Some readers might get confused by so many schools of thought, which are more or less intertwined. They are actually so connected that one can’t easily tell where one of them ends and the other starts.
Sometimes even the semiotic intellectuals get confused and are incapable of choosing the correct semiotic branch to use in a certain situation.
Yet, we ought not to worry!
All these semiotic schools of thought are but an abstraction, a way to distinguish different branches of the vast field of semiotics.
Either way, the semiotic world stays intact and indivisible.
Umberto Eco calls the semiotic world a “semantic field”, Sebeok on his part uses the term “semiotic sphere”, and Juri Lotman uses “semiosphere”.
Yet, being separate is conditioned on a need. In reality, neither of the separate approaches is capable of working by itself.
All the semiotic approaches, branches, or schools of thought can only work in a specific semiotic continuum.
