Objectification and semiotic function

Theobjectiveofthispaperistostudystudents’difficultieswhentheyhavetoascribe the same meaning to different representations of the same mathematical object. We address two theoretical tools that are at the core of Radford’s cultural semiotic and Godino’s onto-semiotic approaches: objectification and the semiotic function. The analysis of a teaching experiment involving high school students working on the tangent, shows how students’ difficulties in ascribing sense to different representations of a common mathematical object can be traced back to the kind of objectification processes and semiotic functions they are able to establish.