Abstract
As it was shortly discussed in the Sect. 4.1, the connection between mimicry and semiotics was originally established in the works of Thomas A. Sebeok . He was the first one who expressed an opinion that mimicry is a semiotic phenomenon, discussed mimicry in several essays and included it as a separate keyword in semiotic handbooks. Also due to Sebeok’s interpretation, mimicry has later been mostly treated in semiotics as an example of iconicity in nature. The connection between mimicry and iconicity has been expressed and discussed, e.g. by Winfried Nöth , Frederik Stjernfelt , John W. Coletta, Göran Sonesson and others. However, taking mimicry as an example of an iconic sign or a sign based on similarity between the representamen and the object, is not as simple of an issue as it might appear at first glance. In the present chapter, the relations between mimicry and iconicity will be analysed by discussing the different types of iconicity in nature and the necessary conditions of the sign. I will rely here predominantly on Peircean semiotics and will later also discuss different mimicry types based on Peirce’s sign typology.
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Notes
- 1.
Original manuscript, Robin Catalogue id. Retrieved from http://www.commens.org/dictionary/term/icon on 31 Jan. 2016.
- 2.
This secondary relation appears to correspond to what Frederik Stjernfelt has called dicisign structure of animal communication, which makes it possible to “convey information—to rely claims, assert statements true or false” (Stjernfelt 2014: 54).
- 3.
Distinction of rheme, dicent and argument has been seldom used in analysing animal communication (a positive example being Stjernfelt 2014).
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Maran, T. (2017). Iconicity and Mimicry. In: Mimicry and Meaning: Structure and Semiotics of Biological Mimicry. Biosemiotics, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50317-2_5
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