Ecosemiotics: main principles and current developments

Ecosemiotics studies the role of environmental perception and conceptual categorization in the design, construction, and transformation of environmental structures. This article provides a brief review of the history of ecosemiotics, and formulates eight core principles of the ecosemiotic approach. The ecosemiotic view understands humans as capable of both prelinguistic (biosemiotic) and linguistic (cultural) modelling of their environment. Accordingly, the diversity of structures is, to a certain extent, resultant of the types of semioses partaking in their formation. Ecosemiotics could provide geography with conceptual tools to describe the role of signs and communication in the dynamics of physical environments.