Some issues in the semiotics of gestureGöran Sonesson,Department of semiotics,Lund University

Abstract: Semiotics is basically about differences and similarities between different vehicles for conveying meaning. On one hand, questions formulated in other semiotic domains maybe of interest to the study of pictures; on the other hand, answers to these questions within the study of gesture are important to general semiotics. Here we will be looking at the nature of signs as opposed to other meanings, as well as to actions. We will also scrutinize indexicality as contiguity andas directionality, as well as whether it precedes or results from the act of signification. Without going deeply into the nature of the iconic scale, we will consider the relevance to gesture of the distinction between primary and secondary iconicity, and of the hierarchies of the world taken for granted.

Some of the domains that now form part of semiotics, such as,

most notably, the semiotics of pictures, had hardly been

studied at all before the revival of semiotic theory in the

middle of the last century. Gesture, however, has been the

focus of a long tradition from Condillac to Efron, and played a

part even, in a sense, in ancient rhetoric. Nevertheless, also

the study of gesture received a new impetus at the same time

as, and in part due to, the re-emergence of semiotics.

Therefore, there is every reason to remind also the students of

gesture not to lose track of the task of semiotics as a global

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discipline: to compare different semiotic resources, in order

to determine their differences and similarities.

In the present case, that means determining the place of

gesture among other kinds of semiotic resources. All students

of gesture, it must be admitted, do not necessarily feel

inclined to address the big questions concerning the nature of

semiosis and of its different kinds. Yet it is not only the

Peircean ethics of terminology, but also the practical purpose

of semiotic inquiry, which require all scholars not to use

established terms in new meanings, or to avoid introducing new

terms for notions already entrenched in semiotic theory. This

would suppose a minimum of contact between those working in

general semiotics, and the students of specific domains, such

as gesture studies.

1. Signs and other meanings1.2. On the notion of signEven though the scope of meaning is nowadays sometimes taken

to be wider than the notion of sign (cf. Sonesson 1989), there

is every reason to investigate whether some particular kind of

semiotic resource, such as gesture, consists of signs or some

other type of meaning, or perhaps contains both signs and other

meanings. Signs, or some particular kind of signs, are

conceivable only mastered by children at a relatively mature

age, and are possibly not accessible at all to other kinds of

animals. A concept of sign is needed to pursue this question

experimentally (Cf. Sonesson 2012a; Hribar et al., in press;

Zlatev et al., in press).

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To structuralists, from Saussure to Eco, it was easy to

determine whether something was a sign or not. Signs were

conventional. Thus, Eco tried to show that putative iconic

signs (by which he mostly meant pictures) were actually

conventional; indeed, he even hinted that there must be

something conventional to indexical signs (such as pointing).

Saussure himself mused that miming could be of the nature of

signs, since it must imply a rudiment of conventionality.

Nowadays, most semioticians would probably recognize that

convention enters into every kind of meaning. Hjelmslev

required all signs to be made up of smaller combinatories of

elements that as such were meaningless, that is, which had

“double articulation”. Eco therefore argued that iconic signs

must be made up of meaningless iconemes, and Birdwhistell

claimed to have found kinemes in gestures. Both ideas have long

since been shown to be untenable (Cf. Sonesson 2010a).

We are left with the Saussurean definition, according to

which a sign consists of a signifier and a signified, or the

Peircean one, which states that signs are formed out of

representamen, object, and interpretant – but we are offered no

means to tell whether any particular item, or even a dyad or

triad of items, answers to any of these labels. There is of

course the common sense notion, often invoked by Peirce,

according to which one of these things “stands for” (one of)

the other(s) – but it is not clear what this means. Searle

(1995: 43ff) describes the constitutional rules giving rise to

what he calls institutional reality, including signs, using the

formula “X counts as Y in C”. This may really characterise the

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kind of meaning with which chessmen are endowed, to the extent

that they are all, in an extended sense, pawns in the game. As

Saussure taught us, an array of buttons are enough to

distinguish the different bundles of possible movements that

the chessmen embody. Traditional chessmen, however, also look

like kings, queens, horses, and so on, and in this respect they

are like language, which, in spite of what Saussure seems to

say, also refer us to the world of our experience (Cf. Sonesson

2009a; 2010b).

