Galen of Pergamum (129–c. 215) was an eminent philosopher/ physician, born in what is today Turkey of Greek parentage. He took as his primary subject the nature of the human body.
Galen is recognized as an important figure in the history of semiotics for his insistence that semiotike (the observation and classification of past and present signs for the purpose of revealing the underlying nature of a patient’s condition and in order to prognosticate his/her future) was critical to effective medical practice. He has been referred to as the ‘founder of clinical semiotics’ and the ‘first “scientific” semiotician’ (Sebeok 2001a: 52).
Galen construed the symptom (semeia) as any sign of bodily disorder that was contrary to nature or, more specifically, to the patient’s own nature. He believed that a comprehensive knowledge of the hidden causes of symptoms (here the term refers to both signs observed by the practitioner and complaints issued by the patient, though the patient’s report was less credible) would lead to a systematic classification of diseases and a rational basis for allopathic treatment. He attempted to lay out just such a taxonomic structuring of symptoms, causes and diseases in several treatises. Galen thought it important, as Hippocrates had, to search for signs in the patient’s past (this he termed the mneumonic or anamnestic), though he gave this process less importance than observation and prognostication. He held that disease could be tracked to external or internal antecedent events or inherent conditions which resulted from an imbalance in the principal elements and humours of the body. Effective treatment was the mark of a valued practitioner, but accurate prognostication was of even greater value. Galen noted that he did not go about extolling the accuracy of his forecasts in order that other physicians/philosophers might not ‘hate him even more’ or call him a ‘wizard or a prophet’.
While much of his work is directed to creating a rational basis for medical practice and encouraging experimentation, he also wrote extensively on pharmaceuticals and on anatomy, which he learned from attendance at the Alexandrian schools (where human dissection was still approved practice), from vivisectional experiments with animals, from surgical practice and from the treatment of wounds when he served as physician to the gladiators of Pergamum. In one treatise he records his delight at finding the body of a robber picked clean by birds lying along a roadside.
The high regard in which Galen was held and the systematic nature of his attempts to reveal the underlying causes of illness was so compelling (though largely incorrect, based upon a belief in humours and a body that was constituted of hot, cold, wet and dry) that Galenic medicine was adopted by Arab and Asian practitioners, circled the globe several hundred years later with European explorers and persisted as the orthodox in Western medicine for centuries. Many medical historians today believe the dominance of Galenic medicine/anatomy effectively stifled valuable work that yielded contrary results well into the middle of the second millennium.
Galen’s longer lasting contribution is that he insisted all illness was of natural and not of supernatural origin and that practitioners must not attempt to apply broad medical knowledge to individual cases without respect for the uniqueness of the patient. He encouraged anatomical exploration and experimentation and is to be much credited for his refusal to treat psychical disease (what today we would term ‘mental disorders’) as significantly different from physical disease. (KSR)
See also MEDICAL SEMIOTICS.
Galen (1997) Galen: Selected Works, trans., Introduction and Notes by P. N. Singer, New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnston, I. (2006) Galen: On Diseases and Symptoms,New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sebeok, T. A. (2001) Global Semiotics, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
A description of a language which is formal and explicit: one which does not rely on the linguistic knowledge of the human being who reads or writes the grammar. Generative rules are a convenient notation for writing grammars. In mathematics a set is said to be generated by the rules which specify it: for instance, the rule ‘include months of the year which end in-ember’ generates the set {September, November, December}. In the same way, the rule ‘put adjectives in front of nouns’ generates a set of expressions including nice meal, happy hour, fervent believer and many others in English. For Chomsky, a generative grammar of a particular language is interesting if it is a step towards a theory of Universal Grammar for all languages. (RS)
A controversial tendency in linguistics which flourished in the USA in the late 1960s but gradually declined in influence. The disagreement began with a technical dispute about the nature of deep structure, which some linguists thought was unnecessary because it was simply the same as meaning. As the issues broadened, the emphasis in generative semantics was increasingly on questions of meaning rather than syntax, with many arguments put forward that meaning influenced grammatical form. Some generative semanticists claimed that the beliefs and presuppositions of speakers also had a role in grammar. Generative semantics was strongly opposed by Chomsky and led to a great deal of angry controversy, most of it now of purely historical interest. (RS)
See also LAKOFF.
