By SERAPHIM PIETROFORTE*
Concepts derived from semiotics, such as “narrative”, “discourse” or “interpretation”, have become fluent in our vocabularies
Currently, from academic discourse to the public sphere, whether in political debates or in pedagogical proposals, the term “semiotics” is becoming popular; If this does not happen with semiotics itself, as a study of meaning, at least concepts derived from it, such as “narrative”, “discourse” or “interpretation”, have become fluent in our vocabularies.
That said, with the aim of motivating readers to learn about semiotics, we have prepared the following considerations. It is not intended, obviously, to offer a course on the subject; far from that, it is rather about presenting fundamental topics, with a view to encouraging those interested in sign theories to continue studying.
Etymology of the word “semiotics”
Using etymology to explain the meanings of words does not always prove to be a safe path because, as a rule, the history of vocabulary does not coincide with its understanding by speakers of the language; Furthermore, due to the similarities between sounds and senses, several mistakes easily occur.
In the midst of these mistakes, semiotics certainly does not mean “half an eye”. If so, it would be “semiotic”, since “optics” refers to the ears while “optics” refers to the eyes; In this case, the word semiotics derives from the Greek sēmeiōtiko, that is, “related to signs”, and it is approximately in this sense that the word “semiotics” is used in the human sciences of the modern world.
The word “sign” originates from the Indo-European sekw, whose meaning coincides with “point out, indicate”; Taken in a broad sense, the word “sign” is close to the concepts of “sense” and “meaning”, that is, the objects of study of “semiotics”. However, for this introduction to become enlightening, it remains to define, contemporaneously and from different points of view, the concept of meaning.
Meaning and sign
The word “semiotics”, like “semantics” and “semiology”, derives from “sema”, a Greek word, whose meaning is “sign”, maintaining the Indo-European meaning sekw, from which it derives. The Greek word sema, in turn, has an interesting history; sema It once meant “grave”, now it designated the tombstone, that is, the stone placed to cover the tomb, thus coming to mean “sign”, in this case, the sign of someone being buried under the slab. In this process, meaning is manifested, as the stone points to other meanings besides itself, thus becoming the signifier arbitrarily related to the meanings “tomb”, “corpse”, “death” (Cornelli, 2011 : 173-185).
The word “signification” is formed from the word “sign”, derived from the Latin signum, whose meaning is “sign”, referring again to the Indo-European sekw; the word “sign” itself, in Portuguese, derives from the Latin signum, revealing that it is the same semantic field. However, before proceeding with the sign, how to define the semantic field? This conception uses a metaphor inspired by geometry; Through it, we imagine an extension formed not by points, but by the conceptual limits of a given theme.
This theme, in turn, is constructed through the speeches made about it; in other words, the theme, as a semantic field, is defined in a discursive network, in which it gains meaning, thus inserting itself into a certain sociocultural environment. That said, as it is defined in a network of discourses, the concept of sign, far from being consensual, is generated in discursive controversies; defining a sign, therefore, is equivalent to knowing the discursive polemics that outline its semantic field.
To develop this, among numerous theorists of sign and meaning, it is essential to know two thinkers: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913).
From divine logos to ideoscopy
Although we will now deal with contemporary theories of sign and meaning, it is worth going back a few centuries to reach the ideas of Saint Augustine (354-430), who developed, in his own way, a semiotics. To this end, we turn to Tzvetan Todorov (1939-2017) in his work Symbol theories (Todorov, 1979: 15-54), specifically, when referring to the universal symbolism based on the Gospel of Saint John and the famous considerations about the Word and the flesh; In this context, the word “Verb” is used to translate the Greek word logos and, consequently, all the implications and complexities that accompany it.
