Morris Semiotics Research Thought

Charles W. Morris (1901-1979) is often looked upon as a well-known philosopher of American pragmatism in the20th century. However, the present dissertation, A Research into Charles Morris’ Semiotic Ideas, attempts to investigate his semiotic contribution to the development of modern semiotics. From the perspective of dialogue, this thesis adopts the combined research methods of literature retrieval, introspection, theoretical analysis and historical comparison, regarding Morris’ semiotic theories as an utterance of dialogic construction. The dialogic perspective is helpful to our understanding of the characteristics of comprehensiveness, dynamism and interdisciplinarity in Morris’ semiotic ideas.This investigation finds out that Morris’ semiotic ideas are based on solid theoretical foundations. First of all, philosophically speaking, Morris’ semiotics and its components have deep roots in his scientific empiricism. Secondly, the three consisting branches of Morris’ semiotics, syntactics, semantics and pragmatics, respectively and wholly benefit from Carnap’s logical syntax, Ogden and Richard’s empiricist semantics, and Peircean pragmatic semiotics. Thirdly, relying on Mead’s social behaviorist theory, Morris integrates those three sub-disciplines into an organic whole, semiotics. Therefore, Morris’ semiotics can be analyzed as a result of the harmonizing dialogue between different schools of thoughts.Like his theoretical origins, Morris’ semiotic constructing method is also multiple, eclectic and dialogic. Morris’ semiotics is not only the unity of the three component sub-disciplines, but also serves as a bridge connecting different disciplines. His general description of signs makes possible the dialogue between signs and behavior, with both of his sign typology and discourse typology exhibiting multiple and dynamic features. In Morris’ mind, the purpose of sign use is to present values; therefore, Morris establishes an all-round dialogic relationship between semiotics and axiology.By setting up an imaginary dialogic relation between Saussure and Morris, the present thesis compares the similarities and differences between their semiotic views, which helps to clarify the superiority of Morris’ semiotics to Saussurean semiology. The comparison between Morris and Sebeok, however, is based on their authentic dialogic correspondences and serves to point out Morris’ historic contribution to the development of modern semiotics in which he plays a role of the connecting link between the preceding and the following. Morris has set up the feature of interdisciplinarity for modern semiotics. Cases in point are Morris efforts at constructing his aesthetic theories and linguistic theories in reference to his semiotic framework, which reflects the interdisciplinary dialogic spirit. Taking literary and artistic works as iconic signs presenting values, Morris’ conception of aesthetic semiotics emphasizes both form analysis and content analysis in studying literary and artistic works, which embodies the semiotic spirit of unifying syntactics, semantics and pragmatics. The same spirit can also be traced in the discussion of some modern linguistic theories like case grammar and speech act theory, which testify Morris’ semiotic influences in this area and his semiotic integrating research conception. The enlightening significance of Morris’ semiotic ideas for the present academic world is interdisciplinary and multiplied.