The term has a history reaching back to Aristotle, who named prominent literary forms and their textual characteristics. This usage has informed much of the debate in the intervening centuries, establishing the salient textual forms of literary production. Since the 1970s the term has enjoyed an enormous resurgence, in two distinct directions: in the description and naming of new and largely ‘popular’ forms (popular print fiction, and filmic texts; for instance, the ‘Western’), and in the description of all textual production as conforming to regularities. In part, the popularity of the term is a recognition of the social and cultural origin of textual form, as a ‘realization’ of the features of the social environment in which it has been produced.
The theoretical interest dates back to the late 1970s and the early 1980s. Two strands are discernible: one in which the term genre is used as a near synonym for text, that is, genre describes all the relevant features which characterize text; the other treats genre as one of the constitutive categories of text, that is, it sees the text as the product of several distinct social factors.
Genre work of both kinds has been developed in Australia, in Canada and in the USA. Where genre is taken to equal text, emphasis tends to be placed on the overall shape and structure of the text. The narrative is a well-known instance. Or, in a job interview for instance, there are the opening welcoming remarks by the chair of the meeting; the introduction of members of the panel; the thanks to the applicant for attending the interview; the series of questions/answers in turn; the invitation by the chairing member to the interviewee to put questions to the panel; and the concluding remarks. These constitute a relatively stable structure, so much so that it is possible to prepare for, and to provide training in, ‘interview techniques’. The structures are of relative stability only: job interviews in 2001 are very different from those in 1981.
Genre responds to the changing social structures, of which it is a realization. In genres power is not evenly or equitably distributed, so that the means for alteration are unequal and attended by unequal risk of sanctions. Genres make available specific ‘positions’ for its participants (e.g. the interviewer, the interviewee), which they may – given the constraints of power – simply adopt, may attempt to change, or may reject entirely.
There is some irony in the fact that the newly intense interest in genre comes at a time when the very constitution and stability of genres have come under the severest pressure. The current period is characterized much more by blurring of generic boundaries, by the dissolution and corrosion of stable types (the interview which becomes a ‘chat’, the advertisement which has become indistinguishably blended with the feature article), than by the (relative) stability of genres which had characterized the immediately preceding period. This is a reflection of the questions posed by new distributions of power in the contemporary period. (GRK)
Altman, R. (1999) Film/Genre, London: BFI.
Bakhtin, M. M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. V. McGee, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Kress, G. R. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.
‘Gesture’ usually refers to any visible bodily action expressing thought or feeling or that plays a role in symbolic action. Although it cannot be precisely defined, actions considered as ‘gesture’ are commonly regarded as ‘voluntary’, at least to a degree. Such actions range from the informal to the highly formalized. Included are the hand, head and face movements that often accompany speech; bodily actions employed to convey something when speech is impossible; codified forms such as the ‘OK’ gesture, ‘thumbs up’ gesture and ‘V for victory’ gesture; and handshakes, embraces, and the like, that play a role in greeting and other interaction rituals. The manual and facial actions of sign languages such as those found in communities of the deaf (primary sign languages) (e.g. Klima and Bellugi 1979) or in tribal communities such as certain groups of Australian Aborigines (Kendon 1988) or of Native Americans (alternate sign languages) (Mallery 1972 [1881]; Farnell 1995) are also part of ‘gesture’ but today often receive separate, specialized treatments. Also to be included are the complex gestural systems found in some dance traditions, especially in India; actions in religious ritual such as those performed by priests in celebrating mass or the mudras used in prayer in Tantric Buddhism.