In general terms, for many interpreters of the Christian scriptures, Christ identifies himself with the incarnation of the Word, however, from other religious points of view, the Christian God himself coincides with the Logos, his flesh being, precisely, the universe in all its grandeur and with its mysteries. From this perspective, the world becomes a symbol of God in Saint Augustine's semiotics, establishing relationships between the signifiers before men and the respective sacred meanings; In this theory of meaning, men understand the things of the world because they are animated by the same Divine Spirit expressed in nature.
There are many previous sources from Antiquity and the implications of this doctrine of meaning, including the medieval analogical laws on the correspondences between things, which are still in force in some modern discourses; according to such laws, for example, if there is the Sun in the celestial world, in the earthly world there is gold, in the animal, the lion, in the human body, the heart, etc.; the Renaissance thinker and physician Robert Fludd (1574-1637) (Godwin, 1991) and several symbolist poets, readers of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), were inspired by those theories (Balakian, 1985: 17-28).
When questioned by humanism and its materialist judgments, however, those thoughts, as they were based on religious precepts, were partially abandoned, leaving it no longer up to religion or similar discourses, but to philosophy to answer by what means men understand the world.
A Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), published in 1781, meets this demand exactly; Still in general terms, according to him, human consciousness would not relate to the things of the world passively, because, once governed by its own and specific categories, it is guided, a priori, by certain ways of conceiving the supposed reality arising, precisely , from this table of categories.
The category of quantity, for example, is projected into the world through the relationships between the terms unit vs. plurality vs. totality, the last being the complexification of the first two, in turn, terms that are contrary to each other; the category of quality is articulated in reality vs. denial vs. limitation; there are also the categories of relationship and modality.
Now, from Kant's varied contributions to Western thought, it is worth retaining, for semiotic and semiological knowledge, the notion of the activity of consciousness in relation to things in the world. Through this conception, we dialogue with the past using the categories of thought proposed by Aristotle (384ac-322ac); it can also be compared with later theories, such as the phenomenological thought of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) or ideoscopy, conceived by Peirce, directly linked to the semiotic theories of sign and meaning.
Edmund Husserl opposes psychology's ideas about consciousness as a cognitive capacity; for him, consciousness is a phenomenon and not a thing, and it cannot be located in the brain or other parts of the body. In this phenomenon, similarly to Kant and his table of categories, there is no passivity of consciousness, rather it is a matter of modes of adequacy between intuition, that is, the human capacity to project oneself in the world, and meaning.
As for Peirce, seeking to differentiate himself from phenomenology, he proposes ideoscopy, whose task, in his own words, focuses on the description and classification “of ideas that belong to ordinary experience or that emerge naturally in connection with current life, without taking into account consideration of their psychology or whether they are valid or not valid” (Pignatari, 2004: 41-47).
Returning to etymology, the word “ideoscopy” is formed by the Greek words idea, whose meaning is close, in this case, to the concept of thought in a broad sense, and skopeo, meaning look; It is, therefore, the observation of the relationships between things in the world, thought and the ways of expressing things and thoughts, the process of which, for Peirce, is explained through the definition of sign.
However, before proceeding, it is worth considering the status of meaning in human history, because, although only eight thinkers are mentioned, the importance of Aristotle, Augustine, Fludd, Swedenborg, Kant, Husserl, Peirce and Saussure justifies the keen interest of theme. From a historical and discursive point of view, such authors do not just represent particular ideas; considering the historical circumstances, or rather, the work relationships, ideologies and cultures in force at each time, they express collective thoughts, generated in discursive controversies.
In these controversies, the relationships between humanity, the world and meaning assume, in the history of human thought, varied characteristics; This occurs from religion to philosophy, from metaphysics to scientific discourse, from art to politics.
In this way, far from being a trivial topic, the result of banal discussions, questions of meaning occupy the core of human thought, allowing us to identify the phenomenon of meaning with the advent of hominids on our planet and, consequently, of life itself.
The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce
For Charles Sanders Peirce, mediation between man and the world is described by a logic, which he calls semiotics, based on signs, in principle, quantities formed by referent, interpretant and foundation; In theory, the three concepts define each other, with no predominance or presupposition of one in relation to the others.
