A Theory of Semiotics

Eco, U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1976

Link

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16xwcfd

Cited from

art_aesthetics, linguistics_semiotics, philosophy

Cited by

5 citations across 5 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Arbitrariness of Symbolic Conventions
  • Eco 1976

    This sourceSystematic synthesis treating semiotics as a theory of codes plus a theory of sign-production; culturally established codes bind expression to content across linguistic, visual, and behavioral sign systems.

• Icon–Index–Symbol Distinction
  • T2 — Cultural variation in iconicity. What counts as "resemblance" is culturally variable — Western perspective drawings exhibit a particular kind of iconicity that is not universal; other visual traditions (Egyptian profile view, Chinese scroll conventions) achieve iconicity through different formal rules.

    This sourceEco iconicity culturally variable resemblance visual traditions.

• Iconography
  • The community of interpreters who recognize and understand the system's conventional meanings
• Indexicality
  • The pattern shows up just as cleanly in physical traces, biological signals, and instrument readings as it does in pronouns or demonstratives, a breadth Eco (1976) develops when he treats indexical signs as a substrate-neutral semiotic category.
• Symbolic Representation
  • Symbolic representation encodes a structural pattern: sign vehicle → arbitrary convention-bound link → meaning → interpretive community → maintenance over time → productive composition, a six-role decomposition Eco (1976) develops in his general theory of how codes assign expression to content.

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