Frances to listers with some quickies... The messages posted recently on this topic have stimulated me to gather the ideas together and fit them into an angloamerican semiotic framework, from which corrections to my guesses can be made. All aspects of semiotics incidentally are held by pragmatists to be objective logical constructs that continue to exist as facts independent of mind.
(1) All things sensed are existent phenomenal objects, and all objects are signs and thus signs of objects, whether the objects signed are the objects themselves or some other objects. Objects as signs continue to evolve and therefore grow and change. Objects hence are signs and signers. It is objects however that determine the main kind that signs will be in each situation, as icons or indexes or symbols, by setting limits in the grounds of signs, which grounds may be of formal similarity or causal contiguity or conventional arbitrarity. Any object or sign can therefore be used as a symbol. Signs in turn determine the signers by imposing contexts on how signs will be effectively interpreted, which contexts are spheres or domains or realms. These peripheral margins control the conformity of objects to their signs and of signs to their signers. The grounds and contexts are relations. Some of the effects of such relations are the contents or subjects and meanings that a sign might bear or yield in situations. The key "grammatic" dimensions of informative signs in related situations are syntactic representations and semantic referentions and pragmatic interpretations. The relation of signs and objects and signers together can be by immediate matched correspondence, or intermediate workable expedience, or mediate agreed coherence. (2) The signers of signs can broadly be any phenomenal phaneron and all phanerisms, from mechanisms of matter to organisms of life. To the extent that all these phenomena exist in fact, they are found to be objects and thus signs and so signers. The signer is the originating author of a sign, which is the authorial authority of a sign. The combinatory signer can variously be the maker and sender and driver and framer and getter and taker and user of the sign, just as say the literary author can variously be the writer and researcher and editor and designer and publisher and recorder and reviewer and reader of the text. The signer in being combinatory is therefore preparatory and contributory and consummatory of the sign. (3) The pointing arrow in any visible form, whether the form is graphic or plastic or tectonic, is an indexic indicator and then an indicative vector. The referred object of an arrow is a direction, which direction causes the sign to in fact exist as an index. If the orientation of the arrow is changed by rotation, so also is the object or direction changed. This is unlike icons and symbols, where any such orientation does not change their referred object. The pointing arrow may be one of the few general signs that are globally common to virtually all persons and peoples on earth. If this commonality is so, then it can be posited that some signs can justly be held as general or universal and therefore objectively global. (4) For an object to be minimally a sign, the sign must bear some information to a signer, but the sign need not endure any communication for the sign to exist as a sign. For the information born of a sign to be sufficient and efficient in communication, when this action does occur, the sign should be economical. This however does not entail that such a sign need be simple or ordered, but rather that it be adequate and appropriate to be effective. What communication does for the information a sign bears is to give the sign its force and power. It is here in communicative contact and exchange and union that a transition occurs, which tends to alter the sign so that ambiguity is reduced. The means of communication prepares the sign for its modes of signification, such as its location and function, and then the syntactic means and semantic modes contribute to its pragmatic methods of application, such as its immediacy and directness and rationale.