It would be wrong, when explaining meaning, to consider the objective world of things pre-existing to humans and then for such things to become thoughts, which are finally expressed in human languages; such processes do not correspond, respectively, to the concepts of referent, interpretant and foundation, although they may eventually be related to them.
It must be considered that the referent is not simply confused with things in the world; nor is the interpretant equivalent to thought as a phenomenon centered on itself, therefore, self-sufficient; Not even the foundation coincides with images, words or sounds used to express things and thoughts, which would exist independently of the appropriate references.
The referent, effectively, is defined as everything that presents itself to knowledge; to explain how this happens, Peirce, in his semiotics, proposes the articulation between the knowing subject and the knowable object according to the logic formed by the three terms, with the sign and signification being defined, exactly, in the triadic relationship.
The model appears to be quite complex; in the articulations of the proposed triad, distinct types of signs emerge – icons, indices, symbols; remes, students, arguments; sin-signs, quali-signs, legi-signs – which, in turn, articulate with each other in new combinations. Furthermore, because the interpretant presents itself to knowledge, this makes it a knowable object, that is, the interpretant becomes a referent, inaugurating new semiotic relationships, called “infinite semiosis” by Charles Sanders Peirce (Peirce, 1977).
Finally, in its developments, Charles S. Peirce's semiotics, initially an anthroposemiotics, that is, a semiotics restricted to human meaning, unfolds into zoosemiotics, phytosemiotics and even physiosemiotics, semiotics whose objects of study are , respectively, the animal meaning, the vegetable meaning and the meaning between inanimate beings, for example, elementary particles, atoms, stars and other cosmic quantities (Deeley, 1990: 69-123).
Ferdinand de Saussure's theory of the sign
Although Charles S.Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure are theorists of meaning and the sign, the corresponding formations, objectives and theoretical proposals differ significantly, and there is no room for approximations between them without due care. Saussure was not a philosopher; His main works are dedicated to the areas of historical linguistics – specifically, Indo-European studies –, in addition to being considered the founder of structural linguistics.
The 19th century was marked, in the field of language sciences, by historical linguistics, characterized by the conception of language change and their groupings into linguistic trunks; According to those thinkers, languages change over time due to precise phonetic laws, whose determinations allow the reconstruction of grammars and vocabularies, making it possible, through comparisons, to trace degrees of kinship between different languages.
In this way, Latin, Hellenic, Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Vedic, etc. languages are grouped together. on the Indo-European throne; other branches are conceived, for example, the Afro-Asian branch, in which the Semitic languages are grouped; According to experts, the most brilliant thesis of the time was Saussure's theory regarding Indo-European vowels. Following the tradition of his teachers and colleagues, Ferdinand de Saussure deeply understood several languages, their similarities and differences; such knowledge allowed him to formulate a theory about meaning.
In sign theories, the presence of the object, referent or thing remains constant; In all of them, including Peirce's semiotics, the sign is linked to the reference. For Saussure, however, a sign is defined in relation to other signs, and not in relation to things; This needs to be explained carefully, as it goes against common sense regarding how language works.
In general terms, it is not difficult to accept that there are things in the world, that people think about them and that words and other signs are used to communicate such things and thoughts. Saussure, however, distancing himself from philosophical reflections on the relationships between man, languages and the world, focuses his studies on phonological and morphosyntactic structures with a view to thinking about the internal history of languages, that is, the transformations in linguistic structures capable of enabling the reconstruction of Indo-European and the languages derived from it.
It seems, to those unfamiliar with linguistics, that there are direct relationships between words and things, however, in addition to the phonological and morphosyntactic dimensions, there are semantic dimensions in languages, referring to meaning, which also vary from language to language.