We need to define a notion of sign based on our intuitive

understanding of what a sign is: it should include words among

the signs, and it should at least exclude perception (though

Peirce would not agree with the latter). I have put together

such a definition, inspired in the work of the phenomenologist

Edmund Husserl and the psychologist Jean Piaget (Sonesson

1989). It starts from Husserl’s idea that perception is imbued

with meaning. It is not only that everything we see has its own

shape, its colours, and its parts. If we look at a cube, we

necessarily perceive it from a certain angle, showing certain

sides entirely, others in part, and yet others not at all, and

revealing some of its properties, but as long as we see it as a

cube, the others sides and properties are part of what we see.

Yet the part of the cube which we most directly see is normally

also what is the focus of our attention, at least as long as we

do not start to wonder whether the object is really hollow on

the other side, or the like. Different variations are possible

here, which I have discussed elsewhere (Cf. Sonesson 2011;

2012b). However, in the case of a sign, there clearly must be

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one item which is most directly given but not in focus, namely

the expression, and another item which is indirectly given, yet

in focus, viz. the content (and/or the referent). Nevertheless,

the same situation might perhaps occur even in the case where

we would not like to say there is any sign present: if I look

at the side of the cube which is directly present to me while

concentrating hard on how it may look from the hidden side.

Another criterion is needed, and it can be found in Piaget’s

notion of semiotic function, which is defined by

differentiation. As such, the criterion of differentiation is

not very clear, so I believe it must be applied to the result

of using the other criteria, which means that, like the latter,

it cannot be a sufficient criterion. Applying differentiation

to the relation between an item which is directly given but not

in focus and another item which is in focus but indirectly

given, there seems to be mainly two possibilities: it can be

spatio-temporal or categorical. I can turn the cube over to

have a look at its other sides, but this is not possible in the

case of a sign. There is no spatio-temporal continuity. I can

collect the cube together with cubes into a class of cubes, but

it does not make sense to do the same thing with expression and

content. They form part of different categories.

Words (including those of ”sign language”) are clearly signs

in this sense, and so are pictures (Sonesson 1989; 2010a;

2011). In the case of everyday gestures, there can be no doubt

that emblem fulfil these criteria, as do Efron’s (1972[1941])

kinetographic and iconographic gestures (Cf. Kendon 2004).

Other cases so far seem less clear.

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1.2. Sign and groundAccording to the classical division of signs made by Peirce

(following upon many other thinkers who made similar

distinctions in other terms), there are three kinds of signs:

icons, indices, and symbols. In very general (non-Peircean)

terms, iconicity is the relation between two items that is

based on (an experience of) similarity between one or several

properties of the items; and indexicality is a relation founded

on a contiguity (or neighbourhood) existing between two items

or properties thereof. If such a neighbourhood exists between

two things that are experienced as being parts of the same

whole, we may more specifically call this relation factoriality

(Cf. Sonesson 1989, 49ff.; 1998). Finally, if there is neither

similarity nor contiguity between the two items involved, but

some kind of regularity, which may be a simple habit, an

explicit convention, or something in between, we have to do

with symbolicity. Peirce thinks of all these as signs, because

his notion of sign is very broad (as he realised late in life),

more or less equivalent to any kind of meaning, including

perception. Contiguity and factoriality are present everywhere

in the perceptual world without as yet forming signs: we will

say, in that case, that they are mere indexicalities. An index,

then, must be understood as indexicality (an indexical relation

or ground) plus the sign function. Analogously, the perception

of similarities (which is an iconic ground) will give rise to

an icon only when it is combined with the sign function. No

matter what Peirce may have meant, it makes more systematic and

evolutionary sense to look upon iconicity and indexicality as

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being only potentials for something being a sign. Iconicity,

indexicality, and symbolicity merely describe that which

connects two objects; they do not tell us whether the result is

a sign or not (Table 1).

