An Exploration Of Pierce's Semiotic Thought

Born about a hundred years ago, semiotics is a relatively new research field which concerns the production, understanding and mechanism of human signs. Generally two people are credited with the founding of this field:Saussure, the Swiss linguist, and Peirce, the American mathematician, logician, and philosopher, both of whom devoted all their lives to studies of signs. However, for some historical reasons, Saussure's theory was widely accepted and later became the driving force for the Russian formalism and the French structuralism while Peirce's importance was not realized until the 1980s after a long period of oblivion. Fortunately, the nearly 100,000 pages of Peirce's manuscripts were found and gradually processed and published, and a once-forgotten genius was brought back to life again.This dissertation aims to introduce Pierce's philosophy (especially his pragmaticism, inquiry theory, and phenomenology) and illustrates what is behind them—his categories of the modes of being:First, Second, and Third. With this philosophical background, the thesis goes ahead to the unique semiotics of Peirce's which basically falls into two areas:the notion of the sign and the three trichotomies of signs. According to Peirce, a sign consists of three components:representamen, object, and interpretant, then the gap between Saussure's signifier and signified is bridged. Then an effort is made to compare Peirce and Saussure's semiotic theories in order to clarify the controversy long existent among international semioticians.The final part, as well as the most important part of the paper is to analyze and assess the suitability of the two semiotic theories for literary studies. Comparing with the linguistic structural theory, which basically is grounded in linguistic analysis on the sentence level and was found not quite useful in literary analysis, Peirce's semiotic notions demonstrate their ability to explain a number of conceptions in literary field such as literariness, de-familiarization, relations between reading, literary criticism and literary theory. This tentative application of Peirce's semiotics to literary studies demonstrates its compatibility with the field of liberal arts. However, this is just a beginning, and the need for more Peircean semiotic research is clearly indicated.