Morphologies of meaning

Director of the Center for Semiotic Research, implemented by the University fo Aarhus and the Dansih National Research Foundation, presents in this book, following three voumes in French: L´analyse phrastique, 1973, La charpente modale du sens, 1992 and Dynamiques du sens, 1994, a new approach to the study of meaning. Dynamic semiotics, developed from Structural Semantics and Peircean philosophy through the morphogenetic views made possible by catastrophe Theory, is here engaged in a constructive dialogue with Cognitive Linguistics, and challenged by Aesthetics and Phenomenology. The resulting cognitive semiotics restates and discusses a wide range of foundational problems retlated to contemporary research on perception, communication, and subjectivity.
A basic assummption of the seventeen studies of the Morphologies of Meaning gathered for this volume is that sign structures, however cultural, are grounded in natural patterns of both perceptual and pragmatic cognition, and that these patterns can be understood as dynamic schemes connecting forces and forms in stable ways that account for human actions, passions, and the organization of thought.