ABSTRACT
A three-tier semiotic model is used to explore the affective impulsion of cultural forms. At the first tier, indexical and iconic signs, such as cry breaks and pitch raising, evoke feelings and emotions stimulating the replication of cultural forms as expressions of personal experiences. At a second tier, cultural forms convey prior or even imaginary conditions via semantic meanings; those conditions engender virtual icons and indices operating analogously to those in the base layer. At the third tier, conditional propositions, themselves seemingly devoid of emotion, produce stories based on failures of their underlying desirability logic; such stories evoke powerful and widely circulated affects.
