Dear Terry,

Thanks for the questions, which are not naïve at all. The answer to both concerns the constructivist epistemology of generative semiotics. A caution: since we are talking about epistemology, we should not confuse it with semiotics in itself: I'll just expose only one among the other philosophical interpretations of its methods and results. This because semioticians, as linguists and anthropologists, developed good methods to describe "structures" very well; then a classical question is: where to put these structures? Where actants do live, precisely? There are different answers in Lévi-Strauss (culture), Eco (phantasy of the researcher), Deleuze (a third realm between reality and imagination), Chomsky (built in the mind) …

Starting from constructivism: we construct the theory as a metalanguage composed by inter-defined terms. For example, in the Semiotic dictionary, a term as "pragmatics" is related to other definitions such as "cognitive", "To know", "Communication", "Discourse", "To do"; "Tree" is defined on the basis of entries like "Generative grammar", "Representation", "Classification" … The meaning of the metalanguage is relationally constructed because meaning in general is relational.

Now, approximatively speaking, your point is: if there are not linguistic universals, how can semiotics pretend that there are "semiotic structures" valid in different systems of signs such far as the ones which organize novels, music, and objects of design?

Well, the point is that there are not universals in language _except_ for the scholar's metalanguage, which is constructed to describe languages and their variety. The same way we can interpret semiotic categories. The point is that they represent a construction, not something that "exists" somewhere, ontologically speaking. They are not true or false, they are adequate or inadequate to describe our object. Where's meaning, after all? 

Yes, by the way: where's meaning? A second philosophical leading idea of many semioticians is the "principle of immanence". Meaning is not manifested in the world or in the speaker's mind: it is immanent to artifacts, texts, signs. The structures we describe represent the articulation of this immanent plan. We can see them not as "the meaning" of the considered object we are describing, but as the condition of possibility of signification. A subtle distinction, but necessary: semiotics is not hermeneutics. 

Let's focus on this categorial opposition: immanence/manifestation. In practice, the consequence are that 

1) With Greimas, even if actantial structures are not manifested in the morphology or in the syntax of a particular language, they can describe the immanent plan. If I use this particular language to explain what I did this morning, there will be a subject (me), an addresser (the coffee) who transfers me a value (being-able-to-do), etc. If you search for an equivalent in linguistics, Chomsky's notion of "trait" could be a good example, because some of them are not manifested in certain languages; another similar notion is Fillmore's concept of "case". As a matter of fact the immanent principle has been introduced by Hjelmslev in linguistics. 
We find something similar about the relation between actantial structures and the technical artifacts: you don't find the actantial function of "helper" represented directly in the morphology of, let's say, a hammer; nevertheless this term is adequate to describe this manifested morphology and - eventually, to project new hammers. Where to place this function? Not in the world or in the mind of the subject (because "power" is incarnated in the technical artifact, not in the psychological dimension of the Carpenter).

2) As I anticipated, generative semiotics defines meaning as a relation, on the same line of structural linguistics. Then, it is not a surprise if you can exchange verbs and nouns, because their respective meaning is not "positive"; it depends on their relation, on the difference between them. 

I hope that all this will be not considered just as post-modernist blah-blah-blah. It is true that Greimas has been a structuralist scholar and that semiotics has been an answer to the crisis of structuralism; nevertheless (1) No one should confuse a scientific discovery with the epistemological beliefs of the researcher; (2) Many philosophical ideas behind semiotics have been developed before the rise of post-modernism: I think to "metalanguage", "immanence", "form/substance/matter" and so on; (3) The debate between neo-structuralist, pragmatist, and pheonomenological interpretations of Semiotics is always open; (4) Post-modernism is not necessarily our destiny.

Francesco

P.S. About that simple straightforward book you asked me, you mean on semiotics in general or on semiotics applied to the field of design?


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