ABSTRACT
Denis Cosgrove has stated that there are two distinct discourses in landscape studies: ecological and semiotic. A semiotic approach to landscape is sceptical of scientific claims to represent mimetically real processes shaping the world around people. This chapter introduces a distinction between semiotics, defined as a general study of sign processes in the living world and semiology that studies sign relations mainly in their synchronic, social and human aspects. Landscape paintings in particular have been an on-going source of examples about the discrepancy of semiotic and physical reality. Phenomenological approaches to landscape deal with a very fundamental aspect of semiotics, that is, how the meanings are generated in the phenomenal world and in respect to the corporeality of the person who dwells in a landscape. For a non-semiotician it is important to remember that the Saussurean sign model and the Peircean triadic model are incompatible.
