Global Semiotics vs. Human Semiology

Abstract

This paper adopts as its point of reference an integrational semiology as developed by Oxford Professor of linguistics Roy Harris. It contrasts two contemporary approaches to communication as proposed by global semiotics and Saussurean semiology. Against the former, integrational linguists argue that there is no ‘science’ of communication (i.e., there is no way to isolate communication as a ‘thing’ and only then decide what is rightly called

Don’t Uncover that Face! Covid-19 Masks and the Niqab: Ironic Transfigurations of the ECtHR’s Intercultural Blindness

“…The need to maintain an ecological attunement between the human symbolic universe and the signical communicative one of the natural cosmos can be considered as a severe warning coming out from the contemporary pandemic. The necessary and adaptive attunement between these two semiotic levels constitutes a third dimension between the Human Semiology inspired to Harris' integrational semiology (see [38]) and the Global Semiotic rooted in Sebeok's signical cosmology of the non-natural world (see [39]. The need for a symbolic/semiotic attunement, as such paralleling a holistic and relational approach to the ecology of the human/nature divide, is amazingly and dramatically materializing in the upheaval that the proxemics of daily life and personal relationships have undergone because of Covid-19.…”