Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

I am not actually going to review this book. This book has chapters with titles such as "Discursive isotopies within sentences with paradigmatic disjunction". I read every word, I didn't understand every word. I probably understood a tiny fraction of the words.

I wanted to read a book about Semiotics and the library didn't have many to choose from so I picked some from university libraries to borrow but some were unavailable and I ended up with this one.

There was a lot of "food for thought" about metaphors in here! And the last chapter on mirrors (note: mirrors are NOT signs) was very good and understandable to a lay person like me.

What wasn't so understandable (to me) were the quotations in French or Latin with no translation, there show more being an assumption I could read more than just English.

I did like Eco's sense of humor peeking through here and there in the middle of his scientific discourses. In the Mirror chapter, for instance, he talks about how is facing a mirror as he is writing and "before deciding whether the door handle is on the right or on the left. . .in the event I wanted to throw my lighter and hit the handle. . . " Wait? What? He's smoking? Wow.

In the meantime, always remember "Greimas has admitted that the isotopies can take place also on the expression-plan, by accepting a minimal definition according to which isotopy is the iterativity of linguistic units, be it manifested or not at the expression plane, belonging to both expression and content."

I'll keep on reading and I'll get it eventually. show less

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