 549-556,
558, 560, 562, 565, 567-569, 575, 582, 600-603,
608,610,614-615,617
Literature, 3-7, 10-11, 14-17, 32-39, 43--44, 48-51, 55-
58,60,64,67,70-76,86,88-97,99, 114, 119,
121, 129-130, 132, 134-138, 140-143, 146-148,
153, 164, 181-182, 198, 200-202, 205, 210-212,
216, 220-223, 225-226, 231, 233, 238-24~, 246-
247,249-251,255-257,263-268,273-275,277-
 SUBJECT INDEX
Literature (Cont.)
278, 282, 284-286, 289-292, 294, 296-301, 303-
304, 307, 310-312, 316, 321-333, 338, 340, 348,
351-356, 359-360, 362-363, 370-374, 380, 382-
385, 387-391, 393-402, 404, 407-414, 421, 423,
433, 452-457, 460-461, 463-464, 467-483, 486-
488,492-493,495-499,503-504,512,514-517,
545-547, 549, 553, 555-561, 565-568, 572-576,
578, 581-582, 605-609, 614-618
Logic, 45, 52, 54, 63-64, 91-92, 96, 98, 115, 146, 161-
162, 177, 183,209,221-222,225,227,234,243-
244, 247, 249-250, 284, 286, 301, 305, 340-344,
349-354,356,365,378-379,403,410,418,422-
423, 433-434, 440, 442-447, 453, 491, 505-508,
523, 525, 527, 530-532, 536, 542, 548, 551-552,
566,601
Marxism, 7-10, 100, 106, 121-122, 130-132, 135-137,
142, 249, 251, 259-260, 265-266, 268, 271, 274-
275,286,292,299,302,308,352,408,471,481-
482, 495, 497, 499-501, 504, 554, 561, 607
Mass communications, 9, 11, 14, 16-17,44,48,53-54,
76, 81, 90, 100, 102-103, 106, 109-111, 138, 218,
240-241,249,250,283,292,296,298,304,306,
312-314, 321, 344, 350-351, 365-366, 377, 401,
412,414,483-484,497,502-503,613
Mathematics, 77, 124-125, 133, 136, 185, 191,201,215,
218, 220, 222-223, 227, 285-286, 288-289, 291,
341,365,377,414,447-448,450-451,456-460,
462-463,466-467,530,532,536,539,547,549,
555,566
Media, 3, 6, 9-11, 16-17,66,78,95,102-103, 106, 109,
112, 138, 193-194, 202, 208, 215-216, 221, 240-
241,250-251,257,393,401,404,412,483-484,
489, 501
Medicine, 79, 92, 113, 187-188, 216-217, 224, 226-227,
367, 433-434, 437, 447, 467, 525, 535, 543
Metaphysics, 25, 52
Music, 41, 43, 45,54,64,70, 79-80,87,90-95, 104-
105,108,110-111,113,125,138,146,148-151,
172, 186, 191, -194, 196, 202-203, 219-220, 222-
226,244-245,250,255,264,267-271,285,287,
290, 299, 314-315, 331, 337, 339, 341, 343-344,
355, 375-376, 423, 427, 433, 448, 454-456, 458-
461,464-468,470-471,497-498,501-502,541,
546, 563, 567, 576, 582, 617
Myth, 16,41,76,90,93,95,102,106,112,135,140-
141, 146, 148, 153, 155-156, 162-163,212,223,
227, 234, 263, 267, 275-276, 291, 307, 390, 393,
396,400-403,410,413,417,428-432,434,441-
442,456, 458-459, 463-464, 469, 471-472, 488,
493, 500-502, 516, 556-559, 565-569, 571-574,
579, 582, 617
Narrative, 6, 9, 11, 15-16,33-34,36,43,55,57-58, 71-
73, 76, 80, 88, 90-91, 93-96, 98, 102, 112, 122-
123, 135-136,138-140, 142, 145-146, 156, 162-
645
Narrative (Cont.)
