Nalans (Jun 2021)
Narrative Discourse as an Emergent Phenomenon: Global Semiotic Approach
Abstract
This theoretical paper continues a spectrum of research on the sign character of narrative discourse on the background of the modern post-classical theory of narrativity. It aims to uncover the relationships between the meaning of the narrative text and a sign signification, assuming an intentional character of the narrative discourse governed by telic aspects (global semiotics). The global semiotic approach (Thomas Sebeok, 2001) views a narrative discourse as a self-organizing entity with the purposeful (telic) character of all its constituent parts which turn a static text into a dynamic whole in the process of reading/perception/interpretation. The key notion for analysis of emergency is the term Umwelt (Jakob von Uexküll) to denote the perceptional world in which an organism (and a human) exists and acts as a subject. Therefore, Umwelt represents a human’s perceptual boundary, which modifies the surrounding by the human’s subjective perspective. As Umwelt can be attributed to both biological and abiotic texts, meaning creation in the narrative discourse is compared to a semiotic study of comparative Umwelten (Cobley, 2014) where the narrative is defined as a modeling device for the world created through embodied subjectivity. It has been confirmed, that stressing on the subjective sphere of information eÑ…change and processing from the position of global semiotics necessitates the introduction of basic principles of biosemiotics (i.e. semiotic scaffolding etc.) and teleology (i.e. cause, purpose, result) to the analysis of narrative discourse and it constitutes the perspectives for further research in this domain.