In the Romance languages Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and French, the word pairs brother and sister, brother e sister, brother e sister, frere e soeur are systematized through the semantic category masculine vs. feminine, with the age category old vs. new. In Hungarian, on the contrary, in addition to the category of sexuality, the category of age becomes pertinent, generating, in the systematization of the same semantic field, the four words bátya – older brother, occs – younger brother, baby – older sister and húg – younger sister; unlike those Romance languages and Hungarian, in Malay there is only the word sweat, without reference to sex or age (Pietroforte, 2002: 85-87).
Thus, based on little data, it appears that the meaning of words depends on the relationships between the phonological signifier and the semantic meaning, but also depends on the relationships between a word and other words of the same language; In other words, meaning depends rather on linguistic value, that is, on the systematization of words through specific semantic categories in a given language, than on the relationships between words and things.
Having in-depth knowledge of numerous languages and their historical transformations, Ferdinand de Saussure noticed this property of linguistic signification, determined both by the relationship between signifiers and signifieds in the formation of specific signs, and by the relationship between such signs and other signs of the same system. (Saussure, 2012: 158-170). For the author, reiterating, language is a system of verbal signs, which, in turn, shares social existence with sign systems of other orders – that is, systems formed by non-verbal signs –; consequently, the general science of signs is conceived, semiology, whose branch responsible for the analysis of verbal signs would be linguistics (Saussure, 2012: 47-49).
The semiology
In his lifetime, Ferdinand de Saussure did not develop semiology; those who carried it out were mainly Roland Barthes (1915-1980), whose book Elements of semiology (Barthes, 1992) is practically the first systematization of the analytical procedures of the new science. In general terms, it is about the application of Saussure's dichotomies, deduced from linguistics, to other sign systems, making it necessary to know them to minimally understand the principles of semiology.
The time of Ferdinand de Saussure coincides with the consolidation of European national states; If romantic poets and novelists focused on nationalism and the birth of their own countries, linguists, immersed in the same period, studied linguistic trunks, searching for the origins of languages, cultures and modern societies.
In this way, when there is an emphasis in studies on the transformations of linguistic systems, according to Saussure, diachronic linguistics is defined, that is, the analysis of languages over time; On the contrary, when the study focuses on the internal relationships of a given system of signs, isolated from time, synchronic linguistics is defined. This first dichotomy, diachrony vs. synchrony, leads to the next dichotomy of language vs. he speaks.
Every attentive listener notices how much people's speeches differ from each other, as each person has their own timbre of voice, the accents specific to the places they live in, the vocabulary of their homeland, their social class, their profession; In addition to individual characteristics, whose motivations seem mostly psychological, each speaker inherits sociolinguistically determined variants of region, social stratum, age group and discursive situation of the language.
Despite the differences in speech, however, all speakers of the same language understand each other precisely because language is conceived as an abstract and general form, from which all concrete and specific speeches emanate. Consequently, the study of any language, whether changes and variations or structure, begins by focusing on this general and abstract form, from which variations are systematized, changes are estimated and the structure is described.
Once proposed, the dichotomy of language vs. speech forwards the dichotomy of signifying vs. meaning, used in the definition of sign and essential in the definition of language. For Saussure, it is worth remembering, language is a system of signs, formed by the relationship between acoustic images, that is, phonological forms, and concepts, semantic forms, respectively signifiers and meanings, whose meanings are made through relationships between the signs of the same verbal system, as previously explained.
Finally, the paradigm vs. syntagm. If languages are described through sign systems, it is necessary to determine the rules governing these systems; to this end, Ferdinand de Saussure proposes associative relationships, those established between every sign and other signs in the formation of the system, and rules for combination between such elements in the creation of language. The first constitute paradigmatic relationships, in which a sign defines itself in relation to the others through the signifier, the signified or both.
No General linguistics course, Ferdinand de Saussure uses the word “teaching” to exemplify the proposal: (i) through meaning, this sign is related to “learning” or “education” and even to the opposite terms “ignorance” or “brutification” ; (ii) through the signifier, with “slow” or “element”; (iii) through the morphological sign of the radical, with “teaching” or “teaching”; (iv) through the morphological sign of the suffix, with “disfigurement” or “armament” (Saussure, 2012: 174-175).
