Expressivity in Semiotics

Abstract This chapter explores expressivity in semiotics through the frameworks of Cassirer, Peirce, Langer, and Dewey. It argues that expressivity is not just an auxiliary or external feature of sign systems but is rooted in the felt intensity of the consciousness of symbolic pregnance or significant forms in experience. These significant forms are articulated in the diverse human semiotic form worlds of language, myth, ritual, and art. Following the lead of biosemiotics, expressivity is also seen as an essential feature of creative natural processes giving rise to a diversity of meaning-seeking and sign-using beings and their consequent life environments or Umwelts. Biosemiotics continues, extends, and deepens the work of von Uexküll on the species-specific characters of the different sign systems and form worlds of animals and humans and the consequent diversity of ways expressivity informs their wide range of relations both to their specific worlds and to the worlds of others.