CCS Faculty Fellow Todd Madigan shares his newest publication, “Cultural Syntax and the Rules of Meaning-making: A New Paradigm for the Interpretation of Culture,” in Interpretive Sociology and the Semiotic Imagination (Bristol University Press, 2023), edited by CCS Faculty Fellow Andrea Cossu and Jorge Fontdevila.
Abstract: While the interpretive social sciences have been focused almost entirely on the analysis of meaning and structure, my claim is that a third level of analysis is warranted. Just as Saussure argues that a sign’s signifier and signified are joined arbitrarily, so too do syntactic rules arbitrarily dictate the ways in which meaningful phenomena may or may not be conjoined. The rules of cultural syntax thereby enable and constrain the cultural structures we experience every day throughout the social world. That is, these rules determine the limits of how we are able to combine signs and symbols within those cultural structures. For this reason, having a theoretical model with the vision to identify these rules enriches the descriptive and explanatory powers of any semiotic approach to culture.