Table. 1. The relationship between principles, grounds, andsigns, from the point of view of Peirce (adding a Thirdness of

ground from Sonesson’s point of view).

Firstness Secondness Thirdness

Principle Iconicity — —

Ground Iconic ground Indexicality =indexical ground

Symbolicity = symbolic ground

Sign Iconic sign (icon)

Indexical sign(index)

(Symbolicity = symbolic ground =) symbolic sign (symbol)

The sign thus defines a principle of relevance, which Peirce,

in his earlier texts, called a ground, but other factors, such

as attention, may pinpoint other such principles. These

considerations allow us to separate the study of the

phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence of iconicity,

indexicality and symbolicity from that of the corresponding

signs (cf. Sonesson 1998, 2001). Thus, in a recent study

(Zlatev et al., forthcoming), we found that indexical vehicles,

such as pointing and markers, were understood much earlier by

children than iconic vehicles such as pictures and scale-

models. This could mean that indices are easier to understand

than icons, but an alternative explanation is that indexicality

may function to indicate something, which was the task at hand,

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without having sign character, whereas an iconicity without

sign character would only be another item of the same category.

Further experiments have to be conceived in order to separate

these two interpretations.

1.3. To interpret the world and to change itNot all ”visible actions” count as ”utterances”, as Kendon

(2004) puts it, that is, as signs. Mukařovský (1978)

distinguishes between actions that have the function to change

the world, and those that merely change the interpretation of

the world; and Greimas (1972) opposes praxis and gesture in

similar terms. Vygotsky (1978) similarly separates technical

and psychological tools. Nevertheless, Rodriguez & Moro (1999)

and Andrén (2010) have observed that bodily movements with

props may still function as gestures rather actions. On the

other hand, it is conceivable that some gestures making use of

no props could be seen as actions rather than signs. Many years

ago, when I directed a group analysing video clips from French

television (Sonesson 1981; cf. Sonesson 2009b), I suggested the

extension of what I called the proxemic model to the study of

gesture. In proxemics, which studies the meaning of distances

between two or more subjects, movement does not serve to convey

a content, but to create a space, whether intimate or public or

somewhat in between. These spaces do not really exist in the

physical world, of course, but they are real in the human

Lifeworld, or at least in some varieties of it.

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Fig. 1. Differential valorisation of spatial relation,

according to the position of the palm : relation to the ground(1), relation to the above (2) relation to the back (3 ),

inclusion of the other (4a) pointing outside of own space (4b)

The multinational group which I headed in Paris in the late

seventies and early eighties, which analysed the gestures of

French marketers, agreed that the meaning of many hand

movements occurring in front of the chest considered as a scene

should be understood as ways of relating either to the chest

itself, to the ground, and to the other person. Today I don’t

know how much to make of this multinational consensus. However,

in Kendon’s (2004:248ff) recent discussion of “palm down” and

“palm up” gestures, there are certainly some which, in

particular cultures, have gained an emblematic meaning, but

others could be understood rather as creators of spatial

relationships, and so could these same emblematic gestures,

outside of their domain of validity – similarly to how we

understood them in our “proxemic model” (Sonesson 1981; 2009b).

It is not obvious how one would show that a particular kind of

gesture fits better in with the action model than with the sign

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model, but maybe those who dedicate themselves to the study of

gesture would do well to integrate also the action model into

their analytical toolkit.

