Charles Morris (1901-1979) was a contemporary American semiotician of paramount importance.
According to Morris, “Semiotics aims at a general theory of signs in all their forms and manifestations, whether they belong to animals or humans, whether they are normal or pathological, linguistic or non-linguistic, personal or social. Thus semiotics is interdisciplinary. undertaking. ” (1938, 1; cited in Noth 1990, 49).
Morris views this endeavor both as “science among other sciences and an instrument of science” (1938, 2; cited in Noth 1990, 49).
He divides signs into syntactics (the study of signs in their relationship with other signs), semantics (the study of signs in relation to their objects or denotations), and pragmatics (the study of signs in relation to those who use them – their creators and interpreters.
