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.

Verification

Does it exist? Not checked yet. This entry carries no identifier to resolve. It was extracted from the citation as written in the article, normalized, and deduplicated against the rest of the registry.

Does it back the claim? Not recorded. Neither this nor any other of the 5 citations of this work carries a recorded support check.

Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.

See how references were verified.

Registry ID ref:3d3bbba354d5 · see in the full table