Figures of speech such as rhymes, alliteration and assonance are established in paradigmatic relationships between signifiers, while metaphors and metonymies, through meaning.
As for the rules for combining linguistic elements, Saussure calls them syntagmatic rules. In general terms, if signs are morphological, there are lexical rules for combining them in the formation of words; If signs are lexical, there are syntactic rules for combining words in the formation of sentences. In Portuguese, according to Mattoso Câmara (1904-1970) (Câmara, 1986: 65-71), verbs are aligned in the phrase (stem) + (thematic vowel) + (mode and tense) + (number and person), for example (am)+(á)+(va)+(mos), (am)+(á)+(sse)+(mos) or (am)+(a)+(rá)+(s); Still in Portuguese, words are aligned in the phrasal phrase (subject) + (verb) + (verb complements).
Well, if such dichotomies allow describing verbal systems, a general science of the sign, built on the same principles, would not only start from the application of the dichotomy of signifying vs. meaning in other languages, but also the application of the other three dichotomies in the description of systems. Basically, this is the analysis methodology of semiology; in Elements of semiology (Barthes, 1992), Roland Barthes develops exactly such a proposal, with the book's chapters based on Ferdinand de Saussure's dichotomies.
To briefly exemplify the semiological analysis, similar to Roland Barthes, cuisine and the semiology of food are used. Currently, both feijoada and sarapatel, and the same can be said about mushroom-based cuisine, belong to haute cuisine; The first ones even became typical and celebrated dishes of Brazilian cuisine.
However, because they are made up of leftovers discarded among the soft and tasty parts of meat animals or the nature of fungi and vegetables, they were considered, in the past, to be lower quality food, allowing synchronic and diachronic valuations to be traced.
Regarding the dichotomy of language vs. speech, suitable for analyzing the relationships between the system's abstractions and concrete occurrences, once extended to any abstractions, makes it possible to describe variations, for example, of sandwich cuisine; After all, both the American hot dog, made with sausage, mustard and bread, and the Brazilian one, made with the same previous ingredients plus ketchup, mayonnaise, potato chips, mashed potatoes and vinaigrette sauce, become variations of the same general and abstract form.
In the domain of the sign, no food means only food; cultural connotations are projected onto all of them: (a) the mentions of feijoada illustrate this, as the diachronic analysis coincides with the analysis of cultural valuations through meaning; (b) although considered ordinary food, there are currently chefs specializing in artisanal sandwiches; (c) meat animals are analyzed, in the language of butchers, according to the culinary qualities of the meat, correlated to specific dishes, to which consumers correspond separated into social classes, that is, neck meat for the proletariat and filet mignon for the petty bourgeoisie.
Finally, any menu presents the ritualized syntagmatic sequence of eating practices, in other words, the order in which food is consumed, and the possibilities of choice, when they exist, at each stage. In the West, the syntagma of restaurants usually consists of starter, cold dish, hot dish, dessert and coffee, and the paradigm, formed by the dishes available at each stage, depending on the house's specialties; So, if it's a canteen, the hot dishes are pasta, if it's a steakhouse, they're meats.
In addition to semiology, developed directly from Saussure's ideas, there are other theories of meaning inspired by them, standing out among many, due to their analytical scope, the narrative and discursive semiotics proposed by Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917-1992) and carried forward by collaborators, such as Jean-Marie Floch (1947-2001), Dennis Bertrand (1949) and José Luiz Fiorin (1942).
The semiotics of Algirdas Julien Greimas
To understand the concepts of semiotics proposed by Greimas without getting lost in details, which are undoubtedly pertinent, it is worth choosing a text to, using it, describe the process of meaning called the generative path of meaning. To that end, here is the poem The pulverized mountain, by Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987):
I get to the balcony and see my mountain,
the mountains of my father and grandfather,
of all the Andrades that passed
and they will pass, the mountain that does not pass.