2. Grounding indexicality2.1. Indexicality and directionIn Peirce’s work, there are many other definitions of the

three kinds of signs than the ones referred to above, but, as I

have argued elsewhere (Sonesson 1989), these three are the only

ones which seem able to exhaust the universe of signs,

considered from the particular perspective of motivating the

content from the expression. It is, in particular, in the case

of indices that Peirce seems to propose many other criteria,

which do not yield the same result, notably causality, which,

as I have shown elsewhere (Sonesson 1998), would delimit a much

more narrow group of signs. Although Peirce never explicitly

defines the index by means of direction, the choice of the term

index, clearly suggests that, like the pointing finger,

indexicality serves to mark a direction, and this also seems to

be how the term has been understood in much of the

psychological literature. Starting out from semiotics, however,

I have argued that signs showing a direction are only a

subcategory of those relying on contiguity (Sonesson 1989: 47;

1998). In fact, an arrow or a pointing finger may be just as

contiguous to something at its beginning as to something at its

end, and yet both would normally be understood as signs only of

what is at their end – and indeed in a particular spot at the

end. Interestingly, René Thom (1973) conceives indexicality in

terms of the forward thrust of the arrow-head as imagined in

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water or the sentiment of its slipping from our hands. Since

this is very much a distinction in the spirit of Gestalt

psychology, I suggested we should use the term vectoriality to

describe it. Directionality may however be a more familiar

term, and can be used as long as it is understood that his is

not simply indexicality.

It seems natural for an indexical sign incorporating

vectoriality to be easier to grasp than on without any

vectoriality. In an experiment (Zlatev et al, forthcoming), we

tried to separate mere contiguity from vectoriality

(directionality), in the form of a marker and pointing,

respectively. Four chimpanzees were tested at Lund University

Primate Research Station Furuvik and three groups of children

at the Humanities Laboratory, Lund University. In the majority

of the cases the results for the apes failed to reach

significance. Still, there was a tendency for indexical signs

to be more often correctly interpreted than iconic signs.

Preliminary results for the children show the same tendency and

thus support the hypothesis that 18-month olds most often

understand pointing and more rarely markers, while only some

24-month olds understand the iconic signs. The 30-months olds

usually understand all four types of signs. In our study, the

difference between pointing and marker was not significant, but

that may have been because we did not manage to hide completely

the action by means of which the marker was placed, which has

its own directionality. This poses the question whether it is

contiguity or directionality that accounts for pointing and

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marker being easier to grasp than picture and replica. Other

studies are necessary to separate these two criteria.

2.2. Contiguity assumed or createdThere is an ambiguity in the use of the term indexicality,

which, as far as I know, was never noted before I did (Sonesson

1989; 1998): the items involved may either be contiguous at

some moment before the act of signification, or they may become

so precisely at the moment, and because of, the act of

signification. In other words, the contiguity may be currently

perceptible and actually perceived, as in the case of an arrow

pointing the way, or it may have existed at a time anterior to

the time of perception, as in the case of footprints, or

photography. Elsewhere, I have suggested that we could speak of

performative or abductive indices, according as the contiguity is

created by the sign itself, or, conversely, is a condition for

the use of the sign (cf. Sonesson 1989; 1998). Indeed, an arrow

or a pointing finger works by creating a neighbourhood which

did not exist before to the thing they point to, but the

footprints can be interpreted because we know beforehand about

the relationship between feet and the different kinds of

surfaces on which they are susceptible to leave their marks.

There is no independently existing category of pointed-out

objects, but there certainly is a category of feet, which (if

we take this only to mean human feet) can be differentiated

into big feet and small feet, male feet and female feet,

flatfeet and feet of traditional Chinese women, etc. The former

are performative, because they create the relationship they are

about (following Austin’s classic definition); they latter are

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abductive, because they rely on our ability to draw conclusions

from one singular fact to another on the foundation of habitual

relationships (following Peirce’s characterization of

abduction).

In this sense, pointing is of course performative, but so is

the marker. It may seem, therefore, that gesture can only

convey indexicality abductivily through the intermediary of

iconicity: thus, for instance, in Mallery’s (1972[1881])

example of the content woman being indicated by the palm held

at a small height, the position of the palm is iconic for

height, but height is connected to woman by abductive

indexicality. Nevertheless, abbreviated gestures may be said to

rely on abductive indexicality by themselves, as in the

classical interpretation of pointing as being an abbreviation

of reaching.

