Signs and Society is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities and social sciences focusing on the study of semiosis in the realms of social action, cognition, and cultural form.

Like all Cambridge open access (OA) journals, Signs and Society offers open access publication to all authors regardless of their funding or institutional agreements through our waiver system. See the journal’s Open access options page for more details.

Signs and Society engages with a wide-ranging and cross-disciplinary audience and, in doing so, offers authors the opportunity for a broad dissemination of their research beyond the confines of a traditional journal.

Our Editors work to offer relatively rapid and high-quality turnaround process from acceptance to publication.

Mission statement

We have decided to use the term semiosis to describe the journal’s general focus. We take semiosis to be the most general label for the activity of sign production, communication, and interpretation in the realms of cognition, social action, and cultural forms. In using this word, made famous as a technical term by Charles Sanders Peirce, we do not suggest that Signs and Society is another semiotics journal, nor do we intend that every contribution need advance the often arcane quasi-discipline of semiotics. Rather, we intend semiosis to refer to a set of interrelated dimensions and to argue that research from many disciplines is required to understand their dynamic interrelationship. 

As a starting point, we propose that the following dimensions of semiosis can be heuristically distinguished, in order of implicational complexity:

• representation: the “standing for” relationship between two things which come to be linked as signifying sign and represented object by virtue of some typologically specifiable motivation (Saussure), reason, or ground (Peirce);
• codification: code structures, including presupposed patterned systems of signs that feature “mutual delimitation” (Saussure) between planes of expression and content and less coherently articulated systems of indexical and iconic signs characterized by formal gaps, overlapping signals, and referential opacity;
• communication: the flow of signs across face-to-face and technologically mediated channels, from speaker to hearer or performer to audience, along with mediational relays of various sorts, by means of codes that, because of differential usages and stratified manipulation, serve additionally to demarcate social categories and groups;
• entextualization: the inscription of signs and sign complexes in cognitively or historically fixed or sedimented forms, as distinct from the real-time interactional flow of signs that can potentially become the focus of subsequent communicative interactions;
• interpretation: actions that read or misread signs by users who, taking sign and object relations as meaningful, generate additional chains of signs which variably naturalize (“downshift”) or conventionalize (“upshift”) the linkage between signs and meanings; and
• regimentation: semiotic frameworks and power-laden social actions that restrict, forbid, or shape interpretive meaning-making by explicitly or implicitly stipulating, constraining, or otherwise metasemiotically formulating the characteristics of sign structures and processes.

While frequently understood as a real-time phenomenon, semiosis, in our view, includes modalities for diachronically and historically recording events in fixed forms, such as memorializations, museums, and archives, and for extending the range of communication from interpersonal, contextualized messages to the global “flow” of transmitted or commodified cultural forms.

We believe that our approach will provide flexible scaffolding for investigation and not be a constraining grid for explanation. Focusing directly on semiosis in its multiple dimensions, we believe, will promote collaborative translation across analytical categories and technical vocabularies already established in distinct disciplinary traditions and lead to uncovering unanticipated parallels in the ways semiosis is manifest in diverse empirical domains. 

While the journal insists on this “big picture” approach, we do not expect that each contribution will treat all of these dimensions of semiosis. Rather, we seek to publish articles that, taken as a group, will illuminate this larger view.