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mics, and their congeners have developed or are in the course of developing a syntactics and a semantics of their own. The pragmatic study of the contexts of verbal interaction cannot be enriched by a semantics of nonverbal languages. Not to speak of the fact that pragmatics in itself cannot be exclusively the study of linguistic interaction, since there are interesting instances of a pragmatic approach to theater, cinema, painting. . . .
Thus even along the axis opposing language to other, nonverbal systems, pragmaticsmore than being a science with its own exclusive objectis one of the dimensions of a more general semiotic research.
1.2. Semantics and Pragmatics: A Semiotic Web
Semiotics studies both the abstract structure of signification systems (such as verbal language, card games, road signals, iconological codes, and so on) and the processes in the course of which the users practically apply the rules of these systems in order to communicate, that is, to designate states of possible worlds or to criticize and modify the structure of the systems themselves.
One would be tempted to say that semantics is mainly concerned with systems of signification while pragmatics deals with processes of communication. However, the opposition signification/communication does not correspond to the opposition semantics/pragmatics but rather, characterizes various sorts of semantic theories as well as different sorts of pragmatic phenomena.
1.2.1. Three Semantic Theories
Morris (1946) says that semantics is that branch of semiotics which deals with the ''signification" of signs. We know, however, that Morris distinguishes significatum from denotatum. Thus one must say whether one is speaking of semantics as a theory of the systems of signification or as a theory of the acts of reference or mentionwhich are processes of communication. So-called structural semantics deals with meaning, thus with a theory of signification, whereas the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of language speaks of semantics apropos of a truth-conditional approach to propositions. Those two approaches must be carefully distinguished, even though both can be covered by a more liberal notion of semantics.
Moreover, a truth-conditional semantics covers two different problems or phenomena: sentences that are true by virtue of a set of meaning postulates and sentences that are true by virtue of what is the case. Thus, on one side,

 
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