The paper aims at revealing the way the three semiotic concepts of relation, relationship and relatedness work when a human being’s identity is shaped through the roles s/he performs and the attitudes s/he takes towards nature and culture. Starting from theories such as Greimas’s semiotic square, the Tartu School’s studies on how cultures are encoded in/through language and how they are understood by others and by themselves, the mechanisms of representing the world vision of a specific community through models and codes (Eco 1976; Sebeok 1994; Sebeok and Danesi 2000; Peirce’s concept of semiosis) and the functions of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989), the author tries to map the traits which define a historically-rooted cultural model. We consider that the becoming of a community’s identity built up through its relation to nature and culture may be best represented by literary, particularly metaphorical, discourse, pursued in its diachrony.
