Social semiotics: Towards a sociologically grounded semiotics (original) (raw)

2017, Semiotics and Its Masters, eds. Paul Cobley & Kristian Bankov. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton.

Semiotics has defined its field as the study of meaning, which is entirely legitimate. However, if we wish to reach a deeper interpretation and explanation of semiotic texts, we need an articulation of semiotics with an epistemologically superior level. Semioticians have looked for this articulation in the framework of an individualistic paradigm, in biology or sometimes in psychology; we counter-propose a sociological paradigm. Our paper reviews earlier attempts at such an articulation in sociosemiotics and sociolinguistics and argues that they range from a weak awareness of society dismissed in the name of semiotic relevance (Greimas and Courtés) to the systematic articulation of language with the social (Bernstein). Finally, we demonstrate how an articulation between semiotics and society (in the sociologist's sense of the word) can illuminate semiotic analysis through the example of case studies from Antiquity to our own times. The anchoring of semiotic systems in society challenges both Peircean global semiotics and cognitive semiotics, which both imply the historical priority of biology as an explanation of cultural semiotic systems. Both approaches try to pass directly from culture to biology, but the recognition of the mediating role of society creates major epistemological problems for a biological approach to semiotics.