Abstract

Of the many teachings on triadic semiotic that I was fortunate to receive in my life, none was more long-lasting and stimulating than what I learned by reading and exchanging ideas with Joseph Ransdell. And most salient among the ideas he explained with such admirable clarity were those related to iconicity, that apparently simple but most enigmatic relationship of formal identity between a sign and its object. That is why the main objective of this article is a discussion of the semiotic quality that is embodied in some kind of material substance, called ‘hypoicon’ in Peircean semiotic.1 The hypoicon is the kind of sign whose functioning is based on its likeness to its dynamical object,2..