Welcome to the first CogSeminar for this semester, to be held onsite by our long-term collaborator Elena Faur, who is visiting us in this last week of September. If anyone wishes to meet her for a discussion on Coserian integral linguistics or such topics, please let me know and I will arrange it. We will also continue to Valvet for the customary post-seminar on Thursday at 5pm, for more informal discussions. As usual, this will be a hybrid seminar - and all are welcome to join the on zoom link, with cameras on for introductions and questions.

In my presentation, I will approach the individual level of Coseriu's matrix as a semiotic framework for the study of discourse. For Coseriu, the specific content at this level is sense. Sense involves “a double semiotic relation”, in which the contents specific to the previous levels, the significata and the designata, function as a semiotic expression for a new type of content, which is textual sense. In this understanding, the new content specific to the individual level “presupposes and integrates the former two types of linguistic content, while at the same time expanding beyond them, mainly due to the contribution of a wide spectrum of contextual knowledge manifested in the ‘evocative relations’ of the signs which constitute the text” (Tămâianu-Morita in press). In several studies, Coseriu (1971, 1981) creates an inventory of these evocative relations of the sign and offers some insightful textual analyses to illustrate them. It is true that Coseriu's “text linguistics” focuses on the linguistic sign and system, as it is only in linguistic text or discourse that all or most types of sign relations can be fully realized and studied. However, Coseriu does not exclude the possibility of applying this inventory to polysemiotic discourse as well. In my presentation, I have chosen a few polysemiotic texts for illustration, aiming to demonstrate that, unlike the linguistic sign, other signs from different semiotic systems can only partially realize the full range of sign relations established in Coseriu's text linguistics.

Coseriu, E. (1977/1971). Tesis sobre el tema ʻlenguaje y poesía’. In Eugenio Coseriu, El hombre y su lenguaje. Estudios de teoría y metodología lingüistica, Madrid, Gredos, pp. 201-207.

Coseriu, E. (1981). Textlinguistik. Eine Einführung, Tübingen, Narr. 

Tămâianu-Morita, E. (in press). A Coserian Outlook on Textual Meaning – With Some Observations Regarding the Process of Translation.