It was an Indian thing and we took it
to adorn and preside over life
in this dark valley where wealth
greater is your view and behold it.
From afar, he reveals his serious profile to us.
Every turn of the path points
a form of being, in iron, eternal,
and breathes eternity in fluency.
This morning I wake up and
I can't find it.
Crushed into billions of splinters
sliding on conveyor belt
clogging 150 wagons
on the 5-locomotive monster train
– the biggest train in the world, take note –
my saw runs away, go
leaving on my body and on the landscape
measly iron dust, and it doesn't pass.
According to Saussure's sign theory, the understanding of the poem would occur because the speaker of the Portuguese language knows the system of signs in which it is defined; If this is true, the poem is formed by signs of Portuguese vocabulary and grammar, the mastery of which allows the text to be read. In this way, the reader, through the signifiers expressed prosodically and phonologically, recognizes the meanings, realizing the systematic dimension of the language; however, one must consider, in the process of signification, the discursive dimension, responsible for placing those signs in specific narratives and discourses, in this case, the narrative and discourse carried out by the poet when enunciating the poem The pulverized mountain.
From this point of view, beneath the signs, there are semiotic processes, duly described in the model of the generative path of meaning, guided by Greimas' semiotics. According to the model, the scene expressed through signs is based on figurative paths, that is, in Drummond's poem, the scene in which the poet opens the window and reflects on the mountains, its history and the destruction caused by the locomotive, metonymy of the industrial exploitation of nature; this figurative path, to make sense, is subordinated to thematic, general and abstract paths, in this case, the political themes of the imperialist exploitation of Brazilian natural resources and the occupation of indigenous lands during colonization.
According to semiotics, the correlations between themes and figures form the semantics of discourse, which is subordinated to the even more general and abstract categories of discursive placements of person, time and space, that is, the syntax of discourse.
The discursive level, in turn, is subordinated to narrativity, which is described by the relationships between subjects and narrative objects; in the poem, it deals with the controversial relationships between the poet subject and the personification of the locomotive, mediated by the junctions with the object saw, in which the first appears plundered by the second. Finally, such narrative relationships are based on values generated in the semantic category nature vs. civilization, which organizes both the narrative and the figurative distribution enunciated in the verses (Pietroforte, 2016: 15-24).
Schematically, the model is configured as follows:
The plane of expression and semi-symbolism
In the previous scheme, we can see the emphasis of the theory on the content of the texts, making the meanings of the signs the conceptual basis for the formation of figurative paths; In doing so, theorists of the generative path of meaning, in the first moments of developing the model, isolate the plane of expression, considering the plane of content independently of the system of signs in which it manifests itself. According to Greimas, man is the meaning of all languages (Greimas, 1981;116); From this perspective, the generative path of meaning describes, precisely, the process of meaning, properly human, through which humanity constructs itself semiotically, that is, through which humanity gives meaning to itself and the world.
In poetic discourses, however, the plane of expression, as it actively participates in meaning, despite its semiotic constitution, be it verbal, visual, etc., is included in the generative path of meaning through the theory of semisymbolism, another proposal inspired in Saussure's ideas. For the linguist, within the linguistic sign, the relationship between signifiers and signifieds is arbitrary, or rather, there is no motivation between the concept and its phonological expression; however, when the opposite happens in certain systems of signification, that is, when there is motivation between the signified and the signifier, for example, if images of skulls are associated with death, a specific sign called symbol occurs (Saussure, 2012: 105- 110).
That said, considering no longer relationships between signifiers and signifieds within signs, but the process of signification of signs in narrative, discursive and textual semiotic paths, it is possible to draw correlations between semantic categories and categories of the plane of expression; in this way, neither arbitrary signs nor motivated symbols are forwarded, but correlations between the planes of content and expression, called semi-symbolic, which suggest motivations between the specific signs of the text in question.
