Relationality is an umbrella concept that characterizes contemporary tendencies in sociology, in research on power, in public administration, and in many other disciplines. In addition to disciplinary diversity, relational approaches conceptualize the ontological, epistemological, and methodological dimensions of relations in a differing manner. Mustafa Emirbayer and various other authors have made a point that there are several "substantialist" approaches in the social sciences: self-actional approaches characteristic of various actor-centered perspectives (e.g., rational choice, exchange theory) and structuralisms (e.g., structural Marxism, functionalism), and inter-actional approaches that by and large presume the social world to be graspable in terms of variables (the bulk of sociological approaches) or nodes and ties (social network analysis). Thus there are at least three meanings that can be associated with substantialism. Relationalism that Emirbayer equates with trans-actional approaches are mostly found in the Continental European social sciences (schools revolving around towering figures like Elias, Bourdieu, Foucault, and Latour) and are currently taken further in various forms of "deep" or "radical" relationalism. At the same time, the potential of semiotic approaches to the social or the political has been somewhat neglected in most debates on this "relational turn". The present paper aims, firstly, to argue for the proximity between the ideas present in cultural semiotics (more precisely, the cultural semiotics of the Tartu-Moscow School) and those of the relational paradigm. For this purpose, we shall analyze the connections between some of the basic concepts of cultural semiotics – systematicity, dialogism, untranslatability. Emirbayer refers, in his article "Manifesto for a relational sociology", to Saussure's and Peirce's approaches to semiotics as sources for the relational paradigm. However, he does not analyze them in any great detail. Through the ideas of cultural semiotics – that are intimately connected to the Saussurean theory of language –, the paper attempts to explicate those connections. The second aim of the paper is to outline, in a preliminary manner, how could semiotics as a discipline investigating meaning contribute to sociology and research on power. Outlining this connection is fruitful for both intellectual communities – semiotics and relational social sciences.   Round-table (organized by Andreas Ventsel & Peeter Selg, Tallinn University, Estonia): Political semiotics.