My article on “Brentano and the Theory of Signs” has been published in Paradigmi. Rivista di Critica Filosofica, in a special edition on phenomenology and semiotics, edited by Claudio Majolino and Giuliano Bacigalupo.
In this article I discuss Franz Brentano’s theory of intentionality and the ontological status of the intentional object specifically with respect to symbolic presentations. I compare the role and function of intentionality to the process of semeiosis, pointing out several interesting parallels between fundamental problems in the interpretation of the Brentanian notion of intentionality and issues in semiotics as the “general theory of signs”. I concentrate mostly on semantics, understood as the relationship between signs and their objects, which involves two of the central components in semeiosis: that which acts as a sign and that which the signs refers to. In particular, I focus on the theory of Charles W. Morris, trying to apply core notions of his semiotics to clarify Brentano’s ambiguous account of intentional reference, the role of signs in symbolic presentations and how this relates to outer perception.
What do symbolic presentations, i.e. presentations through signs, “stand for”? A symbolic or improper presentation “stands for” a proper presentation, not is the sense that it represents it, but surrogates for it, “stands in for” it. A proper presentation would be immediate, direct and make no use of surrogating signs, it would “give” the object as it is: it would be an Anschauung, an intuition. A symbolic presentation occurs when this is (temporarily or absolutely) impossible or impractical.
At this point we face a critical difficulty, namely the paradox that all presentations must have an intentional object, yet not to all presentations corresponds an object in reality. What happens when we indeed cannot form a proper presentation due to the non-existence of its object?
Carlo Ierna's Blog 
Carlo, I don’t want to spoil your article neither to waste your time for something that maybe is not the point of the Blog, but can you give an example of an impossible presentation due to the non – existence of the object?
No problem: if a certain object does not exist (e.g. the present king of France, color without extension, a square circle), it is impossible to obtain a proper presentation of it. Instead we have a presentation through signs, i.e. an improper, symbolic presentation.
So, the paradox is that we expect to have proper objects for all presentations and sometimes we do not, i.e., we get not a fulfilment of the meaning because this meaning is impossible?
I don’t think we really expect all our presentations to be proper ones and “fulfilment” is a very phenomenological way of putting it. Where Brentano speaks of “(im)proper” presentations [(“un)eigentliche Vorstellungen”], Meinong rather says “(in)direct” presentations. The point is not so much the impossibility of the object itself, but of obtaining a proper presentation of it. One of the most used examples by Brentano, Stumpf and Husserl is the case of numbers: beyond a certain limit, we cannot have a proper presentation of numbers anymore and must rely on signs.