semiosphere

English

Etymology

semio- +‎ -sphere

Noun

semiosphere (plural semiospheres)

1. (semiotics) The sphere of semiosis in which the sign processes operate in the set of all interconnected Umwelts; The domain of all signs that represent and define a culture.
   • 2003 Iu. M. Lotman, Edna Andrews - Conversations With Lotman: Cultural Semiotics in Language, Literature, and Cognition

     Lotman's conceptualization of the semiosphere was inspired by Vernadsky's and Teilhard de Chardin's vision of the biosphere and the noosphere.

   • 2006, Jacques Fontanille, The Semiotics of Discourse, →ISBN, page 205:

     The semiotic experience in the semiosphere, according to Lotman, precedes the production of discourses because it is one of their conditions. The semiosphere is above all the domain that allows culture to define itself and to situate itself, in order to be able to dialogue with other cultures; it is also a field whose dialogical functioning has as its principle task to regulate and resolve semio-cultural heterogeneities.

   • 2011, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, Towards a Semiotic Biology: Life is the Action of Signs, →ISBN, page 183:

     The category of boundary leads to two further characteristics of semiosphere: binarism and asymmetry. The translation mechanism responsible for the generation of new meaning in semiosphere presupposes at least two semiotically different participants that are mutually untranslatable.