Donna E. West

Donna E. West is Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at the State University of New York at Cortland (USA). For more than twenty-five years she has been presenting and publishing internationally in Semiotic studies using Peirce's sign system, and comparing it to semiotic properties in the works of Karl Bühler, Lev Vygotsky, and Jean Piaget. She is the first investigator to apply a developmental psycholinguistic perspective (supplying fresh data) to Peirce’s ten-fold division of signs; her work offers empirical answers to phenomenological questions. Her 2013 book, Deictic Imaginings: Semiosis at Work and at Play, published by Springer-Verlag, investigates the role of Index in the acquisition of demonstratives and personal pronouns. The impetus for the publication of her 2016 anthology: Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit: Before and Beyond Consciousness, derives from her longstanding fascination with how Peirce’s concept of habit relies chiefly upon index’s influence in event processing.