‘Zoosemiotics’ is the name for the study of animal semiosis, communication and representation. The term was proposed in 1963 by the Hungarian-American semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok (Sebeok 1972a: 178). He also established the framework for the new paradigm by finding and tightening connections to predecessors, developing terminology and methodology. Zoosemiotics stems from the semiotic tradition that does not limit sign processes to human species. Such an approach is developed most clearly in the pragmatic semiotics of Charles S. Peirce and Charles Morris. Other main sources of the zoosemiotic paradigm established by Sebeok include Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory that describes meanings in animals’ subjective worlds, the communication semiotics of Roman Jakobson and Karl Bühler, as well as ethological studies by Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and others.
Zoosemiotics is one of several directions of semiotic research including: anthroposemiotics (the study of the human use of signs), phytosemiotics (the study of communicative activities in plants) and physiosemiotics (the study of semiotic relations in the material world). This classification largely follows the classical typologies of nature established already by Aristotle and Linnaeus. Another possibility to locate zoosemiotics in the science of semiotics is to focus on the sign process and to distinguish animal semiosis from vegetative and language-based semiosis. This approach makes it possible to include also nonverbal elements of human communication such as gestures and proxemics within the scope of zoosemiotics.
In zoosemiotics, three major directions of study can be distinguished that focus on the processes of, respectively, signification, communication and representation. The first direction studies the semiotic processes that relate organisms to their natural environment and addresses such questions as which properties of the environment are relevant to organisms and which meanings are attributed to the environment. This approach is closely related to ecosemiotics (Nöth 2001: 71) and Umwelt theory (Uexküll 1982).
The second approach studies the process of communication where the sender of the message is also involved. However, the animal sender does not always need to be active and act with intent. For instance, in some cases of biological mimicry, the sender’s semiotic intentionality can be detected on the level of the species and evolutionary processes (Maran 2007: 228–230). In the communicational approach attention is paid to the specific aspects of the communication process, for example message, channel, code, repertoire, coding and interpretation. Sebeok combined these aspects with the terminology of Charles Morris and proposed a distinction between zoopragmatics, zoosyntac-tics and zoosemantics (Sebeok 1972b: 124–132). Zoopragmatics deals with the origin, propagation and effects of signs. Zoosyntactics targets the combination of signs: such questions as message composition, code and the repertoire of messages available for particular species. Zoosemantics is concerned with the meaning and context of messages, tries to identify the part of the signal that is meaningful for the animal and find out its meaning in the environment of a particular communicative situation.
The third direction of study – the representational approach (also anthropological zoosemiotics; Martinelli 2007: 34) – comes close to cultural semiotics and anthropology by studying concepts and categories used to denote animals, representations of animals in different media of human culture, and communicational, behavioural and social aspects of human–animal relationships. (TM)
See also BIOSEMIOTICS.
Martinelli, D. (2007) Zoosemiotics. Proposal for a Handbook (Acta Semiotica Fennica XXVII), Imatra: Finnish Network University of Semiotics.
Sebeok, T. A. (1972) Perspectives in Zoosemiotics (Janua Linguarum, Series Minor 122), The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sebeok, T. A. (1990) Essays in Zoosemiotics (Monograph Series of the TSC 5), Toronto: Toronto Semiotic Circle; Victoria College in the University of Toronto.