170, 234-235, 240, 250, 256-257, 263-266, 275,
283-284,290-291,298,300,304,307,311,344,
352,360,362,372,377,383,389,392,396-401,
403-404, 412, 428-429, 452-453, 461-462, 464,
472, 478-479, 481, 496, 500, 507, 512-513, 515,
561,615
News. See Journalism
Nonverbal communication, 15,39-41,52-53,66, 78-79,
89-90, 93-97, 112, 134, 159, 174, 179, 185, 193-
194,200-201,209,213,216-217,219,223,250-
251,271,315-317,336-337,339,343-344,350-
351,376,422,471,476,483,503,520,541,546,
548-553,614,616-617
Objects, 89, 209, 307, 319-320, 341, 380, 402, 457, 463-
465, 512-513
Opera, 79, 311
Painting, 36, 39-40, 44, 55, 80, 93, 104, 113, 143, 151,
173-174, 212, 223, 246, 249, 420-421, 457, 467,
497, 501, 557, 563, 575-579
Perception, 25, 40, 92, 542
Performance, 14, 17, 43, 79, 90, 93, 489
Phenomenology, 52, 95-96, 115, 121, 126-127, 132-133,
174,289,326-327,347,374,413,494,498,503,
531, 553, 609
Philosophy, 4, 50, 52, 63-65, 69, 89, 95, 107, 111-112,
120,146-147,150,178,180-184,195-196,218-
220, 222, 224, 226-227, 229-230, 238, 244, 251,
286-297, 305, 325, 327-330, 339-343, 345, 347-
350,353,365,371-373,378,382,385,417-418,
421,423,45',,464,466,468-469,476-477,486,
527-528, 533, 542, 547-554, 601, 604
Philosophy of 1anguage, 11,29-30,48,57,64,73,93,
95-97,133,140,142,197,199,217,221,226,
232, 236, 243-244, 250, 302, 327, 330, 337, 342,
346, 352-355, 357, 365, 377-378, 443, 455, 471,
489, 548, 554, 561, 617
Photography, 14,40,42,44-45,51,80,93,95, 109,
172-173, 204, 212, 225, 242, 245, 290, 304, 319,
321,331,483,512,524
Poetics, 6, 17, 28-29, 35-36, 38-40, 43-44, 57, 69-71,
73,96,98, 102, 120-122, 127-128, 130-131, 134-
137,139-140,142,165,173,182,196,201-202,
215, 221-222, 235, 238, 283-285, 289-290, 300,
303, 325, 337, 360, 362, 364, 370, 372, 388-389,
394-395,398,410-441,413,417,447,450-451,
453-456, 460-466, 469, 471-474, 481-482, 490,
495, 498, 503-504, 514-515, 543, 548, 550, 552,
554, 556, 559-561, 563, 565-566, 570-576, 580,
611,613,616
Poetry, 6, 17, 33-34, 36, 38-39,43, 45, 49-53, 58, 70-
71, 88, 90, 94, 96-97, 104, 112-113, 119, 121,
125, 131-132, 139, 143, 146-147, 149-151, 160-
161,215,222,229,233,239,247,250-251,263,
266, 282, 294-295, 298, 311, 323, 329, 332, 334-
646 SUBJECT INDEX
Poetry (Cont.)
336, 353-354, 360, 362, 370-372, 382-383, 393,
395-398,403,413, 418, 422-423, 432, 437, 448-
449, 496, 498, 516, 557, 560, 563, 566, 574-575
Politics, 8-9, 16, 53
Pragmatics, 28-32,42-43, 63, 68, 96, 129-130, 133,
136-137, 143, 183, 196, 198,209-210,218-219,
221, 223, 225, 227, 256, 286, 304, 344, 348-350,
352,354-356,361,373-374,378,382,384,391,
394, 400, 426, 431, 459-460, 464, 477, 480, 494,
510, 523, 552-553, 560, 564, 578
Pragmatism, 42, 60, 218, 238, 243, 297, 328, 330-331,
341-342,373,378,481,523,528,533-535,539,
542, 546-547, 549-552, 554
Prague school, 73,84,101,147,153,157,311,347,369,
374, 430, 495-496, 528-529, 531, 538, 549, 554,
560, 572-573
Press. See Journalism, Media
Proxemics, 28, 315, 343-344
Psychiatry, 106, 113, 122, 143,224,338,391,398,414,
553, 609
Psychoanalysis, 4, 9, 16, 38, 48, 51, 97, 100, 127, 129,
131-132, 134-138, 140-141,242,260,268,273-
274, 277, 287, 299, 301, 303, 311, 359, 367, 388,
393,408,414,419,436-437,491,501,548,599-
611
Psychology, 29, 31, 65-66, 83, 89-90, 92-93, 95-96, 98,
106, 112-113, 117, 120, 124-125, 153, 172, 174,
189-190,194,217-218,227,233-234,236,238,
277,287,331,337,341,355,363,367, 373-374,
377,384-385,417-418,423,460,464,468,483,
486,501,526-527,548, 553, 599
Psychosemiotics, 51
Publicity, 22-23, 42-44, 58, 90, 93, 103, 112, 278, 304,
313,401-402,483,512
Radio, 3, 110, 142, 292, 483-484
Religion, 74,85,90-91,98,104,106,113,137,140,174,
210-212,216-217,220-221,223,225-226,249,
271, 323, 342, 352-353, 355, 377, 418, 420-421,
427-432,443, 458-459, 498, 502, 515-516, 546,
556-557, 565, 567-568, 570, 578
Rhetoric, 33-40, 42-45, 70-71, 85, 89, 91, 95, 102,206,
209,219,222,225,238,251,278,298, 313, 334,
340,344,347-348,372-373,382,410,413,441,
459,461,465,472,497,510,522,531-532,539,
543, 551-554, 579, 617
Ritual, 17,251,267,271,339,393,428-430,441,454,
458, 466, 472, 498, 503, 516, 564-565, 570
Russian formalism, 16, 120, 130, 146-147,249,289,
362-363,369,413,481,495-496,500,558,560-
561,572,580
Semantics, 31-33, 35-37, 41-43, 45, 65, 68, 89-93, 95,
97-98, 106-107, 110, 112, 120, 122, 125, 127,
130-133, 138, 140-142, 148, 150, 155-158, 160-
163,165,168-170,174,180,183,191,193,196-
Semantics (Cont.)
