The Body in Language

The primary object of this book is to introduce an alternative approach - heterosemiotic semantics - to the typical ways in which meaning has been theorized. The author attempts to show that any semantics contains unacknowledged political and ideological motivations and convictions. Empiricist assumptions of meaning, as a linkage between language and world, and formal assumptions of meaning, as ruled by definitions, are rejected. Instead, the book offers a semiotic picture in which non-verbal and verbal signs are combined to constitute the world by way of interpretive acts. In such a semantics, metaphor plays a central role because it brings to the surface the intersemiotic and heterosemiotic labour which we perform in the processes of making meaning.