The earliest systematic treatment of gesture in the West is by Quintilian (1924) who discussed it in his treatise on rhetoric from the first century. Gesture is discussed in books on courtly etiquette in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century many books on the art of gesture in rhetoric and in acting were published (Barnett 1987). Representative are Bonifacio’s L’arte dei cenni [Art of Signs] (1616), Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia (1644), Austin’s Chironomia (1806) and J. J. Engel’s Ideen zu einer Mimik (1756). Gesture was of great interest to the philosophers of the French Enlightenment for what it might reveal about the original nature of language (Seigel 1969; Wells 1987). It was also seen as a possible basis for a universal language (Knowlsen 1965). In the nineteenth century, anthropologists such as Edward Tylor (1865) and Garrick Mallery (1972 [1881]) considered inquiries into gesture important for questions about language evolution.
Today, students of cognition and language examine the relationship between gesture and speech for what may be learned about the thought processes underlying the production of utterances. Gestures used simultaneously with speech are deemed to express aspects of meaning not manifest in words and reveal a fuller view of a speaker’s conceptualizations (McNeill 1992). The study of the processes by which gestures can become conventionalized and systematized when used apart from speech, as in the elaborate gesture vocabularies found in some cultures (e.g. Southern Italy) or in language systems fashioned in gesture such as sign languages, provides insight into the origins and development of symbol formation and the organization and origin of language (Armstrong et al. 1995). Gesture is also of interest to students of the history of the culture of everyday life, who study gestures and bodily expression in sculptures, paintings, prints, and the like, for the clues this can provide for an understanding of the expressive practices of the past (Bremmer and Roodenburg 1992). There is also interest in gesture in computer science, both in relation to attempts to develop computers that can respond to the gestures of users and in relation to the development of animated robots. (AK)
See also KINESICS.
Calbris, G. (1990) Semiotics of French Gesture, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Kendon, A. (2004) Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNeill, D. (1992) Hand and Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press.
The notion of ‘globalization’ can be understood in a double sense. Globalization in ordinary language, in the mass-medial version of the term, in economic, sociological and political terminology, refers to global communication in today’s social reproduction system. It is connected with progress in technology and expansion of the market. But global communication in today’s social reproduction system is only one aspect of the great web of communication formed by life over the planet Earth. In other words, globalization can also be understood in biosemiosic terms as globalism, a tendency that characterizes the evolution of life from its origins. Globalization was a fact of life well before the advent of global communication as understood in today’s capitalist society. Globalization is understood reductively if identified with the characteristic phenomenon of modern society with its now wide-ranging (and mostly devastating) effects over the planet. Globalization in the biosemiosic sense is the structural condition provided by evolutionary development for the proliferation of life over the planet, in its multifarious and interconnected manifestations. As a specific sphere of life, anthroposemiosis is strictly interrelated with the other spheres – microsemiosis, phytosemiosis, mycosemiosis and zoosemiosis, all being specifications of biosemiosis. Together they form the global communication network that is the biosemiosphere. The vital challenge today for human beings – ‘vital’ in the sense of crucial, essential, but also in the sense that it is a matter of life, that life is at stake – is to reconcile economic globalization with global communication of life on the planet. This question concerns humans as unique ‘semiotic animals’, that is, capable of signs of signs, reflection, conscious awareness; consequently as exclusively responsible for all life over the planet. (SP)
Ponzio, A. and Petrilli, S. (2000) Il sentire della comunicazione globalizzata, Rome: Meltemi.
