The cognitive semiotics of the picture sign

The picture is as original a human creation as language, and yet there has not been any study of pictures as such until recently. In the sixties of the last century, the picture was discovered as a subject of study at the same time, but independently, by French structuralism and by perceptual psychology in the tradition of James Gibson. My own contribution has consisted, from the beginning, in bringing these two traditions to bear on each other, adding the inspiration from those few philosophers, notably Edmund Husserl, who have taken a serious interest in pictures. More recently, it has been possible to realise some experimental studies with children and apes from a semiotical point of view. The present chapter describes some of the main methods and traditions of pictorial semiotics and then goes on to illustrate a cognitive semiotic approach, consisting, in this case, of a detailed text analysis of a picture by Rothko, which is based on results from psychology.