In Drummond's poem, mentioned in the previous item, correlations are established between the semantic category nature vs. civilization, through which the narrative, speech and figurative paths, carried out on the content level, and prosodic forms, manifested on the verbal expression level, are structured. In the first three stanzas, when nature is effected on the level of content, in prosodic terms, on the level of expression the verses are decasyllables; In the poem, in its own way, the stability of nature, sung in the first three stanzas, appears correlated to prosodic stability.
In the fourth stanza, differently, when nature is denied – in the verse it says “this morning I wake up and / I don’t find it” –, the decasyllable verse breaks down into two verses, the first, with seven syllables – “this morning I wake up and” –, and the second, of three syllables – “I can’t find it” –; the fifth stanza, finally, is made up of eight verses without prosodic stability, thus configuring a stanza formed by free verses, which ends up correlated, in terms of content, to the changes resulting from civilization, when the locomotive is described and the consequent destruction of nature.
Schematically, the semi-symbolism, with which the poem is composed, is represented in this way: (decasyllable verses / nature) → (disarticulated decasyllable verse / denial of nature) → (free verses / civilization). In semiotic terms, the prosodic expression of the poem is systematized in the category of verbal expression metered verse vs. free verse, which correlates to the semantic category nature vs. civilization, according to semi-symbolism (nature / metered verse) vs. (civilization / free verse), leading to narrative, discursive and textual developments characteristic ofThe pulverized mountain (Pietroforte, 2016: 24-26).
Everyday language, on the contrary, is not guided by similar correlations. Although all verbal semiotics are expressed through phonological and prosodic categories – that is, through vowels, consonants, tonic accentuation and intoactive curves –, in colloquial language, the effects of poetic meaning, such as rhymes, alliteration, assonances and verse feet, are neutralized, eventually occurring; In non-poetic social discourses, the content of the texts is prioritized, thus avoiding deviations from the plane of expression.
The phenomenon of semi-symbolism, common in poetic discourses, is not restricted to verbal semiotics; in plastic semiotics, that is, painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, comic books, etc., there are semi-symbolisms with chromatic, eidetic and topological categories, relating, respectively, to colors, shapes and distribution of colors and shapes; In musical semiotics, there is semi-symbolism with categories of frequency, pitch, intensity, duration and timbre, distributed in chronological categories.
In this way, regardless of the semiotic status of the plane of expression, it is always possible to establish correlations between the categories of its form and the semantic categories of the forms of content; consequently, semi-symbolic correlations are potentially found in all semiotic systems.
What is semiotics?
After this brief introduction to the topic, how do you answer the question? In the previous items, the etymologies and semantic fields of the words sign and meaning are discussed; some religious and philosophical conceptions on the matter were briefly introduced; studied from logos to phenomenology, from Peirce's ideoscopy to Saussure's semiology and even Greimas' semiotics; Finally, it is known that, in addition to them, there are other semiotic proposals, some seeking reconciliations, others affirming contrary and contradictory positions. In these circumstances, the only possible answer to the initial question is the awareness that these are, above all, controversies formed between similar discourses.
From this perspective, declaring that the objects of semiotic studies are the sign and signification, in truth, says very little about the topic; to improve clarification, sign and meaning must be defined, and such definitions, as can be seen, do not always coincide, given different conceptions in the different proposals.
Finally, instead of taking exclusive positions on what would or would not be semiotics, the best answer is to consider the concepts of sign, meaning and the concept of semiotics itself being, precisely, such a controversy of different conceptions; Semiotics coincides, from this point of view, with the discursive field formed by the set of proposals of what would be sign, meaning, semiotics.
*Seraphim Pietroforte He is a full professor of semiotics at the University of São Paulo (USP). Author, among other books, of Visual Semiotics: the trajectories of the gaze (Context). [https://amzn.to/4g05uWM]
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