Bias, in analysis or any thinking about signs, towards verbal communication. Frequently noted by Sebeok, such a bias is particularly evident in structuralism and poststructuralism, purporting to be derived from Saussure, thinking which often claims to identify and expose other biases such as ‘phonocentrism’, ‘logocentrism’, ‘phallogocentrism’ and ‘ethnocentrism’. Where these biases pertain to differences of emphasis within the phenomena of culture and human interaction, glottocentrism draws attention to the fact that semiosis takes place also outside the world of humans, in the spheres of animals and plants as well as within organisms (endosemiosis). As such, glottocentrism is also a ‘speciesism’. It is important to note that glottocentrism is frequently responsible for, in some considerations of signs, a repression of the fundamental non-verbal component of human modelling. (PC)
Erving Goffman (1922– 1982), one of the pioneers in qualitative human science research who originated the concept of frame analysis and its research methodology. A frame is a schematic matrix of human behaviours that phenomenologically constitutes a conscious experience of the self that is recognizable by others. The titles of Goffman’s books provide clear examples of a frame: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959); Encounters (1961a); Asylums (1961b); Stigma (1963a); Behavior in Public Places (1963b); Interaction Ritual (1967); Strategic Interaction (1969); Relations in Public (1971); Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organi zation of Experience (1974); and Gender Advertisements (1978). Born in Canada, Goffman’s 1945 BA degree is from the University of Toronto, but his 1949 MA and 1953 PhD are from the University of Chicago where he began his teaching career in the Division of Social Sciences. He subsequently worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, before moving to the Sociology Department at the University of California at Berkeley. After one year there, he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1959, then to Professor in 1962. In 1968, he was appointed Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he remained until his death. Goffman is a communicologist, although he never used that contemporary name for his work. Nonetheless, he devotes his major methodology book Frame Analysis (1974) to the approach of semiotic phenomenology which is the common theory and method of Communicology. He uses the first chapter of this book to take up the history of phenomenology from Edmund Husserl’s method of ‘bracketing’ to Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of ‘typicality’, and finally to the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (from whom he takes the notion of ‘frame’) and Jürgen Ruesch (from whom he takes the concept of ‘communication as interaction’). Thus, Goffman’s frame analysis method consists of 1) description (bracketing, a ‘token’ focus on specific interactions called a strip), 2) reduction (a search for ‘types’ or typicality in strips where logic depicts a definition) and 3) interpretation (the analytic determination of the code or structural system that governs the ‘tone’ behaviour in its typicality). Type, token and tone are terms used by Charles S. Peirce, not Goffman. However, the Peircean terms help us explicate the logic of semiotic phenomenology adopted by Goffman. Goffman literally ends his book with an extensive quotation from the modern French semiotic phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty whose three-step method (description, reduction, interpretation) Goffman has mastered in all of his published research. Goffman’s own theory and method is concise: ‘There is a relation between person and role. But the relationship answers to the interactive system – to the frame – in which the role is performed and the self of the performer is glimpsed.’ (RL)
Goffman, E. (1974) Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lanigan, R. L. (1990) ‘Is Erving Goffman a phenomenologist?’, in S. H. Riggins (ed.), Beyond Goffman: Studies on Communication, Institution, and Social Interaction, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lemert, C. and Branaman, A. (eds) (1997) The Goffman Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Charles Goodwin (b. 1943) is a linguistic anthropologist who has developed the concept of multimodal semiotic fields to denote the multiply embedded sign processes that are always at work in any given instance of human interpretation. Originally working with-in the discipline of Conversation Analysis, Goodwin’s work has evolved beyond the examination of talk alone to include the study of the sequential organization of moment-to-moment body positioning, eye-gaze and manipulation of the artefacts of the material surround whereby meaning is co-constructed in human interaction. His work is devoted to discovering and explicating the fine-grained details of participant-fashioned semiotic resources and the essentially ‘public’ nature of semiosis per se. In all instances, Goodwin seeks to identify and explicate the many simultaneously available meaning-making resources that the interactants themselves are continually recognizing and manipulating in their acts of co-constructing communicative meaning. Goodwin’s wife and frequent collaborator Marjorie Harness Goodwin conducts similar semiotic investigations into children’s moment-to-moment co-construction of their discourse and play. (DF)
Goodwin, C. (2000) ‘Action and embodiment within situated human interaction’, Journal of Pragmatics,32: 1489–1522.
Goodwin, C. (2006) ‘Human sociality as mutual orientation in a rich interactive environment: Multimodal utterances and pointing in aphasia’, in N. Enfield and S. C. Levinson (eds), Roots of Human Sociality, London: Berg Press, pp. 96–125.
Goodwin, C. and Goodwin, M. H. (1996) ‘Formulating planes: Seeing as a situated activity’, in D. Middleton and Y. Engestrom (eds), Cognition and Communication at Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–95.
