This talk will follow an ongoing paper for "Semiotica", where I have been asked to focus on "contributions from cognitive semiotics for general semiotics". The three definitions mentioned are in part new, and emerged through the MA course on "semiotic translation theory" that has just ended. I look forward to more feedback! Welcome to the room or the zoom, with cameras on!

Following suggestions by Göran Sonesson and others in cognitive semiotics, I propose definitions for three key concepts: sign, translation and narrative. Using a Swedish term that is often said to be not fully translatable, I argue that these definitions are lagom (‘just right’), and truer to the phenomena (“the things themselves”) than most alternatives, which have tended to be either too broad, often overlapping with meaning making and/or cognition in general, or else too narrow, restricted to language.

In the spirit of the conceptual-empirical loop of cognitive semiotics (Zlatev 2015; Mouratidou 2025), I will briefly review a few empirical studies that apply the proposed definition, giving a kind of pragmatic, “proof-is-in-the-pudding” justification.

Mouratidou, A. (2025). Mind the body: Verbal and non-verbal signs of choice awareness (Doctoral dissertation, Lund University).

Zlatev, J. (2015). Cognitive semiotics. In International handbook of semiotics (pp. 1043-1067). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.