Roland Posner

Roland Posner (30 June 1942 in Prague – 26 May 2020 in Berlin) was a German semiotician and linguist.

He was Professor of Technische Universität Berlin since 1974.

He was editor-in-chief of the Zeitschrift für Semiotik and an editor of a major 4-volume handbook in semiotics. He was the President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in 1994–2004. He was one of founders of the International Society for Gesture Studies.

Selected publications

Posner, Roland 1982. Rational Discourse and Poetic Communication: Methods of Linguistic, Literary, and Philosophical Analysis. Berlin: Mouton.
Posner, Roland (ed.) 1990. Warnungen an die ferne Zukunft: Atommüll als Kommunikationsproblem. Raben.
Jorna, Rene; Heusden, Barend van; Posner, Ronald (eds.) 1993. Signs, Search and Communication: Semiotic Aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Posner, Roland 2000. Semiotic pollution: Deliberations towards an ecology of signs. Sign Systems Studies 28: 290–308.
Posner, Roland 2011. Eight historical paradigms of the human sciences. In: Peil, Tiina (ed.), The Space of Culture – the Place of Nature in Estonia and Beyond. (Approaches to Culture Theory 1.) Tartu: Tartu University Press, 20–38.

↑ Posner, Roland; Robering, Klaus; Sebeok, Thomas A. (eds.). 1997–2004. Semiotik/Semiotics: Ein Handbuch zu den Zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur/A Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Culture. 4 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
↑ Posner, Roland. 2001. Semiotics: The physics of the 21st century. Presidential Address at the 7th Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS). In: Walter Schmitz & Ulrich Froeschle (eds.), Sign Processes in Complex Systems. Proceedings of the 7th Congress of the IASS, Dresden, October 6–11, 1999. Dresden: WEB-Verlag, 40.
↑ Kull, Kalevi; Velmezova, Ekaterina 2025. Sphere of Understanding: Tartu Dialogues with Semioticians. (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition 23.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Pp. 258–277 includes an interview with Roland Poisner.