Introduction to zoosemiotics

pp. 1-64

in: Dario Martinelli, A critical companion to zoosemiotics, Berlin, Springer, 2010

Abstract

Zoosemiotics is a field of inquiry introduced in 1963 by Thomas Albert Sebeok. That is the year when the term and a first definition make their first appearance, initially as a compromise between ethological and semiotic research (in the beginning, Sebeok was convinced that "zoosemiotics' had to be meant mostly as an umbrella term, gathering different scholarly approaches to animal communication). A synthetic definition of zoosemiotics, in the light of its most recent developments, can be today that of the study of semiosis within and across animal species. A spectrum of different possible definitions of the term has been attempted (in the next chapter of this book), but at the end of the day it is probably safe to trace a common ground in the way just mentioned.