Cognitive semiotics is the transdisciplinary study of meaning, mind, and communication, combining concepts and methods from semiotics, cognitive science, and linguistics. It studies how sign processes work in minds and bodies — how meaning-making is grounded in perception, action, and social interaction rather than in abstract codes alone.
Methods and approach
Cognitive semiotics is distinguished from purely formal or structural approaches by its insistence that meaning-making is embodied and intersubjective. Signs do not operate in a vacuum of abstract relations but in living organisms that perceive, act, and communicate. The field draws on phenomenology (particularly Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) to ground its account of how signs are experienced, and on experimental methods from cognitive science to test claims about how sign processes work.
Key contributions
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Polysemiosis — the study of how multiple semiotic resources (language, gesture, depiction, bodily movement) interact in communication. Cognitive semiotics analyzes how speakers combine words, gestures, and spatial arrangements into composite sign acts that are more than the sum of their parts. Simon Devylder, Rebecca Defina, and Jordan Zlatev developed methods for analyzing polysemiotic practices (2023).
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Motivation and Sedimentation Model (MSM) — a framework for understanding how meaning relations between signs and their objects arise (motivation) and become conventionalized over time (sedimentation). Motivation can be iconic, indexical, or based on embodied experience; sedimentation is the process by which motivated relations become habitual. Zlatev and Todd Oakley applied MSM to the origins of money (2024).
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The phenomenology of semiosis — Göran Sonesson (1951–2023), co-founder of the Centre for Cognitive Semiotics at Lund University, developed a phenomenological account of how the gap between the sign and what it stands for is experienced. His work explored how perceptual experience is structured by semiotic categories without reducing experience to mere coding.
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Semiotic agency — cognitive semiotics asks where semiotic competence begins. Unlike biosemiotics, which extends semiosis to all life, cognitive semiotics is attentive to qualitative differences between levels of sign use — reflexive bodily response, perceptual categorization, imaginative projection, linguistic reference. Zlatev and Juan Mendoza-Collazos assessed ideas about agency from cognitive science and neuroscience through a cognitive-semiotic lens (2022).
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Consciousness and meaning — the field takes seriously the question of how consciousness relates to sign processes. Not all sign processing is conscious, but phenomenal experience shapes how signs are produced and interpreted. This connects to Peirce’s categories: Firstness (quality of experience) is where phenomenology and semiotics meet.
Institutional presence
The Centre for Cognitive Semiotics (CCS) at Lund University, Sweden, founded in 2009 by Göran Sonesson, is the field’s primary institutional home. Jordan Zlatev, Professor of General Linguistics at Lund, directs the division’s research. The journal Cognitive Semiotics (De Gruyter, transitioning to Gold Open Access in 2025) publishes work integrating semiotic theory with cognitive science.
Sonesson’s death in 2023 was a significant loss. A memorial issue of Cognitive Semiotics (Volume 17, Issue 1, 2024) — “Image, Mind, Culture: a tribute to Göran Sonesson” — documents his contributions.
Key texts
- Zlatev, Jordan, and Juan Mendoza-Collazos. “A Cognitive-Semiotic Approach to Agency.” Biosemiotics 15, no. 1 (2022): 141–170.
- Devylder, Simon, Rebecca Defina, Kalina Moskaluk, Linea Brink Andersen, and Jordan Zlatev. “Analyzing Polysemiosis.” Semiotica 253 (2023): 81–116.
- Sonesson, Göran. “Cognitive Semiotics: A Phenomenological Approach to Nature, Culture, and Other Meanings.” Signs and Media 2, no. 1–2 (2021).
- Zlatev, Jordan, and Todd Oakley. “Origins of Money: A Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) Analysis.” Semiotica 257 (2024): 1–27.
- Short, T. L. Peirce’s Theory of Signs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Related schools
- Peircean Semiotics — cognitive semiotics draws on the triadic sign model and the interpretant concept
- Biosemiotics — shares the concern with sign processes beyond language but differs on where semiotic competence begins
- Social Semiotics — shares the concern with situated, embodied sign-making in social contexts
See also
- Peirce’s categories — Firstness connects phenomenological experience to sign classification
- interpretant — cognitive semiotics studies how interpretants are produced in minds and bodies
- semiosis — the process whose cognitive dimensions the field investigates