Urban trees are considered to be essential and integral to urban environments, to contribute to the biodiversity of cities as well as to the well-being of their inhabitants. In addition, urban trees may also serve as living memorials, helping to remember major social eruptions and to cement continuity with the past, but also as social disruptors that can induce clashes between different ideals of culture. In this paper, we focus on a specific case, a Ginkgo biloba specimen growing at Suda Street in the centre of Tallinn, in order to demonstrate how the shifts in the meaning attributed to a non-human organism can shape cultural memory and underlie social confrontations. Integrating an ecosemiotic approach to human-non-human interactions with Juri Lotman’s approach to cultural memory and cultural space, we point out how non-human organisms can delimit cultural space at different times and how the ideal of culture is shaped by different ways of incorporating or other species in the human cultural ideal or excluding them from it.

The paper organizes the topic of signs in Lev Vygotsky’s various writings into a coherent whole in order to study signs’ role in child development. Vygotsky related conventional signs that have their origin in interpersonal communication, and are subject to cultural history taking place over generations during historical time, to psychological functioning of individual human beings. Vygotsky’s “natural history of signs” is the study of how symbolic activity appears and develops. The paper outlines the process of inclusion of symbols within the behaviour of the child and gives an account of various changes in psychological functions and their interrelations that it brings along. In cultural development specifically human forms of behaviour appear, and children’s relationship to social and material environment is changed qualitatively. Vygotsky outlines the formation of sign use and analyses its developmental steps. Vygotsky’s approach explains how the use of various sign systems shapes both the cognitive processes in the person, the child, and the cognitive development as a whole. Vygotsky’s approach to signs is presented within the conceptual framework of its time.

The Estonian scholar Jakob Linzbach is primarily known for having published, in 1916, a Russian-language book with the title The Principles of Philosophical Language: An Attempt at Exact Linguistics. In this book, and in his other published and unpublished works, he aimed at creating a universal written language in which mathematics and images would mix. Linzbach’s ideas have raised awareness among people from different (scholarly) fields – semiotics, interlinguistics, philosophy, cinema theory, informatics, etc. However, not much has been published about Linzbach’s life. In one of his manuscripts kept in Tartu, there is a chapter that can be considered an autobiography and that provided, in the pencil of Linzbach himself, information about his life and work. This text is edited, translated into English and commented here for the first time.