3. Iconicity3.1. The scale of iconicityAs I have pointed out elsewhere (Sonesson 2001), iconicity,

in the Peircean sense, goes well beyond depiction, as thus

beyond McNeill’s (2005:39) ”iconic gestures”, to include his

“metaphoric gestures”, some emblems, and perhaps all beats. In

the following, I will take this for granted and go on to

discuss more complicated issues of iconicity.

The idea of a “scale of iconicity” first seems to have been

introduced by Charles Morris (1946): in this sense, a film is

more iconic of a person than is a painted portrait because it

includes movement, etc. Abraham Moles (1981) constructed a

scale comprising thirteen degrees of iconicity from the object

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itself (100%) to its verbal description (0%). Such a conception

of iconicity is problematic, not only because distinctions of

different nature appear to be amalgamated, but also because it

takes for granted that identity is the highest degree of

iconicity and that the illusion of perceptual resemblance

typically produced, in different ways, by the scale model and

the picture sign is as close as we can come to iconicity

besides identity itself (cf. Sonesson 1998). Nevertheless, on a

very general level, e.g. in the simple case of distinguishing

drawings, black-and-white photographs, and colour photographs,

this idea has been confirmed by psychological experiments,

including our own (Cf. Hribar et al., in press). Kendon (2004:

2) rightly takes exception to what McNeill (2005:5) calls

“Kendon’s continuum”, which is the application of the iconicity

scale to gesture, as well as to the “expanded” version proposed

by Gullberg (1998). The results from both the study of pictures

and that of gesture thus suggest that we should rather consider

a number of different parameters on which expression and

content may vary. The general issue seems to big an issue to

analyse here, but we will have a look at two related notions.

3.2. Primary and secondary iconicity.A distinction can be made between two kinds of iconical

signs: those that become signs because they are iconic, and

those that are understood as iconic because they are signs (cf.

Sonesson 1994, 2008, 2010a, 2010c). In other terms, a primary

iconic sign is a sign in the case of which the perception of a

similarity between an expression E and a content C is at least

a partial reason for E being taken to be the expression of a

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sign the content of which is C. That is, iconicity is really

the motivation (the ground) or, rather, one of the motivations

for positing the sign function. A secondary iconic sign, on the

other hand, is a sign in the case of which our knowledge that E

is the expression of a sign the content of which is C, in some

particular system of interpretation, is at least a partial

reason for perceiving the similarity of E and C. Here, then, it

is the sign relation that partially motivates the relationship

of iconicity. Pictures are of course primary iconical signs, in

this sense. To be exact, they are primary iconical signs to

human adults, for there is every reason to believe that they

are no signs at all, but simply objects as such, to apes and to

children below the age of 2 or 3 years. Secondary iconical

signs, however, are often identical to the object itself, but

in some context, such as a shop-window or an exhibition, they

may be turned into signs of themselves.

There are two ways in which iconicity may be secondary:

either there is too much iconicity for the sign to work on its

own, such as objects becoming signs of themselves in some

capacity, or there is too little iconicity for the sign

function to emerge without outside help. Thus, iconicity may be

said to be secondary, because of depletion, or because of

profusion. A car, which is not a sign on the street, becomes a

sign at a car exhibition, as does Duchamp’s urinal in a museum.

In other cases, the sign function must precede the perception

of iconicity, because there is too little resemblance without

it, as in the manual signs of the North American Indians,

which, according to Mallery (1972[1881]: 94f.), seem reasonable

15

when we are informed about their meaning. This is also the case

with “droodles” such as the sketch that may either be seen as a

olive dropping into a martini glass or as a close-up of girl in

scanty bathing suit, or some third thing, according to the

label that is attached. While both scenes, and many more, are

possible to discover in the drawing, both are clearly

underdetermined by it.

