Cognitive Semiotics

This paper offers a broad overview of Italian cognitive semiotics from its origin, in 1988, to its latest developments. Starting from Eco’s novel The Island of the Day Before (Eco 1994), the paper tries to delineate a coherent path of the discipline by keeping track of its most fundamental stages: the encounter with cognitive semantics, the reflections on the experiential dimension of meaning, the problems and possibilities offered by the theories of embodiment, and the dialogue with 4E Cognition. In this journey, particular attention is offered to the way in which the relationship between semiosis and perception has been articulated from Kant and the Platypus (Eco 1997) to Cognitive Semiotics (Paolucci 2021).