From Operator Strings to Semantic Economy is a comparative paper by Lee Sharks on Pearson’s Theory of Operational Semiotics and Operative Semiotics.
Pearson’s theory is presented as a formal account of operators acting within sign processes. The paper asks how such operations should also be analyzed in relation to labor, ownership, provenance, machine summarization, and effects on a shared meaning commons.
The proposed relation is one of scale rather than contradiction: Operational Semiotics analyzes operator structure, while Operative Semiotics analyzes the operation’s institutional and economic world.