Adopting my terms, de Cuypere (2008) claims that linguistic

iconicity is exclusively secondary. Supposing this to be true,

would it apply also to gesture? Mallery’s example, quoted

above, would seem to suggest so. Nevertheless, no matter what

similarities there may be between language and gesture (and in

particular “sign languages”), gesture resembles pictures in

being founded on a system of transformations from perceptual

experience, which language is not (or very marginally so). More

specifically, gesture and pictures both share in the sensory

modality which dominates human perception, visuality, to which

we are fairly accustomed to translate other domains of our

experience. On the other hand, it may seem that gesture must

rely on secondary iconicity, both because of too much

iconicity, and too little. If we primarily look upon human arms

as technical tools, in Vygotsky’s sense, the iconicity that

they may convey as gestures would necessarily have to be

secondary, because of the difficulty of seeing arms as anything

else than arms. At the same time, the similarity between

perceptual experience and what may be mimicked using the arms

would normally seem to be at the level of droodles, because of

the constraints intrinsic to the shapes of the arms themselves.

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Thus, gesture appears to be based on secondary iconicity,

because of both depletion and profusion. If so, this suggests

that the two categories of secondary iconicity delineated above

are not exclusive. As far as I know, there are no empirical

studies bearing on this issue. This is especially unfortunate,

because already the reasoning above shows that the distinction

between primary and secondary iconicity cannot account for the

facts, even at the level of intuitions. Nonetheless, there has

to be a dialectics of theory and praxis. Before the

distinction, however faulty, has been put to any empirical

test, it does not make much sense to revise it.

3.3. The dominance hierarchyA prerequisite for signs working at all, and for iconical

signs in particular, would seems to be the hierarchy of

dominance which is part and parcel of the Lifeworld, the “world

taken for granted”. Elsewhere (Sonesson 1989), I have suggested

that there are in fact two such hierarchies, one which is more

abstract, and which accounts for some objects serving more

naturally as expressions in signs than others, and another

which is more concrete, and indeed more directly relative to

human beings, their bodies and other properties, and which

serves to explain why the effect of iconicity can be brought

off much more simply in the case of certain contents. In the

first case, I have indicated that a two-dimensional object

functions more readily as the expression of a three-dimensional

content than the reverse; that something static more easily can

signify something which is susceptible of movement than the

opposite; and that an inanimate object could more easily stand

17

for an animate one than the other way round. DeLoache (2000)

has independently invoked the first principle when explaining

why pictures are more easily interpreted by children than

scale-models; and Mandler (2004) has shown that very small

children are aware of the distinction between animate and

inanimate objects. The second, more concrete, but somewhat

overlapping, scale suggests that very little information is

needed to convey the idea of a face; somewhat more for a human

being; a little more for an animal; and somewhat more again for

an object which is not an animal but which is susceptible of

movement. There is ample proof that human faces are indeed very

high up on this scale (cf. Messer 1994). We are presently in

the process of investigating whether the other surmises can be

substantiated in the case of pictures. The idea would not

necessarily be that these hierarchies are innate; they may

result from communalities in the human situation. In any case,

I would suppose them to be universal.

We can so far only speculate what relevance these scales may

have to gesture. Unlike the case of pictures, the expression of

gesture is always made out of the same material, arms and hands

and marginally some other body parts. All these are three-

dimensional objects. Clearly these three-dimensional objects

may stand for other three-dimensional objects and even, in the

limiting case, for two-dimensional ones. This is in

contradiction to the first hierarchy. Gesture is also unlike

pictures in having an expression plane that is normally in

movement (although some movements, notably in the case of

emblems and pointing, may really only serve to move hands into

18

a position which is the real carrier of the content). Perhaps

the inclusion of movement is a facilitating factor here. If so,

this would be an interesting result from the point of view of

general semiotics, not only to the semiotics of gesture.

