Where and How Meanings Emerge (Roundtable Proceedings)

Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 2025. Vol. 95. No. 1. P. 2–18.

Zolyan S., Ilyin M., Teslya A., Tulchinskii G. L.

The discussion aims to identify the interpretive mechanisms that provide an interface between text and context (between language and the world, language and culture, and language and society). It is a multilevel system of interfaces connected by inversion and recursion relations and operations. We identify this system as a pragmasemantics. It also acts as an interface platform for correlation/transformation of intrasystem semantic units and extralinguistic objects within a set of possible worlds. This platform is endowed with the autopoietic potential to generate new operating interface systems, as well as textualized structures of operations and interpretations (instructions, memory, and reframing). The generation of meaning is the result of the interaction of the platform-as-system with the platform-as-context, as one generates and determines the operational potential of the other, acting as a recursive loop or a Möbius strip. The connection between agency and meaningful semiosis is crucially important due to the key role of textualization and languaging. The signified is generated by signifiers, whose structures, shaped by interactions and practices, reproduce these processes. In complex systems (biological and beyond), the possibility of self-replication arises through recursive self-interpretation. Thus, agency acts as a kind of universal interface that implements the change of contexts, their interaction, and the generation of possible new ones, ensuring the procreativity and preadaptability of the system, and its stability and development.

Keywords: семиотика, контекстуализация, смыслообразование, semiotics, semiosis, семиозис, contextualization, meaning-making, прагмасемантика, pragmasemantics, agency, оязыковление, languaging