The term ‘grammar’ has a range of definitions, all of which revolve around the process of systematization in language. Generally, grammar means the rules which are employed in the construction of language structures such as words or sentences (see syntax). These rules can, on the one hand, be the precise systems which have to be learnt as a child at school and which have been the subject of prescriptions since the teachings of the classical period, and through the ‘general’ grammar provided during the Enlightenment by the Port-Royal scholars. On the other hand, and increasingly following the work of Chomsky, the rules have been understood to constitute an ‘internalized’ capacity for language in humans. In this formulation, the capacity to observe certain syntactical rules is thought to be innate or contained within the genetic code passed down to successive generations of humans as a Universal Grammar. However, it should be remembered that post-Chomskyan linguistics also identifies rules in languages which are not innate but are sufficiently systematic to allow prescriptions to invariably be effective. Such generative grammars make it possible to write textbooks describing the rules of national languages. Somewhat confusingly, such accounts are often themselves called a ‘grammar’. (PC)
Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) was a French semanticist and semiotician. Born in Russia, A. J. Greimas studied law in Kaunas (Lithuania) before enrolling at the University of Grenoble, France, where, before the Second World War, he focused on the language and literature of the Middle Ages. He obtained a first university degree with a specialization in Franco-Provencal dialectology. He enrolled for his military service in Lithuania in 1939 and escaped to France in 1944 when his country was invaded and occupied by the Soviets for the second time, after three years of German occupation (1941–1944). He enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris. There he obtained his State Doctorate in 1948 with a primary thesis on fashion in France in 1830, a lexicological study of the vocabulary of dress as depicted in the journals of the times, and a secondary thesis, based on the analysis of the various aspects of social life of this same period. Greimas taught the history of the French language at the University of Alexandria, Egypt, where he met Roland Barthes, before taking up appointments at the Universities of Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey, and Poitiers, France. He was elected to the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris in 1965, where he directed a yearly seminar in semiotics that attracted a large number of graduate students and professors from France and abroad. This seminar, which continues to be held today by his students and colleagues, subsequently evolved into the Paris School of Semiotics.
Greimas proposed an original method for discourse analysis that evolved over a thirty-year period. His starting point began with a profound dissatisfaction with the structural linguistics of the mid-century that studied only phonemes (minimal sound units of every language) and morphemes (grammatical units that occur in the combination of phonemes). These grammatical units could generate an infinite number of sentences, the sentence remaining the largest unit of analysis. Such a molecular model did not permit the analysis of units beyond the sentence.
Greimas begins by positing the existence of a semantic universe that he defined as the sum of all possible meanings that can be produced by the value systems of the entire culture of an ethno-linguistic community. As the semantic universe cannot possibly be conceived of in its entirety, Greimas was led to introduce the notion of semantic micro universe and discourse universe, as actualized in written, spoken or iconic texts. To come to grips with the problem of signification or the production of meaning, Greimas had to transpose one level of language (the text) into another level of language (the metalanguage) and work out adequate techniques of transposition (Greimas 1987).
The descriptive procedures of narratology and the notion of narrativity are at the very base of Greimassian semiotics. His initial hypothesis is that meaning is only apprehensible if it is articulated or narrativized. Second, for him narrative structures can be perceived in other systems not necessarily dependent upon natural languages. This leads him to posit the existence of two levels of analysis and representation: a surface and a deep level, which forms a common trunk where narrativity is situated and organized anterior to its manifestation. The signification of a phenomenon does not therefore depend on the mode of its manifestation, but since it originates at the deep level it cuts through all forms of linguistic and non-linguistic manifestation. Greimas’ semiotics, which is generative and transformational, goes through three phases of development. He begins by working out semiotics of action where subjects are defined in terms of their quest for objects, following a canonical narrative schema, which is a formal framework made up of three successive sequences: a mandate, an action and an evaluation. He then constructs a narrative grammar and works out a syntax of narrative programmes in which subjects are joined up with or separated from objects of value. In the second phase he works out a cognitive semiotics, where, in order to perform, subjects must be competent to do so. The subjects’ competence is organized by means of a modal grammar that accounts for their existence and performance. This modal semiotics opens the way to the final phase that studies how passions modify actional and cognitive performance of subjects and how belief and knowledge modify the competence and performance of these very same subjects. The challenge ahead lies in working out adequate and necessary descriptive procedures not only of the modal but also of the aspectual features of cognitive and passional discourse: for example, aspects such as inchoativity (the beginning of an action), durativity (the unravelling of an action) and terminativity (the end of an action) that allow for the description of temporality as processes in texts. (PP)
Greimas, A. J. (1987) On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, ed. and trans. P. Perron and F. Collins, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Perron, P. and Collins, F. (eds) (1989) Greimassian Semiotics, special issue of New Literary History, 20(3).