Nevertheless, that fact that arms and hands, which are a direct

part of human embodiment, contradicts general principles of the

Lifeworld, does not necessarily show that these principles are

invalid in the general case.

It is not clear how much can be made of the second hierarchy

in the case of gesture. As I suggested above, the shapes of

arms and hands impose severe constraints on the iconicity of

gestures; it is really on the level of droodles. Again, the

movement that gesture incorporates certainly serves to liberate

it partly from those constraints. It is at present an empirical

question whether gesture may yet profit from the principles of

the second hierarchy in their rendering of faces, human beings,

animals, and moving bodies, and/or other objects of the

Lifeworld.

4. Conclusion.We have looked at some issues that loom large in general

semiotics and in the semiotics of pictures, to evaluate their

relevance to the semiotic of gesture. The answers to many of

these queries seem unclear at the moment, but it may be

worthwhile for students of gesture to incorporate these issues

into their future investigations. In any case, any such answers

would be of immense interest to comparative semiotics.

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Sonesson, Göran 2001 De l’iconicité des images à l’iconicité desgestes, in Oralité est gestualité: Interactions et comportements multimodaux dans lacommunication. Actes du colloque ORAGE 2001, Aix-en-Provence, 18-22 juin 2001. Cavé,Christian, Guïtelle, Isabelle, & Santi, Serge (eds), 47-55. Paris:L’Harmattan

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Sonesson, Göran 2009a New considerations on the proper study ofman – and, marginally, some other animals, Cognitive Semiotics, 4 (Spring2009), 133-168.

Sonesson, Göran 2009a Here comes the semiotic species.Reflections on the semiotic turn in the cognitive sciences. In Symbolictransformations. The mind in movement through culture and society. B. Wagoner, ed., 38-58. London: Routledge.

Sonesson, Göran 2009b Au-délà du language de la dance: Lessignifications du corps. Degres-Revue de Synthese à Orientation Semiologique 139-40:C1-C25

Sonesson, Göran 2010a Pictorial semiotics in Encyclopedic dictionaryof semiotics, edited by Sebeok, Thomas A., & Danesi, Marcel. Berlin ; NewYork : De Gruyter Mouton. 3. rev. and updated ed.http://www.degruyter.com/view/EDS/pictorial_semiotics?rskey=UXxz91&result=1&q=&dbq_0=Pictorial%20semiotics&dbf_0=eds-fulltext&dbt_0=fulltext&dbop=and

Sonesson, Göran 2010b Semiosis and the Elusive Final Interpretantof Understanding, Semiotica 179(1/4): 145-258

Sonesson, Göran 2011 The mind in the picture and the picture inthe mind: A phenomenological approach to cognitive semiotics, Lexia - Rivistadi Semiotica, 07/08: 167-182.

Sonesson, Göran 2012a Semiosis beyond signs: On two or threemissing links on the way to human beings. In Schilhab, T., Stjernfelt, S.& Deacon, T. (eds.), The Symbolic Species Evolved (81-96). Dordrecht: Springer

Sonesson, Göran 2012b The foundation of cognitive semiotics inthe phenomenology of signs and meanings, Intellectica, 212/2, 58, 207-239

Thom, René, 1973 De l’icône au symbole. Cahiers internationaux dusymbolisme 22-23, 85-106.

Vygotskij, Lev 1978  Mind in society: the development ofhigher psychological processes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U.P

Zlatev, Jordan 2011 What is cognitive semiotics? Semiotix XN-6.Consulted on 2012-07-17 athttp://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/2011/10/what-is-cognitive-semiotics/

Zlatev, Jordan, Alenkær Madsen, Elainie, Lenninger, Sara, Persson, Tomas,Sayehli, Susan, Sonesson, Göran, & van de Weijer, Joost

forthcoming Understanding communicative intentionsand semiotic vehicles by children and chimpanzees. Cognitive Development

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