Ökosemiootilise analüüsi perspektiivid: loodusteksti mõiste
Ecosemiotic method in the analysis of texts of nature

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical methodology of analysis. For that, the article first discusses the relation between meaning and context seen as a possibility for an ecological view immanent in semiotics. Then various perspectives in ecosemiotics are analysed by describing biological and cultural ecosemiotics and critically reading the ecosemiotic works of W. Nöth and K. Kull. The author emphasizes the need to combine these approaches so that the resulting synthesis would both take into account the semioticity of nature itself as well as allow analysing the depiction of nature in the written texts. To this end, the author introduces a model of nature-text, which relates two parties intertwined by meaning-relations – the written text and the natural environment. In support of the concept of nature-text, the article discusses the Tartu–Moscow semioticians’ and other authors’ concepts of text, which are regarded as broad enough to accommodate the semiotic activity and environment creation of other animals besides humans. The concept of nature-text allows us to define nature writing as a verbalized esthetical appreciation of an alien semiotic sphere. The concept of nature-text also elucidates the nature writing’s marginality, explaining it with the need to interpret two different types of texts. In the final section the article introduces the starting points for the practical ecosemiotic analysis, focusing on the relations between the written text and the natural environment, on the selective depiction of nature and on the possibilities for communicating with and relating to the nature presented in the written texts. Within the latter part, ecosemiotic analysis tries to detect the author’s corporeality, the particular nature experience, sensory capabilities used to relate to the environment, and other traces of zoosemiotic modelling in nature writing.

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