Making Sense, Making Science

5The Semiotic Articulation of Textual Meaning: Significance, Signification, Designation and Expression

What can be said about textual meaning by a text-based semantics that is epistemologically founded upon the semiotic character of language resources? It is known that Benveniste, in his elaboration of the distinction between semiotic and semantic levels, mentioned that the articulation of the semioticity of linguistic units with the thematico-intentional, praxeological and hermeneutic dimensions of meaning is problematic to the point that the “hiatus” between these two levels is justification for him to envisage the existence of two distinct linguistics, each conceptually matched in a specific way¹. As it appears to share the same position, a whole tradition of phenomenology of language, although sensitive to the semiotic articulation of languages, insisted on the solution of continuity between meaning and linguistic semioticity, supporting this observation with the fact that the signifier is fading away in favor of the meaning of speech, both in reception² and in production³. In other currents of linguistics, however, proposals have been made to try to carry out the analysis in its entirety within the semiotic framework. Coseriu (1997) thus put forward a “textual sign” model in his linguistics of texts that encompasses three levels (signification, designation, meaning), the last being considered as the signified of the first two, which together play the signifier function ...