200,209,215,218-221, 224, 226-227, 232-233,
238,249-251,256,272,275,282-283,286,288-
289,298,305, 310, 327, 330, 341, 343,348-350,
352-353, 357, 360-363, 374-375, 377-380, 382,
384,388,391,399-401,427,430,442,451,454,
457, 459-461, 463, 466-470, 477, 480, 496, 499-
500, 509-510, 516, 554, 560, 565, 567-569, 571,
573, 601-602, 609-610, 616
Sign language, 66, 94, 494, 541,548
Sociology, 41, 58, 77,102,106,111,120,135,138,149,
203, 221, 223, 225, 236, 245, 250-251, 255, 271-
272, 289, 292, 294, 304, 338, 355, 359-361, 363,
375-376, 385, 433, 482-483, 486, 500, 502-503,
507, 515, 542, 615
Space, 52, 56-57, 73, 80, 89, 92, 105, 111, 113, 172, 205,
220,250,255,257-263,269,274-275,306,318,
339,341,397,419,513,516,570, 573
Spectacles, 89, 93, 174, 393
Speech act, 21, 37, 74,93,97, 130, 136, 185,218,223,
225, 236, 243-244, 301, 339, 348, 356, 373, 378,
385, 460, 494, 500, 511, 551
Speech surrogates, 553-554
Sport, 291, 339
Structuralism, 3,15,17,30,34,48,51,57,60,71,74,
76,78,90-93,95,97,99, 101-102, 105, 107-108,
111,119-122,124,126,129-136, 140-142,146-
148, 153, 181, 196-197, 199,207, 218,221,225,
231,233-236,238,242,247,249, 251,256,258,
263, 265-266, 270-272, 274, 282, 287-290, 294,
296-298,300-304,309,310-312, 345-347,352-
353,355,362,369-371,374-375, 377-378,380,
383,407-410,412-413,424,453, 457,462-464,
466, 468, 473-474, 480, 482, 485-491, 498-500,
502-503,509,520,525,529,531, 538-539,543,
548-549, 552, 555-556, 558, 561, 566-568, 570,
572, 575-576, 579, 582, 600-602
Stylistics, 70, 111, 150,238,240,251,256-257,263,266,
283,285,289,295-296, 301, 310, 371-373,380-
381,384,387,410,413,417-421,433,453-455,
457-458,461-466,468-471,473, 482,486,503,
543, 549, 553
Synecdoche, 28, 36-38
Syntax, 31, 42-43, 71, 74, 91, 94, 125, 133, 163-164,
167-168, 183, 203, 206, 222-224, 236, 308, 349-
350,382,384,399,403,411,426, 442,446,459,
467,469, 472, 478, 516, 579, 610, 615
Television, 3, 15-17,40,44,51,57,91, 103, 110-113,
138, 141, 151,242,249,296,298-299,304,309,
312-314,363,401-402,411,483-484,502,504,
547, 613
Text theory, 124-132, 134-136, 138-143,202,207,214,
236, 256, 263-266, 268, 275, 286, 290-291, 295,
301-302, 310-311, 337, 348, 352, 355, 362, 373,
377, 382-383, 389, 394-399, 401, 412, 460, 464,
466, 468, 471, 478-479, 494-496, 499, 515-516,
 SUBJECT INDEX
Text theory (Con!.)
554-556, 559-560, 564-565, 567, 574, 606-609,
614
Theater, 6,17,41,43-45,55-56,58,74,79,85,91-93,
95-96, 102, 104, 112, 134, 140, 143,202,205,
215-217,219-220,224,242,249-250,257,268,
276,278,304,311,316-318,325,373,376,383,
393,432,447,457-463,467-469,471,475-476,
478-479, 489, 495, 497, 499-500, 502-503, 513-
514,564,579,613
Touch, 93
Translation, 95, 237, 249, 337, 352-353, 356, 401, 447,
462-464,471,492
647
Urbanism, 41, 51, 57, 80-81, 104, 111-113,207,218-
219, 222, 225-226, 241, 255, 258, 260, 262, 276-
278, 297, 299, 306, 340-341, 366-367
Women's studies, 4,14-15,17,85,217,271
Writing systems, 77, 81, 89,101,108,110-111,117,217,
382, 494, 556
Zoosemiotics, 44, 50, 62, 179, 188, 191, 200-201, 218,
220-221, 223, 226, 244-246, 250-251, 287, 331,
337-338,343-344,351,376,385,520,541,546,
550,553