What is the main challenge for contemporary semiotics?

Once again, something important is going on in semiotics. Within the framework of preparing the fi nal talk “Semiotics taking form: Th rough the eyes of leading semioticians” at the 12th World Congress of Semiotics in Sofi a in September 2014, we asked several leading semioticians3 to give brief answers to the question: “What is the main challenge for contemporary semiotics?” We received 35+3 responses which are published below. Some years ago, Peer Bundgaard and Frederik Stjernfelt posed a similar question to 28 semioticians4 formulated as “What are the most important open problems in this fi eld and what are the prospects of progress?” Th e responses were published in a book (Bundgaard, Stjernfelt 2009). Indeed, a regular (re)formulation of the main tasks and unsolved problems can be seen as a form of self-description of semiotic inquiry, which is important for the identity and development of the fi eld. Understanding what is going on in semiotics, a broad fi eld with much variety in it, would help us to provide a better focus for our research today. For instance, it seems that the scholars working in the fi eld of (what we would at present call) semiotics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries produced much more than the semiotically oriented researchers could actually make use of during the period of rapid growth and institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s–1970s. Th e aim of many studies conducted in the 1960s–1970s, oft en described as structuralist, supposed a formalization of the conceptual apparatus used by semioticians. For