Semiotics of Law

Abstract

In this contribution we aim at discussing the relevance of an ethnosemiotic approach to law, namely for the specific issues of the block of flats as an object. The chapter is hence structured in four sections. In the first one the theoretical disciplinary context of semiotic studies on law is introduced, encompassing various approaches across Europe and the United States, in the fields of pragmatics, sociolinguistics, legal anthropology and legal geography. The second section links some of these approaches to Greimasian semiotics, going back to the crucial outcomes of Algirdas Greimas, Bernard Jackson and Eric Landowski’s investigation in the field of law. The third section presents the main aspects of an ethnosemiotic approach, and focuses on the matter of considering law and social norms as inextricably interlaced. The fourth and last section therefore comes to analyse the case study of block of flats in an ethnosemiotic perspective. Despite the existence of many issues involved, such as space, anthropological habits, architectural styles, and the law, the approach of ethnosemiotics makes it possible to display a structural coherence of block of flats in terms of a semiotic form of life.