Sign vehicles for semiotic travels: Two new handbooks

Abstract

Semiotik/Semiotics is a handbook in three volumes of more than three thousand pages presenting 178 articles written by 175 authors from 25 countries. It may be considered as a representation of the general state of research in descriptive and applied semiotics compared with other single disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches, including medicine, This handbook (cited as S/S, followed by volume and page numbers) studies sign processes in human cultures as well as in nonhuman animals, in their orientation, perception and communication activities, in the metabolism of all living organisms generally, and therefore in the behavior of all living beings. In relation to human culture it deals with social institutions, everyday human communication, information processing in machines, knowledge and scientific research, and the production and interpretation of works in literature, music, art and so forth.With this handbook are achieved the purposes formulated in the final report of the international workshop on 'The systematics, history, and terminology of semiotics', which took place at the Technische Universita¨t of Berlin on September 17-22, 1979. Its design goes beyond the task of proposing a comprehensive dictionary of the terminology used by specific semiotic schools and trends. That was the aim of another handbook entitled Handbuch der Semiotik by Winfried No¨th (1985), as well as of an encyclopedia presenting the current state of the arts