Nonobviousness of Believability: An Outline for the Semiology of Cartographic Images

The article tries to review the geographical maps as a specific type of semiological system. Application to semiology carried out through two basic cartographic constructs usually denoted in verbal language as “route” and “border.” The paper shows that both these constructs could be considered as a sample of particular cartographic “syntagms” with such “speech” equivalents as travel and demarcation correspondingly. The distinctive attribute of travel (route) is predominantly metonymic type of discourse, while the distinctive attribute of demarcation (border) is predominantly metaphorical one. It is possible to delineate such zones in which one plane overlaps the other and a paradigm extends into syntagm and vice versa. In such zones the cartographic “discourse” assumes distinctly aesthetic dimension. The article determines the main characteristics of maps as facts of a special semiological system, which include arbitrariness, isologicalness and what the author defines as locouniqueness.

The article also considers the types of semiotics involved in mapping. It is shown that since the signifieds of the maps are themselves semiotics (which include the codes assigned by the inhabitants to their habitat), the majority of maps made as part of a routine mapping procedure that does not involve any super-purpose use are nothing more than semiologies. In particular, the signifiers and signifieds of the maps are invariants in contrast to variants of the signifiers and signifieds used by inhabitants in their local languages. It follows that any semiological description of maps is not semiology, but metasemiology. One manifestation of this is the fact that variants of routes and borders in cartography have acquired the status of invariants in our study. They became basic concepts for defining the two axes of the language (according to Roman Jakobson) and made it possible to divide cartographic “statements” into two fundamentally dissimilar categories, one of which tends to be metaphorical (paradigm), and the other to metonymic (syntagm).