The article attempts to link John Searle’s philosophy and the area that is traditionally called semiotics, to bridge these domains and to demonstrate that they do relate to a shared bunch of problems. A brief discussion about the basic semiotic terms suggests that Searle’s philosophy offers an explanatory framework to key semiotic questions, namely the differentiation of non-signs and signs, the place of intentionality in semiotic description, and the nature of sign correlations. As a consequence, Searle’s theory can be called communication-oriented semiotics, which in the light of classical concepts developed by Peirce and de Saussure can be seen as a non-trivial contribution to the semiotic research.