Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics

In Semiotic Investigations, Alec McHoul develops a theory of meaning that he calls "effective semiotics"-a theory that investigates "the ways in which signs have meaning by virtue of their actual uses." As McHoul notes, "these uses take place in a number of 'media,' the most important of which is the medium of history-so important, in fact, that it catches up all the other possible media of semiosis, including everyday life and language, fiction, film, talk, art, mathematics, [and] photography. …