“The Fourth Basic Sign Type”: On the Aesthetic Cultural Semiotics of Roman Jakobs
Jiang Fei
Abstract: Roman Jakobson’s most remarkable contribution to semiotics is having synthesised the views of Saussure, the Prague Linguistic Circle and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce. In his theories of aesthetic cultural semiotics, verbal art and non-verbal art must be treated in the total context of semiotics, such as poetics must be turned from aesthetic-poetics to aesthetic-arts and even aesthetic cultural semiotics. After transforming and compensating for Peirce’s “Trichotomy of Sign”, Jakobson creatively advances the theory of “The Fourth Basic Sign Type”. This theory constructs a peculiar paradigm of aesthetic autonomy in the modern cultural context, making an important contribution to the study of contemporary semiotics. It is also significant for Chinese cultural studies or cultural poetics, which emphasise the “aesthetics”.
Key Words: Roman Jakobson; aesthetic cultural semiotics; the fourth basic sign type
