The Role of Semiotics in the Study of Language, Linguistics and Communication: An Overview

All knowledge, from the most tentative guess to the most demonstrative certainty, is grounded on evidence; it is supported by data, credentials, warrants, and premises. The data are not them-selves evidence for that to which they attest; they must be interpreted to be evidence, to give some credibility to what they support. David Savan on C.S. Peirce (1980: 255) The whole of culture should be studied as a communicative phenomenon based on signification systems. U.Eco (1976: 22) It is the organization of memory that defines what concepts are. ...the property of being a concept is a property of connectivity, a quality that comes from being embedded in a certain kind of complicated network, and from nowhere else....concepts derive all their power from their connectivity to one another. D.Hofstadter (1985: 528)