The concept of protosemiosis or semiosis at the lower levels of the living goes back to Giorgio Prodi, Thomas A. Sebeok and others. More recently, a typology of proto-signs was introduced by Sharov and Vehkavaara. Kull uses the term of vegetative semiosis, defined by iconicity, when referring to plants and lower organism semiosis. The criteria for the typology of proto-signs by Sharov and Vehkavaara are mostly based on two important presuppositions: agency and a lack of representation in low-level semiosis. We would like to focus on an alternative approach to protosign classification. In particular, we aim to provide a sign-typological characteristic of proteins (in analogy to Maran’ s classification of environmental signs). Our approach is focused on representation, that is, we only consider the relation between a sign and its object. We are considering representation independently from the role of interpretant and interpretation (which is an epiphenomenon of agency). Two hypotheses are investigated and accordingly evaluated in this paper: (I) Proteins are indexical protosigns. (II) Proteins are iconic protosigns. The conclusion our argumentation leads to supports the hypothesis (II).

生活中较低水平的原始符号化或符号化的概念可以追溯到Giorgio Prodi，Thomas A. Sebeok等人。最近，Sharov和Vehkavaara引入了原型符号类型。当提到植物和下层有机体符号化时，Kull使用由象似性定义的营养符号化一词。Sharov和Vehkavaara对原型符号进行分类的标准主要基于两个重要的前提：代理和在低级符号学中缺乏代表性。我们想着重于原型分类的另一种方法。特别是，我们旨在提供蛋白质的符号分类特征（类似于Maran对环境符号的分类）。我们的方法侧重于表示，即，我们仅考虑符号与其对象之间的关系。我们正在考虑独立于解释者和解释（这是代理的一种现象）的作用的代表制。本文对两个假设进行了研究，并据此进行了评估：（I）蛋白质是标志性的原型。（II）蛋白质是标志性的前兆。我们的论证得出的结论支持该假设（II）。