Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Thomas A. Sebeok (1920–2001), a student of Charles W. Morris, was a prolific and wide-ranging American semiotician. Although he insisted that animals are not capable of language, he expanded the purview of semiotics to include non-human signaling and communication systems, thus raising some of the issues addressed by philosophy of mind and coining the term zoosemiotics. Sebeok insisted that all communication was made possible by the relationship between an organism and the environment in which it lives. He also posed the equation between semiosis (the activity of interpreting signs) and life—a view that the Copenhagen-Tartu biosemiotic school has further developed. Juri Lotman (1922–1993) was the founding member of the Tartu (or Tartu-Moscow) Semiotic School. He developed a semiotic approach to the study of culture—semiotics of culture—and established a communication model for the study of text semiotics. He also introduced the concept of the semiosphere. Among his Moscow colleagues were Vladimir Toporov, Vyacheslav Ivanov and Boris Uspensky. Christian Metz (1931–1993) pioneered the application of Saussurean semiotics to film theory, applying syntagmatic analysis to scenes of films and grounding film semiotics in greater context. Eliseo Verón (1935–2014) developed his "Social Discourse Theory" inspired in the Peircian conception of "Semiosis." Groupe µ (founded 1967) developed a structural version of rhetorics, and the visual semiotics. Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an Italian novelist, semiotician and academic. He made a wider audience aware of semiotics by various publications, most notably A Theory of Semiotics and his novel, The Name of the Rose, which includes (second to its plot) applied semiotic operations. His most important contributions to the field bear on interpretation, encyclopedia, and model reader. He also criticized in several works (A theory of semiotics, La struttura assente, Le signe, La production de signes) the "iconism" or "iconic signs" (taken from Peirce's most famous triadic relation, based on indexes, icons, and symbols), to which he proposed four modes of sign production: recognition, ostension, replica, and invention. Julia Kristeva (born 1941), a student of Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, Bulgarian-French semiotician, literary critic, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist. She uses psychoanalytical concepts together with the semiotics, distinguishing the two components in the signification, the symbolic and the semiotic. Kristeva also studies the representation of women and women's bodies in popular culture, such as horror films and has had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies. Michael Silverstein (1945–2020), a theoretician of semiotics and linguistic