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On the Diversity of Environmental Signs: a Typological Approach

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Abstract

Environmental signs as physically manifested signs that we and other animals perceive and interpret in the natural environment are seldom focused on in contemporary semiotics. The aim of the present paper is to highlight the diversity of environmental signs and to propose a typology for analysing them. Combining ecosemiotics and the pragmatist semiotics of C. Peirce and C. Morris, the proposed typology draws its criteria from the properties of the object and the representamen of the sign, and of their relationships. The analysis distinguishes eight basic types of environmental signs and provides examples of these from the natural environment. The typology also integrates existing concepts of environmental affordances, ecofields, phonetic syntax, sign fields, ecological codes, meta-signs and others. In addition to basic types of environmental signs, compound environmental signs are discussed with three types of these distinguished: (1) environmental meta-signs; (2) ecological codes; and (3) environmental-cultural hybrid signs. Further study of compound environmental signs could lead to reconceptualising relations between linguistic and pre-linguistic semiosis.

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Notes

  1. What is the natural environment in semiotic terms is a complex issue on its own. For this paper, I describe this through three characteristics — environment: (1) includes multitudes of Umwelts of organisms of different species and interactions between them; (2) contains physical forces, structures and resources that can be objects of interpretation, that can constrain interpretation or be a context for interpretation; (3) provides conditions for the multisensory and multi-layered semiosis from tactile to symbol-based semiosis.

  2. In some typologies, reagents can be further divided between tracks and symptoms (see Johansen and Larsen 2002: 32).

  3. Relevant to the present topics is also work done in architectural semiotics on “object semiotics”, as a study of structural and functional relations between elements forming an architectural space (Krampen 1979: 6–20).

  4. W. Nöth explains this twofold relation as follows: “The sign vehicle (A) and the referent (B) in this type of natural semiosis are related in two ways. At an extrasemiotic level, the level of natural events, A is the effect of the cause B. At the semiotic level, the effect A becomes an index or symptom which an interpreter connects by inference to B″ (Nöth 1990: 86).

  5. “A sign is vague to a given interpreter to the degree that its signification does not permit the determination of whether something is or is not the denotatum; so the extent that sign is not vague it is precise “(Morris 1971b: 97).

  6. For ecosemiotics, C. Morris’ interpretation of the concept of “meaning” appears to be suitable. This includes not accepting any narrow definition – meaning is not “considered as one thing among other things, a definite something located somewhere”; it is not in the designatum (leading to realism), in the interpretant (leading to conceptualism), or in the sign vehicle (leading to nominalism) (Morris 1971a: 57). Rather, “meanings are not to be located as existences at any place in the process of semiosis but are to be characterised in terms of this process as a whole” (Morris 1971a: 57). From this basis, Morris accepts the subjectivity of meaning (interpretation), which at the same time is compatible with treating every meaning as potentially intersubjective (due to rules and generality of usage) leading to the possibility to study meanings by objective analysis (Morris 1971a: 58–59). For ecosemiotics, a most fascinating perspective is extending this intersubjectivity to the domain of the environmental sphere and to interspecies semiosis.

  7. Interpretation of an unfolding course of a hiking trail by humans could be considered another example of this kind (cf. Lekies and Whitworth 2011).

  8. Consortium “as a group of organisms connected via (sign) relations, or groups of interspecific semiosic links in biocoenosis” is another example of community level signs complex (Kull 2010: 347).

  9. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/spring (accessed 25.08.2017).

  10. Perhaps the danger to interrupt this natural convention was also the true strength behind the metaphoric title of Rachel Carson’s book Silent spring (Carson 1962).

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Acknowledgements

The research for this article was supported by the institutional research grant IUT02-44 and by the individual research grant PUT1363 “Semiotics of multispecies environments: agencies, meaning making and communication conflicts” from the Estonian Research Council. I express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of Biosemiotics for their constructive feedback.

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  1. Department of Semiotics, University of Tartu, Jakobi 2-311, 51014, Tartu, Estonia

    Timo Maran

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Maran, T. On the Diversity of Environmental Signs: a Typological Approach. Biosemiotics 10, 355–368 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-017-9308-5

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