sign

Direction tested: remove interpretation and signs stop operating — a sign without an interpreter is merely a physical mark or sound, not a functioning sign. Signs require someone to read them as standing for something beyond themselves. Object-level dependency, not meta-level.

Remove semiosis (the sign-process of interpretation) and sign stops operating — a sign functions only through interpretation. The removal test confirms: without the process of meaning-making, a sign is merely a physical mark.

Iconicity is the property of a sign where form resembles its referent. Remove sign and iconicity has no substrate — it's a relation between sign and meaning. Object-level dependency in semiotics (Law 8b).

An icon IS a specific kind of sign: a sign that represents by resemblance to its referent. A competent speaker would call an icon 'a kind of sign.' Law 9 specific to general. Direction icon→sign correct.

Indexicality is a specific kind of sign — in semiotics, an indexical sign has a direct physical connection to its object (smoke indicates fire, footprint indicates walker). A competent speaker would call it 'a type of sign.' Law 9.

An omen is a specific kind of sign — one that signifies future events. Tested: omen is a subtype of sign (a competent speaker would call an omen 'a sign'). Omen has properties (significance, predictive intent) that sign lacks, making the direction specific→general. No ladder exists between these.

indicator IS a specific kind of sign — a marker or data point that conveys information about a condition or trend. A competent speaker calls an indicator a sign. INSTANCE_OF per Law 9.

Semiology is the systematic study of signs and sign processes. The removal test: remove sign and semiology has nothing to study — its entire subject matter vanishes. This is an object-level dependency about the discipline's subject matter, not a meta-level dependency (Law 2b): semiology literally operates by examining signs, and without signs, the examination has no object. Signs are what semiology is about, not merely what it needs to be said.

In Peircean semiotics, the interpretant is derived from the sign (representamen) — it is the meaning/mental effect that a sign produces in an interpreter. The sign came first in the semiotic triad and the interpretant is generated by the relation. Which came first? The sign precedes the interpretant in the semiotic process (Law 7).

Removal test (Law 8): remove sign and the interpretant — defined as the mental effect produced by a sign — ceases to exist. This is a genuine operational dependency distinct from the historical DERIVED_FROM already filed between these entries.

Closest-kind INSTANCE_OF (Laws 9, 11e). Placeholder's accepted def: 'a construct that stands in for absent real content' with parameters substitution, legible fakeness (it must signal that it is not the real thing), designed disposability. That is exactly the sign carve: a signifier (the stand-in form) + a signified (the concept it evokes: 'content belongs here / this is not the real thing'), linked by convention, operating through interpretive practice. It is NOT a symbol — a symbol converts abstract meaning into concrete form; a placeholder converts nothing, it marks an absence. Sign is the nearest kind.

Law 9, nearest kind, with the sense pinned honestly. The accepted definition of indexical carves 'a sign that points to its object through a causal, spatial, or temporal connection — not resemblance or convention' and persists 'through semiotic theory (Peircean classification)'. The board has already accepted the other two rungs of that trinity: icon (resemblance) and symbol (agreement). Sign is the only accepted genus that can house the third: its accepted scope carves 'a human-made construct in which one thing is treated as standing for something else to someone — the fundamental unit of semiotic meaning', and an indexical is exactly that — smoke treated as standing for fire, a weathervane standing for wind — read by an interpreter, as sign's definition requires ('signs exist only when someone reads them'). Pinned sense: the sign whose link to its referent is causal or contiguous rather than conventional; convention is the defining link of the symbol rung, and the index is its causal sibling. No Peircean sign-kind entry exists; sign is the nearest accepted kind.