Schleifer, R. (1987) A. J. Greimas and the Nature of Meaning, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
A philosopher of language, H. Paul Grice (1926–1985) started his career in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy while working with Austin at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s. With relatively few publications during his lifetime, he exerted an unparalleled influence on the theory of meaning. He introduced a distinction between ‘natural’ meaning (as in ‘Clouds mean rain’) and ‘non-natural’ meaning (or linguistic meaning). Though allowing for the existence of conventional meaning associated with linguistic expressions (some of which may be implicit rather than explicit, as when the expression ‘the US President’ logically implies that we are talking about ‘a US President’), Grice devoted most of his attention to those types of non-natural meaning dependent on the utterer rather than on the structure of words and sentences; hence the term ‘utterer’s meaning’ in contrast to ‘sentence meaning’ and ‘word meaning’ (Grice 1957, 1968, 1969). Utterer’s meaning, which is occasion-specific in contrast to the ‘timeless’ sentence and word meaning, is further defined in terms of the speaker’s intentions (without denying that some forms of meaning are simply expressed without being intended): utterer’s meaning is the speaker’s intention in the making of an utterance to produce an effect in the hearer by means of the hearer’s recognition of the intention to produce that effect.
Observing that utterances, more often than not, mean more than what is literally said, Grice probes into implicit meaning beyond the realm of logical implications (Grice 1975, 1978, 1981). According to Grice, conversations are typically governed by a ‘cooperative principle’ which says: ‘Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose and direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’ (1975:45). In keeping with this principle, a number of ‘maxims of conversation’ guide conversational interaction:
1 The maxim of quantity: (i) Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. (ii) Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
2 The maxim of quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. (i) Do not say what you believe to be false. (ii) Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
3 The maxim of relation (later called relevance): Be relevant.
4 The maxim of manner: Be perspicuous. (i) Avoid obscurity of expression. (ii) Avoid ambiguity. (iii) Be brief. (iv) Be orderly.
Assuming that these maxims are normally adhered to, utterances give rise to conventional or standard conversational implicatures: thus the statement ‘It is raining outside’ implicates, on the basis of the maxim of quality, that the speaker believes that it is raining outside (an implicature that reflects the sincerity condition of an assertive speech act). Often, however, the maxims are obviously broken. But since interlocutors are supposed to be cooperative, any obvious breach of a maxim will lead to further (non-conventional) conversational implicatures. Thus, in Grice’s classical example, the response ‘There’s a garage round the corner’ in response to ‘I am out of petrol’, because it does not adhere to the maxim of quantity, but because cooperativity is assumed, will implicate that the garage has petrol for sale and is open. (JV)
Grice, H. P. (1989) Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Leech, G. N. (1983) Principles of Pragmatics, London: Longman.
Levinson, S. C. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
A term introduced by Charles S. Peirce to denote ‘some respect or capacity’ on the basis of which something becomes a sign or representamen (in other words, stands for something else, an object), thanks to another sign which serves as interpretant. In fact, the something which serves as a sign does not stand for the object in all respects but in reference to a particular respect or capacity or, as Peirce also says, ‘in reference to a sort of idea’ (CP 2.228). This is the fundamental idea that forms the ground of the representamen. Therefore, this something in its indeterminacy is gradually determined under a certain respect, thanks to which it becomes a sign for an interpretant. If, to recall an example made by Peirce, I say ‘This stove is black’, the immediate object ‘stove’ is assumed in a certain respect, its ‘blackness’, which is the ground of the interpretant (cf. CP 1.551). From the point of view of the phenomenology of perception (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) the ground is something which was undifferentiated and is now differentiated in a certain respect, thereby becoming a sign for an interpretant. (SP)