Affordances of Arbitrariness in Transmodal Semiosis
Jijo Paulose Kandamkulathy1
Kandamkulathy, J. P. (2021). Affordances of Arbitrariness in Transmodal Semiosis. InterViews: An Interdisciplinary Journal in Social Sciences, 8(1), pp. 9-25. https://doi.org/10.36061/IV.8.1.21.9.25
Abstract
Arbitrariness is a linguistic principle proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure through his synchronic structuralist analysis of language. He delineates the structure of signs and establishes the absence of a necessary relationship between the signifier and the signified. Any such putative relationship is arbitrary. Whereas his theory discusses the arbitrariness in linguistic perception, this paper argues that there is significant arbitrariness between sensory modalities in object identification which affords experiments on sensory substitution projects.
Keywords: affordance, arbitrariness, haptisigns, vidisigns, semiotics, neurosemiotics, transmodality
1Jijo Paulose Kandamkulathy is a research scholar in cognitive semiotics at the Department of Science in Saint Joseph’s University, Macau. He has co-authored the chapter on cognitive semiotics in the soon to be published title, Bloomsbury Semiotics. He also serves as director of Claretian Publications, Macau. Correspondence regarding this article may be directed to him at: frjijo@gmail.com